The girl who got my high school diploma held back in 1985 was in a motel room off the interstate with my library book in her bag, and when I handed her the pills she said, “Well, if it isn’t Pill Girl.” Her husband had sold her house for $71,500 and dumped her there. I knew where he’d be on Thursday.
Her name came up on my refill screen at ten to seven on a Tuesday, right as Josie was pulling the gate down.
Tapia, Alejandra. Blood pressure pills, thirty count. A note from the night clerk at the Starlite off exit 112 said the guest had no car and could somebody bring them.
Josie read it over my shoulder.
“Isn’t that the one?” she said.
It was the one.
In fourth period, senior year, Alejandra Tapia lifted a hardback copy of Rebecca out of my backpack, and that book never made it back to the county library.
It was checked out on my card.
The library put a hold on my records over a $23.50 fine, and the school honored it, so in June I walked across that stage holding an EMPTY blue folder while she clapped from the second row.
She’d called me Pill Girl all year because my dad ran the drugstore on Main. Now I run it.
She called me worse than that in the locker room.
Dad paid the fine in August and never brought it up, which was somehow worse.
I’ll be honest. I thought about letting the delivery sit until morning.
Then I thought about her blood pressure.
Our driver had gone home, so I got my keys.
She opened the door of room 14 in a sweatshirt with a bleach spot on the shoulder.
Forty-one years and I’d have known that chin in the dark.
She looked at the white bag, then at me, and laughed once through her nose.
“Well, if it isn’t Pill Girl,” she said.
I held out the bag and the clipboard.
Her hand shook so bad the pen skipped across the line.
Behind her the bed was covered in grocery sacks. Clothes, a toaster, a shoebox full of papers, and a pink plastic lawn flamingo, for reasons I still don’t know.
“Where’s your car?” I said.
“Ramiro has the car.” She signed her name like somebody signing a cast. “Ramiro has everything.”
I should have left right then.
I didn’t.
It came out in pieces, the two of us standing in that doorway while the semis went by.
Her mother left her the house on Delgado Street. Paid off. HER NAME ONLY.
Last spring she had her gallbladder out, and Ramiro slid a paper in front of her in the hospital bed so he could “handle the bills.”
It was a power of attorney.
In September he sold the house to his own cousin for $71,500. She found out when the cousin backed a moving truck into the driveway.
“He drove me out here Sunday,” she said. “Paid for a week. Said he’d come back once he figured some things out.”
“It’s Tuesday,” I said.
“I know what day it is, Latoya.”
Then she bent to dig through the sack at her feet for her other pills, and something slid out onto the carpet.
A hardback in a cracked plastic jacket.
The spine said REBECCA.
I picked it up before I decided to.
The card was still in the pocket in the back. My name was on it, in my own handwriting, from when I was seventeen.
“You KEPT it?” I said.
She wouldn’t look at me. “It was the only thing in my room he didn’t box up.”
“Do you know what that book cost me?”
“Twenty-three fifty,” she said. “I know exactly what it cost you. I was sitting right there.”
Her face did something then that I never once saw it do in high school.
“I took it because you had a daddy who’d pay it,” she said. “Mine would’ve put me through the wall.”
So I stood there in a motel doorway holding a library book that was forty-one years overdue.
And I thought about Ramiro.
Because I know Ramiro Tapia.
Not socially.
Cholesterol pills, forty milligrams, plus a cream I’m not allowed to tell you about. He picks up at my counter every thirty days like a clock, always at lunch, always in cash, always calling me sweetheart.
That money went somewhere. And a man who just sold his wife’s house out from under her doesn’t bother changing pharmacies.
I pulled up his profile on my phone right there under the porch light.
Next refill: Thursday.
“Get your stuff,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because you are not sleeping here another night. And because on Thursday at noon your husband is going to walk up to MY COUNTER and ask me for his pills.”
She stared at me for a long time.
“You hated me,” she said.
“I still might,” I said. “Grab the flamingo.”
Thursday at 11:58 the bell over the door rang.
Ramiro walked in whistling, wallet already out, and leaned on my counter like he owned THE WHOLE STORE.
“Afternoon, sweetheart,” he said.
He never looked at the consultation booth.
He didn’t see who was sitting in it.
Two minutes to noon
Alejandra was in there, in my consultation booth, with Rebecca in her lap and the shoebox at her feet.
The booth door stood open about a foot. From where Ramiro leaned, he’d have had to turn his head maybe twenty degrees to see his wife.
He didn’t turn it. He was busy smiling at me.
“The usual,” he said. “The cholesterol, and the other one. You know the one.”
“I know the one,” I said.
His bag was already done. It was stapled and sitting in the will-call bin behind me, under T, where it had been since nine that morning.
I didn’t reach for it.
“Have to run it again,” I said. “Insurance kicked something back.”
“I don’t use insurance, sweetheart. I pay cash.”
“Then the computer kicked something back.”
He laughed at that. He laughed at most things I said, and he had for nine years.
He tapped a fold of twenties on the counter. He kept them in a gold money clip with a little steer head on it, and he always peeled the bills off one at a time, like he wanted you to watch.
There were two people in line behind him. Mr. Liu, with his cane hooked over the shopping basket. Charlie from the feed store, holding a bag of cough drops and his truck keys.
Josie was at the register. She hadn’t looked up once since the bell rang.
I had told her to keep her eyes on the drawer, and she was doing it so hard her neck was stiff.
Ramiro leaned to one side to see around me.
“Hey, Josie, sweetheart,” he said. “You got your stamp on you today?”
Josie’s hand stopped in the coin tray.
“I’ve got one more little paper,” he said. “Same deal as last time. Won’t take a minute.”
He slid it halfway out of his jacket so I could see the top of it. A state form, light blue, folded in thirds.
“She’s not feeling good,” he said. “She’s out in the car.”
Dad’s green book
My father opened this store in 1971 with a loan from his brother and a brass bell he bought at a church sale.
The bell’s the same one. It’s the one that rang when Ramiro walked in.
Dad was a pharmacist, but half the county knew him as the notary. He had a hand-painted sign in the front window that said NOTARY PUBLIC, WALK-INS WELCOME. Car titles, wills, adoption papers, the forms people need when somebody dies.
He kept a journal for it. A green clothbound book, one line for every signature, with the date, the time, the type of paper, the ID number, and the signer’s own name in their own hand.
“The stamp is me saying I saw it,” he told me once. “I don’t stamp what I didn’t see. Not for the mayor. Not for your mother.”
The hard ones he sent upstairs to Naomi Rao, who did wills in the old bank building across the street.
Naomi still buys her reading glasses from me. Plus two-fifty. She breaks a pair about every six weeks.
When I came home from college with my license, the folder from graduation was still in my desk drawer, empty. I never asked Dad about the $23.50 and he never told me what he said to the librarian.
He died in 2017. The store came to me, and the green journal came with it.
I kept the sign in the window. I let my own commission lapse, because I was tired, and there was no one else.
Then Josie came to work for me two years ago. She was twenty-two and she wanted to be useful at everything.
Last March I paid her fee and her bond and the state sent her a stamp with her name on it. I gave her the green journal and a new one to start when it filled up.
I told her Dad’s rule word for word. I’m sure I did.
Ramiro Tapia had been coming in since before all that.
Nine years. Every thirty days, give or take a day. Kolaches for the girls at the register at Christmas. Twenties off the clip. He told every person in line I was the best pharmacist in Texas, and he called me sweetheart, and he called Josie sweetheart, and he called Mr. Liu “boss.”
I never thought much about him. That’s what he was good at.
I never once saw his wife come in with him. Her pills came on her own profile, and she picked them up on her own, in the afternoons, in sunglasses, and she never said a word to me past “thanks.”
I figured that was about 1985.
Now Josie was looking at me across the store, and Ramiro was holding up that blue paper, and I knew exactly whose stamp he meant.
It was Dad’s sign in the window. It was my book.
Tuesday, at my kitchen table
Tuesday night I drove her home with the grocery sacks in the back seat and the flamingo standing up between them.
She didn’t say anything the whole way. When I took the exit she said, “You still live on Pecan?” and I said yes, and she said, “Your mom’s house,” and I said yes.
That was all.
I put her in my mother’s old sewing room. There’s a daybed in there and a machine nobody’s touched in eleven years.
I brought a blood pressure cuff home from the store and put it on her arm at the kitchen table.
One sixty-eight over a hundred and two.
“You’re going to take your pill,” I said. “Right now, in front of me.”
“I’ve been taking them.”
“You’ve been out of them since Saturday. It’s on my screen.”
She took the pill.
Then I asked her for the shoebox.
She pushed it across the table without arguing. I think she was too tired to fight me, and I think she wanted somebody else to look at it.
Most of it was her mother. A funeral program. A tax bill for Delgado Street, marked paid. A Christmas card from a church in Laredo.
Under that, a Texas certificate of title for a 2009 Mitsubishi Galant. Gold. Owner: Alejandra Tapia.
“That’s the car Ramiro has?” I said.
“That’s my mama’s car. He’s been driving it to Benito’s every night since September.”
Taped inside the shoebox lid was a car key on a red hair tie.
“Spare,” she said. “Mama kept it in her purse. Ramiro doesn’t know about it.”
There was the closing paper from the house sale. Buyer: Benito Tapia. Sale price: $71,500. The money had been wired to an account ending in four numbers she didn’t recognize.
“Benito is the cousin,” she said. “Zoe is his wife. Zoe drove the truck. She was wearing my good coat when she did it. My camel coat. She borrowed it at Easter and never gave it back. It’s missing the second button.”
She said all of it in the same flat voice.
And under the closing paper, folded in thirds, was the power of attorney.
Her signature was at the bottom of page three. It went downhill. The A was so big it ran into the line above.
“I’d had the surgery that morning,” she said. “I could barely hold a cup.”
Then there was the notary block under her name.
Sworn to and acknowledged before me on the 10th day of April.
And the stamp. Purple ink, the same purple as the pad in my top drawer at the store.
JOSIE SANDBERG. NOTARY PUBLIC. STATE OF TEXAS.
I read it twice. Then I went and got my reading glasses and read it again.
“What day did they let you out of County General?” I said.
“The twelfth. A Saturday.”
I knew that already. Her discharge prescriptions were filled at my store at 2:20 that Saturday afternoon. Pain pills and a stool softener. The pickup log said Ramiro Tapia, driver’s license, signature.
So on the tenth, she’d been in a hospital bed on the fourth floor, with an IV in her hand.
And on the tenth, according to this paper, she’d been standing in front of Josie in my store.
Alejandra looked at the stamp and then at me.
“That’s your girl’s name,” she said. “Isn’t it?”
Josie’s journal
I didn’t sleep. At six-fifteen Wednesday morning I unlocked the store and took the journal out of the drawer under the register.
Josie’s handwriting is round. She dots her i’s with a little circle, and Dad would have hated it.
April 10. 4:40 p.m. Durable power of attorney. Signer: Alejandra Tapia. Texas driver’s license, the last four numbers written out.
And in the signature column, Alejandra’s name in a neat hand. Every letter sat right on the line. The A was the size of the other letters.
I went out to the car and got my delivery clipboard off the passenger seat. Tuesday’s slip was still on it.
Tapia, Alejandra, with the pen skipping across the line, the way it went when her hand shook in that motel doorway.
I set the two side by side on the counter.
Josie came in at seven like always, with her iced coffee and her hair still wet.
She saw the journal open. She saw the clipboard. She set the coffee down very carefully on the floor, like it might go off.
“Sit down,” I said.
She didn’t. She stood there with her hands under her armpits.
“He came in at four-thirty,” she said. “He said she’d just had surgery and she couldn’t walk. He said she was in the car and she’d already signed the paper and she just needed the stamp, because the hospital wanted it for the bills.”
“Was she in the car?”
“There was a woman in the car. In the passenger seat. Gold car, right at the curb.”
“Did you look at her?”
“She had a scarf on. And big sunglasses. She said she had a migraine from the anesthesia.”
“Did you look at her, Josie?”
“I looked at the license.” Her voice went up high. “She held it up to the window. It was the right name. It was the right birthday. It looked like her.”
“It’s a twenty-year-old picture. It looks like anybody.”
“He brought kolaches, Toya. He’s been coming in since I was in middle school.”
“Did she sign the book in front of you?”
“She signed it on her knee. With the window down. He held it for her.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust what was going to come out.
Josie looked at the two signatures for a long time. She put one finger on the neat one.
“That’s not her, is it,” she said.
“She was on the fourth floor at County General with a tube in her arm.”
Josie sat down then. Right on the floor, next to her coffee.
“Am I going to jail?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
It was the truth, and I wasn’t going to give her anything else.
I turned the journal around to put it away, and there was a note in the margin of that line. Josie’s round handwriting, small, squeezed in after the fact.
Signer in vehicle. Husband held book.
She’d known it was wrong enough to write it down.
Naomi Rao’s office
Naomi Rao’s office is up a flight of stairs that smell like floor wax and old money.
I closed the store from one to three and put a sign on the door that said FAMILY EMERGENCY. Charlie from the feed store was already waiting outside when I hung it.
Alejandra sat in Naomi’s waiting room with the shoebox on her knees. She wouldn’t come in.
“It’s your people,” she said. “You go.”
Naomi read the power of attorney with my reading glasses on, because she’d broken hers again. She read the closing paper. She read the photocopy I’d made of Josie’s journal page.
Then she took the glasses off.
“Here’s what you want me to say,” she said. “You want me to call him and scare him into giving it back.”
“Yes.”
“He’ll laugh. The deed’s recorded. Benito owns that house on paper. Ramiro has the money in some account we can’t touch without a court. To set aside that sale she needs a lawsuit, and a lawsuit is a year, and a year is money she doesn’t have.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“You’ll pay for a year of me?” She looked at me over the desk. “On a woman who took your diploma?”
“She didn’t take my diploma. She took a book.”
Naomi let that go.
“There’s another way,” she said. “And you’re not going to like it.”
She tapped the stamp on page three.
“A power of attorney used to sell land has to be acknowledged before a notary. In person. If that acknowledgment is void, the paper he sold the house with is a very different paper. The title company that closed that sale is going to have a very bad week. So is Benito.”
“Then it’s void,” I said. “She was in the hospital.”
“Says you. Says the hospital, if we subpoena them. The fastest way to make it stick is for the notary to say so. Under oath, in writing, to the Secretary of State. With her employer’s name on the letter beside hers.”
I knew what she meant before she said the rest.
“Josie loses the commission,” Naomi said. “Maybe a fine. Your store’s name goes in a state file. And every person who ever had a car title stamped at your counter is going to hear about it at church.”
“Dad’s sign.”
“Dad’s sign comes down.”
I thought about that sign. I’d been reading it backwards from inside the store for fifty years.
“Do it,” I said.
Naomi typed up a revocation of the power of attorney while I sat there. One page. I went out and got Alejandra, and this time she came in.
She signed it at Naomi’s desk. Her hand shook so hard Naomi had to hold the paper flat with two fingers. The A ran uphill this time.
Naomi stamped it and wrote it in her own book.
“I’ll file a notice at the county clerk before five,” she said. “It tells anybody who looks at that house that there’s a fight over it. Benito’s lender will hear about it by morning.”
She put the revocation and a copy of everything into a manila envelope and licked it shut.
“He has to get this in his hand,” she said. “Does anybody know where he’ll be?”
“Thursday at noon,” I said. “My counter.”
Naomi held the envelope out.
Alejandra took it before I could. She held it in both hands, the way she’d held that white bag in the doorway.
Then she reached into the shoebox, peeled the tape off the lid, and pulled out the key on the red hair tie.
She put the hair tie on her wrist.
The gold Mitsubishi
So that was Thursday. Ramiro at my counter with a blue paper half out of his jacket. Josie frozen at the register. Mr. Liu and Charlie in line.
His wife ten feet away in my booth, with the manila envelope on top of Rebecca.
“Out in the car,” I said.
“She’s real tired,” Ramiro said. “Doctor’s got her on something new. Josie can just walk out like last time. Right, sweetheart?”
Josie didn’t answer him.
“What’s the paper?” I said.
He unfolded it and smoothed it on the counter with his whole hand. Application for a certified copy of title. Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. 2009 Mitsubishi Galant.
“Lost the title in the move,” he said. “Can’t sell a car without a title. Benito’s got a buyer.”
The title was eight feet behind me in a shoebox. I knew because I’d taped the lid back down myself.
“Owner has to sign,” I said. “In front of the notary.”
“She signed it already.” He pointed to the bottom. Alejandra Tapia, in a neat round hand, every letter on the line. “Josie just needs to come look at her.”
“I’ll go,” I said.
He blinked.
“Josie knows her,” he said.
“I know her better. We were in school together.”
For a second, he didn’t have anything. Then the grin came back, all teeth.
“No kidding? Small town. Go on, then. She’ll be tickled.”
I came around the counter. I didn’t look at the booth. The bell rang over my head on the way out.
The gold Mitsubishi was at the curb in the fifteen-minute spot, where it had been at 4:40 on April 10.
There was a woman in the passenger seat. Scarf. Big sunglasses. The visor down.
I knocked on the window with one knuckle.
She rolled it down about three inches. She had a license in her hand already, ready to hold it up.
“I’m the pharmacist,” I said. “I need you to come inside and sign in front of me.”
“I can’t. I’m sick.”
“Then take the glasses off.”
She didn’t. Her eyes went to the store window.
“He said it was just a signature,” she said. “He said she knew about all of it.”
“What’s your name?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
It was a camel coat. The second button was missing.
The consultation booth
When I came back in, Ramiro had moved down the counter to Josie.
“Sweetheart, I’m asking nice,” he was saying. “It’s a stamp. You did it in April. Same woman, same car.”
“Same woman,” I said.
He turned around. He saw my face, and then he saw where I was looking, and then he finally turned his head the twenty degrees.
Alejandra was standing in the doorway of the booth with the envelope in her hands.
“Ale,” he said.
She didn’t move.
“What are you doing here? Who brought you here?” He looked at me. “You brought her here? Do you know she’s not supposed to be driving? Do you know she’s not right?”
He said it to the line, mostly. To Mr. Liu and Charlie.
“She’s not right since the surgery,” he said. “Ask her pharmacist. She’s on four, five different pills. She forgets things. She thinks people are stealing from her. That’s the whole reason I got the power of attorney, so somebody in that house could make a decision.”
“That house,” Alejandra said.
“Yes, that house. That house that was falling down around her. Your mother’s house. I put a roof on it. I paid the taxes on it for nineteen years. Half of that house was mine the day I married you, and anybody in this town will tell you so.”
“I paid the taxes,” she said. “I have the receipts. They’re in the box.”
“See?” he said to Mr. Liu. “The box. She carries a box around.”
She walked out of the booth and held out the envelope.
He didn’t take it. So she put it on the counter, on top of his blue form, with the title application sticking out from under it.
“That’s a revocation,” I said. “As of yesterday at two-forty, you don’t speak for her. Naomi Rao has the original.”
He picked it up and read the first line. Then he laughed, high, through his nose.
“Naomi Rao,” he said. “Okay. Okay. And who’s paying Naomi Rao? You? You’re going to put your money down on her?” He pointed at Alejandra without looking at her. “You know what she used to call you? I heard it at a reunion. She thought it was the funniest thing in the world.”
“I know what she called me,” I said.
“Then what are you doing?”
His phone went off in his jacket. He pulled it out, looked at the screen, and put it back.
It went off again. He let it ring.
I could see the name from where I stood. Benito.
“The county clerk has a notice on Delgado Street,” I said. “Since last night.”
The phone rang a third time.
He turned back to Josie. He put both forearms on the counter in front of her and he lowered his voice, like that made it just the two of them.
“Sweetheart, listen to me,” he said. “You saw her. In April. You came out to the car and you saw my wife, and you stamped it, and that’s all you’ve got to say to anybody. That’s all that happened.”
Josie looked at him for a long time.
“I saw a license against a window,” she said. “I mailed a letter to the state this morning. It’s got my name on it. And hers.” She pointed at me.
“You’ll lose your little stamp,” he said.
“Yes, sir,” Josie said.
“She’ll lose her store.” He meant me.
“Not the store,” I said. “Just the sign.”
He stood up off the counter. For the first time in nine years he didn’t have anything to say to the line.
Mr. Liu cleared his throat. “Son, either pay the lady or get out of the way. My hip doesn’t wait.”
Alejandra came across the store. She went right past Ramiro and held up her wrist so he could see it. The red hair tie. The key hanging off it.
He looked at the key. Then out the window at the gold Mitsubishi at the curb.
“That’s not yours,” he said.
“It’s in my name,” she said. “Mama’s name and then mine. The title’s in my box. You can ask for a copy.”
Then she went out the front door. The bell rang over her.
The four of us watched her through the glass. She walked straight up to the passenger door of the Mitsubishi and opened it.
I couldn’t hear what she said. Zoe got out. She was still holding the license. She stood on the sidewalk in the camel coat while Alejandra went around and got in behind the wheel.
The Mitsubishi started on the second try. The brake lights came on, and then it pulled out and turned left on Main.
Zoe stood there.
Ramiro ran to the door. By the time he got it open, the car was past the feed store.
He came back to the counter. His face had gone a dark color. He still needed his pills.
I turned around and got his bag out of the will-call bin, under T, where it had been since nine.
“Forty-one seventeen,” I said.
He peeled the twenties off the gold clip, one at a time. I counted him his change into his hand.
“How am I supposed to get home?” he said.
“There’s a motel off exit 112,” I said. “They’ll let you pay by the week.”
Ten to seven
Thirty days later, her name came up on my refill screen at ten to seven on a Tuesday, right as Josie was pulling the gate down.
Tapia, Alejandra. Blood pressure pills, thirty count. Patient will pick up.
There’s a pale rectangle on the front window now where Dad’s sign hung for forty-six years. You can only see it in the evening when the light comes through sideways.
Josie’s commission is gone. The state sent her a letter with a seal on it. She keeps it folded in her apron pocket, and she still comes in at seven with her hair wet.
Naomi says the title company wants to talk. Benito’s lawyer has called her office twice. Naomi says twice is a good number.
I took Ramiro’s cream off the auto-refill. He transferred everything to a chain store out by the highway two days later.
The flamingo is in my front bed by the porch steps. I haven’t moved it.
The gold Mitsubishi pulled up at five till seven, in the fifteen-minute spot.
Alejandra came in through the gate before Josie could get it all the way down. She had on a jacket I’d never seen, a navy one.
She put something on my counter next to the register.
A hardback in a cracked plastic jacket.
“It’s still on your card,” she said. “Library’s open till eight. I’m not walking in there with it. They know me.”
“They know me too.”
“Then you’ll be fine.”
I picked it up. The card was still in the back pocket.
I put her bag on the counter, and the clipboard, and the pen.
She looked at the white bag, then at me.
“Well, if it isn’t Pill Girl,” she said.
“Sign the line,” I said.
She signed it. The pen stayed on the line.
If somebody from your senior year still has your name in their mouth after forty years, send this to the friend who was there.
For more stories of old wounds resurfacing and family secrets changing everything, read the key hidden in a daughter’s coin purse and the bus ride that became a way home. There’s also the father who changed the garage code mid-shift, another tense family story.
