Part 3 — The Pharmacy Signature
The signature on the screen belonged to my son. Roy. Four plain letters in the careful slanting hand I had taught him at the kitchen table when he was six, with his tongue between his teeth. I had drilled him on that R with a pencil until it had the right loop. Now it was on a pharmacy screen, under a medicine that I had never taken, and my son was standing at the back of the fellowship hall with his hat in his hands and a face the color of wet chalk.
Roy walked up the aisle between the tables. He did not run, and he did not make excuses. He set his hat on the table next to the chicken salad and spoke to the pharmacist. “Mr. Okafor, I picked it up because my aunt told me Mama had a new heart doctor in Sherman. She said Mama was too forgetful to go herself. She said the pills were important and that Mama would be offended if I asked her. I signed because I thought I was helping.”
Mr. Okafor nodded slowly. “Mr. Barnhill, I did call your number that afternoon. You did not answer, so I left a message that the medicine should not be taken with the other pills in the house. I held the bottle at the counter for ten minutes before I handed it to you. You were in a hurry.” Roy closed his eyes. “I was,” he said. “I am sorry. I did not hear the message until yesterday.” The pharmacist put a hand on his shoulder. “You are here now.”
The officer asked for the bottle. Roy took it from the pocket of his coat. It was sealed, with the paper seal unbroken and a count of thirty tablets. He had not given it to anyone. He had been carrying it for a week because something in him, he said, would not let him hand it over to Aunt Wanda, who had asked for it three times. I looked at my son and thought that sometimes the best of a person is the part that does not quite understand what it is doing.
Wanda sat very still at the head table in her lavender pantsuit. The speech she had given was still hanging in the room like smoke. “Cleta,” she said, “I only wanted to help you rest. You have been so tired.” “I have been tired,” I said, “because for eight months my coffee has been bitter.” I did not raise my voice. I looked at my sister, at the face I had known for seventy-four years, and I saw nothing of the girl who had once shared a bed with me during a thunderstorm.
The officer was gentle, and I was grateful for it. He explained that the prescription had been written by a doctor in Sherman, Texas, who turned out to hold a license in another state and a telephone that rang in a rented office. The medicine would have made me drowsy, confused and slow, and a woman in that condition is easily brought before a judge. Wanda had meant it for exactly that purpose. She had already prepared papers for a guardianship hearing, signed by herself.
Pastor Wiley took the ledger of the building fund out of the purse of Wanda and held it open on the table. Forty-one thousand dollars had been on the first page. On the last, in the neat blue ink of a treasurer who had been in office for four hours, was a withdrawal of $6,500 made that morning for a trip to Branson. The pastor read it aloud to the ladies, who listened with their forks in the air. Mrs. Hatcher closed the lid of the piano.
The charges against Wanda were many. Forgery of my name at the pharmacy window, nine times. Obtaining controlled substances by fraud. Theft of $23,900 from my accounts. Attempted theft from the church. And the one that took the longest to read, giving an older person a sedative without her knowledge, which the laboratory found in the cup from my kitchen. She was arrested in the fellowship hall with her sweet tea still on the floor, and she walked to the car without a word.
The judge, a woman who had eaten my chili in the cafeteria as a girl, sentenced my sister to a term in the state facility for women, followed by supervision, and ordered her to repay every dollar, with the cost of the church audit. She also barred her for life from serving as the treasurer, trustee or agent of any person or organization. Wanda listened with her hands folded, and when the judge was done she asked only whether she could write to me. I said she could.
Roy stayed with me through the winter. He was ordered by the court to testify, which he did without complaint, and he slept in the guest room with the door open, as he did when he was seven. He fixed the porch light, cleaned the gutters, and drove me to the new pharmacy in Ardmore, where a young woman named Priya counted my pills out loud. He said it was the least he could do. I said it was the most. We argued about it politely over cornbread.
My granddaughter Paige drove down from Tulsa every second weekend. It was she who had put the little program on my phone, and I told her it had saved my life, and she said it had saved her too, because she would never have forgiven herself for not watching. She sat on the arm of my chair with her head on my shoulder like she did at four. I said I was proud of her. She cried, and I had to find a tissue.
A cook of thirty-four years knows by smell when a pot has turned, and I should have trusted my nose about the coffee a long time before I did. I planted a new African violet on the windowsill in the kitchen. It has two buds now.
Every morning I make my own coffee, strong and plain, and pour it into the good cup, and sit by the window while the sun comes up over C Street. It tastes exactly like coffee. Across the room the recipe cards from the flour canister are stacked in a neat pile, nine of them, held with a rubber band, the little record of a woman who wrote down every sound her telephone made. I do not throw them away. They are the best cookbook I ever kept.