The nurse set her clipboard on the counter, picked up one of the little yellow pills between two fingers, and held it to the light. Then she looked at me over the tops of her glasses, and her face went absolutely still. “Mrs. Strickler,” she said, in a very quiet voice, “where did you get these?” I told her they came out of my pill box, the one my daughter in law fills on Sundays. She did not say anything. She walked out of the room, and I heard her footsteps hurry down the hall, and a door open, and a murmur of low voices. I sat on the paper on the table with my purse in my lap.
Dr. Okafor came in two minutes later, a tall, calm woman who had been my heart doctor for nine years. She sat down on the stool in front of me and took both my hands in hers. “Juanita,” she said, “these are digoxin. A strong dose. Four of them, at the same time as your rhythm medicine, in a woman of your age, could stop your heart. I want to be careful. How long has Shayla been filling your box?” I said since the summer. She nodded slowly. Her hand did not let go of mine. “I have been worried about your blood levels since August,” she said. “I did not know why.”
Sometimes the small yellow truth has been sitting in a plastic box on the kitchen table, waiting for someone with a magnifying glass.
She called the police from her own office, right there in front of me. Within the hour, a detective named Ray Cobb, a gentle man in a rumpled tie, was sitting in the other chair with a notebook. I told him everything. I told him about the fitting room, the black dress for the funeral, the half pills one week and double the next, the heels on the tile, and the way Shayla had zipped me into the navy dress while watching my face in the mirror. He wrote for a long time. Then he asked me whether I would be willing to do something dangerous. I told him I had been a home economics teacher for thirty one years, and nothing frightens a woman who has taught seventh grade boys to use a sewing machine.
The plan took a week. Dr. Okafor refilled my prescriptions at the hospital pharmacy and gave me a new box with a lock. I went home and told Shayla that my heart doctor wanted to see me every Monday, that she must not trouble herself about my pills any more because the pharmacy had a service. She smiled the whole time. Her eyes did not. That night, Detective Cobb installed two small cameras in my kitchen, one in the clock over the stove and one in the radio, and he told me to behave exactly as I always had. I made tea. I did the crossword. I tried not to look at the clock.
On Saturday, Shayla came by with a casserole. She set it on the counter, and she looked at my pill box, which I had left deliberately in the middle of the table, and she said brightly, “Mama Juanita, I believe your box is nearly empty. Let me top it off for you.” I said what a help she was. She took a little plastic bag from her purse, and she shook out four yellow pills, and one by one, with the calm hands of a woman folding laundry, she tucked them into the slots for Sunday and Monday and Tuesday. Every single movement was on tape.
The detective and three officers came in from the back porch while she was putting the lid on. “Mrs. Shayla Strickler,” Detective Cobb said, almost kindly, “I need you to put your hands on the counter.” She did not run. She did not even shout. She turned around very slowly and looked at me, and for a moment I saw the girl who had been a bride, the one who had cried at the altar and taken my hand and said, I will take care of him, Mama. “You were never supposed to find out,” she said, with a bitter little smile. “You were supposed to be tired.”
Garrett came to the house within the hour, driving ninety miles an hour from his job at the distribution center. He had been told only that something terrible had happened. He stood in the kitchen doorway, looking from his wife in handcuffs to his mother at the table, and I saw the whole shape of his face collapse. “Mama,” he said. “Mama, I did not know.” I said, “I know you did not, son.” I got up and put my arms around him, and he cried against my shoulder like a little boy who has dropped an ice cream cone, and I held on for as long as he needed.
She had a life insurance policy on me, it turned out, in the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and a second on the house. She had a boyfriend in Frankfort, and a debt on a boat, and a plan that was patient and clean and nearly perfect. Half the pills one week, double the next. She had learned it from a class at the community college, and from a book. Garrett sat beside me at the preliminary hearing with his head in his hands, and when the judge asked if he wished to say anything, he said only, “She was my wife. I am sorry, Mama.”
Shayla pleaded guilty in March. The judge gave her fifteen years. Garrett filed for divorce the week after, and for a while he lived in the spare room, where the quilt of my mother still hangs on the wall. We ate supper at the little table in the kitchen, the two of us, and talked about nothing. Slowly, he began to laugh again. One evening he said, “Mama, I used to think Shayla hung the moon.” I said, “I know, honey. And now we both know what a moon looks like when it is painted on a wall.”
The wedding of my granddaughter Lainey was held on the second Saturday of April, in the garden of the old Presbyterian church in Lexington,. I wore the navy chiffon, altered by my own shaky hands, with a pearl pin from my mother on the lapel. When the music began, I walked down the aisle on the arm of my son, with my chin up, and the whole congregation stood. Lainey, in her ivory silk, looked back over her shoulder and mouthed, Grandma, you made it. I mouthed back, Of course I did.
After the vows, at the reception under the white tent, I danced one slow song with Garrett. Over his shoulder, I saw Dr. Okafor in the crowd, raising her glass of punch to me, and Detective Cobb beside her in a tuxedo that did not fit. Everyone I had needed was in that tent. I leaned my head against the chest of my son, and I could hear his heart beating, steady and strong, and I thanked God for strong hearts.