Friday morning I got up, put on my good dress, and drove back to the drugstore, where corporate had flown in for a thirty-two-years-of-service reception and had no idea their district manager had run me off two days earlier over a single missing bottle.
I came to say goodbye to the counter where I had spent thirty-two years, before the district manager could tell the suits from headquarters that I was the reason inventory came up short.
But a pharmacy is not a candy shop. Every bottle is counted. Every pill is logged. And the logs do not lie, no matter who wants them to.
The corporate people had pulled those logs the moment they heard an accusation involving medication. They had to. And what the logs showed was not thirty-two years of careful hands coming up short. It was a brand-new clerk, hired weeks before, whose access codes lined up exactly with every discrepancy.
Your record is spotless going back three decades, the woman from headquarters told me, and the only thing these logs prove is that the person who accused you was not watching his own store.
The district manager, who had wanted the veterans swapped out for cheaper hires, had no answer for a computer that had been watching all along.
Corporate did not let it slide. Accusing a pharmacy worker of stealing inventory is a serious thing, and getting it flat wrong, in front of customers, over a person with a spotless record, is a firing all its own. He was gone before the reception cake was cut. A man does not get to end a career like mine on a lie and keep his own, the woman from headquarters said, and she meant every word of it.
They asked me to come back, and they made it right in every way that counts. Back pay. A public apology in front of the whole store. And a promise to actually look, next time, before a good name gets dragged through the mud.
I came back. There are too many people in that town who count on me. The ones who cannot quite afford their pills. The elderly ones who live alone and need someone to call and check that they are still on their feet.
I know every one of their stories. Thirty-two years will do that. The young clerk who took the fall for his own theft did not last the week, and I am told he learned something from all of it, which is more than the manager ever did.
So I put my badge back on, and I called old Mr. Hensley to make sure he had taken his morning pills, the way I have every day for years. He said he was glad I was back. I told him I never really left.