This morning I went and saw about that empty storefront two doors down, and by the time the sun was up I had shaken hands on it.
Because that regional manager with her cost targets did not understand the first thing about this town. She thought a pharmacy was a building and a shelf. It is not. It is the person behind the counter who knows your name and knows which refill your grandmother forgot.
The pharmacist I trained twenty years ago, the one who owes me more than he can say, met me at that empty store this morning, and we agreed on the spot to open our own pharmacy two doors down from the chain that ran me off, and to take this whole town with us.
Because the town was never loyal to that chain. It was loyal to me. To the counter I stood at for twenty-eight years, filling every prescription, staying late so nobody drove home without their medicine.
The bottle that supposedly went missing turned out to be a logging error by the new clerk she hired cheap, cleared up in an afternoon once anyone read the record. But by then I was already signing a lease.
We opened six weeks later, and the town came. The grandmothers who forget their refills. The young mama who was splitting her own pills. All of them, walking two doors down, past the chain, to the counter where someone knew their name.
The chain could not understand why their numbers fell through the floor. It was no mystery to anyone in town. You cannot run off the pharmacist folks trust and expect them to keep handing you their prescriptions.
By Friday, the day she thought I would slink away, I was filling scripts in my own store, my name on the door.
I thought a long while, that first dark night, about just signing the paper and going quiet. That is what a man like that counts on, that an old worker is too tired or too proud or too afraid to fight, and will slink off and let the lie stand. I nearly did. I am glad I did not. A name is the one thing you carry your whole life, and I was not going to hand mine to a stranger over a thing I never did.
The young folks coming up watched the whole of it play out, and I hope they learned what I learned the hard way. Keep your own records. Trust your own hands. And when a person with a title tries to make you carry the blame for a thing you never did, do not put your name on their paper until the truth has had its say. The truth is slow sometimes. But it keeps, and it comes around.
Twenty-eight years I filled this town prescriptions, and she tried to end me over one bottle a clerk let walk. It turned out the town filled my new shelves the moment I opened them. The chain has my old counter. I have the town. I know which one is worth more.