I’m calmer now than I was when I started typing this. Yesterday I found a baggie of little blue pills in my sixteen-year-old grandson’s sock drawer, every one stamped with an “M.” Caleb told me everybody had them, that they help you focus, Grandma. I didn’t believe a word of it. So this morning I drove one down to Donna, my pharmacist of twenty years, and watched the color drain right out of her face.
She held it to the light a long time. Then she said, very gently, “Ruth, sit down a minute.” I thought she was about to tell me my boy was an addict. Instead she turned her screen toward me. The pill wasn’t anything dangerous. It was a memory supplement — ginkgo and B-vitamins, a brand called Memorin, sold behind the counter three aisles over. The “M” was just the company’s letter.
“This isn’t a drug, honey,” Donna said. “Somebody’s been buying these by the box. And they’ve been asking me questions.” That was when her voice caught. Because the somebody was Caleb. He’d been coming in after school for two months, asking what helps when a person starts forgetting things.
See, I’d been losing words lately. Leaving the stove on. Calling Caleb by his grandfather’s name, my Harold, gone four years now. I’d laughed it off. I didn’t know my grandson had been watching, and worrying, and reading every label in that pharmacy trying to find something — anything — to slow it down.
When I got home I found a spiral notebook under the baggie. He’d written out a schedule. One pill with my breakfast, one with supper, in his careful little print. And on the last page, not meant for me: “If Grandma’s memory is slipping, I’m going to slow it down. I already lost Grandpa. I’m not losing her too. She just can’t know, or she’ll be scared.”
The “studying” story was so I wouldn’t worry. A sixteen-year-old boy had been quietly trying to save me, and lying about it so I could keep feeling safe in my own kitchen.
I sat him down that evening and held both his hands. I told him the pills probably wouldn’t fix what’s coming, and that he didn’t have to carry it alone. We made an appointment with my doctor together — the real one, the conversation I’d been too frightened to have by myself.
I went looking for trouble in that sock drawer and found the deepest love I’ve ever been handed. However many mornings I have left, I know exactly who’ll be sitting across the table, making sure I remember I’m not alone.