The doctor named on the prescription was Dr. Alvin Mercer, and I knew it the instant I read it, because Alvin Mercer had been the physician of my husband for thirty years and had passed in 2019. A man who had been gone for five years had written me sixty tablets of oxycodone. I stood in the garage in my church dress with the stapled bag in my hands and my reading glasses halfway down my nose, and I understood, slowly, what I was holding. It was not a gift. It was a trap, and the trap had been set for me.
I called the sheriff of Dougherty County first, then my pastor, then the Georgia Board of Pharmacy, whose number I found on the label. Within the hour, Sheriff Willie Grant was sitting at my kitchen table with his hat on his knee, listening, and an investigator from the Board was on the phone from Atlanta. The picture became clear. Kendrick had been using the credentials of Dr. Mercer to write false prescriptions in the names of elderly women of Albany, women who trusted him at the counter. He had filled them himself and sold the pills. Nineteen women were on his list. I was the twentieth.
The prescription in my glove box had been meant to be found. Monica and Kendrick intended to show it to a judge, in a petition that would say Imogene Batts was a pill seeking old woman unable to manage her affairs, and that the eleven hundred acres of pecan orchards should be placed under the guardianship of her devoted daughter. The sixty tablets were the proof. The party, the speech, and even the dinner in front of sixty guests had all been staged to make me look like an embarrassment who could be quietly set aside.
A pharmacy bag found in a glove box gave one mother the afternoon to bring her daughter back to her faith in Albany.
I gave my terms to my daughter on the phone at six that evening, with the sheriff listening. “Monica, I have your car, I have the bag, and I have the name of every woman on the list. You will come to my house tonight, alone, and you will tell the sheriff the truth about your husband. Then you will go to a treatment program in Savannah that Pastor Wilkes has found, and you will stay for the full ninety days. If you do all of this, I will stand by you. If you do not, I will stand by the nineteen women. I love you, honey. That is not the same as trusting you.”
Monica came at nine, in the dark, on foot from a taxi, with her hair loose and her eyes swollen. She stood in my kitchen door and could not speak. When she did, it came out in pieces. “Mama, I am not a religious nut. I am a drowning woman who made fun of the one person who tried to hold her up. I stood in front of sixty people and I called you a nut because I was ashamed of how much I needed you.” She sank into a kitchen chair and laid her head on my table. “Kendrick said you were crazy. I knew he was lying. I kept my mouth shut.”
At ten, headlights swept across the garage. Kendrick had come for the bag. He walked in through the side door with a smile on his face, a handsome man in a navy blazer, and he saw the sheriff in the kitchen and the white bag on the counter beside the bread box. He lunged for it, grabbed it, and ran for the door. He ran straight into Otis Greer, my orchard foreman of thirty one years, who had come up from the grove with the tractor lights burning and was standing in the dark yard, six feet three and built like a gate post. Otis put one hand flat on the chest of Kendrick, and Kendrick sat down on the gravel.
The sheriff took Kendrick away, and the kitchen went quiet except for the refrigerator. Monica lifted her head from the table. I did something I had not done in five years, which was to get up, walk around the table, and stand behind the chair of my daughter. I put both arms around her shoulders, the way I did when she was little and woke from a bad dream. She turned and pressed her face into my apron. I said the Lord prayer into her hair, out loud, the way I do before every meal, and she did not tell me to hush.
The money consequences were severe for the guilty and gentle for the rest. Kendrick surrendered his license, and he was charged with fraud and distribution on the evidence of the nineteen women. The pharmacy board paid restitution to each of them from the bond of the store. Monica cooperated, and the judge agreed to defer her case if she completed treatment. My eleven hundred acres of orchard stayed exactly as they were, and the guardianship petition was never filed. I paid for the program in Savannah myself, in full, fifty four thousand dollars, and I did not count it.
In the name of Rufus, who passed in 2020, I started the Rufus Batts Fund. It pays for prescription costs, pharmacy safety checks and recovery help for seniors in Dougherty, Lee and Worth counties. In the first year we helped one hundred and four older people. One was a widow in Sylvester who had been taking pills she did not need from a doctor she had never met, because a man at the counter had told her to. We sent a nurse to sit with her for a week. She cried and said she had thought she was the only one.
Monica finished her ninety days in the fall and came home on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. She walked into Mount Zion Baptist with me on her arm, in a plain blue dress, and sat in the third pew. When the pastor said it was time to bless the meal at the fellowship luncheon, I bowed my head and began to pray out loud. In the middle of the prayer I felt her hand slide into mine. I kept right on praying, and when I said amen, so did she, loudly, so the whole room could hear.