I laid both hands flat on the pharmacy counter, and the words came out of me as steady as a church bell. “I am Nadine Crabtree. I have never taken a pill of that kind in eighty one years. This girl is my granddaughter, Kayla, and she is sick. I am not going to ask you to call the police on her. I am going to ask you to call the treatment center on Fourth Avenue, and I am going to ask you to tell me which doctor wrote those four prescriptions in my name.” The security guard stopped walking. The whole line went quiet.
The pharmacist, a young man named Greg Adkins with kind, tired eyes, looked at me for a long moment over the top of his glasses. He pulled the printout from the printer and laid it on the counter between us. Four prescriptions, in four weeks, from a clinic in Barboursville called Tri State Wellness. Dr. Alan Pruett. I had never heard the name. “Mrs. Crabtree,” Greg said softly, “I have been filling these since March, and I knew something was wrong. I was waiting for someone to come in and tell me.”
Kayla was crying openly now, with my reading glasses crooked on her head and my blue cardigan hanging off her thin shoulders. She looked like the girl who used to sit on my kitchen counter at six years old, eating biscuit dough with her fingers. “Grandma,” she whispered, “I did not mean for it to get this big. I just needed the pain to stop.” An old man in the line, a retired coal miner with a cane, took off his cap and held it in both hands. Nobody in that pharmacy said a cruel word.
A stolen driver license on a pharmacy counter gave one hardware store widow the length of a quiet minute to bring her granddaughter back to the truth in Huntington.
I gave my terms right there, with my hand on the counter beside hers. “Kayla, listen to me. You will walk out of this store with me, and you will get into my car, and I will drive you to the treatment center this afternoon. You will stay until they say you may leave. The doctor who wrote these papers will answer for them, because Mr. Adkins and I are going to see to that. And when you come home, you will move out of my sweater and into your own clothes, and you will be my granddaughter, and nobody else.”
My granddaughter held onto the counter with both hands. “Grandma, I hurt my back lifting a patient at the hospital,” she said. “They gave me pills for the pain. When the prescription ran out, I could not stop. A man in the parking lot told me about the clinic in Barboursville. He said they would write one for anybody with a name.” She wiped her nose on my sleeve. “I used your license because mine was flagged. I told myself you would never know. I told myself you had plenty. I am so ashamed, Grandma.”
But the fear was too strong. Kayla suddenly snatched the paper bag with the four bottles and my driver license off the counter, and ran for the automatic doors, her bare ankles flashing under my long cardigan. The guard, an older man named Marvin, moved to cut her off. Greg Adkins vaulted the end of the pharmacy counter with one hand, which no one in Huntington had ever seen him do. And the retired coal miner with the cane stepped out of line and planted it, like a gate, in front of the exit.
Kayla stopped inside the glass doors with the bag clutched to her chest, and the afternoon traffic on Third Avenue passed behind her in a blur. Nobody touched her. The old miner spoke in a low voice, in the soft accent of the hollows. “Honey, I lost a boy to those little bottles in 2014. I would give every day I have left to have him walk back up this aisle.” Kayla looked at the bag, and then at the man. She put it in his open hand, turned, and walked back down the aisle to me, with her whole face wet.
The consequences were hard and hopeful. I drove Kayla to the treatment center that very afternoon, with her head against the car window and her hand in mine at every red light. She stayed for ninety days. Greg Adkins reported the clinic in Barboursville, and by Christmas the state had shut it down and Dr. Pruett had lost his license. Kayla called me every Sunday night from the center payphone, and I sat in my kitchen with the receiver in both hands, listening to every word, and I never once hung up first.
In the name of my husband Earl, who passed in 2020, I started the Earl Crabtree Fund. It pays for treatment beds for young adults who cannot afford them and for nursing school tuition for people in recovery, in Cabell, Wayne and Lincoln counties. In the first year we paid for forty one treatment stays and sent eleven students to nursing school. One was a thirty year old man from Milton who had lost his license to the pills, and who stood in a lecture hall in his first set of scrubs, shaking hands with strangers.
On a warm Saturday in June, I stood on the lawn of the community college in Huntington in my best blue dress, with a camera around my neck and a bouquet of Earl favorite zinnias in my arm. Kayla walked across the stage in a white cap and gown, two years clean, and took her certificate in both hands. When she turned and found me in the crowd, she did not wave. She put her fist over her heart and held it there. I held up the flowers, and I did not stop smiling for an hour.