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 woman 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 thirty-four years, filling every prescription, staying late so nobody drove home without their medicine.
The bottle that supposedly went unaccounted for turned out to be a logging error by the new clerk she hired cheap, cleared up in an afternoon once anyone bothered to 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 store two doors up 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.
Thirty-four years I filled this town prescriptions and stayed late a thousand nights. 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.
I have thought a good deal, since, about how easily it might have gone the other way. They count on an old worker being too tired or too proud or too afraid to fight, on us slinking off quiet and letting 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 about to hand mine to a stranger who never even looked.
Folks still come in and tell me they will never set foot in that chain again, not after what the regional woman did. I tell them to hush and take their blood pressure medicine, and I fill it the way I always have, and I know their name when I hand it across. That is the whole of the business, right there. It always was.