Saturday morning, I put on my good coat, drove down there myself, and told them all to go home.
There were about two hundred people on that sidewalk by nine and a police cruiser parked crossways at the end of the lot, and somebody had made signs.
I did not ask for one bit of it and I have said so to everybody who will listen.
I got up on the curb and said what I came to say, which is that there are four hundred prescriptions inside that building and Chase Mickelsen is not the one who fills them. Deanne and Toby fill them, Deanne is twenty-three with a baby, and a picket line does not cost Minneapolis a dollar and it costs those two kids their hours.
I told them to go in and get their medicine. About sixty of them did, right then, and the line at that counter went out into the greeting cards.
Then Rhonda Albrecht came up on the curb with a paper sack.
Her father is eighty-six. He kept every empty bottle since 2011 in a sack in his pantry, because he says he was raised not to throw away something with your name on it. About two hundred of them.
I write on the labels. I have always written on the labels. Not directions, the pharmacist does directions. I write the other part, in ballpoint, in the white space.
Rhonda took one out of that sack and read it out loud on the sidewalk with the police cruiser sitting there, and it is dated the ninth of March, 2019, which is eleven days after her mother’s funeral.
Mr. A, this is your heart one. I know it is hard to care about a pill right now. Take it anyway and call me at the counter if you feel dizzy, and call me if you do not feel anything at all, and I mean that second part. B.
Chase came out the automatic doors while she was reading it and stood there and did not go back in.
He called me on Monday. It was not a good phone call from his end and I have decided not to describe it.
I went back on the eleventh. I had two conditions and neither one was about me. Deanne got moved to thirty-two hours guaranteed and Toby got the raise he had been asking about since June.
Nothing changed about the labels and nobody has said a word about them since.
Chase is still district. He comes through every six weeks and stands at the end of my counter watching the line, and last month he asked why Mrs. Sopko takes her bag with both hands, and I told him, and he wrote it down.
Mr. Albrecht comes Tuesdays. He is eighty-six and he does not need to come Tuesdays.
He called me a relic who handwrites reminders like it is 1985. There is a paper sack in a pantry on Rebecca Street with two hundred of those reminders in it, saved by a man who was raised not to throw away something with your name on it, and one of them got read out loud on a sidewalk in front of two hundred people who already knew.