The Rexall down on Franklin hasn’t changed its floor tile since the Nixon administration, and neither has the smell. It is a mix of old cardboard and that specific kind of bitter floor wax they only seem to use in county seats where the courthouse clock still chimes on the half-hour.

I was standing by the counter because my arthritis has gotten so bad in my knuckles that twisting open a standard amber bottle is about as easy as unscrewing the moon with your bare fingers.

Nia is the girl at the register now. She took over when old man Henderson retired his white coat back in nineteen-ninety-something, and she has the kind of kind eyes that make you want to tell her your grocery list. I had only come in for my blood pressure refills. Bethany, my daughter, usually picks them up on her way home from the high school where she does the administrative filing, but she had been running herself ragged with PTA bake sales and the girl scouts, so Randall had offered to drive me instead.

“Happy to help, Mom,” he had told me in the driveway with that big, wide grin of his that always looked like it belonged on a Sunday morning billboard.

He had been calling me Mom since the second month they were married back in twelve, and I will admit it worked on me. A woman loses her husband and her oldest boy in the same decade, she gets a little soft in the tooth when a younger man starts treating her kitchen table like it belongs to him.

Nia was tapping at her plastic screen, her fingernail clicking against the glass with a little rhythmic sound that got under my skin after three seconds.

She frowned, tilted her head sideways, and looked over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses at me.

“Mrs. Arris,” she said, her voice dropping down low like she was afraid the shelves of aspirin were listening. “You’ve got a balance here on file. Three hundred and twelve dollars.”

I laughed, mostly because I pay cash for every little bottle they hand me so I do not have to mess with Medicare copay forms that look like tax returns. “Well, Nia, that has got to be some kind of clerical mix-up,” I said. “I pay you every time I stand here.”

“I know you do,” Nia said, and she turned her computer monitor around so the greenish light hit my chin. “That is why I am looking at this.

Someone has been collecting these every twenty-eight days for over a year. Right on the dot.”

She started reading down a list of names that made my tongue feel thick in the back of my mouth. The hydrocodone. The ones the doctor gave me back in November of twenty-three after I took that bad tumble off the back porch and cracked my hip on the flagstones. I took maybe six of those pills total because they made my head feel like it was stuffed with wet cotton, and then I told Dr. Finch to take them off my chart because I would rather deal with the throbbing than feel like a ghost in my own skin.

“There they are,” Nia murmured, her finger tracking down the monitor. “Filled. Again and again.”

“I don’t take those,” I told her, and my voice sounded thin even to me. “I haven’t taken those since the snow melted last year. My hands can’t even get the safety cap off, Nia. You know that. I have to ask Bethany to open my aspirin.”

Nia stopped scrolling. She looked up from the screen, and the red in her cheeks went clear up into her hairline. “Mrs. Arris, who has been signing for these?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you were going to tell me.”

She scrolled down to the bottom of the electronic sheet, hit three keys with a sharp little clack, and then let out a breath that blew a stray hair out of her eyes. “It says the pickups were signed by Randall. Listed as your authorized caregiver.”

I didn’t cry. You don’t live seventy-four years in the Missouri Ozarks without learning how to keep your face from cracking when the floor drops out. I have buried a husband who smoked himself into an oxygen tank and a son who didn’t make it past twenty-two on a stretch of Highway 54 with black ice on the bridge. I know how to hold my mouth still in a public place.

“Thank you, Nia,” I said, and my hand didn’t even shake too hard when I pulled three hundred-dollar bills and a ten and a two out of my coin purse. “Let’s just clear that balance right now so it doesn’t follow me around.”

Nia looked like she wanted to reach across the counter and grab my wrist. “Do you want me to call the sheriff, Mrs. Arris? Because this is a controlled substance log and I can see every single signature date right here.”

“Not yet,” I said. “Just print me the history. All of it.”

She hesitated for three long seconds while the little receipt printer by her elbow clicked and buzzed like an angry beetle, spitting out paper that just kept coming and coming until it puddled on the counter like a white snake. Twenty-two pages of blue ink showing every single time my name was used to buy something that made people forget their own names.

Randall was waiting out in his Ford pickup with the engine idling and the heater blowing that stale smell of burnt coffee and cheap air freshener that smells like pine trees sprayed over old gym socks. He hopped out as soon as he saw me pushing the glass door open, took my elbow with that gentle, church-usher grip he uses, and walked me right up the three concrete steps to my own back porch like I was made of spun glass.

“Hot one today,” he said, though it was only fifty degrees out and the wind was coming straight off the river with teeth in it. “You feeling all right, Mom? You look a little pale.”

“I’m just tired, Randall,” I said, and I reached into my coat pocket to make sure the twenty-two folded pages hadn’t unfolded themselves against the lining. They were right there, cold and heavy against my ribs.

“Well, you just go on inside and put your feet up,” he said, standing on the mat and rubbing his palms together. “Bethany is bringing home some of that chicken pot pie from the Piggly Wiggly later, so you don’t even have to worry about dinner.”

I told him I had some tea to make, and he waved from the screen door and loped back down to his truck with his hands jammed deep into his jacket pockets. I watched him back out of the drive, his tires crunching over the gravel that needs raking every spring, and then I walked over to the kitchen table and laid the white snake of paper out across the yellow Formica.

The math was right there in black and white ink. Fourteen months. Every twenty-eight days, right down to the minute the computer allowed a refill on a Schedule II narcotic. My name signed in Randall’s sharp, schoolteacher scrawl where he crossed his t’s like little picket fences.

It wasn’t even the pills that finally made my stomach turn over like a greasy rag. It was the arthritis cream.

For six months I had been listening to him tell me at that very table that the good stuff, the prescription tube with the extra lidocaine that actually stopped my fingers from aching when the rain came in, was simply too expensive for the insurance to touch. “Thirty-eight dollars a tube, Mom,” he would say, shaking his head with that sad, helpful look he wore so well. “It’s highway robbery. Just use the green bottle of Jergens from the Dollar General; it’s practically the same thing.”

I had rubbed that cheap green lotion into my knuckles every night until my skin was red and raw, believing him because he was a man with a steady job at the lumberyard and he did the taxes on his little laptop every February. While I was sitting in my armchair crying over my hands because I couldn’t even hold a crochet hook without my fingers locking up like old gate hinges, he was pulling down a bottle of high-grade painkillers every month under my insurance card and selling them to whoever hangs out behind the bowling alley on county road J.

I looked down at my hands right then. The skin was thin enough to see the blue veins bunching up like angleworms under river silt. Those were the hands that had baked three thousand peach pies for the church bazaar and wiped my daughter’s knees when she fell off the bicycle with the red handlebars. And some boy from three counties over had looked at those same crooked fingers and decided they made me too stupid to notice when my own name was being sold off by the ounce.

I didn’t call Bethany that night. I didn’t want to do it over a telephone wire where she could use her schoolteacher voice to tell me I was getting confused or seeing things that weren’t there. People look at a woman of seventy-four the second she gets mad about something and they start wondering if her stove is still turned off.

Instead, I sat by the radiator with the twenty-two pages tucked under the cushion of my rocking chair and I waited for the clock to reach nine in the morning.

The Cracker Barrel off the interstate smells like maple syrup and old carpet no matter what month of the year you walk through those double wooden doors. They have those little peg games on the tables that nobody ever wins, and the waitresses wear those yellow aprons with too many pockets for pens that don’t work.

Bethany was already sitting in the corner booth by the fake fireplace when I walked in with my purse tucked tight under my arm like a football. She had her papers out from the high school, blue folders with grade sheets she was supposed to be alphabetizing, and she looked up with that bright, tired smile she has worn since the girl was born.

“Mom, you look like you didn’t sleep,” she said before I even got my coat off. “Did your hip start acting up again with this dampness?”

I slid into the vinyl seat across from her. The springs groaned underneath me, loud enough to make the man at the next table look up from his eggs. I didn’t take off my gloves. My hands were shaking just enough that I wanted the wool to keep them quiet.

“Bethany,” I said.

She stopped with her ballpoint pen halfway across a column of ninth-grade absences. “What is it? Is it the furnace again? I told Randall he needed to go down there and check the pilot.”

“Randall wasn’t at the lumberyard yesterday afternoon,” I said. My voice didn’t shake. That was the funny part. When you get old enough, your voice just turns into dry reeds rubbing together in the wind, and it doesn’t matter how hard you push on it.

Bethany laughed, a little short sound that had three different kinds of worry in it already. “Well, of course he wasn’t, Mom. It’s Tuesday. He had to run those invoices over to the county barn in Hermann.”

I reached into the leather bag, pulled out the thick white snake of printer paper, and dropped it right on top of her grade sheets. It landed with a soft, heavy thud that knocked her coffee spoon against the rim of her mug until it stopped ringing.

“He went to the Rexall,” I said. “Every twenty-eight days since the winter before last. For the hydrocodone they gave me after the hip. The ones I told Dr. Finch made me see green spots on the wall.”

Bethany stared at the paper. She didn’t touch it. She looked at it the way people look at a dead snake on a gravel path, knowing it can’t move anymore but not quite trusting it to stay dead either.

“Mom, what is this?” she whispered. “Did you lose a prescription? Did someone steal your card out of the kitchen drawer?”

“Nobody stole anything, honey,” I said, leaning across the sticky table until I could see the little blue veins in her temples just like the ones my mother had before she went. “He told Nia he was my authorized caregiver. He signed his own name twenty-two different times right there on the bottom line. And while he was doing it, he told me my arthritis cream was too expensive to buy so I could sit here and rub cheap lotion into my knuckles until they bled.”

She picked up the top page. Her fingers were younger than mine, but they moved just as clumsy over the blue ink. She read the first three lines, and then she read the signature at the bottom, that little flourish on the R that Randall uses when he signs the Christmas cards we send to his cousins in Nebraska.

“He… he said he was just picking up your blood pressure stuff,” she said, and her voice went very flat and very small, like someone had let all the air out of a bicycle tire in an empty garage. “He always said you wanted him to save you the trip.”

“He saved me a trip alright,” I said. “He saved himself three hundred and twelve dollars yesterday just to keep the account from going to collections while he was out at the tavern.”

The waitress came by then with a little glass pot of coffee, ready to fill our cups, but she took one look at Bethany’s face and kept right on walking toward the kitchen without saying a word. In a town this size, people know the look a woman gets when her house falls down around her ears.

Bethany didn’t cry right there at the table. She has my jaw, poor thing, and she held it together until her knuckles turned the same white as the paper between us.

“He’s at the house right now,” she said, her eyes fixed on the salt shaker between our plates. “He’s supposed to be clearing out the leaves in the back garden before it freezes.”

“No, he isn’t,” I told her, and I reached out and put my gloved hand over hers until she stopped trembling. “I told him you were meeting me here to go over the grocery list for Sunday dinner. By the time we get back to my place, his truck won’t be in the driveway, and if it is, I’m the one who’s going to call Nia’s sheriff.”

Bethany looked down at the twenty-two pages one last time, her breath hitching once in her throat before she swallowed it back down where nobody could see it. She reached out with her free hand, gathered up the white snake of paper, and folded it into four neat squares before she tucked it straight into her own purse, right beside her car keys.

“Let’s pay for the coffee, Mom,” she said, and her voice didn’t shake at all when she called the waitress over for the check. “And then I think Randall is going to have to go find somewhere else to park his truck for a while.”