"I can neither confirm nor deny that this is anybody's bottle," Aldo Boulanger said, and laid both hands flat on the counter like a man swearing off it. "But I can read. Reading isn't privileged."
Dot Mercier set the amber bottle on the rubber mat between them, label up, and let him not touch it. It was the afternoon after the board meeting, and Boulanger's Drug still smelled of floor wax and cherry cough drops the way it had when she was a girl too short to see over this same counter. Aldo had inherited the smell with the store — third generation at the Four Corners, fussy enough that he'd once made Peg spell her own name to prove she was allowed to know it.
"Read me the label, then," she said. "The parts the state already made public." He leaned back, not down, and read it at arm's length the way men his age read everything now. "Filled the Tuesday after Labor Day. Quantity thirty. One of the heart-rhythm generics — the kind that went from yellow to white on half my customers back in August, and I heard about every one of them." He set it down. "That's the label talking, Dorothy. Not me." "And the man it belonged to?" "Filled his organizer Sunday nights during the Packers, forty years running. Everybody on this corner knows that much." Aldo folded his arms. "I can't tell you one word about anybody's prescriptions. But arithmetic's free."
The bottle had come out of the estate's effects box that morning, signed for as Dorothy Mercier, appraiser, on a Voyageur Mutual form and initialed twice — legitimate to the letter, because the appraiser gets to count. She'd counted it once already in the car, thumb and a folded index card, sliding the pills into the cap one at a time. She counted them again on Aldo's mat so he could watch her do it and confirm nothing. Twenty-three. "Thirty filled," she said. "Twenty-three standing." "I'm not doing your subtraction," Aldo said. "That's practicing pharmacy at you." "Seven." She said it to the bottle, not to him. "Seven left here in one trip. A tidy man finishes the old bottle before he cracks a new one, so these didn't leave a day at a time — they left in a handful. Sunday night, into the organizer, during the highlights." "Then you don't need me at all," Aldo said. "I need you to have watched me not need you," Dot said. "A number's a rumor until somebody with nothing to gain has seen it counted."
And on the Sunday they found him, the organizer had held something that was not these. She'd stood in the effects room three days running with the two pills side by side, the one from the bottle and the one from the box, and no amount of wanting had made them the same size or the same face. Seven true pills went into that box on the last Sunday of his life. When he died, six days on, what sat in it wasn't real. Somewhere in the week between, the true ones had left and the false ones had taken their place. Real in, she wrote later on a card, and beneath it, not-real at the end. She drew the line between them and left the middle of it blank, because the blank was the honest part: she could pin the front of the window to the Sunday he filled it and the back to the Saturday he didn't wake, and she could not, standing at a drugstore counter, close either end nearer than a week. "Well," Dot said. For a second Aldo wasn't fussy at all. "The imprint database is free on the internet," he said. "I never told you which way it'd point." He rang up a roll of wintergreen Life Savers nobody had asked for and slid it across the mat. "On the house. You've got the look of a woman who skipped her lunch to count somebody else's pills."
Voyageur Mutual's weekly check-in came the next day, a young man named Corley reading her a schedule in the voice of a form being filled out — appraisal dates, a walk-through window, and then the item that landed like a dropped pan. A cremation. Set by the estate, for Friday. Dale had signed for it down in Green Bay. "Friday," Dot said. "Should I note an exception on the inventory?" Corley asked. She noted her own. When she called the annex, Rollie did not say memo. He didn't say anything for a moment — a quiet with a chair-creak in it — and then, "Friday," in a voice that had finished its decaf. "Don't do a thing till I call you back, Dorothy. Let me make a call of my own." "A call to who?" "To somebody whose signature that Friday needs," he said, and hung up before she could price the answer. Two days ago he'd sent her home to write things down. She wrote that down too.
She stopped at the Kwik Trip out on 57 on the way home and ate a glazer out of the bag in the dark of the farmhouse kitchen, a dollar nine, because supper was a thing that happened to other people. Then she made the wall useful. Index cards went up beside the back door on masking tape, one fact to a card, the fan angled at her neck and the window cracked to the cold coming in off the stubble fields — her own private September, arrived early and staying late. One card for the bottle, one for the organizer, one for the thirty that should have read twenty-three and didn't. A Sunday she could name and a back wall she couldn't. The safe that opened for nobody. Her mother's name going still in a stranger's mouth at a board meeting — that card she turned face-down, under a heading she wasn't ready to write. The octopus furnace clanked awake in the cellar and she didn't need it. She stood in the draft with the cards glowing and did the last subtraction Aldo had left her. Friday. The body was at the funeral home up in Sturgeon Bay, and come Friday it would not be. Four days. Whatever proof there was had four days left to exist, and after that it would be arithmetic nobody could ever check again.
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