"Nora, we need to talk about selling the pharmacy," my husband said over a Tuesday night dinner, and thirty years of trust began to dissolve like aspirin in water.
I set down my fork. Bayside Pharmacy was mine, every shelf of it, and the equity in it, better than four hundred thousand dollars, was the floor under my whole retirement.
Roger had cooked, which should have warned me. He grilled snapper only when he wanted something.
"Sell it to whom?" I asked.
"A national chain. They came to me, Nora. It's a pre-emptive offer, and a generous one."
"They came to you." I turned my water glass on its coaster. "A buyer calls the owner of record. I'm the owner of record."
He smiled the easy smile he uses on marine supply buyers and slid a folder across the table. "Look at the spreadsheets before you get your back up."
Advertisements
I looked. Reimbursements shrinking, costs climbing, the chain store out by the Publix plaza eating our front-end sales. It was a tidy story, and it was wrong in places I could see from where I sat.
His prescription volume was a figure I hadn't seen since the year the hurricane shut us down for a week. My monthly filings said otherwise, and I had signed every one of them.
"These aren't my numbers," I said.
"They're the numbers I could pull."
"Pull from where? Lina and I run those reports."
"Honey." He covered my hand with his. "You're attached. Twenty-five years, I understand. But attachment isn't a business plan."
I took my hand back and carried the plates to the sink. He called it emotional. I called it a variance I couldn't explain, and I don't sleep well with those.
That night I lay in the dark listening to the ceiling fan tick on its loose screw, checking his figures against mine the way I check a prescription against a patient's whole list of medications. Something in his folder interacted badly with the truth. Beside me, Roger slept with his mouth slightly open.
By Thursday I'd said nothing to him and everything to Lina.
She was restocking the allergy aisle in scrubs printed with pineapples, and she listened to the whole thing with a box of antihistamines in her arms.
Advertisements
"Since when does Roger look at your books?" she asked.
"He doesn't. He says he pulled them."
"From what? I run your reports with you." She set the box down. "Nora, I like him. I've liked him for fifteen years. But a man who wants your store and gets your numbers wrong is either stupid or lying, and Roger isn't stupid."
"I'll look this weekend."
"Look hard," she said, and went back to the shelf.
I spent Saturday at the kitchen table with the pharmacy's ledgers, a pot of Cuban coffee and a yellow legal pad. Bayside was healthy. Slim in the front store the way it always is, strong where it counts, and the filings matched what I remembered to the cent.
Sunday morning I opened our personal accounts, which I hadn't studied in years because Roger handled them and I trusted him to.
The retirement fund had been bled in a series of withdrawals over the last year, each one large, each one round. I added them on the legal pad twice. Eighty thousand dollars.
I carried the pad out to the lanai, where Roger sat with the Sunday paper and a glass of sweet tea going watery.
"Explain this," I said.
He read the figures, and I watched his jaw work. "That's a confidential short-term investment."
"Confidential from whom?"
"From everyone. It was a bridge, Nora. It went sour, and I'm handling it."
"With my pharmacy."
"With the family's resources." He folded the paper. "Don't make this ugly. Friday we're taking Tim to The Salty Pelican to toast his first year in business. I want that night to be good."
I stood there holding a pad of numbers that proved my husband was not the careful man I'd married. I'd lost him a little with every withdrawal, and I hadn't felt a single one go.
Monday I found the charge.
It was a small thing on the household card, a recurring sixty-some dollars at the Oyster Bay Marina fuel dock. Roger sold marine supplies, but he didn't own a boat. Tim did.
At lunch I left Lina at the counter and drove the five minutes to the marina. The harbormaster, Walt Pruitt, was in the shed office with a box fan going and a Styrofoam cup of coffee.
"Mrs. Sullivan. Been a while."
"Walt. I'm here about Tim's boat."
He rubbed the back of his neck. "The Timeless. Sure. Real shame." He glanced at me and kept going, because I had a face that said I knew. "Bank's been after it since winter. I had to tape the notice on the hull Friday."
"Do you have that notice here?"
"Final Demand for Payment. It's in Tim's folder." He hesitated with his hand on a drawer. "You're his mother. I figured he'd told you."
"May I see it?"
He gave it to me. I read it standing, then ran the dates against what I knew, and the dates said Tim's business had been failing while Roger toasted it. Walt ran off a copy on the machine behind him without my asking, and I folded it into my purse.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Sullivan."
"So am I, Walt."
The county clerk's office closed in the afternoon, and I made it by a margin I didn't care to measure. The woman at the counter charged me twenty-five dollars for a certified copy of the lien against the Timeless. I paid in cash and kept the receipt.
Then I sat in the car in the parking lot with the air conditioning running and my forehead against the steering wheel. I stayed there until the glass stopped feeling like it was pressing on me.
That was the last place I could have been wrong. I wasn't.
Friday the Gulf was flat as a plate, and the dining room at The Salty Pelican smelled of fried shrimp and lime. Roger had reserved a table by the window with a white cloth and a candle in a glass.
Tim arrived in a pressed fishing shirt and his good ball cap, which he took off for me. He looked like his father at twenty-eight, only more tired.
"Hey, Mom."
"Hello, sweetheart. You're thin."
"Long season," he said, and sat down without looking at his father.
We ordered. Roger got the grouper sandwich at eighteen ninety-five and pressed Tim to try the crab cakes. He talked about charter bookings, about Tim's "growth trajectory," about the Gulf's good fishing. Tim moved a hush puppy around his plate.
I ate half my salad and waited.
After the main course Roger stood, lifted his glass of white wine and tapped it with his knife. At the next table a couple in matching sunhats looked over, pleased to be witnesses.
"To my son. To Tim's hard work and success." Roger's voice carried. "It's been a wonderful first year, and I couldn't be prouder."
Tim lifted his iced tea six inches off the cloth and put it down again.
"And with that success," Roger went on, turning to me, "it's time for new beginnings for all of us. Your mom and I are looking at a new chapter, too."
He looked at me expectantly. He had the whole room set up, and he was waiting for me to say yes.
I let the silence hang until it started to cost him. Then I opened my purse, took out the certified copy of the lien and the marina's Final Demand for Payment, and laid both on the white tablecloth between the bread basket and the candle.
"Before we celebrate," I said, "maybe one of you can explain these. Is the bank's repossession notice part of the new business plan?"
Roger sat down slowly. He did not touch the papers.
"Nora, this is not the time or place."
"You chose the place, Roger. You chose the tablecloth."
"It's a simple paperwork mix-up. Walt Pruitt has been behind on his filing for a year."
"The lien is from the county clerk. I paid twenty-five dollars for the stamp."
His voice dropped, low and hard. "Why are you doing this? In front of your son? Are you trying to humiliate him?"
Tim had gone the color of the tablecloth. He stared at his plate as if the answer might be printed on it.
I noticed the couple in the sunhats had stopped talking. I noticed the waiter standing just past the kitchen door with a tray, not moving.
"The humiliation," I said, "was draining eighty thousand dollars from our retirement and then trying to trick me into selling my life's work to cover it up. I am not going to wait for a better place. The place for this is wherever the lies stop."
Roger opened his mouth.
"Dad." Tim's voice cracked on it. "Just tell her."
"Tim, not now."
"The business is gone." He pushed his chair back an inch. "Mom, it's all gone. The boat, the charters, all of it. Dad gave me the money, and I couldn't make it work."
Silver clinked against china at the next table, and someone's ice shifted in a glass. Nobody spoke.
The waiter set the check folder at Roger's elbow and backed away without a word. Roger paid in cash and left a tip too large, the way he does when he's ashamed.
We drove home in two cars. Tim followed in his truck and parked at the curb, and neither of them argued when I told them to come inside.
The living room was lit by one lamp. I sat in the armchair with my legal pad. Roger took the sofa, and Tim stayed standing by the bookcase, turning his cap in his hands.
"All of it," I said. "From the beginning."
Roger rubbed his face. "Tim came to me with the boat idea. A good idea, Nora. I believed in it."
"You didn't ask me."
"I didn't want you to worry. I thought it'd take off by spring. I moved money in pieces so it wouldn't show."
"Each withdrawal was larger than the last," I said. "I noticed that Sunday."
"Dad told me it was fine," Tim said. "He said you'd sign off after the first season. Then the engine went, and the bookings dried up, and I couldn't pay the note." He swallowed. "He told me not to tell you. He said he'd fix it."
"By selling my pharmacy."
Roger didn't deny it. "It was the only asset big enough. The offer is real, Nora. I called them in March."
"You called the chain before you ever told me the money was gone."
"I was going to tell you after the closing."
I wrote that on the legal pad, word for word, because I knew in a month he would remember it differently.
"Here is what happens," I said. "The pharmacy is not for sale, now or ever. Monday I'm calling an accountant to separate Bayside's finances from our personal ones, in writing, on paper, with signatures."
"Nora, that's extreme."
"It's a precaution. You'd call it one if a patient asked for it." I turned a page. "You will find a way to pay back the money you took. I don't care how. Sell the boat, sell your truck, take a second job. But you'll put it in writing."
Tim wiped his eyes with the heel of his hand. "Mom, I'm sorry."
"I know you are." I stood and touched his shoulder, and he leaned into it for a second like he was ten. "You'll find work, and we'll talk Sunday when we've both slept. Go home."
He went. The truck started in the driveway and the headlights swept the wall.
Roger looked up at me. I looked down at a man I had once picked out of a crowded dock and promised my whole life to, and could not find the one I'd chosen.
"And Roger," I said. "I made up the guest room this afternoon. Fresh sheets. I need some space to think."
"How long?"
"I don't know."
He took his glasses off, folded them, and set them on the coffee table. He went down the hall without another word, and I heard the guest room door close, not hard.
I sat there until the lamp bulb ticked as it cooled.
In the morning the air outside Bayside Pharmacy was cool and salty, and the sun hadn't yet burned the dew off the sidewalk. A gull stood on the lamppost across the lot, watching me.
I looked up at the gold lettering on the window. *Nora Sullivan, R.Ph.*
For years I'd read it as part of a we. I'd thought of the pharmacy as one of the things we were building together, a room in a house with two names on the deed. This morning I read it as a me.
I didn't know what my life with Roger would look like. I didn't know whether there would be one.
I took the key out of my purse and set it in the lock, the cold metal solid in my hand as I prepared to open the door.
Comments