Lazaro closed his eyes for a second.
"And today," Emi said, "she came home from work early. She said a lady at work gave her something for the pain. She said she was just going to take a half and lie down for one hour, and I should do my worksheet, and she'd make grilled cheese. And then I heard a thump."
Lazaro opened his eyes. "A lady at work gave her something."
"That's what she said."
"Did she say what?"
The boy shook his head.
Lazaro sat with that. He knew what it probably was. He knew what the little blue round tablets stamped M on one side and 30 on the other usually were on the east side of Elmira in 2026. They were not what they were stamped to be. They had not come out of any pharmacy. They had been pressed somewhere in a garage on a machine that cost a few thousand dollars, and what was in them was whatever the man running the machine had put in them, and sometimes that was a little fentanyl and sometimes it was a lot, and there was no way to know, not by looking, not by the person taking it and not by the person who had kindly handed it to a coworker with a swollen jaw in the break room of a nursing home.
He wondered if the woman at Arnot Hills who had given Celestina that pill was still there now, finishing her shift, with more of them in her purse.
"Emi," he said. "I need to ask you something, and you can tell me it's none of my business. Why did your mom tell you to come to me? Did she ever say?"
The boy hesitated. He looked down at the juice can and picked at the tab.
"She said you were the only one," he said. "She said when she was really sick, a long time ago, before she got better, she was really, really sick one time, and you helped her. She said you were the only person who ever came when she needed somebody and didn't want anything back. She said everybody's scared of you, but they're wrong. She said you were a good man and she was—" He stopped.