He had done it right tonight. Exactly right. And still he had been turned and pressed against a warm car while a girl watched through a door.
"They put cuffs on me, Daddy," he said to the man in the casket.
He had not called him that since he was fourteen. It came out without permission and stayed in the room with the carnations.
"I did it how you showed me. Exactly how you showed me."
The big hands didn't move. Marcus didn't cry—not here, not yet. He did what he did at work when the line was long and a child's dose looked off by a decimal: he slowed down. He breathed. He let the room be what it was.
He thought about the catch book—a black composition notebook in the second drawer of his station at the outpatient pharmacy on the east side of Indianapolis. In it, over twenty-one years, he had written down every error he caught before it reached a patient. A doctor who wrote milligrams for micrograms. A tech who grabbed hydroxyzine instead of hydralazine because the bottles sat side by side. A warfarin dose that would have bled an old woman out by Thursday. Three hundred and twelve entries. He kept it to remember what checking was for. Every entry was a person who went home.
Two people, two signatures: that was the rule he had pushed through for high-alert drugs, over a district manager who complained it slowed the line. Of course it slowed the line. That was the point. Nobody gets to be sure. You check, somebody checks you, and then you hand it across.
Run the plate before you put cuffs on me.
I decide what gets checked.
At 8:40 he thanked Lindqvist, who held his hand a moment longer than a handshake and said, "Your father talked about you at the co-op Christmas party every year, my wife says. 'My son the pharmacist.' Like it was one word."
In the lot, in the silver Camry, he called his wife.
He told Celeste about the gas station first, in order, with no adjectives, and when he got to I decide what gets checked he heard her breath go in and not come out for a while.
"Are you hurt?"
"My wrists. My right thumb's a little numb. Superficial radial nerve. It's called handcuff neuropathy. It's in the literature. It usually resolves."
"Marcus, I don't care what it's called."
"I know." "Is Wendell asleep?"