The first time Verlene Quisenberry called my daughter's EpiPen narcotics, it was the second week of July, and it cost me fifty dollars and a lettering job I'd already been paid for.
I should explain the lettering job first, because it matters, and because I still think about it every time I drive past the pool.
My name is Ike Benedetti. I paint signs. Not the vinyl kind that come out of a plotter in twenty minutes, although I do those too when the rent asks me to, but the old kind, with a mahl stick and a quill brush and One Shot enamel that smells like a hardware store in 1965. Benedetti Sign & Letter, a storefront on Santa Fe Street in old downtown Olathe, Kansas, between a vacuum repair shop and a place that sells nothing but hot sauce. My grandfather painted gold leaf on bank windows in Kansas City. My father painted barns and grain trucks. I paint craft breweries and barbecue joints, and once a year somebody's grandmother asks me to put her late husband's name on the tailgate of his truck, and I don't charge her.
In May, the Meadowlark Commons Homeowners Association hired me to paint the new rules board for the community pool. Verlene was the president of the board then, and she came down to the shop herself with a typed list, eleven rules on a single page, double-spaced, with the numbering she wanted already in place. Rule 9.2: No outside food or beverage permitted in the pool enclosure. All refreshments must be purchased from or provided by the Association. Rule 11.4: No bags, coolers, or personal containers on the pool deck. Sharps and glass strictly prohibited.
"Navy on white," she said. "Nothing cute. People need to understand these are rules and not suggestions."
I painted it on a four-by-six panel of MDO board, navy enamel on white, with a thin red keyline around the edge because I couldn't help myself. Clean Roman capitals for the heading, a good readable casual for the rules underneath. It took me most of a week. She paid on delivery, and she said it was the most professional thing the Association had ever owned, and she shook my hand on the pool deck in front of the board treasurer like we'd closed a land deal.
Six weeks later she was standing under that sign with my daughter's hip pack open in her hands.
Clem was fourteen that summer. She has had a peanut and tree nut allergy since she was three years old, since the afternoon at a church picnic in Lenexa when a lady from the choir gave her a bite of a Nutter Butter and she went from laughing to gray in the time it took me to set down a paper plate. I remember the sound she made more than anything else. Not a cry. A kind of stuck, creaking sound, like a door that won't close all the way. My wife Saoirse held her in the back seat while I drove to Shawnee Mission Medical Center with my flashers on and my hand on the horn, because we didn't know then to call 911, and we didn't have a pen, and we didn't know what a pen was. A resident in the emergency department gave her a shot in the thigh and I watched my daughter's face come back to her, like somebody turning a dimmer switch up. I have never in my life seen anything work that fast, before or since.
So we learned. Everyone who lives with this learns. We learned to read labels the way other people read the sports page. We learned "may contain" and "processed in a facility with" and that pesto has pine nuts and some chili has peanut butter in it and that the word "natural flavors" can hide almost anything. We learned that epinephrine comes in a two-pack because one dose doesn't always hold, and that you carry both, always, and that the pens can't sit in a hot car in a Kansas August because heat breaks the drug down. We learned that it goes into the outer thigh, through clothes if you have to, and that it's adrenaline, the same thing your body makes when it's scared, only faster and more of it, and that it opens the airway and squeezes the blood vessels and keeps the blood pressure from falling through the floor. Clem learned it all too. By the time she was eight she could teach it. By fifth grade she carried her own, in a little black zippered pouch on a belt around her waist, because the state of Kansas lets a student carry and use her own epinephrine at school once her doctor and her parents sign the form, and we'd signed it, and her allergist had signed it, and the school nurse had a copy in a red folder with Clem's picture stapled to the front.