I told them I'd do it for free. I'd told them that in July.
Verlene came to my shop on a Tuesday in October.
I was alone, lettering a menu board for a taco place in Shawnee, and I heard the bell on the door and looked up and she was standing just inside it, in a tan raincoat, holding a small paper bag. She didn't come any farther in. She looked around at the shop, at the paint rack and the brush jars and the old gold-leaf sample boards of my grandfather's on the wall, and at the stapled CVS printout pinned over the rack, and I watched her read it. Epinephrine: Schedule — Not Controlled. I didn't take it down.
"I won't stay," she said. "I just wanted to give you this. I didn't want to come to the house." She held out the bag. "It's for her pens. The ones she used. My attorney says I'm to pay restitution for them as part of the agreement, and I'll do that, through the court. But I didn't want her to wait for the court."
Inside the bag was a CVS receipt for a two-pack, paid in full, and the box, unopened.
"The agreement," I said.
"Diversion." She said it the way you'd say the name of a disease you'd recently been diagnosed with. "I plead to the false report and the interference. They hold the rest. Twelve months. Community service. Restitution. A letter of apology, which I have to write to the dispatcher, of all people, and to the fire department. And a course." She almost smiled. "In anaphylaxis recognition and response. Court-ordered. I'm sixty-four and I have to take a class."
"Whit and Soledad?"
She was quiet for a moment. "I see Archie on Sundays. At their house. With one of them there." She looked at the paint rack. "That's fair. I'd have done the same. I'd have done worse." She seemed to think about saying something else and then decided against it. She tightened the belt of her raincoat. "I'm putting the house on the market in the spring. I thought you'd want to know that, too. You don't have to say anything about it."