I didn't. I set the bag down on my workbench, next to the taco menu.
"Your daughter," Verlene said at the door, with her hand on the handle, not turning around. "She did the steps. That's what the officer told me she said. I've watched it. On the footage, she never once looks at me. Not even when I grab her. She just keeps looking at him." She opened the door. The bell rang. "I don't think I've ever in my life looked at one thing that hard."
Then she was gone, and I stood there with a quill brush in my hand and my hands perfectly still, and I didn't know what I felt, and I still don't, exactly. I'd wanted, in the garage that morning in September, to paint her name four feet tall in fire red. I'd wanted her to stand in front of a hundred and fifty people and be ashamed. She had done that, and she had done it without me, and it hadn't felt the way I'd thought it would. It hadn't felt like anything. It had felt like watching somebody pay a bill.
I repainted the pool rules board that winter. Same panel, sanded down and primed, same navy on white. I kept the keyline. Rule 9.2 now has a line under it, (c), in the same readable casual: Medically necessary food is always permitted. Rule 11.4 has one too: Epinephrine auto-injectors and other prescribed emergency medication are always permitted on the pool deck. Ask a lifeguard if you need help. At the very bottom, in small capitals, where I usually sign my work, I painted a red cross and an arrow pointing toward the pool office door, and the words EPINEPHRINE INSIDE.
In March, before the pool opened, Olathe Fire held a community Allergy Ready class in the Meadowlark clubhouse, on a Saturday morning, with coffee and nut-free muffins from the bakery Whit had found. Lieutenant Bergstrom taught it. She'd asked Clem to help, and Clem, who is fifteen now and has started saying things like "when I'm a paramedic" as if it's already been decided, had said yes before Bergstrom finished asking. There were maybe forty people in the folding chairs: Tuck and the new lifeguards, Yoshiko in the front row with her straw hat on her lap, Wynette, Saoirse on a day off, Soledad and Whit with Archie, who had been told he could be the patient. I stood against the back wall, where I like to be.
Clem stood at the front with a gray plastic trainer pen in her hand, the kind with no needle and no drug, and held it up, and said, in the voice she'd used on the pool deck, clear and level and not loud, "Okay. So the most important thing is, you don't wait. If you think it might be anaphylaxis, you give the epinephrine. Then you call 911. You can't really hurt somebody with this. But you can hurt them a lot by waiting." She showed them. Fist around the middle. Blue to the sky. Orange to the thigh. Click. Count three Mississippi. Rub it in. Lie them down, legs up, unless they can't breathe lying down. Note the time. Second pen ready. Everybody goes to the hospital, every time, even if they feel better, because it can come back. Archie lay on a yoga mat on the floor and let her demonstrate on him, and giggled when the trainer clicked against his leg, and said "Ow" in a big fake voice, and everybody laughed.
Then Bergstrom passed out trainer pens, one to every chair, and the room filled up with the soft plastic click of forty people practicing, and Clem walked up and down the rows checking grips, the way Bergstrom had done for her in seventh grade.
I didn't see Verlene come in. She must have slipped in after it started, through the side door by the kitchen, and taken the last folding chair in the back corner, three feet from where I was standing. She was in the tan raincoat. She had a trainer pen in her lap, in both hands, and a little card on a lanyard around her neck from the county diversion program that said ATTENDANCE VERIFIED, with a space for an instructor's signature. She was holding the pen the wrong way, orange end up, with her thumb over the tip, which is exactly how people end up putting a needle through their own thumb.
I thought about saying something. I didn't.