"It's not the locked-up kind," Ruthie said. "It's insulin. Anybody can pick it up if they know her birthday and her address."
"Anybody can," he agreed. "That's sort of the problem."
He saw her understand what he meant. He saw it go across her face, the slow shock of it — that he thought it was possible she had taken her mother's wallet, or that someone had given it to her, or that someone was waiting outside in the rain for her to bring a hundred needles out of a pharmacy. Her chin came up a quarter of an inch.
"I didn't steal it," she said.
"I didn't say you did."
"You thought it."
He let that sit, because it was true, and because thirty-one years had taught him that lying to a kid who had just caught you was the fastest way to lose the kid. "I thought about it," he said. "I think about a lot of things. Most of them turn out not to be true. Let's figure out which one this is. Can you tell me why your mom can't come herself? You said her pump broke."
"Her insulin pump. It got a motor error at four-ten. The new one comes tomorrow. She needs the long one to get through the night." Ruthie said this quickly, fluently, the way another kid might list the starting lineup of a baseball team. "She's been doing shots of the fast one but she needs the long one or she'll get ketones, and she already has small to moderate."
The pharmacist glanced at Denny with an expression that said: that's correct, actually.
"Okay. And she can't come because—"
"She can't leave my brother."
"Can't she bring your brother?"