"You're fat."
"I'm solid."
"Your A1C is seven point four. Dr. Pruszynski says you're solid diabetes." She had slid a sticky note across the table to him, and on it, in her retired-librarian handwriting, she had written METFORMIN + METER + STRIPS + LANCETS, and underlined METER twice. "Don't come home without the meter. I mean it."
So here he was at 8:25 on a Thursday night, in his own clothes, in the rain, sitting in one of the three vinyl chairs by the free blood pressure machine at the back of Stimson Drug, waiting for a nineteen-year-old pharmacy technician named Tyrell Dorsey to find a glucose meter in the stockroom, because the one on the shelf had been the display model and someone had walked off with its batteries. His metformin was already bagged and sitting on the counter. He could see the bag from here. It had his name on it.
Stimson Drug was the last independent pharmacy in the county, and it looked it. The floor was the same green-and-cream linoleum it had been when Denny was a boy and came in with his father to buy Lifesavers and Field & Stream. The old soda fountain was a counter for greeting cards and reading glasses now, but the chrome stools were still bolted down in front of it. There was a hand-lettered sign over the register that said WE KNOW YOUR NAME, and a newer, printed sign taped to the pharmacy counter, laminated, that said: PROXY PICKUP — PATIENT NAME, DOB, ADDRESS REQUIRED. MINORS AT PHARMACIST DISCRETION. QUESTIONS? ASK THE PHARMACIST. Denny knew why that sign was there: in September somebody had picked up three of Phil Hartnett's prescriptions with Phil's stolen debit card.
Warren was in Myrtle Beach. The pharmacist behind the counter tonight was a young woman Denny didn't know, Indian American, late twenties, with her hair in a tight bun and a white coat with a name stitched on it in blue: Neha Kulkarni, PharmD. She was a fill-in from a staffing agency out of Canton, and she had the look of a person who has worked in a different store every week for two years and has learned to trust no one's shelving system. When he said he had no questions about the metformin, she had told him anyway, in two crisp sentences, to take it with food, and he had liked her for that.
The bell over the door rang at 8:31.
Denny looked up out of habit. He looked up at every door. Joyce said it was the most annoying thing about him and also the reason she had married him.
It was a kid. A girl, nine or ten, in a yellow rain jacket that was a size too big and darkened to mustard across the shoulders with wet. Rubber boots. A purple backpack. In her left hand she carried a small soft-sided lunch cooler, blue, with a cartoon whale on it. She stood inside the door for a second and let the water run off her, the way kids who have been told not to drip on floors will do, and then she pushed back her hood. She had straight brown hair, cut at the chin, and a narrow serious face, and she did not look around the store the way kids usually look around a store, at the candy and the toys and the rack of cheap sunglasses. She looked straight at the pharmacy counter at the back, and she walked to it.
Denny glanced at the door behind her. Nobody came in.
He glanced out the front window. The rain was coming down steady in the cone of the streetlight. There was no car idling at the curb, no headlights, no mother running from a minivan with a coat over her head. Front Street was empty except for the glow of the Suds 'n' Duds across the way, where two dryers were turning in the window, and above it a lit window on the second floor.
The girl set the cooler on the counter. She stood up very straight. Behind the counter Neha Kulkarni looked down at her over the top of the computer monitor.