He had not decided not to drop the bottle. He would tell himself that later, many times, and it would be true. He had only thought that he would like to know first whether Mattie had the hydromorphone, and how much, and that if she had none at all, and the courier did not come, and Ivah woke at four o'clock tomorrow morning with her hand clenched on the blanket and nothing in the cash box but the nineteen oxycodone with DISCONTINUED written on the tape, he did not know what he would do. He would call Vonnie. Vonnie would say don't. And then he would stand in the kitchen at four in the morning with the cash box open and decide, and he did not want to have already put the choice through a slot in a steel box where he could not get it back. That was all. It was not a plan. It was a man walking past a box.
There was one person ahead of him at the drop-off window, a young mother with a toddler on her hip, and he waited behind the strip of tape on the floor that said PLEASE WAIT HERE FOR PRIVACY. Behind the counter a young woman in a blue smock was on the phone in the chanting voice of somebody telling an insurance company the same thing for the fourth time. Her name tag said BRANDI — CPhT. Ancil did not know her. He knew most of the Holcombs' girls, but this one was new, or newer than the last time he'd come in himself instead of sending Wilma.
And at the computer behind the pick-up window, with a pair of reading glasses pushed up into her hair and another pair on her face, was Mattie Holcomb.
She was forty-eight. Ivah had been the cafeteria manager at Burkett's Ford Elementary for twenty-six years and had fed every child in that school a hot lunch, and she remembered them all, and she remembered Mattie Holcomb as the little girl who would not eat the green beans no matter what and always asked for extra cornbread and said thank you, Mrs. Sizemore, in a voice like a bell. Now Mattie was a tall, rawboned, plain-faced woman with a long gray-blond braid down her back and a white coat that said M. HOLCOMB, PharmD over the pocket in blue thread, and she had come back from a job at a hospital in Indianapolis twelve years ago when her father's hands started shaking too bad to count, and she had been behind that counter ever since, six days a week, and she did not take any guff, and she had sat up with Ivah one whole night in August when Ancil had to drive to Bloomington for a part for the well pump and Wilma had the flu.
She saw him and lifted her chin. When the young mother had gone, she came down to the window herself.
"Ancil."
"Mattie."
"I've got it," she said, quietly. "Alison sent it at eight-thirty. I've already been through it. I called her office myself to verify since she's not one of my regular prescribers, and I talked to her nurse, and it's good. I checked Ivah's INSPECT and there's nothing on it but what I'd expect. You've got your license?"
He got his wallet out and gave her the license. She handed it back over her shoulder to Brandi without looking, and Brandi, still on the phone, tucked the receiver against her shoulder and scanned it into the computer and wrote something on a log sheet on a clipboard and handed it back.