"Now here's the thing," Mattie said, lower. She leaned her forearms on the counter. "She wrote it for a hundred and twenty. I have sixty-two on the shelf and that's all I'm going to see until the wholesaler's allocation resets on the first of the month, and I've got two other patients on hydromorphone. So I'm going to give you sixty and owe you sixty. Alison put terminal on the prescription, so I can do a partial fill and the rest of it stays good for sixty days, and you come back for the balance, or I'll call you the second it comes in. All right? Sixty gets you about ten days at the rate she's going, if the hospice box doesn't come. If the hospice box comes, you keep this as your backup and you lock it up with the other."
"All right," Ancil said. He felt his shoulders come down a half inch. Sixty. He would not have to stand in the kitchen at four in the morning. "Thank you, Mattie."
"Don't thank me, I didn't do anything. Go have a seat at the window and give me ten minutes to count and check it and I'll come talk to you about it. There's a couple of things I want to go over now that she's on the higher amount." She looked at him over the glasses. "How is she?"
"She says you owe her a pan of brownies."
Mattie's face did something, briefly. "From the cake walk," she said. "In 1987. I won her chocolate sheet cake and I took it home and ate a quarter of it in the car and I promised her a pan of brownies, and I never did it. She's never going to let me hear the end of that."
"No," Ancil said. "I don't believe she is."
He went and sat on the stool at the consultation window, in the little booth with the frosted glass on either side, with his cap on his knee. Through the window he could see Mattie at the back counter, with her back to him, opening the safe. It took a while. There was a keypad and then a pause and then a second keypad. She took out a stock bottle and closed the safe and carried the bottle to a counting tray and began counting with a steel spatula, five at a time, click, click, click, sliding them down the channel, and then she counted them again, and wrote on something, and then she called Brandi over from the phone and Brandi counted them a third time, and initialed something, and Mattie initialed it beside her. That was how it was done with these. He had watched it eleven weeks ago the first time, and he had found it comforting, the clicking and the counting and the initials. It was like watching a man check his harness at the bottom of a pole.
He heard the bell over the door ring at the front of the store.
He did not turn. You did not turn in the consultation booth; it was a booth. He heard boots on the tile, a heavy man's, unhurried. He heard a voice say, "Afternoon, Mrs. Gaither," and Mrs. Gaither say, "Why, Sheriff," in the pleased way old women in that county said it, and he knew the voice before she said the word.