"Then why'd you say eight."
"Because you looked like you was about to cry, and I couldn't stand it at four in the morning." She moved her hand on the blanket an inch, which was how she pointed now. "Put a nine."
He put a line through the eight and wrote a nine beside it, small, and showed her. She looked at it a long time, the way she had looked at report cards when Jody brought them home, and then she nodded and closed her eyes.
It was in her bones. That was the way the oncologist in Bloomington had put it, back in June, when there was still an oncologist, before the second scan and the long talk in the little room with the box of tissues on the table and the painting of a covered bridge. In her bones, in her hip and her spine and two of her ribs and the long bone of her right leg, and the doctor had drawn a picture of a skeleton on the back of a form and shaded in the places with a pen until the skeleton looked like it had been left out in the rain. Ivah had asked if she could keep the drawing. The doctor had been surprised, but he'd let her, and she had brought it home and stuck it to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a tomato, beside the church calendar and a photograph of Jody at sixteen holding up a smallmouth bass. When people came to visit she pointed them toward the refrigerator and said, "That's me. That's where it's at," as if she were showing them the weather map.
Ancil sat in the kitchen chair he kept by the bed and listened to her breathing change as the medicine came on. It took about twenty minutes. He knew the shape of it now the way he had once known the shape of a storm coming up the valley, the long-distance flicker and then the wind and then the rain. First her hands let go of the blanket. Then her jaw. Then her breathing dropped down from her chest into her belly and slowed and evened, and the little crease between her eyebrows that had been there since June went smooth, and she was asleep. He sat with her until the window went from black to gray, and then he got up and went into the kitchen and counted.
That was the other rule. Vonnie had not given it to him; he had given it to himself. He kept the pills in a gray steel cash box with a key, the kind you'd use for a church bake sale, and the cash box lived on the top shelf of the cabinet over the refrigerator, and the key lived on his own ring with the truck key and the barn key and the little brass one to the gun safe. Every morning he took the cash box down and set it on the table and counted what was in it, and wrote the count in the back of the green notebook, and then he put it up again. He did not have to do it. Nobody had asked. Ivah had watched him do it the first week from the bed, with her head turned on the pillow, and she had said, "Ancil, who do you think's going to take them? The cat?" and he had said, "Nobody's going to take them. That's why I count," and she had not asked again. She knew why he counted. They both knew.
This morning there were four hydromorphone tablets left in the orange bottle, little white ones with a line down the middle, and that was the trouble. There should have been a box coming. Ivah's hospice ran its medicines through a pharmacy in Indianapolis that mailed them out by courier, sealed in a bag with a pink tag, and the courier came on Tuesdays, and this was Thursday. On Tuesday a man in a car with Marion County plates had not come. On Wednesday a woman on the phone in Indianapolis had told Ancil that the order had shipped, and given him a tracking number, and Ancil had sat at the kitchen table with his reading glasses on and his phone held out at the end of his arm and typed in the tracking number and watched a little picture of a truck say IN TRANSIT – DELAYED, and nothing else, and nobody could tell him where in transit was. The old Ninevah Creek bridge on 450 had been closed since the rain in September; maybe the courier had come to the barricade and turned around. Maybe he had got lost. Maybe there was no courier. Ancil did not know, and the not-knowing sat in his stomach like a stone he had swallowed.
There were four tablets. Two at a time, every four hours when it was bad, and it was always bad now in the mornings. That was eight hours. He could make it to noon.
He also had the other bottle. The oxycodone. She had been on it through the summer, five milligrams and then ten, and in September when it stopped being enough Vonnie and the nurse practitioner had switched her over to the hydromorphone, and the oxycodone had gone into the cash box with a rubber band around it and a strip of masking tape on which Ancil had written in marker DISCONTINUED. There were nineteen of those left. He had counted them every morning for five weeks, too, nineteen, nineteen, nineteen, as if they might breed in the dark.
At seven-thirty he called Vonnie on the cell phone, and she called the nurse practitioner, and at eight-fifteen Vonnie called him back.