"Ancil," he said, "I've got thirty-one names on the wall of my office. I wrote every one of them. Every one of those people got it out of somebody's medicine cabinet, or somebody's kitchen drawer, or somebody's coat pocket, from somebody who meant to get rid of it and didn't. Every one. Your boy is on that wall. Fourth row. I put him there myself." His voice did not shake. He was proud of that for perhaps three more seconds. "I stood in your kitchen and I promised Ivah. And I have spent every day since trying to keep the next one off that wall. So don't you tell me I can't ask a man what he's doing with nineteen oxycodone in his coat. Don't you tell me that. Not you."
The store was entirely quiet now. Somewhere at the front, a refrigerated case with sodas in it was humming. Elmo Pickens had both hands on top of his cane.
Ancil Sizemore looked at the sheriff for a long time. The pale eyes did not move. And Nolan saw something happen in the weathered face that he would not have been able to describe, except that it was like watching a man at the top of a pole, in the wind, decide whether to cut a line that he knew was live.
Ancil thought of Ivah on the pillow saying, You leave that lie. He thought of her saying, I don't want that to be what you do. He thought he had kept that promise for two weeks, and that he would have kept it, he believed, for the rest of his life, if the man had not said not you. If the man had not said fourth row. He thought: she'll forgive me or she won't, and either way I'll be home by one.
He did not raise his voice. He asked it the way you'd ask a neighbor what time the feed store closed.
"Nolan," he said, "when Vonnie Huff stood in your kitchen after Verlie passed, with the coffee grounds and the bag, ready to cut up the rest of Verlie's fentanyl patches in front of you — why wouldn't you let her?"
Nolan Caudill opened his mouth.
He had an answer. He had always had one. He had built it the way you build a retaining wall, a stone at a time, over six years, and he knew every stone in it. He had been grieving. He had not been thinking straight. He had not been able to stand there in his own kitchen and watch a woman in a hospice fleece slit open the last of Verlie's things with a pair of bandage scissors and fold them sticky side in and stir them into a Ziploc of wet coffee grounds and kitty litter, as if Verlie had been a spill to clean up. He had said, Vonnie, I've got a box in my own lobby, I'll carry them in myself. He had signed her form where it said FAMILY DECLINED ON-SITE DISPOSAL — WILL USE AUTHORIZED COLLECTION SITE, and she had looked at him a long moment and let him, because he was the sheriff, because the box had his name on it. And then he had put the white pharmacy carton, with five sealed foil pouches left in it, in the drawer by the sink, behind the dish towels and the coffee filters, because he would get to it, because there was the funeral to plan and the casseroles and the people, because it was the last thing in the house with her name typed on it.
All of that was true. Every stone. He opened his mouth to set them out one at a time in front of Ancil Sizemore, the way he had set them out in front of himself at five-fifteen every morning for six years over a cup of coffee that tasted of the plastic tub.