It was a while before Mattie could do anything. Then she did what she knew how to do, which was her job. She went to the back counter and finished it. She put the sixty tablets in an amber vial and capped it and labeled it and checked the label against the screen, and against the stock bottle, and initialed it, and wrote PARTIAL — 60 OF 120 — TERMINALLY ILL on the hard copy in red ink and initialed that, and put the vial in a white bag with a stapled receipt and a printed sheet, and she came to the consultation window and sat down on her side of it, and Ancil sat down on the stool on his, and she counseled him.
She did it all, every word, the way the law said and the way her father had done it. She told him it was the same medicine and the same strength Ivah was on, so nothing about the dose had changed, and to keep giving it the way Alison and Vonnie had told him. She told him to keep the stool softener going every day and not to stop it, because constipation was what made people miserable on these, more than the pain sometimes. She told him if Ivah got so sleepy he could not wake her, or if her breathing went slow and far apart, less than eight or so a minute, to call Vonnie first and 911 second. She reached under the counter and put a blue and white box of naloxone nasal spray in the bag on top of the vial, and told him it was no charge, and showed him on the box how you peeled it and put the nozzle in the nostril and pressed, and he said he knew how, and she said, "I know you know. I'm going to tell you anyway," and told him. She told him to lock it up with the other. She told him she'd call the second the rest came in. She told him to tell Ivah the brownies were coming Sunday, and that she was going to make them with the good cocoa, and that this time she meant it.
Nolan stood in the aisle and listened to every word of it, because he could not think how to leave.
When she was done, Ancil stood up and put the white bag in the inside pocket of the canvas coat, where the freezer bag had been. He put his cap on. He walked down the middle aisle on the gray path in the black and white tiles, past Elmo Pickens, who moved his cane to let him by, past Ardella Gaither, who reached out and touched his sleeve and said nothing, past the greeting cards and the reading glasses, to the gray steel kiosk under the front window. He unzipped the freezer bag. He took out the amber vial with its rubber band and its strip of masking tape that said DISCONTINUED and held it a moment over the slot. Then he let it go.
Everybody heard it fall. It was not a loud sound, a plastic bottle dropping a few feet onto other plastic bottles in the dark. But the store was so quiet that everybody heard it, and Nolan Caudill, standing by the compression stockings with his hat on and his blood pressure pills still waiting in a white bag in the bin at the pick-up window, heard it the way you hear a door shut at the far end of a house.
Ancil folded the empty freezer bag in half and in half again and put it in his pocket. Then the bell over the door rang, the same note it had always rung, and he was out on the sidewalk in the wind, and then he was past the window, walking toward the hardware store with his hands in his coat pockets and his head down a little against the wind, and then Nolan could not see him.
Nobody in the store moved for a while.
"Sheriff," Brandi said finally, in a very small voice. "Your amlodipine. It's twelve dollars."
He went to the window. He took out his wallet and gave her a twenty and stood while she made change. He put the change in his pocket and the white bag in the other. He looked up and Mattie Holcomb was standing at the end of the counter, with her arms folded over the front of her white coat, looking at him. She did not look angry. He would have preferred angry.