"Alison's sending it to Holcomb's," she said. "Electronic. Hydromorphone two milligram, same as she's on, a hundred and twenty tablets so you don't get caught like this again. She's putting terminal on it so Mattie can do a partial if she has to. Mattie's good. You know Mattie."
"I know Mattie."
"She might not have the whole amount. They've been rationing everybody since the spring. The wholesaler gives her so many a month and that's it, she can't get more if she stood on her head. But she'll give you what she's got and owe you the rest. Take your license. They'll want to see your license and write it down, even though she knows you. That's the law."
"All right."
"And Ancil." Vonnie's voice changed. He could hear the Buick's turn signal clicking on her end. "Take that oxy in with you. The old bottle. Holcomb's has the drop box now, the steel one by the front door. Just drop it in. I was going to do it with you Tuesday and I didn't get to it."
He looked at the cash box on top of the refrigerator. "I was going to keep it. In case the hydro didn't come."
"I know you were. That's why I want you to drop it." She was quiet a second. "Honey, I've been doing this twenty-two years. The bottles that stay in the house are the bottles that walk off. Not because of you. Because people come to see her. People are going to keep coming, more of them, and you're going to be tired, and there'll be a day you don't count. You've got the new one coming. Drop it."
He did not say anything. Vonnie had said nearly the same thing two weeks ago, sitting at this kitchen table with her big freckled hands folded over a cup of coffee, and she had said more than that, too. She had said, "I'll destroy it right here if you'd rather, in coffee grounds, with you watching, and we'll both sign," and when he had said he'd think about it she had gotten a look on her face he had not seen there before, and she had said, "I let a family carry it in themselves one time. One time. I've thought about it every day since." And Ancil had asked who, and she had shaken her head, and then, after a while, looking down into her coffee, she had said, "Somebody that should've known better. A man with a drop box in his own building."
He had not slept much that night. He had lain in the bedroom down the hall, the one that had been theirs and was now only his, and he had done arithmetic in the dark. Vonnie had been the hospice nurse for this end of Gentry County for twenty-two years. A man with a drop box in his own building. There were three drop boxes in the county that Ancil knew of: the one at Holcomb's, which was only a year old; the one at the Walgreens out by the highway in Salem, which was in the next county over; and the one in the lobby of the Gentry County Sheriff's Office, in the basement of the courthouse annex in Burkett's Ford, which had been there since before Jody died, because Ancil had seen it on the morning he went in to sign for Jody's things. It was a blue steel box like a mailbox with a slot in the top and a sticker on the front that said TAKE IT TO THE BOX — PROTECT YOUR FAMILY, and under that, in smaller letters, a picture of a badge and the name NOLAN CAUDILL, SHERIFF.
He had told Ivah about it the next morning. He had not meant to. She had seen it on him, and she had made him tell, and when he was done she had lain quiet a long time looking out the window at the sycamores. Then she had said, "Ancil, you leave that lie."