Three Years Ago
Elowen
"Mija, look at this." My mother holds up the end of day dispensing log, squinting at it over the top of her reading glasses. "Someone bought seventeen boxes of antacids today." She looks at me. "Seventeen."
"People have stomachs, Mamá."
"Let me tell you," she says, setting the report down with a decisive click of her pen. "Your abuela, God rest her soul, cooked with enough chili to strip paint off a wall, and no one in our family ever needed seventeen boxes of antacids." She shakes her head. "These people are weak."
I'm laughing before she finishes the sentence, and she catches it, laughing too, like she always does. It’s like my laugh is contagious to her specifically.
“You are awful,” I say, and she reaches over and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear.
My mother is still stunning at fifty-five.
Her dark hair is threaded with silver that she refuses to color, and she has reading glasses she refuses to wear half the time. She’s been telling people she's forty-nine for six years, and nobody has the nerve to correct her.
"Rosita." My father appears in the doorway between the back room and the main pharmacy floor. "Mrs. Chakraborty stocks up every month. Her husband has acid reflux."
My mother points at him. "You know everything about everyone."
"I'm a pharmacist," he says simply. "It's my job."
"Your job is to count pills and smile," she says. "Not to memorize the digestive systems of half the town."
"Mamá," I say.
"What? I love him. He's wrong, but I love him."
My father smiles at her with his crinkly eyes. "Alright, my loves. Almost done?"
"Almost." I turn back to the filing cabinet. "Ten minutes."
"I'll start locking up the front," he says, and disappears back into the main part of the shop.
My mother watches him go, then she turns to me and whispers. "Don't tell him I said this," she says, not lowering her voice at all, "but he's right. It was Mrs. Chakraborty."
"He can hear you," I say.
"He knows I love him," she says, then she goes back to the report.
We work in a comfortable quiet for a few minutes. The scent of antiseptic. Lavender hand lotion, and the faint sweetness of the glucose tablets my father keeps in a bowl on the counter swirl around me.
“The reconciliation count is done,” I say, powering down the computer.
"So," my mother says, without looking up. "Your apartment."
I close my eyes briefly. "Mamá."
"I'm only asking."
"You've asked fourteen times this week."
"I'm a thorough person." She flips a page. "When do you sign the lease?"
"Friday."
She makes a sound clearly not pleased.
"I'm twenty-seven years old," I say gently.
"I know how old you are," she says. "I was there."
"It's time for me to move out.”
"You could stay another year," she says. "Two. Who would know?"
"Ma.”
"I'm just saying.” She flips another page. “You could save a lot of money.”
“I’ll tell you what,” I say, wrapping my arms around her shoulders. "I'll come for dinner every Sunday.”
"Every Sunday?" she repeats as her dark eyes slide to me. "And every Wednesday too. I want to make sure you’re eating."
"And Wednesdays, too,” I relent.
"And if you get sick."
"Mamá."
"Fine." She stamps the last report with more force than necessary. "Fine. Go. Leave your mother. See if I care."
"No. You clearly don’t care at all.”
"At all," she confirms, and we're both smiling when the knock comes.
Three sharp raps on the front door of the pharmacy.
My mother's head comes up. She looks at the clock on the wall, then at the little service window that separates us from the customers in the shop.
"It’s after hours," she says, shocked that anyone would be here this late.
"Someone probably needs something real quick," I say.
"Then they should have come before eight o'clock." She's already pushing back from the desk, pulling off her reading glasses. "I'll tell them—"
"I've got it," my father's voice carries from the front. He's already moving, I can hear his footsteps on the pharmacy floor.
"Eduardo." My mother raises her voice toward the door. "Just ignore them."
"It'll only take a minute," he calls back.
My mother gives me a pointed look. "He can't help himself," she says as she rolls her eyes. "Someone could knock on that door at midnight and he would answer it. You know this. I know this. The whole town knows this."
"It's why everyone loves him," I say.
"It's why I have gray hair," she says, but she's smiling as she puts her reading glasses back on.
We go back to closing up. My mother hums something under her breath, the same song she's been humming since I was little. I file the last of the day's prescriptions and listen to my father's voice at the front of the store, low and polite, saying something I can't quite make out.
Then a different voice answers.
I don’t recognize his voice. He’s not a regular.
And underneath their distant conversation, I hear a sound. Thin, metallic rattle.
Tnk. Tnk. Tnk.
My mother's humming stops.
We look at each other across the small back room, then I glance out the service window. I can’t see anything from this angle other than the display of get-well cards.
"I'll go check.” She pulls off her reading glasses and sets them on the desk. She smooths her hands down the front of her lab coat, lifts her chin, and pushes through the door into the main pharmacy floor, clearly about to tell whoever this is to leave.
I stay where I am, listening.
I can hear my mother's voice, clear and professional, asking if she can help. My father says something, his tone still easy. And I can hear the other voice, lower now, saying something I can't make out.
The metallic sound has stopped.
I look at my phone on the counter, and slowly pick it up.
Everything is probably fine.
It's probably someone who needs cold medicine or forgot to pick up a prescription and thought they could catch us before we locked up.
Perfectly normal.
But then my mother's voice changes.
It rises, making the hair on my arms stand up before my brain has caught up to why.
"You need to leave," she says firmly. "Right now."
My thumb finds the nine on my phone.
There’s a sudden shuffle of feet. Something scraping against the floor.
Then a crash, sharp and sudden, followed immediately by the sound of small boxes hitting the linoleum in a cascade, one after another, like a shelf coming down. My mother makes a muffled sound and my thumb moves.
Nine. One. One.
It rings once before someone picks up.
"Nine one one, what's your emergency?"
"Someone broke into our pharmacy." My voice comes out barely above a breath as I press myself against the wall beside the door. My heart is slamming so hard I can feel it in my throat. "Cassville Care Pharmacy. On Birch Street. Please send someone."
"Can you tell me what's happening?"
"I'm in the back room. I can hear—" I stop and listen. "There's someone in the store. They won't leave. And I heard something fall over."
"Is anyone else in the building with you?"
"My parents." The words come out cracked down the middle. "My parents are in the main part of the shop with him."
"Okay. I need you to stay where you are. Can you do that for me?"
I press my back harder against the wall and close my eyes.
"Yes," I whisper.
Then my mother screams, and my body moves.
I hit the door with my shoulder, bursting through it into the main pharmacy floor, and my feet find the blood before my eyes do.
I push myself up on my hands.
My palms are wet.
I look down, horrified to see that I landed on my father.
He's on his back in the middle of the cold medicine aisle, surrounded by boxes of cough suppressants, cold packs, and thermometers. Everything that was on the shelf above him. His lab coat is soaked through, dark and wet, his face turned toward me with an expression I have never seen on him before.
"Dad?" I whisper, praying he’s still alive.
His mouth moves. His face is a ghostly white, etched with a shock so profound I almost don’t recognize him.
“Eh…elle…” He tries to lift one hand toward me, and it barely gets off the floor before it drops back down, fingers twitching uselessly. The blood is coming from his chest, pumping up from somewhere deep in rhythmic spurts that match the frantic beat of my own heart.
There's so much of it. soaking through his lab coat, pooling around him, seeping into the cracks of the linoleum. I can't figure out where to press, I can't find the wound, I can't find anything that makes sense.
I press both hands against his chest anyway, pushing down hard.
"Dad?” My voice shakes. “Look at me. Look at me."
His eyes find mine.
From somewhere on the other side of the shelving unit, my mother makes a sound that I will hear for the rest of my life. It's not a scream but something wetter, something choked and guttural, like an animal caught in a trap.
Fear rips through me as my head snaps up at the sound.
Through the gap between the bottom of the shelving unit and the floor, I can see feet. Two pairs. My mother's white pharmacy clogs, one of them knocked sideways. And a pair of dark boots, moving.
"Help. Mom." My father's voice is barely a sound at all. Just breath shaped into words.
I look back down at him. His lips are dark, almost purple, and his tongue is dark too, coated in red, but his eyes are still on mine, still focused, still my father. Barely.
"Go." He mouths.
"I'm going," I whisper, hot tears flowing down my face, tracing paths down my cold cheeks. "I'm going, Dad. Just stay with me."
I pull my hands off his chest and stand up.
My legs don't feel like mine. They're heavy, disconnected things, moving through molasses as my entire world collapses around me.
I move to the end of the aisle and peer around the shelving unit, too scared to actually step into the aisle. I can see the top of a man's head. His dark hoodie is pulled up with a ski mask underneath it. He's bent forward, his back to me, but I can't see my mother.
Did she get away?