11. Della
DELLA
The pharmacy calls it in the polite version first. The refill’s flagged, prescriber review required, would I like them to fax Doc Ellison.
Then the bottle gets down to a rattle you could fit in a hymn, and the pharmacy calls in the plain version.
No bloodwork, no pills, honey. Doc’s front desk has an opening after the lunch rush, Arlene already penciled me in, because this is Ember Hollow, where my pharmacist, my doctor’s receptionist, my lunch rush are all the same fourteen people.
Privacy is a thing I hear other towns have, and it must be nice.
Wren once told me she drove two towns over her first year here, to see a doctor who didn’t know her order.
I understood it, and I told her so, and then I told her the truth, which is that it’s wasted gas for a girl like me.
I was born in this county. Doc Ellison set my arm when I came off the loading dock at nine years old showing off for a bread man.
He’s eaten my meatloaf every meatloaf night for as long as I’ve run the flat-top, he plays canasta with half my regulars, and the man has known what’s in my windowsill bottle since I was nineteen because he’s the one who put it there.
My privacy ship didn’t sail. It was never built.
We use the lumber for the specials board.
The waiting room is, of course, the lunch rush in chairs.
From the first chair, Mr. Pelham wants to know if the meatloaf’s on when I get back.
Old Dietrich tells me he’s here about “the usual,” which, again, is not a thing the man has.
Arlene checks me in at a volume I’d call performative and takes my blood pressure while asking about pie flavors for her granddaughter’s birthday, and I answer, because I’m me.
By the time Doc calls me back, I have somehow catered two hypothetical events from a vinyl chair with a cuff on my arm.
Doc Ellison’s office hasn’t changed since the loading dock incident.
Same fish on the wall. Same jar of lollipops he’s been threatening to retire alongside for years.
He’s got my bloodwork up and his glasses down, and he looks at me over the top of them as he’s looked at this town over the top of them for half a century, which is how I know before he says one word that I’m not walking out of here with a refill.
“Della Rae, please sit down.”
“Good morning, Doc Ellison.”
“How long have I been renewing these pills?”
“You know exactly how long. You’ve got it right there in the folder.”
“I do.” He taps the folder. “I wanted to hear if you’d say it out loud. Since you were nineteen, without a break, which is past every guideline they print and a couple they only mutter. These things were built for a few seasons at a stretch, honey. Not a career.”
He turns the page around, points at numbers I don’t need explained, because I read my own books too, and I know what it looks like when a line that’s supposed to sit level starts drifting.
“Your liver’s been covering your shifts for years. It’s asking for time off. I’m giving it some.”
“So we taper after the Supper.”
“We taper starting now.”
“Doc. The Supper is my whole season. You’ve eaten that chili at that Supper every year since my grandmother ladled it.
You know what that stretch is.” I have negotiated with produce men, tax forms, and the county health inspector, and I bring all of it to that little office.
“Spring. First thaw. I’ll come in the same day the ice lets go, I’ll be a model patient, I’ll eat vegetables. ”
“Della, look at me.”
He takes the glasses off, which is Doc for the negotiation being over, and his voice does the thing it did when I was nine, when the arm was at the wrong angle, and he needed me to hold still. Kind as a quilt and no give in it anywhere.
“You’ll taper now, because the numbers say now, and I intend to be at that Supper eating that chili for a good many more years, served by you, upright.
That’s the whole math. I’m not scaring you.
There’s nothing here that doesn’t mend with time off the pills.
But the time is now, not after you’ve worked yourself flat through one more season.
If you make me choose between your chili and your liver, I will miss that chili like a lost limb, and choose the liver. ”
There’s not a comeback for that. I’ve fed this man since I could see over the counter.
He set my arm. There are maybe four people on this earth allowed to talk to me like that, and I’m looking at one, and the awful truth is that somewhere under the arguing, a small disloyal part of me finally sits after standing for years.
“What happens,” I ask, “when they wear off?”
“Honestly? With this long a run, the literature’s thin.
Most folks cycle off a few years in. You’re…
” he consults the folder, and has the decency not to whistle, “an outlier. Best I can tell you is your system’s been idling a long while, and when it comes back, it tends to come back like a diner at six.
All at once, everybody hungry, nobody patient. ” He looks at me steady.
“Senses first, then the rest. And the first cycle off a long suppression runs early and runs hard. That’s the one piece the literature agrees on. Your body will have opinions, Della Rae. It’s been saving them up.”
On the way out, the new nurse hands me a pamphlet.
She’s a sweet girl, not from here, doesn’t know me from Eve.
I look at it. It’s the one they give the teenagers.
Pastel, glossy, a cheerful cartoon of the relevant biology wearing a smile, Your Changing Body and You in a font that thinks everything’s going to be fun.
“Honey,” I tell her, gently, because she’s new and she means well, “I have catered more heats than this clinic has seen. I’ve done the meal plans.
I’ve done the drop-offs. Then I invented a nesting casserole that reheats from frozen in a dish you don’t have to return.
I could write this pamphlet; I could cater this pamphlet. ”
She blinks. “So… you don’t want it?”
I take the pamphlet. Of course I take the pamphlet. It goes in the van, in the glove box, face down, where it can think about its font.
The walk from the van to my door takes me past the whole gauntlet.
Wren’s windows going gold, the firehouse, the hardware store, the street I’ve fed since I was a girl.
I do it as I’ve done it for years, moving quick, waving easy, a woman everybody knows and nobody smells.
That’s the part I don’t say in Doc’s office, or anywhere, because there’s no line item for it on any chart.
The pills were never about the heat. Heats are logistics; I do logistics in my sleep.
The pills were about the rest of it. About walking down Main as the beta everybody’s got me filed under, the workhorse, the counter, the plate in the hand.
Wax paper works both directions. Nobody’s smelled the truth on me since I was nineteen years old, and there is a particular kind of quiet in that.
I built a whole life inside it, and Doc Ellison just told me the lease is up.
Because here’s what cycling off means, in the only books I keep.
Some stretch from now, soon, not someday, the seal comes off the jar.
And this town, this sweet nosy casserole of a town, re-files my paperwork in an afternoon.
And three men who smell like pine, like cold air, like coffee walk into my diner some morning and know, not suspect, know, as their kind knows, exactly what’s been standing behind this counter the whole time.
I get the evening service done on muscle and stubbornness.
After close, I take the amber bottle off the windowsill and hold it up to the streetlight, half empty, no refills, career over.
Then I set it back in its spot between the aloe and the spoons, and I look at my little shelf.
It used to hold a plant, a radio, a lie that worked.
Now it holds the same plant, the same radio, a lie with an end date, plus two wooden spoons with my initial on them, leaning like they’re settling in.
“Opinions,” I tell the bottle. “He says you’ve been saving up opinions.”
The bottle says nothing. It’s the last thing on that windowsill still keeping my secrets, and now it’s short-staffed, and we both know it.
Well, so does the walk-in compressor, and I’ve kept that running three winters past its warranty on nothing but rags and respect.
I flip the kitchen light off. Upstairs, through the floor, I can hear the scanner murmuring its long quiet, the valley tucked in, the mountain keeping its men, and my body, nineteen years old the last time anybody asked it a question, humming away down there in dry storage, patient as inventory.
It’s been saving up opinions.
Lord knows, so have I.