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1
Five customers were waiting at the pharmacy window, and Joey had gone on break. I needed a break, too, but there was no way I could leave.
"Miss, when will the pharmacist be back?" A woman about my own age peered through the window at me. She wore a bright paisley blouse with clashing pink shorts and pink tennis shoes.
"I'm the pharmacist," I said. "May I help you?" My smile was forced. I could see she wouldn't accept me as a professional, but, I reminded myself, it was worse thirty years ago when I got my pharmacy degree.
"No, I mean the fellow who just left. The pharmacist."
She was ready to believe that Joey Franklin, my 20-year-old technician, was in charge. "I'm the pharmacist," I repeated more firmly, straightening the lapels of my white lab jacket so she could read the words on the name tag, "Ruth Kantor Morris, Pharmacy Manager." She never looked at it, but did hand over two prescriptions.
While I tried to clear the backlog, more people lined up at the window. I waved and said, "Be with you in a minute," but one waiting customer walked away. People want instantaneous service today. I try not to let it bother me when I lose business for my company, Food Go, but it's frustrating. And not just because I'm in the employee stock plan.
It was hot even with the air conditioner blasting away. Summertime, I wear my hair short to cope with the desert heat, but my forehead was uncomfortably damp. With the back of one hand, I brushed a lock of auburn hair, tinted nowadays, out of the way and rushed to help more waiting customers.
Joey returned from his break and pitched in. His dark eyes, always sharply intelligent, seemed animated with suppressed excitement, but we couldn't talk until a pause in the flow of customers about an hour later.
"Do you remember that old guy who comes in for his Viagra? The one with the pretty blonde wife." He waited while I handed out a prescription and cautioned the customer not to take it with dairy products. "You always say that's why widows like you don't have a chance. Because the old guys marry young gals ..." Joey looked stricken. "I didn't really mean old," he said.
I remembered him all right. Harry Stokes. Another one who thought Viagra would help him keep a young wife. "Was he in for a refill today? It can't be more than a few days since the last time."
Joey's excitement was at the bursting point. "He won't need Viagra now."
"What happened?" I asked.
"He's dead."
I felt a pang of sadness. Harry Stokes had been good-looking and polite. I always remembered the polite customers. And I appreciated the way he respected my professional judgment—often asking my opinion about nonprescription drugs.
"And that's not all," Joey said. " I think he was murdered."
I had no chance to question him. Someone was tapping on the pharmacy window to get my attention.
"Excuse me. Where's the rubbers?" It was a teenage girl.
"Just over there, on the left." In my day, women never bought condoms, and certainly girls didn't. Even men were embarrassed to ask for them. Thirty years ago, they'd come into Dad's store and wait for me to walk away from the counter. After a while, I learned to busy myself elsewhere so they could talk to Dad alone.
A customer left three new prescriptions at the window, and I had no time to talk or even speculate about Joey's bombshell. He looked like he wanted to say more but had to get the phone, one call right after the other. He was a dependable technician, who wanted to study medicine someday, and was always asking questions. Although pharmacy law required me to check his work, I rarely found an error.
By the time Joey's shift ended, half a dozen people were waiting for their medications, and I barely had a chance to wave goodbye to him. I had no opportunity at all to think of Harry Stokes.
But I like to keep busy, and the night schedule works best for me since Bob died. It's that much later till I have to go back to my empty house. Nearly two years, but I still can't get used to being alone. My friends tell me, "Come on, Ruthie. It's not like you can't manage. You're different than the other women of our generation. Most of us didn't have careers."
Then they talk on, letting me know how lucky I am to have a profession, to have always worked, to make a good salary, to have no children. I stopped communicating my feelings and fears after the first bewildered months of loneliness. No one wants to hear the truth, anyhow. They ask, "How are you, Ruthie?" and I say, "Fine." And most of the time, I am fine.
I guess it's getting better because I don't cry myself to sleep very often any more. And about a year ago, I started noticing good-looking men like Harry Stokes. He was a little older than Bob, and his expression wasn't so serious. Bob always seemed to be working out a problem in his head, maybe because of his engineering background. Friends considered me the outgoing one and Bob the introvert. But then again, I deal with people all day long, and he worked with machines.
Don't misunderstand me! Nothing was the matter with Bob's sense of humor. Sometimes it seemed to take him forever to get to the punchline of a joke, but I'd give anything to hear him tell one again. I wouldn't get impatient either.
Harry Stokes was different. He smiled more and he kidded with Joey or with me whenever he came in. Not about the Viagra, though. We didn't dare joke about it.
I knew he'd been a widower for some years because Denise Seaford from the Food Go coffee shop had pointed him out to me. Denise was a divorcée, about 10 years younger than me, and she was interested in Harry Stokes. She lived next door to Harry and knew all about him. In fact, I remembered the day last October when Denise told me he remarried.
"She's after his money."
I laughed. Denise thrived on melodrama. "After all the times you've told me how much you like him," I said. "Maybe she feels the same way."
"That's different. I'm old enough to appreciate a man in his sixties. But she's only half his age." Then Denise leaned over my table and spoke softly, as if confiding a secret. "She's just a couple of years older than his children. Could be the same age as the married son, now that I think of it."
Denise had to leave to refill someone's coffee. My shift in the Food Go pharmacy over, I sat there thinking about Harry Stokes and his young wife. I had never told Denise that I sometimes daydreamed about Harry. He'd see me standing behind the pharmacy window, nibbling on some danish and gulping down coffee between customers.
"Let me take you to dinner," he'd say. "You look like you need to relax."
"Wonderful idea," I'd answer. My imagination worked very well with the details: what I would wear, when he would call for me, where we would eat, and what we would say to each other. We'd find that we laughed together and talked a lot. I could work out the conversation in the restaurant, but after that my imagination faltered. It had been too many years since I'd dated, if they even called it that today. I had no idea how to act after dinner or whether Harry, who was from my generation, would expect me to be uninhibited like the younger women I talk to and read about. Well, now I knew. He had skipped a generation in choosing a new wife.
Denise returned and started to tell me that her neighbors all figured the Stokes children were unhappy about the marriage. "When so many years went by and he didn't remarry, the kids thought they were safe."
"Safe?"
"It's like a TV soap. There's money. Lots of money. And the son and daughter are used to having whatever they want."
I thought Denise was probably exaggerating. Most of the young people I know want their divorced or widowed parents to remarry. That way, they don't have to worry about them. Or if they're less selfish, they want the parents to be happy.
Denise went away again to microwave a slice of pizza for someone. When she came back, we occupied ourselves comparing schedules. We were looking for a night when we were both off and could go to the movies together.
Since then she'd kept me up to date about Harry Stokes and his wife, Betsy. I knew they honeymooned on Maui, and I heard when they redecorated Harry's home. Denise told me Betsy was pretty, but a stereotypical dumb blonde. "And you should see her clothes. She never wears the same thing twice."
"How do you know?" In Scottsdale, we don't see much of our neighbors. We all live behind our block fences and, although we spend a lot of time outdoors, it's usually on our own patios or in our own swimming pools.
"I see her getting into her BMW, the new one he bought for her. Or walking out to the mailbox."
Denise seemed envious. I knew she was struggling, even though she had kept her house as part of the divorce settlement. Not for the first time, I thought what a nice bit of gossip it would make for Denise if she learned that Harry Stokes was taking Viagra. But of course I wouldn't reveal anything about a customer's prescriptions.
Now, instead of the details of Harry's new life with Betsy Stokes, I would be hearing about his death and funeral. I shivered as I began my closing procedure for the pharmacy, wondering whether Joey was right about murder.
I connected the order machine to the telephone and began to transmit 40 or 50 items from the order book. The pharmacy closed at nine, although Food Go stayed open all night. That made it hard to get out of the place, because last-minute customers could come into the store while I tried to finish up. Sure enough, while I was printing a copy of my computer's Rx record for the day, a woman came in with a prescription for birth control pills.
"Why couldn't she get here sooner," I grumbled quietly as I filled her prescription. "They never remember until they start to think about bed."
At least I didn't have to back up the entire day's prescriptions the way they did in some pharmacies. All Food Go stores were linked to a mainframe computer at the central office, and they ran the backups.
I took off my white jacket, put it neatly on a hanger, locked the door to the pharmacy, and went to sign out. Yes, we have to punch a timecard even though we're supposed to be professionals. That's one disadvantage of working for a chain of supermarkets. Dad would have been upset if he'd lived long enough to see me working for Food Go. I remember the bitterness in his voice whenever he talked about the "chains" and the way their competition was forcing him out of business.
Thinking about Dad and how pharmacy has changed over the years, I reached in my handbag for the canister of Mace that I always carry, and walked out of the store. Employees are supposed to park at the outer perimeter of the lot and leave the closer spaces for customers. And although the Food Go parking lot is well lit, occasionally there are assaults and carjackings around town. It doesn't hurt to be careful.
Just as I pulled into my driveway, I remembered I'd wanted to look up Harry Stokes's prescription record. I was curious to see what other medications he'd been taking.
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