What Was in the Trash

I've got exactly one friend left who still returns my calls, and that's Ray down at the pharmacy on Ninth — knew him since we were both dumb enough to enlist together forty years back. I dialed him from the kitchen phone, the old one with the cord, because I never did trust the cordless.

"Ray. Louise Tanner still get her heart pills from you?"

"Garrison Pruett, calling me for gossip. Miracles happen." He tapped at his keyboard, I could hear it. "Yeah, she's on our system. Why?"

"When'd she last fill?"

A pause. "That's not really something I can just—"

"Ray."

He sighed, the sigh of a man who's known me too long to bother fighting it. "Says here her last pickup was eleven days ago. She's due for a refill. System's been trying to reach her — no answer on the number on file."

Eleven days. My stomach dropped somewhere around my shoes.

I thanked him and hung up before he could ask why I cared so much about an old woman's blood pressure medication.

That evening, waiting for the garbage truck same as every Thursday, I did something I'm not proud of and would do again without hesitation: I walked down to the curb where the Tanner house had set out its bins, and I looked.

Ordinary trash, mostly. Takeout containers. A child's juice pouches, three of them, which told me the girl behind that curtain was real and had been there a while.

And near the bottom, half-hidden under a torn cereal box, an amber pill bottle. Empty. Louise Tanner's name typed clean on the label, the same medication Ray had just told me she never picked up.

Which meant somebody had thrown away a bottle she should still have half-full.

Which meant somebody didn't want anyone counting how many pills were left, or weren't.

I put the lid back exactly where I'd found it and walked home slower than I'd walked in years, the porch light across the street still dark, still watching me the way an open grave watches a man who knows too much.