Nine Days
My Aunt Ione called me on a Tuesday afternoon in January, the day after the blizzard finally blew itself out. I was in the bus garage at the Norway Lake school district, flat on my back on a creeper under Bus 14 with a drop light hooked to the frame, trying to figure out why its air brakes kept bleeding down overnight. My phone buzzed in the pocket of my coveralls, and when I saw her name on the screen I rolled out from under the bus so fast I bumped my head on the bumper.
Aunt Ione doesn’t call during the day. She is of the generation that believes long distance is expensive and phone calls are for emergencies, Christmas, and funerals, and she has never quite accepted that I live only six miles away. So when her name came up on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon, my stomach dropped before I even answered.
“Jessa,” she said. Her voice was calm, the way it always is, the calm of a woman who spent thirty-eight years as a nurse at the hospital in Willmar. “I don’t want you to worry. But I wondered if you might have time to come by this week.”
“Are you all right? Is it your heart?”
“My heart’s fine,” she said. “It’s my pills I’m worried about. The post office is holding my mail. I called them this morning. They said the carrier can’t get to my box, so they’ve been holding it at the counter in Sunburg. My heart pills are in there, from the mail-order pharmacy.” She paused. “I have through Thursday.”
I sat up on the creeper with my back against the bus tire. Aunt Ione takes a pill called Eliquis for her heart, and another one for her blood pressure, and she gets them in a three-month supply through the mail from the Medicare pharmacy her insurance uses. She is the most organized person I have ever known. She orders her refills two weeks early, every time, and keeps a little calendar on her refrigerator where she checks off each day’s pills with a pencil.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
TAP ” READ MORE ” 👇
