Everyone Thinks I Stopped Caring

The receipt printed with a soft mechanical whir, and I folded it twice before tucking it into my wallet, the way I did on the first Tuesday of every month. Everett's Pharmacy knew me by name. The pharmacist, a woman named Dana with silver-streaked hair and reading glasses pushed up onto her head, already had the bag waiting on the counter by the time I walked in. Two bottles of omega-3 capsules. A jar of turmeric with black pepper extract. A box of magnesium glycinate. A container of bone broth protein powder, vanilla flavor, because my mother-in-law, Corinne, said the chocolate one tasted like wet cardboard. A bottle of liquid vitamin D with the little dropper, because she refused to swallow pills larger than an aspirin. "Same as always," Dana said, sliding the bag across the counter. "How's Corinne doing?" "Getting stronger," I said, and I believed it. That was the whole point. Three years ago, Corinne had fallen in her garden and broken her hip, and the recovery had been slow and miserable, and I had decided that if I could not fix her hip, I could at least make sure her body had everything it needed to rebuild itself. So I started the standing order. Every month, the same bag, delivered to Corinne's house on the edge of Bell Harbor, where the salt air ate through the railings and the roses grew wild along the fence. I worked as a project manager for a construction firm, coordinating schedules and permits and the thousand small catastrophes that happen when you try to build anything on a coastline. It paid well. Not Morrison money, never Morrison money, but well enough. Three hundred and forty dollars a month for the supplements. I never once flinched at the number. Because Corinne had been kind to me. When I married Graham, she had welcomed me into that big drafty house with the crooked floors and the smell of woodsmoke, and she had never once made me feel like the girl who grew up in a rented duplex on the wrong side of the harbor. She had taught me how to make her mother's shortbread, and she had cried at our wedding, and when my own mother died two years later, Corinne had driven four hours in the rain to sit with me on my kitchen floor and say nothing at all, which was exactly what I needed. So yes. Every month. The bag. Graham was a Morrison, which in Bell Harbor meant something, though not as much as it had meant thirty years ago, before the cannery closed. The family still had the house on the bluff, and the trust, and the name on the hospital wing. Graham worked for his father's marine insurance company, which was a polite way of saying he answered emails and played golf. He was handsome in the way that expensive men are handsome, which is to say he had good teeth and a good tailor, and he could be charming when he wanted something, and I had married him because I had mistaken his charm for warmth. It took me four years to figure out the difference. And by then, I had already started noticing the supplements. The first time, it was the turmeric. I had bought it on a Tuesday. On Saturday, we went to Corinne's for dinner, and I saw that the jar was not on her kitchen shelf, where she kept it next to the salt. I assumed she had moved it. Then, two weeks later, I was at Graham's sister's house, Patricia's, dropping off a casserole because her daughter had a fever, and I saw it on Patricia's counter. The exact jar. I knew because I had peeled the price sticker off and there was a little patch of residue in the corner shaped like a comma. I did not say anything that day. I said something the next month, when the omega-3s disappeared, and Graham said, "Patricia's doctor told her to take more fish oil. She's got that inflammation thing in her shoulder. It's just a bottle, Emma." "Just a bottle," I repeated. "Corinne has plenty. She doesn't take half of what you buy her anyway." That might have been true. Corinne was forgetful, and she had a habit of letting the bottles pile up in the cabinet and then apologizing about it, and I had never once been angry at her for that. But I had also never bought supplements for Patricia, who was forty-six and ran a boutique on the harbor and had never once been nice to me, and who had money of her own, and who could have walked into Everett's Pharmacy and bought her own damn fish oil. I let it go. Because it was one bottle, and because Graham's family was complicated, and because I wanted to be the kind of wife who did not make a scene over fish oil. The second time, it was the bone broth powder. The vanilla one, the expensive one, thirty-eight dollars a container. Corinne had told me she drank it every morning with her coffee. And then one Sunday at Patricia's, I opened her cabinet to get a mug and saw, sitting right there on the second shelf, a container with the lid slightly dented, which is how I knew it was the one I had bought, because the delivery box had been crushed on the corner and so was the lid. "This is Corinne's," I said, holding it up. Patricia barely glanced at me. "She brought it over. Said it was too sweet for her." I called Corinne that night. "Did you give Patricia the bone broth?" A pause. "Well." Another pause. "Graham took it. He said Patricia was having trouble with her stomach." I did not say anything, because what was there to say. Graham took it. Graham was always taking things. Graham took and took and took, and the taking was so smooth and so casual that you did not notice it until you stood in your own kitchen, holding a container you had paid for, and realized it was not where you left it. The third time, I did not confront anyone. I just watched. I started keeping the bags in the trunk of my car and delivering them myself on Saturdays, and I stopped telling Graham when I had been to the pharmacy, and I noticed that the bags went where they were supposed to go. Corinne's cabinet filled up. She started taking the magnesium at night, and she told me her sleep had improved, and she looked better, actually better, her cheeks pink when I saw her, and I felt something I had not felt in a long time, which was the satisfaction of a thing working. And then Graham found the bag in my trunk. I had left the back hatch open while I carried in groceries, and he saw it, and he said, "Oh, you already went. I was going to take that over to Patricia." "Patricia," I said. "The turmeric. Her shoulder's been acting up again." I closed the hatch. I looked at him standing there in the driveway in his pressed polo shirt, and I thought, he does not even hear himself. He does not hear the way every sentence bends toward his sister like water running downhill. "You can take it," I said. "It's for your mother." He took it.