Begging was not working. But what else could I do? What else did I know? How had Bay done it, offering me chocolate, calling me Greyhound girl, showing me that he understood me like no one else ever had? I remembered how he made me feel. And then I thought: This might be the most exciting thing that ever happens to Annie. I told myself to stop shaking. “Don’t do that, Annie.” I touched the back of her hand, fine velvet. “Didn’t you take an oath to do no harm?”

“Pharmacists have a different oath,” she said.

“We live so far out in the mountains. She can’t come to town,” I said. I thought about what I looked like to her: a strong girl with close-shorn white-blond hair, those white-blond eyelashes like a fringe of icicles. The big sun spot on my cheek. My ochre shirt and shorts, my big heavy boots. I must have seemed so wild. Her hand, which had the softness of the owl’s feathered chest, moved slightly under mine. “You’ll never see me again. No one will ever know.”

She looked up at a closed-circuit TV. We were both on it. I saw the bulk of my shoulders. I saw my close short white-blond hair.

“Keep your voice down,” she said.

I remembered Bay loading my bags on the bus and telling me to catch them in Durham.

“Fever and what else,” she said. She was speaking simply. She straightened a stack of papers. She was putting on an act for the cameras.

I described the blood, the smell. The cord that Pear cut. She went back to her bright shelves of bottles.

I wondered if Queen was dead by now. I wondered if I’d ever expected her to die in the first place.

I looked around the Ingles. So many things. Hand cream. Painkillers. Blue gel insoles, DEET, melting breath mints. Greeting cards. It was easy to pick out the ones my mother would have liked. The birthday card with the flocked, embossed teddy bear. The sympathy card with lilac-colored glitter.

The girl passed me three rattling orange bottles. “This is what they’d do in the hospital, three antibiotics. Morning and evening.” She did not smile.

“I can’t pay.”

“She should really have an IV and some tests,” she said. “Septic shock in particular.” She looked at me carefully. “Make sure she’s eating well-cooked food,” she said.

I put my big calloused hand back on hers. Her hands were indoor hands, pale and soft and shaky. In this one moment, I was the lightning and she was the rod. Then she pulled away. She told me to have a nice evening.

* * *