Waiting for Daybreak (21 page)
“Good to see Cory, too, huh?” Dawn giggled from the side.
Clarissa cut a sharp glance toward her. “Cory?”
Dawn laughed. “Tell her, Paige.”
“Well, I . . .”
“See, he dropped some stuff by Paige’s house from his mother, and Paige’s friend invited him to stay for dinner. Paige has been trying her best to avoid the guy, and he just keeps showing up.”
“I never said that.”
“Did too. You told me the whole story just this morning.”
“I mean, I never said I was doing my best to avoid him.”
“Well, duh, you don’t have to tell me that. It’s pretty obvious the way you disappear every time he comes around. I bet I’ve heard him ask you out three times, and you’ve had an excuse every single time.”
“Dawn, why don’t you go listen to the refill line? In fact, why don’t we all get busy instead of standing here yakking about stuff that makes absolutely no difference to anybody?” Clarissa turned and walked to her desk.
Wednesday morning, Paige walked the length of the fast-mover section, stopping every now and then to look behind a white plastic bottle, or to pick up and shake a brown one. Yes, they definitely needed to order more furosemide. By the time she finished writing the word on the order list, the ink ran so sporadically that the “ide” was illegible. Time for a new pen.
She looked in the usual coffee cup and found one pencil, three paper clips, a rubber band, and no pens. There had to be some around here somewhere.
Likely Clarissa’s desk drawer would have a few. Paige walked back and slid it open.
Three blue pens sat atop printouts of weekend reports; the corner of a yellow legal pad stuck out from the bottom. A yellow pad just like the one she’d seen Clarissa writing on the other day, when she was acting so mysterious.
Paige slid the drawer shut. Whatever it was, it wasn’t her business.
Right?
She stood staring at the drawer, debating.
Maybe one quick
peek.
Paige pulled on the handle and slid the pad out from under the printouts. The first thing that caught her attention was her name at the top of the sheet
Paige Woodward File
April 1—complaint from Mr. Pauling for slow service
April 4—Let Dawn take call-in for prednisone
April 8—spent half an hour on the phone, customers waiting at the counter
The pad grew heavy in Paige’s hand. She couldn’t believe this was happening again. This was a page of distorted facts, and one out-and-out lie—Paige never ever let Dawn take a call-in for anything. At least she could prove that one wrong. As for Mr. Pauling’s slow service, the doctor hadn’t written the strength on the prescription and she’d had to call. How was that her fault? The only truth at all on the page was that she had talked on the phone on April 8th. It was the day her father called about the stem cell transplant, but there were no customers waiting at the window until the very end.
Something cold and pointed seemed to take residence inside her chest. She walked over to the computer and looked up the prescriptions filled on April 4. Sure enough, a prescription for prednisone had been filled that day under Paige’s initials. She went to the cabinet and pulled out the hard copy. The paper slipped through her fingers and fell to the floor. Paige collapsed beside it and picked it up again.
The handwriting was not her own, and on closer inspection she knew it wasn’t Clarissa’s either. It
could
be Dawn’s, she supposed, but since when did Dawn print anything? And since Paige did not authorize Dawn to take this call-in, and Clarissa knew it had happened, it had to be part of a setup.
Why would Clarissa do this? Was Dawn unaware, or part of it?
She needed to start taking measures to defend herself, and right now. She would write out her own account of the Pauling incident, while it was all still fresh in her mind. She’d write out the account of the phone conversation with her father, and write out the truth about the prednisone—or at least the untruth of what was written on the legal pad.
Today was Clarissa’s day off, so she couldn’t talk to her about it until tomorrow. Maybe in the meantime, she should confront Dawn.
No. Maybe Clarissa had just done this when she was mad, and nothing would come of it. After all, she hadn’t entered anything in almost a week. If Paige got Dawn involved now, it would make it hard for things to settle down. Maybe she should just watch. But she wouldn’t be caught unawares this time. Never again.
By the time she got off work that night, Paige’s head was swimming. As soon as she locked up the pharmacy, she walked around the corner to the neighborhood grocery store in search of some soup. One of the few remaining family-owned groceries, it was small and a bit outdated, but it felt quaint and cozy. Nothing like the gigantic chain store just across town.
She walked to the soup aisle and stood staring at the red and white labels:
Chicken with Stars, Cream of Chicken
. . . there it was:
Chicken Noodle
. She picked up two cans for good measure.
“I hope your boss wasn’t too hard on you.” Rita Konkel was standing beside her, hands wrapped around the handle of a metal shopping cart.
“Hi, Mrs. Konkel.” Paige looked at the cans in her hands. “Hard on me?”
“About your mistake, I mean. I didn’t want to get you in trouble, honest. But, boy, I sure am glad I came in to double-check when my pills looked different. It could have been a disaster otherwise, huh? You must feel pretty lucky. Of course, since I’m the one who was about to take the wrong thing, I feel even luckier.”
“Wrong thing?”
Bright smile. Calm voice,
she told herself. “Mrs.
Konkel, I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“My arthritis pills. My daughter picked them up for me on Tuesday. They looked different, and I came right in to ask about ’em. Sure enough, you’d given me the wrong stuff.”
“
I
gave you?”
“Yeah. The other young lady, Miss Richardson, looked it up.
She changed everything out for me, was real nice about it. She told me she’d have a good long talk with you about being more careful in the future. The way she was acting, I was afraid she’d really let you have it.”
“She . . .” Paige’s mind reeled. She thought about how strange Clarissa had been acting lately. “She left a note. I haven’t had the chance to talk to her yet.”
“Tell her to go easy on you. I’m sure you’ll be more careful next time.”
“I’m just sorry you got the wrong thing, Mrs. Konkel. So, are you . . . okay?”
“Just fine, didn’t take a single one. Mistakes happen, that’s why I always double-check everything.”
“Did you find it out before you left the store then?”
“No, doesn’t it just figure? This is the one time I had my daughter pick up my stuff. That’s why I can’t trust other people to do things for me. Like I said, I’m just glad I caught it before I took any.”
“Me, too.”
Paige looked at the cans in her hands. “I just remembered something I need to do.” She set the soup back onto the shelf and ran from the store, back to the pharmacy. Nothing else mattered but finding the truth about what she’d done—or at least what Clarissa had made it appear she’d done.
Once inside the pharmacy, she turned on the computer and paced nervously while waiting for it to boot up. Finally, she got Mrs. Konkel’s prescription number and looked it up, then went to the cabinet and found the hard copy.
Naprosyn 500 BID #60
Paige’s computer initials were stuck to the paper, along with her customary hand-written initials beside them, the date, and “Used Genxrix brand.” She had a vague memory of filling this and then reordering.
Down in the bottom corner was a notation from Clarissa.
Bottle was filled with Anaprox DS instead of Naprosyn.
Patient did not take any. I replaced with correct
medication.
Anaprox? The mistake would be easy enough to make, because Anaprox,
naproxen sodium,
would be directly beside Naprosyn,
naproxen
, on the shelf.
Paige walked to the shelf and looked. She saw the bottle of GenXrix brand generic Naprosyn, and right beside it, the generic Anaprox from LLZ Pharmaceuticals.
Odd.
Her note clearly stated she’d used the GenXrix brand. Tomorrow, she would talk to Clarissa and find out exactly what happened.
When Dawn arrived the next morning, Paige made small talk for a few minutes, then leaned back against the counter in what she hoped look like a casual pose. “Do you remember Rita Konkel coming in this week?”
“Like you can ever forget Mrs. Konkel coming in.” Dawn rolled her eyes. “I was so happy when her daughter came to pick up her prescription for her. I mean, you know how she is, I always have to stand at the counter for an hour while she counts everything for the bijillionth time. It just figures that the one time she doesn’t do all that is the time we mess her stuff up.”
“What happened?”
“Mrs. Konkel came back in, just after you’d left for the day, I think. She was all dramatic and carrying on.”
“So what was in the bottle?”
“I don’t know. Some sort of blue caplets, and hers were supposed to be white caplets. Clarissa spent a lot of time talking to her, then replaced it and sent her on her way.”
“I just don’t understand it.” A disquiet began to jab at her, a thought so jaded she knew it couldn’t be true. Still, she had to ask the question. “Before you gave it to her daughter, did Clarissa do anything with the prescription?”
Dawn shook her head and looked at Paige as if she were crazy. “Not that I saw.”
And that was the problem. No one would have seen a thing.
Come on, Paige, you know Clarissa wouldn’t do something like
that.
Don’t you?
Mrs. Konkel and her Naprosyn would have presented the perfect opportunity for a setup, if Clarissa had been looking for such a chance. Mrs. Konkel always double-checked everything, so it was bound to be discovered. And, if by some miracle the switch escaped notice, the difference in the drugs was so small that it wouldn’t make that much difference. Still, Clarissa wouldn’t do that.
Would she?
When Clarissa arrived at work a little later, Paige approached her casually. “I ran into Rita Konkel at the grocery store last night.”
“That’s nice.”
“She said I misfilled her anti-inflammatory prescription.”
“That’s right. She brought it back in, and it had Anaprox DS in the bottle that was supposed to have Naprosyn. Didn’t I tell you about it?”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Must have slipped my mind.”
Paige felt a chill run the length of her spine. “Clarissa, what is going on?”
“What would make you ask that?”
“Well, for one thing, you ‘forgot’ to mention to me an apparent misfilled prescription. For another, I wrote the generic manufacturer on the hard copy for Naprosyn, not Anaprox. I put the correct thing in that bottle.”
“Listen, say what you will, the wrong thing was in that bottle. There’s nothing I can do about that. And as for forgetting to tell you—as I recall you ‘forgot’ to tell me that you’d gone out with my uncle. People forget things. In fact, I’ll bet if the truth is known, you’re seeing him this weekend. You are, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am, but it’s not the same.”
“Of course it is. You didn’t mean to hurt me by not mentioning the date, I didn’t mean anything bad by not mentioning the mistake—in fact, I thought I’d spare your feelings by just letting it pass. I’m sorry if it upset you. Okay? Let’s just put this whole misunderstanding behind us.”
“Is that all it is? A misunderstanding?”
“Of course.”
That afternoon when Paige returned from lunch, she found Dawn alone in the pharmacy. “Where’s Clarissa?”
“She’s next door at the travel agent’s. I think she’s helping her friend plan a honeymoon or something.” Dawn pointed to a row of five prescriptions. “I left out everything I did while she was gone, so you can double-check.”
Paige felt her stomach plummet. She looked at the prescriptions and the bottles beside them, and they did all look correct. But she would not put her initials on them. If Clarissa wanted to run her pharmacy this way, she would have to take responsibility for it, because Paige certainly would not.
“Dusty. Here, boy.” From where she sat on her mother’s bench, Paige saw Tony’s car pull into the driveway—ten minutes early. “Dusty, come on.” Where was that dog?
Tony started across the lawn, waving a greeting as he did. “Hello.”
Paige jumped to her feet and moved away from the sitting area. This was her mother’s special place; it felt sacred almost. Not a place for outsiders. She walked forward and peered between the trees. “Dusty.”
“The old boy’s out carousing, huh? I knew he still had some spunk left in him.” Tony leaned forward and squinted into the thicket. “Young ma-an. Young man.”
“You always call him that, but you know, he’s actually a senior citizen.”
“Youth is all about frame of mind, and I’m telling you, Dusty’s a young buck if ever there was one.”
Dusty loped out from the trees, his tongue hanging out of his mouth, his eyes bright. He hobbled directly up to Tony, who bent down to pet him. “Listen here, young man, you come from much too nice a family to be out carousing at all hours, worrying us like this. From now on, I expect you to come the first time you’re called. You understand?”
Dusty lay down during the middle of the admonishment, his tail thumping against the clover. Tony stood up. “There, I think that’s all settled. Let me know if I need to have another talk with him.”
Paige felt the sudden urge to throw her arms around Tony’s neck and hug him in sheer delight. How long had it been since she’d been with someone who made her feel so good?
But . . . he was Clarissa’s uncle. As much as Paige was growing to like him, as much as she believed the feeling was mutual, she couldn’t help but wonder what he knew about Clarissa’s apparent conniving. The answer to the question sobered her enough to stop her from doing anything foolish.
