Her final figure was forty-one days.
Forty-one days of nothing at all, somewhere in the February and the March, right before the appointment.
A child of thirteen knew the exact date her mother was going to run out of medicine, and she had known it since roughly the previous autumn, and she had been coming to my counter once a month and asking me arithmetic questions because she was trying to find a way to make forty-one days disappear.
And I had been standing there telling her twenty-eight, fourteen, fifty-six, like a talking calculator.
I picked the book up off the floor and I gave it back to her and I asked her to sit down on the chair by the blood pressure machine for ten minutes, and I locked the front door, which I have done twice in fifteen years.
Then I telephoned the surgery, with her in the room, and I did not let them put me in a queue.
Here is what none of the three of them knew, and it is the thing that makes me want to put my head through a wall.
There was nothing to ration.
Marisol had been paying for her prescriptions one month at a time, at full price, every month, for two years. There is a prepayment certificate that caps what you pay for a whole year, and on her medicines it would have saved her about three hundred and ninety dollars, and she had never been told it existed, and she had never asked, because she is a woman who says sorry four times a sentence.
The rationing was not about the medicine running out. It was about the money for the next box.
Twelve minutes of my telephone and a form with eleven boxes on it.
That is what the forty-one days was.
Two years of a woman halving her own doses, and fourteen months of her daughter counting tablets at the kitchen table at seven in the morning, for a form.
The surgery re-issued the month properly on the Thursday. Marisol has been on the full dose since the twenty-second of September.
She came in herself in the October, for the first time in a year, and she stood at the end of the counter by the hot water bottles and she said sorry eleven times and I counted.
She made her appointment on the eleventh of March. She walked into it.
Saoirse still comes on Tuesdays, between twenty past four and half past, and she still says her mother’s date of birth before I ask for it.
She does not ask me how many days any more.
She still has the blue book. I asked her why, when the counting is finished, and she said she wants to keep it so that she remembers she was right.
She was right. That is the thing. A twelve-year-old with a ruler was the only person in that house who had done the arithmetic honestly, and she was right about every number in it, including the forty-one.
The only thing she got wrong was that she thought she was the only one who could fix it.
And she thought that because for fourteen months, every single month, she stood at my counter and asked, and the person she asked gave her the number instead of the question.
