The woman in the silver Nissan had a name, and I had known it for nine years. She was Lorna Deveaux, forty one years old, who sang alto in the choir at Dauphin Way Methodist and sat in the second pew every Sunday beside her mother Gladys, my oldest friend. I am Dottie Kirby, seventy nine years old, and I stared at the frozen picture on the screen of the pharmacist with my hand pressed flat against my heart, the heart that her little white bags had been feeding with nothing at all. The pharmacist, a gentle man named Mr. Bui, turned the monitor off.
He lined up the bottles from my kitchen on the counter, the ones that had come by mail since August, and he opened them one at a time under a lamp. The capsules had the right color. They had the right little stamp. But when he pressed a pill between his thumb and finger, it crumbled like chalk. “Mrs. Kirby, this is not your medication,” he said, very quietly. “It is not any medication I know. I believe someone has been taking the real pills and filling your bottles with a filler. You are lucky to be standing here.”
I walked out of the Walgreens into the bright Gulf morning and sat on the bench by the bus stop, with the Mobile traffic rushing by and the taste of pennies in my mouth. Four months. Four months of afternoons in my armchair with my ankles swelling, my breath short on the stairs, and my doctor telling me I was simply getting old. I dialed the number of my pastor, and I told him that I would be in the second pew on Sunday, as always, and that I would be bringing some guests.
A drive through pharmacy window gave one retired widow the length of a Sunday sermon to bring a woman in the second pew back to the truth in Mobile.
I gave my terms in the fellowship hall after the service, in my good navy dress, with a detective from the Mobile police and Mr. Bui and my pastor all seated at the long table beside me, and Lorna across from me with her mother. “Lorna, I am not going to shout at you in the house of God. You will tell these people everything. You will repay what you took. You will go with the detective this afternoon. And you will look your mother in the eye, because she deserves to hear it from you.”
Lorna wept into her hands, and Gladys put her arm around her shoulders. “Dottie, my son Jaden has leukemia,” she said, in a ragged whisper. “The insurance would not cover the last round. I work at the billing office of a clinic, and I saw how easy it was to call a patient and say I was from the insurance company. I sold the real pills to a man online for sixty dollars a bottle.” She lifted her blotchy face. “I filled yours with vitamin powder. I told myself you would never know. I am so ashamed.”
But the thought of the courtroom undid her. Lorna suddenly snatched the paper bag from the table, the one holding the mail order bottles, and the list of names, and ran for the side door of the fellowship hall, her heels clattering on the tile, meaning to throw the bag into her Nissan and drive off. She flung open the door. A deacon named Mr. Pratt stepped across the doorway. Two ushers closed in from the hall. And the entire choir, in their burgundy robes, rose in a body from the back row.
Lorna stopped in the doorway, in the blazing noon sun of the parking lot, with the bag in her arms and a wall of burgundy robes behind her, silent as a congregation. Her mother stood at the table and spoke in a cracked voice. “Lorna Grace, you come back here to me.” Lorna turned. The bag slid out of her arms to the floor. She walked back across the tile, fell into the arms of her mother, and sobbed so hard that the choir director began to weep, and then the pastor.
The consequences were just and kind. Lorna pleaded guilty to fraud and theft of medication, and the judge, after hearing from me, gave her probation and a long restitution plan, with a requirement to work in a clinic that treated children. The ring of buyers was broken. Seven other patients had been victims, and each was reimbursed. The church took up a collection for the medical bills of Jaden, and I added a check of my own, and the pastor cried when he read the amount. My heart was carefully restored with the true pills, and the swelling in my ankles went down in a week.
In the name of my husband Roy, who passed in 2014, I started the Roy Kirby Fund. It pays for prescription costs and pill organizers for seniors who cannot afford them and for pharmacy safety checks and medication fraud help, in Mobile, Baldwin and Escambia counties. In the first year we filled two thousand prescriptions and flagged nineteen fraud cases. One was an eighty four year old retired shipyard welder from Prichard who opened a bottle at the counter, looked at the little white pill in his palm, and said he had not expected to see another spring.
On a bright Sunday in April, I sat in the second pew at Dauphin Way Methodist in my good navy dress, with my phone propped on the hymnal so that my son in Germany could watch the service from his kitchen table. Beside me, her hair in a bun, sat Gladys, and on the other side of her sat Lorna, who had been given leave by the judge to come home for the day. The choir stood. Lorna took my hand, and we sang the old hymn together, and the whole row cried, and the choir behind us hummed, and my son in Germany waved at the camera.
