Waiting At The SLV

At the SLV
I sit out front waiting for my prescription to be filled – the cars pushed along on an invisible current –
Nothing means anything more than what it is when waiting like this, watching the lights change, and the cars in the stream.
I choose to patronize this pharmacy because it is locally owned and even in my addictions my social conscience won’t shut up. Also they are fast. Most I ever waited was fifteen minutes. A visit to Walgreen’s often results in one hour of watching the lights change from red to green to yellow and back.
The last time I found myself at Walgreen’s the SLV was closed pending a burglary investigation, and while waiting, I saw a young lady in a minivan pull to the drive thru. She passed a thin stack of prescriptions through the slot beneath the window. The pharmacist routinely thumbed through but paused to scrutinize one closely. He spoke into the microphone telling her it would be only a few minutes. I waited indoors that day because outside, the wind was like a wire brush.
She must have had a dozen cameras drilling down on her out there, they had her name, face, and she was completely beyond recourse. I saw her face thru the window while I listened to one side of the conversation the pharmacist was having with the police over the phone, he used the words prescription and fraud.
Outside, she tapped her finger on the steering wheel in time to some song. She had no idea the hammer was about to fall, listening to that song, counting all those pills in her head. I remember thinking that after this, every time she hears that song, whatever song it may have been, the violent terror of red handed cuffs clamping shut, cold cell withdraws and all the lost time, would creep thru her again, forever.
I said a little prayer that it wasn’t a song that meant something, a song that made her drink too much and dance on tables, or one that mulched up memories of a love worth remembering, even one that made washing her dishes a little less tedious, or one that swept away the pain for a moment like those pills she would never receive.
The SLV, the local place that is my regular, has been robbed three times in the past two months.
As I sit here waiting now for my prescription to be filled, I cannot erase the image of that woman’s face as it was changed by the realization brought on by three cruisers bearing down in slow motion meteoric velocity and with hardly a sound. In an instant it was as if she realized she had died, yet kept on breathing, and wishing she had.