Friday at lunch I was stretching my legs out of the office, because I didn’t like any of the things that were piled up on my desk for me to work on. And as I strolled along trying to mull how to handle one problem in particular, my phone rang. Didn’t recognize the number, but I answered as cheerily as I could manage, “Hello?”
“Mr. Tanatu? This is Daisy … do you remember me?”
Good heavens. Daisy? Long long ago, back when Wife and I were still together and the boys were small, Daisy worked in the pharmacy closest to our house. She was always friendly, and we used to chat whenever I had any prescriptions to pick up. (I’ve alluded to Wife’s medical history in plenty of other posts, so it will come as no surprise that this was generally several times a week. For years. Yes, for the most part Wife sent me out to get her drugs for her and I did it.) There was never anything improper between us, just a casual friendship of the kind that it is easy to strike up when you see someone regularly. But it always cheered me up to see that she was on duty if I had drugs to collect, and she seemed to brighten up whenever I caught her eye.
I say there was never anything “improper” between us, but that’s not quite true. There was never anything sexual or romantic. But improper? Well at one point I was out of work for about a year and a half. I got unemployment insurance, and I had a severance package from my old job, so we had food on the table. But “out of work” meant “no medical insurance.” Wife was too sick to work at that point, so there was no group plan anywhere to cover her drugs. All of a sudden we had to pay list price for them all, and in some cases that meant $1200 for a one month’s supply of a maintenance medication. That’s more than my entire unemployment insurance added up to, even assuming I didn’t care about paying the mortgage or the gas bill. We had no idea what to do next.
I mentioned this to Daisy the next time I was picking up some of the cheaper medications on Wife’s list, and she frowned. “Oh, that’s really bad. What are you going to do?” I admitted that I didn’t know. Daisy thought a minute and then she said, “You know, … we get employee discounts on any medicines we buy for our personal use. Which ones are you having trouble affording?” I told her. She had them in stock – exactly one month’s supply of each because they were rare drugs and Wife was the only one taking them (so they stocked a month’s worth at a time just for her) – so she brought them out, looked around to make sure her manager was nowhere nearby, and then punched a long string of numbers into the cash register. And suddenly instead of $1200 the bill dropped to $130, by magic. I thanked her – many times – and went home with the good news.
She gave us this discount for a year, spelling us while I looked for work. And the very day she told me that the company had revoked their policy allowing employee discounts on medication, I was able to tell her I had a new job. It was bad news for her, I’m sure, and for the other employees. But I understand why they did it. Somewhere along the line they had to have figured out that they had lost somewhere in excess of ten thousand dollars in sales in the previous year, all draining out through this particular loophole. At the time, I have to confess, I was mostly thrilled to be working again. I told Daisy that I couldn’t imagine what I could ever do to repay her: but if she could ever think of something, I’d do it.
Not long afterwards, I saw her in the parking lot of the grocery store. She said that she had decided to leave the pharmacy business and was applying for jobs elsewhere: would I be willing to give her a recommendation? Of course I said yes, though in the back of my head I tried to imagine what such a recommendation would sound like. “Yes, Mr. Squeezeblood, I can absolutely guarantee that Daisy will be an employee with the highest ethical standards. She will gladly steal from her employer – any day, in a heartbeat – if she thinks that he is screwing over his customers with his high prices.” Hmmm. Maybe not. In the end I talked about her dedication to excellent customer service, but the spin I put on it was to highlight how dreadfully complicated Wife’s prescription regimen was (this part was absolutely true), how other pharmacies regularly screwed it up (also true), and how Daisy was scrupulous about keeping everything in order (also true). But I was silent about her biggest service.
Anyway, that was years ago. I think she got the job, and I never heard from her again. But why would I? We never expanded the scope of our friendship outside of the narrow little bubble in which it had grown. Except for that one time we met by chance in the parking lot, I think we never even clapped eyes on each other outside the pharmacy at all. It is true that I gave her my cell phone number, but only so she could put potential employers in touch with me. It never crossed my mind that she would keep it after that, let alone call it.
So there I stand, Friday at noon, trying to escape from my office and get a little fresh air. My phone rings, and the voice on the other end asks:
“Mr. Tanatu? This is Daisy … do you remember me?”
“Daisy? What – Daisy from the pharmacy? Goodness yes! Of course I remember you! Gosh, it’s been … years. What’s the occasion?”
I never got a really clear answer to this question, the question why she was calling me. She asked about the boys, and so I told her they are in high school and Son 1 is applying to colleges. She asked about Wife and me, and so I told her we are separating. I explained we have already sold the house and moved, respectively, into new digs. She made politely sorry noises about the separation, and I said it was a long time coming – also that once the dust settles we’ll both be better off. A couple of minutes later she made a point of casually mentioning a boyfriend of long standing … maybe I’m overcautious, but I assume this was just in case I had any predatory ideas now that I am newly-single. So what’s going on with her?
This is another question to which I never got a really clear answer. She said that her company (“the job you helped me get”) isn’t doing too well these days and so she is thinking of looking for another job. She said she has had a lot of “life-transition events” happen to her in the last year. And somehow these two facts meant logically enough that she found herself sorting through a stack of her old contacts and … what? Systematically calling every number on the list just to see if it is still a live number, so she can discard the ones that aren’t? Systematically calling everyone she has ever known in her life just to hear a voice at the other end of the line? Neither of those makes any sense. Is there another explanation? Surely there must be, and I’m just not clever enough to see it. I can’t help feeling that I should have asked a little more insistently, “So what’s going on with you, anyway?” Or maybe she was calling from some place where she couldn’t discuss it? I don’t know.
I gave her my e-mail address this time. I guess I’ll wait to see if she uses it. Or I suppose I could text her (since my phone stored her number), but that seems a little odd ….
It’s really kind of a puzzle.
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