Lovesick Read Online Free PDF Page B

Lydia’s funeral.
Being here makes him feel closer to Mom
, she tells me.
    Paige’s mother, Lydia, died before I moved back to Crockett. I really only have one memory of her. I was twelve, and a future felon by the name of Anthony “Bunky” Bianco dared me to stealsome Hubba Bubba watermelon-flavored bubble gum. I must have walked back and forth past that candy rack twenty times before stuffing two packs in my Levi’s jeans and booking. “Excuse me,” Lydia shouted politely as I bolted out the front door with bulges in my front pocket. If she wasn’t sure what happened, she definitely figured it out moments later when Bunky high-fived me. We ran like hell. I didn’t return to Day’s Pharmacy for years after that, even if that meant forgoing those precious Red Rocket candy rings and taking my chances at the parade. To this day, those two packs of gum have been the only two things I ever shoplifted in my life—a childhood memory that still sickens me.
    I often wonder how happy Lydia would have been to learn that her daughter ended up with a hoodlum. I can only hope she would’ve been forgiving.
    It’s not stealing now when I snatch a candy bar or pack of gum off the rack. Like Belinda and her magazines, we consider it more like back pay for all the uncompensated overtime Gregory expects from us. The truth is that us stealing chocolate and gossip rags is the least of Gregory’s problems. Gregory has dozens of customers who have gone years without settling enormous pharmacy tabs. Around here, “tab” is code for “free.” Every once in a while Gregory says or does something that suggests he’s ready to collect, but he never follows through. What’s most important to him is that his customers get the medical attention they need, when they need it.
    “No need to do the math. Our customers will never cut a pill in half”—that’s the Day’s Pharmacy credo.
    EVERYTHING I find dreary and dilapidated about this place, Paige finds charming and quaint. She uses words like
authentic
and
warm
to characterize the faux wood paneling on the pharmacy counter.
Retro
is how she describes the now-unused marble-top lunch counter and the red vinyl chrome barstools where Lydia used to serve fountain drinks and hand-dipped milkshakes. The number 4 key on the cast iron cash register sticks,
but we can’t get rid of that, it’s a collector’s item
, she insists. Mixed among the modernplastic pill containers are empty antique glass bottles, oddly shaped, some with corks and some without. In all the time that I’ve worked here, not a single customer has ever asked me to unlock the small glass display case filled with knock-off Montblanc fountain pens and dusty magnifying glasses.
    To me, this place is a death trap: a dying town with a dying generation of clients, and Gregory’s glorified but dying legacy. If not for Paige, I would have managed a Houdini escape long ago.
    OUR delivery guy, Manny Milken, is thirty minutes late and Gregory is annoyed, which is good news for me—anything to deflect attention from our latest argument, somewhere on the order of a magnitude 4.0. (Gregory was mad because I forgot to slap a red “Do not take this medication with antacids” label on one of our orders. I don’t see the big deal—all of our prescriptions come with an instruction booklet. But Gregory thinks no one reads those. He’s probably right. I never do.)
    Manny has an excuse for everything. Today it’s FedEx’s fault.
    “Sorry, Mr. Day, I was, like, ‘Where are these guys?’ and when they showed up, trust me, it wasn’t pretty. We were close to coming to blows. But it’s a blessing in the skies seeing as it gave me time to pick this other package up for you,” he says, holding up a shirt box wrapped in brown paper and twine.
    Manny Milken isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. He’s more like a spoon, or possibly a spork. I suspect he sustained too many blows to the head playing high school football. Last week, he