Between the batteries and the bug spray there was a short row of little boxes, the smallest a store can order, ten caplets to a box, maybe twelve. Not the bottle you buy in town for the medicine cabinet. The travel size, the panic size, the size you buy when the panic is now.
I took one down. Almost weightless, the caplets shifting inside with a dry rattle, the paperboard soft at the corners from handling and from the damp that gets into everything near the door. The blister card inside would be sealed in that foil you have to fight, the foil that resists exactly when your head is worst. A dollar and change per caplet, if you did the math, which nobody standing there with a headache does.
The markup was not greed so much as distance. The pharmacy was an hour of highway, closed by six, closed all Sunday. A headache does not check the hours. A fever in a kid at the lake does not wait for town to open. So the store carried the small boxes at the big price, and people paid it, once, in the moment, and did not resent it until later.
The box in my hand had a dent pressed into one face, a thumb’s worth, where someone before me had squeezed it deciding, then put it back. The perforated flap was half torn along its dotted line, started and abandoned. Someone had nearly opened it in the aisle. I ran my thumb over the lifted flap. It stayed half-open, the dotted seam parted at one end and holding at the other, not sealed, not torn, waiting on the next bad morning to finish it.