Six hours, forty-six minutes.     

The pharmacy counter at my neighborhood Walgreens opened at 9 am, a full hour later than the rest of the store. I should have known that. When I was sixteen, I worked behind a Walgreens pharmacy counter just like this one, deciphering physicians’ cryptic shorthand and counting pills and holding on the phone with insurance companies and getting yelled at by sexually frustrated men refilling Viagra scripts. I lived and died by that clock.

At thirty-one, I was a low-level bureaucrat and recent divorcee swallowed whole by heartbreak and debt. Because of the heartbreak and the debt, I was also a sex worker. And because of the heartbreak and the sex work, I was also a penitent. On Friday nights, men wined and dined me and paid me in fat stacks of bills to do all the things their wives would not, and on Sunday mornings I broke bread and drank grape juice from a tiny plastic cup and said my prayers.

Twenty-three minutes passed until a teenager who looked as bored as I used to raised the rolling counter door overhead and began serving the other customers. Neighbours unprepared for Chicagoland winters, covering babies under fleece blankets, shivering against colds and strep throat, inched forward. The wait between me and salvation.

When it was finally my turn, I gave the teenager behind the counter my handwritten prescriptions from the urgent care clinic, waited longer, trembling and hunched. He searched the shallow drug shelves, came up empty, stared at me, then asked the pharmacist, who didn’t look up from his screen.

‘We don’t have ’em,’ he said. ‘Try the next store over.’

‘What’s it for?’ the apprentice asked.

The pharmacist shook him off. The kid handed me back my prescriptions and sent me on my way.