“Mrs. Chen, your mother’s Xanax refill is ready for pickup.”

I actually had to ask her to repeat it. I was half-listening, standing in my kitchen, unloading groceries. My mother is 82. She lives alone in the house we grew up in, and she has never in her life been prescribed Xanax.

I know her medications. I know them because I’m the one who goes with her to Dr. Patel twice a year and sits in that little exam room while she argues about whether she really needs the cholesterol pill.

I drove to the CVS on Broad Street. I don’t even know exactly what I was thinking. Honestly I think part of me assumed it was a mistake. A database error, a wrong phone number, something boring and fixable. The pharmacist, a younger woman with her hair pulled back, pulled up the account and turned the monitor slightly toward me. Three medications. Xanax. Ambien. A muscle relaxer I’d never heard of. All filled monthly. For fourteen months.

I remember standing at that counter thinking, fourteen months. My mother had been listed as a patient somewhere for fourteen months and I had no idea. The prescriptions were coming from a clinic in Garfield. A Dr. Moser. And every single month, someone was picking them up with a valid driver’s license. The pharmacist told me the name on file for pickup. My sister Debra.

I sat in my car in that parking lot for a while. I don’t know how long. I kept replaying the number. Fourteen months. That’s not a mistake, that’s a schedule.

I called the clinic in Garfield before I even drove home. They confirmed it. My mother was listed as an active patient. Six office visits in fourteen months. I asked if they had a description of the person who brought her in.

They wouldn’t tell me much but the woman I spoke to got very careful and quiet on the phone in a way that told me enough.

My mother was watching Wheel of Fortune when I got to her house. She had a blanket over her legs and a cup of tea on the side table. She looked fine. She looked like herself. I sat down next to her and I tried to keep my voice normal and I asked her if she’d been to a doctor in Garfield recently.

She looked at me with that particular face she makes when she’s genuinely puzzled. Not evasive. Genuinely confused. She said, “Where’s Garfield?”

That was the moment it really landed. Not the pharmacist’s phone call. Not the name on the screen. That was the moment, my 82-year-old mother not knowing she was a patient at a medical clinic an hour away. Not knowing she had been, according to records, seen there six times.