At the Drugstore
By Peter Taylor, first published in The Sewanee Review
A New Yorker returns to his childhood home with his family and comes to understand family dynamics more acutely when he visits a drug store run by a pharmacist whom he used to terrorize as a child.
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Matt has returned to visit his childhood home which now only houses his mother and father. He is joined by his own family; his wife, Janie, and his two sons. In the early morning, Matt has a sudden urge to go somewhere, and finds himself at a local drug store. This is the same drug store where, in his childhood, Matt and some of his buddies had played pranks on the pharmacist and the two employees there. To Matt's surprise, he recognizes the pharmacist as the same one he once knew, only much older now. After a short exchange between them, Matt purchases shaving lotion, and hears another person walk into the store from behind him. He turns to see a man with the pharmacist's face plastered on a young body, and thinks at first that he must be dreaming. Matt purchases a magazine to prolong the interaction with the pharmacist, but he has medicines to attend to, and asks his son to take charge of the counter for him. Matt wants to talk to the older pharmacist more, and makes up a lie about a scalp condition, but the pharmacist tells him to see a doctor, and sends him away. Matt, awash in nostalgia, returns to his childhood home where his family is preparing to eat breakfast. They inquire after his absence, and Matt says that he went for a walk, and notes his guilty look when he returned. Matt's father seems to know that he went somewhere else, but doesn't pry about it. The two of them share some man-to-man father-to-son confidentiality that the rest of the family could not understand.
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