In my dream I was watching TV. Weird but true. Can’t remember what show it was, just that the TV was working and everything was back to normal. It was warm, too, summer warm—not woodstove warm—and I could smell fresh-cut grass and cotton candy.

It was such a comfortable dream that I didn’t want it to stop, even with Becca shaking me as hard as she could.

“Charlie! Charlie, wake up! Something’s wrong with Mom!”

When my brain finally figured out what she was saying, I swung out of bed and put my feet on a floor as cold as an ice rink. Which startled me the rest of the way awake because Mom had been getting up every morning at four a.m. and loading the stove so it was warm when me and Becca got up.

Every morning, never failed.

Becca was crying, which scared me. Really scared me. Because it reminded me of how we found out that Dad had been killed in a skiing accident. Mom waking us up and telling us something really bad had happened, and then both of us crying until we choked, refusing to believe her when she told us a storm had come up suddenly, and he had hit a tree and died.

But it didn’t matter how much we wanted it not to have happened. It did happen, and there was nothing we could do to change it.

We found Mom curled up on the bathroom floor. She wasn’t asleep or unconscious, exactly, but her eyes were unfocused, and her words were slurred, as if she’d been drinking.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking, but Mom didn’t drink alcohol, not ever.

“What’s she trying to say?” Becca wanted to know, desperately. “I can’t figure it out. Charlie, figure it out, please please please.”

I knelt beside Mom and leaned close. She was trying to say something but it sounded like baby talk, ga ga ga. Which totally freaked me out. It’s stupid, but more than anything I wanted to ignore what was happening and pretend it was summertime and the TV was on.

When I tried to get up, Mom’s hand locked around my wrist. She wanted me to lean closer.

“Nah me adah,” Mom said, struggling to speak, her eyes rolling. “Nah me adah.”

“Nah me adah?” I repeated to Becca.

My sister’s eyes lit up. “Naomi Adler! Of course! She wants us to get Mrs. Adler!”

We covered Mom with blankets, because the floor was so cold, and I held her hands for dear life while Becca put on her snowmobile suit and went out to fetch Mrs. Adler.

*  *  *

An hour later Mom was in bed and sleeping soundly. Mrs. Adler took one look at her, checked the medicine cabinet, and then counted the pills in a medicine bottle.

“I was worried this might happen,” she told us. “Are you aware that your mother has a form of type 2 diabetes? Okay. Of course you are. So you know she takes medication that helps regulate her blood sugar. Your mother picked up her prescription a day or so before the store burned. Wasn’t only the food and sundries burned, it was the pharmacy, too. Anyhow, it looks like Emma was trying to stretch her prescription. Taking one pill every other day instead of every day. And it caught up with her.”

“Is she going to be okay?”

As the manager of the Superette, Mrs. Adler was famous for telling it like it was, even if it hurt someone’s feelings. No sugarcoating anything. Her store was gone, turned into frozen charcoal, but Mrs. Adler hadn’t changed.

“I don’t know,” she told us. “I hope she’ll be okay, but I’m not a doctor. I’m a licensed pharmacy assistant, which means I can pass along medication in consultation with a pharmacist. That was by phone, to the hospital pharmacy in Concord.”

“But you know stuff,” Becca said, begging. “Tell us what to do.”

Mrs. Adler sighed. “I know enough to know that Emma can only do so much to regulate her blood sugar by managing her diet and so on. Her condition is quite serious, and she needs her medication.”

“How long will her pills last, if she takes one every day like she’s supposed to?”

Mrs. Adler held up the bottle. “You can count it yourself, to make sure. But I make it nineteen pills.”

Nineteen pills. Nineteen days and counting.