He said, “It’s for Ray, and he’s been out of insurance since June.” The medication is a cardiac drug, four hundred dollars a month without coverage, and my husband had been getting it filled under my name and on our plan since June and handing it to Ray in a coat pocket at holidays and in a parking lot the rest of the year. Ray lost his job in 2023 and lied to all of us about it for eighteen months, and my husband found out by accident, and instead of telling me — instead of us sitting down like adults and deciding what we could do for a man who has fixed every faucet in this house since 2004 — he used my name because my plan had the better formulary.
I got angry at the wrong thing first. I stood in that kitchen furious about insurance fraud while a sixty-three-year-old man put on his coat and tried to get out my front door, and it took me until about two in the morning to understand that the thing I was actually going to be sick about was the pride. Ray sat in my dining room at Thanksgiving carving a turkey with a prescription in his pocket he couldn’t pay for, and he’d rather have taken it that way than said one sentence to me. My kids call him Uncle Ray. He has been at every birthday since my oldest was born.
We fixed the legal part in December — a sliding-scale clinic through the hospital, a manufacturer assistance program, and my husband called the insurer himself and reported it, which cost us six hundred dollars and no charges. What we haven’t fixed is the rest. My husband still thinks he did something decent and can’t hear that he did it by making me a liar without asking. Ray came at Christmas. He stood in the doorway with a poinsettia and couldn’t look at me, and I took it and hugged him and told him to get in here and carve, because that’s the only sentence I had that was true.
