The sign above the door said Lee's Pharmacy in letters that had been painted over so many times the L was barely an L anymore and the P looked like a question mark. It was on a street in Brooklyn that nobody drives past unless they are looking for something and don't want anyone to know what it is.

My name is Marcus Lee. I am thirty-eight years old. I run this pharmacy. It is barely a pharmacy. It sells cough syrup, bandages, vitamins, and the occasional handmade herbal preparation that I make because nobody on this block trusts CVS.

Marie came in on a Friday afternoon. She looked about forty, maybe older. She was wearing an old coat that didn't fit and had a cut on her leg that was swollen and red. She asked if she could sit down for a minute.

I let her into the back room and gave her some iodine and a bandage. She didn't leave.

She stayed for a few days. She didn't ask questions. She helped with the shelves. She taught me things the pharmacy textbooks never covered: how to use willow bark for pain, how to prepare a fever-reducing root, how to make a cough syrup from honey and thyme and something she didn't name.

I used these things on my customers. Word spread slowly. People started coming in for things they couldn't get at the big chain stores.

Then Marie left. Just walked out one Wednesday afternoon. On the counter was a small bag of dried herbs and some handwritten instructions. Nobody remembers what she looked like. Not really.

My neighbor Linda is a single mother. Her son Sammy is seven years old. He was diagnosed with a rare blood disorder—a variant of aplastic anemia that the big hospitals in Manhattan couldn't quite figure out. Linda couldn't afford the treatment. Not even close.

I looked into everything. I found a combination of herbal supplementation and stem cell transplant that might work, but it required a special herbal preparation to protect the transplanted cells. The preparation was only available at a research institution in Manhattan.

I went to Dr. James Park. We went to college together. He studied pharmacy at the same university, but while I came back to Brooklyn to open this pharmacy, he went to Manhattan and put on a suit and started charging two hundred dollars an hour.

"Marcus," he said, looking at me the way you look at something you used to know and no longer recognize. "You know my time costs what it costs. This off-label herbal protocol is not what I do."

I came back to Brooklyn. I locked the door and sat behind the counter and stared at the peeling paint on the wall and thought about how my life had gone in one direction and James Park's life had gone in another and I didn't know which way was better.

Then Marie walked through the door. She said she had a friend in Queens who was a pharmacist and could get the preparation. She made a phone call. Two days later, the medicine arrived.

Sammy's transplant was successful.

I went to thank Marie. I asked her what she wanted in return. She smiled and said, "Keep the pharmacy open. That's enough." Then she disappeared into the Brooklyn crowd and I never saw her again.

Sometimes a customer asks me who she was. I say she was a friend. Sometimes I wonder what she really was. A doctor? A pharmacist? A crazy person? But you know what, on this street, who cares? Someone needs help. Someone can provide it. That's enough.

I turned off the lights. I locked the door. I walked into the Brooklyn night.