by Will Allison
On Friday, their last official day as smokers, Lyle comes home from work, where he’s been negotiating a deal to distribute video poker machines in West Virginia now that they’re illegal in South Carolina. He finds Holly and Claire on the kitchen floor, playing with wooden blocks. Claire is fidgeting. “What’s two and two?” Holly says, moving pairs of blocks into a foursome. Claire looks away, pokes out her lip. Then, a huge smile. “A tutu! A tutu! Can I put on my tutu?” Holly says, “I give.”
Once Claire is busy with her dress-up clothes—tutu, princess crown, elbow-length sequined gloves—Holly and Lyle slip out to their spot beside the rosebush, where they can keep an eye on her through the window. Holly kisses her cigarette before she lights it. “Little friend,” she says, “your days are numbered. Your number’s up. You can’t argue with the numbers.”
On average, nonsmokers outlive smokers by ten years. Holly has posted this bit of info on the fridge, for inspiration. They’re determined to stick around long enough to see Claire graduate from college, get married or not, become whatever she becomes. Even so, quitting feels like a loss. In Lyle’s memory, their early days are suffused with smoke, a gauzy cocoon holding them close. Cal hadn’t approved, so they’d been secretive back then, too, indulging their vice behind the milk house, down by the bluff, up on the silo late at night.
“Would you still do that”—Lyle’s flirting now—“share your last smoke with me?”
He’s remembering when he first started working for Cal. It was his second day on the job, and during a break, he asked to bum a cigarette off Holly. He didn’t really want to smoke, was just looking for an excuse to talk to her. “It’s my last one,” she told him. “But I’ll share.”
Now Holly gives him a curious look, hooks a finger in the pocket of his oxford. “Sucker,” she says. “It wasn’t really my last one.” And then, before he has time to be surprised, she puts her other hand on his chest and kisses him hard, which is exactly what he’d been imagining that years-ago day as he passed the cigarette back to her.
“Hey!” Claire’s tapping the window with a magic wand, her voice tinny behind the glass. “Too! Much! Kissing!” Holly says she’ll be in soon and shakes loose another smoke as Lyle heads inside to start dinner. That’s how it goes the rest of the evening, her ducking out while he brushes Claire’s teeth, helps her into pajamas, reads to her in bed. Normally he and Holly do the whole routine together, but tonight he doesn’t mind going it alone, especially not if the kiss was a preview of what’s to come. It’s been two months, two weeks, and four days; by now even Holly has to be getting the itch. But this is math they don’t talk about. As Lyle lies in bed, watching a ball game and waiting, he tries not to get his hopes up. Probably the only reason she kissed him was the sudden memory of the old days, how much she wanted him back then. After a few innings, he gives up, turns off the TV, and goes downstairs. He’s opening a bottle of wine when Holly comes through the screen door carrying spreadsheets.
“You coming to bed?”
“Soon,” she says. “I’m enjoying my swan song.”
“You know, they say nicotine kills your sex drive.”
Holly opens a Diet Coke. “You know, they say the same about alcohol.”
When Lyle nods off around eleven, drowsy from his fourth glass, she’s still outside.
“Ouch,” Holly said, shifting her weight on top of him. “Something’s not right.” She told him it felt like the equipment down there had been rearranged. Claire was four weeks old, and this was their first try since she was born. They were clumsy as teenagers, but in spite of the discomfort, Holly seemed happy afterward, pleased to know he still wanted her. After a couple weeks, though, it was as if she no longer needed to do it now that she’d proven to herself they still could. At first Lyle was patient. She’d feel sexier once she lost the extra pounds, once she stopped wetting herself every time she coughed, once it didn’t hurt. Besides, her body was busy providing for Claire, and that was the important thing. But even after Holly quit nursing, even after he could once again put his tongue to her breast without feeling like a trespasser, even after whatever had been rearranged during labor got itself back to rights, still nothing.
Lyle took into consideration biology, was willing to allow for the possibility that what his body needed two or three times a week, hers now needed less often. But as the months wore on (the “once-a-months” was how he thought of them), he began to think Holly simply wasn’t trying. If he pushed her, if he dropped enough hints, eventually she’d come around, but even that could take days. And then he was still left feeling not quite right, because he didn’t just want sex, he wanted his wife to want him. When he brought it up, she was apologetic, then defensive.
“Look,” she said. “I can’t help it if I’m not in the mood. Do you want me just servicing you like a broken-down car?”
“No,” he said. “Of course not.” And he meant it. Sex as a favor was even more depressing than no sex at all.
Holly nudges Lyle with her elbow. It’s Saturday morning, six-thirty. “I’ve been up since five,” she says. “Can we have a smoke now?”
“Afraid not.”
“Then there’s not much reason to get up, is there?”
When Lyle ventures a hand on her thigh, she rolls over and blows her nose, probably trying to wake Claire. “I’ve been thinking,” she says. “As long as we’re at it, why don’t we quit drinking, too?”
Lyle reaches into his briefs to adjust himself. What she means of course is that he should quit drinking. She stopped before she got pregnant, and now she hardly drinks at all. “We’re quitting cigarettes because they kill you,” he says. “Drinking a little bit doesn’t.”
“But you don’t drink a little bit.” She rolls over to scratch his back, a consolation prize. “And even when you do, you change. You’re not you.”
There’s a knock on the bedroom door. Claire has a million excuses for venturing in before the hands of the clock point to seven and twelve. When Holly says, “Come in,” she hops toward them, underpants on backward, both legs squeezed through one hole.
“My underwear is broken.”
“What a coincidence,” Lyle says. “I think your mom is broken, too.”
Holly pats his cheek and sends him to make breakfast while she helps Claire get dressed. When they come into the kitchen, she tosses a pack of Camels onto the table. “Get these away from me, please.”
The feel of the pack between his fingers is enough to make his lips tingle, and as he throws it away, he’s already plotting to come back later, fish it out. “Hang tough,” he says, handing Holly her coffee. “Don’t puff.” It’s a saying he picked up the first time they quit, one that got on Holly’s nerves, but he means it as a joke. He’s hoping for a smile. Instead, over Claire’s head, she shoots him a look so full of venom that Lyle at first thinks she must be kidding.
“You know,” she says, slumping in her chair, “I was doing just fine.”
Fine, she means, until he started back. Fine to the point that she could sit behind the register at the antique mall with smokers coming and going all around and not even be tempted. They’d both quit when they were trying for a baby, but then, around the time Claire turned one, Lyle lit up after a few too many beers at the office Christmas party. Soon he was smoking three or four a week. One night in January, Holly followed him outside, drew a cigarette from his pack, and stared him down. “This is your fault,” she said. “I asked you not to keep them around.”
Now, as she sits across the table stewing, Lyle would like to remind her that he wasn’t the one who put it in her mouth and lit it, but somehow he almost feels like he did. Later, when he’s taking out the trash, he buries the pack of Camels under wet coffee grounds.
The morning smolders on. Lyle’s skin feels like it’s crawling with prickly-footed beetles. A massive vacuum yawns inside him. But every time he’s ready to cave, he pictures himself wasting away in the hospital with lung cancer or standing at Holly’s gra
veside while Claire weeps. He’d probably light up anyway if he had the chance, but he doesn’t, because their plan is to stick together and stay busy. They weed the flower beds, take Claire to the zoo, buy a hot dog at Sandy’s, and make their weekly pilgrimage to Winn-Dixie, where, when Claire isn’t looking, they load up on licorice, jawbreakers, Cheez-Its, and Bubble Yum. Holly wears a nicotine patch and chews nicotine gum. She’s so shaky she couldn’t light a match if she tried. That night, instead of smoking, they get in bed with a box of Cheez-Its and crunch the numbers. Thirty smokes a day between them times 365 days = 10,950 smokes a year. Three dollars a pack times 10 packs a week times 56 weeks = $1,680 a year.
On Sunday, Holly switches over to licorice and Bubble Yum, and after another morning waging war on dandelions, they set out in search of the perfect jogging stroller, because now that they’re taking care of themselves, they plan to start running. Holly won’t shut up about smoking, though. “Okay,” she says, “is this little experiment over? Can we now resume our normal programming?” She’s just trying to talk herself through it, but the talk grates on Lyle, because what he wants is to put smoking out of his mind, to forget, if only for a minute, that he’s in constant want of something he can’t have. Finally, standing in the stroller aisle at Babies “R” Us, trying to tell the difference between the $200 model and the $300 model, he asks her in the kindest voice he can manage to please, please give it a rest.
“Sure,” she says, “as soon as you please, please give me an s-m-o-k-e.”
The $300 stroller is still rattling around in Lyle’s trunk on Monday afternoon when he stops at the flower shop in Five Points. They hadn’t planned to spend so much, but it seemed to them, there in the store, that the higher the price, the stronger their commitment to quitting. Lyle buys a dozen gerbera daisies and a foil balloon with the word CONGRATULATIONS! in cheery gold script. He’ll surprise Holly at work; they’ll celebrate making it through the weekend. Even so, it’s hard to get excited about quitting when everyone else seems to think it’s not worth the trouble. Walking back to his car, he passes no fewer than five smokers on the sidewalk, all of them seeming happy as clams. It’s been like this all day, smokers everywhere he turns, as if the whole city is taunting him.
En route to the antique mall, he makes a point of driving past the statehouse to admire the gleaming copper dome. They took down the Confederate flag more than a year ago, but its absence still gives Lyle a good feeling, like the rest of the state has finally come around to his way of thinking. And who knows? Maybe one day they’ll even ban smoking, and he and Holly can pat themselves on the back once again for having been ahead of their time. Never mind that the law-makers merely moved the flag to the statehouse lawn; like everything else, Lyle thinks, you measure progress one day at a time.
The antique mall is just down the hill from the state-house in the Vista, what was once the city’s warehouse district. When Holly first rented a booth there, she’d just been piddling around, trying to sell off some of Cal’s old junk. But after Lyle went back to work for his father and they had some extra cash, she started buying up vintage chandeliers, wall sconces, ceiling fixtures. She also tended the register now and then and eventually assumed the duties of manager. All the while, she was branching out into other areas of architectural salvage—doors, mantels, stained-glass windows, claw-foot tubs—which meant renting more and more space. Just before Claire turned two, the owner of the mall decided to retire. “We should buy it,” Holly said as they lay in bed not having sex. “I’m renting half the place anyway, right?” Within weeks, she was the owner of Queen City Antiques, and Lyle found himself falling for her all over again, the way she paraded about the old warehouse rearranging showcases, chatting up customers, wooing dealers from other malls with promises of higher traffic and larger booths. Running a business was exhausting, though, and it was around this time that the once-a-months became once-every-other-months. Now, instead of not being in the mood, she was too worn out.
He parks beside the loading dock and checks the front desk, then the office. Finally he finds Holly trying to shoehorn a marble-topped dresser between two armoires. “Hey, you,” she says, glancing at the flowers with what looks like dismay.
Lyle drops the bouquet on a chair. “You didn’t.”
She gives the dresser another shove. It’s still cockeyed.
“Well?” he says.
“Just one.” Now she’s trying not to smile. She always smiles when she’s done something bad. Lyle’s not amused. He spent the day grinding his molars, ready to gnaw off his own arm, and part of what pulled him through was the thought of her fighting the same fight.
“Where are they?”
The pack’s right there in her pocket, and she’s telling the truth: only one missing. Not that it matters. To the extent they’re quitting as a team, they’re back at square one, the whole weekend shot, and it’s not just the disappointment that sacks Lyle, but the withering of his own resolve, the sense that he’s now entitled to a smoke. He crumples the pack. “You suck.”
“I know,” she says. “I totally suck.” But then she has the nerve to point out that it was only one cigarette, and one little cigarette isn’t going to kill her. She tells him it made her dizzy, sick to her stomach. “That’s a good sign, right? I didn’t even want another one.”
Lyle shakes his head and goes in search of Claire, trailing the balloon over his shoulder like smoke from a locomotive. After preschool, a sitter chaperones her as she toddles among the antiques, but the sitter’s gone by now, which means Claire is probably over in the aisle with the replica Depression-era toys. Holly follows a few steps behind, still cajoling him, the way she might try coaxing a smile from Claire after a skinned knee. He wants to say something that will hurt— something less retarded than “You suck”—but it isn’t until he sees Claire on the rocking horse that it comes to him. She’s stroking the horse’s neck, cooing in a voice so tender it splits his heart. “Balloon!” she says. Lyle scoops her up for a hug and turns to his wife, cuts her off.
“Look,” he says. “It’s simple. Either you do or you don’t love your daughter enough to quit.” In the next booth, two grandfather clocks begin to chime. Holly lowers her gaze to the floor, smoothes an eyebrow. Claire’s asking her to look at the balloon, look what Dad brought, but she’s having trouble putting on a sunny face.
In the days that follow, he has to give her credit. After he came down so hard, she could have sulked. She could have lashed out. She could have complained that he was drinking more than ever, that at night he was usually too drunk to follow along when she talked about commission fees or dealer contracts. Instead, she has rededicated herself to quitting. She goes back on the patch, even though it makes her queasy. She chews the gum, even though it tastes, she says, like burnt plastic. She hides a Hershey’s kiss in the ashtray of his car with a note: You light up my life. On Friday afternoon, they take Claire jogging at the high school track. They’re whipped after only two laps, but Holly seems proud of herself. She suggests they get a sitter, go out for a nice dinner. At the restaurant, they share a bottle of wine.
“Seven days and counting,” she says, raising her glass.
“The week,” Lyle says, “that lasted a year.”
He’s thinking this will be the night, but back at the house, after she slips out of her dress, she seems disappointed to find him in bed. It’s a special occasion; she wants to celebrate. “One cigarette,” she says. “We’ve been good. We deserve it.”
He should have seen this coming. “But we’re celebrating not smoking,” he says. “Anyhow, if we get a pack, we’ll smoke a pack.”
“No, we won’t.” Holly has an idea. She tells him to go to the bar across the highway, buy a pack, take out two cigarettes, and give the rest away. “At a dollar-fifty apiece,” she says, “we can’t afford to get hooked.”
Maybe it’s the wine, or maybe it’s just the curve of her hip in the lamplight, but at that moment, he doesn’t have a better idea.
The place is called Benchwarmers, a shitty little sports bar that doubles as a bait shop during the day. Lyle’s been doing business with the owner for years and has a soft spot for the old guy, who prefers pinball machines to video games and still leases a jukebox that plays 45s. Lyle’s company owns the cigarette machine, too. It’s against the back wall between bathrooms marked BAIT and TACKLE. Lyle buys a pack of Camels, removes two, and surveys the crowd. As usual, the bar is packed, plenty of smokers to choose from, but it’s a tired-looking woman in a green evening gown who catches his eye. She’s out of place—a refugee, maybe, from a wedding reception. She sits alone, nursing a Heineken. He didn’t know they served Heineken.
“Want these?” he says. “I’m trying to quit.”
The woman looks him over, skeptical, probably deciding if this is a pickup line, then slips the pack into her purse. “My lucky night,” she says. “Thanks.” He’s already turning to leave when she clears her throat, nods toward a bar stool. “Sit?”
Lyle tries to keep a dumb grin from spreading all over his face. He’s forgotten how good it feels to be hit on. “I’d love to,” he says, rolling the two cigarettes between his fingers, “but my wife’s at home waiting for one of these.”
Outside, he sits in his car, staring at the neon Pabst sign in the window, imagining himself back at the bar with the woman, having a drink. Of course his sex life isn’t over at age thirty-five, not if he doesn’t want it to be. But he’s a decent man and he did the right thing, mentioning Holly right off, so that now, rather than enjoying the company of a woman who actually showed some interest, he’s headed home to his frigid wife, where they’ll proceed to wreck a week’s worth of restraint and then, in all likelihood, not end up fooling around. Lyle has both cigarettes between his lips; they smell so good he could eat them. Instead, he flicks them out the window and drives another mile to the 7-Eleven, where he buys a pint of chocolate Häagen-Dazs. At the register, he picks up a Braves pocket schedule, the kind with a calendar inside. Holly’s waiting for him on the porch.