What You Have Left (16 page)

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 graveside 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.

“I got Häagen-Dazs,” he says.

“Great.” She opens the bag, glances inside. “Where's the smokes?”

“I changed my mind.” He shrugs. “Tomorrow would just be that much harder, and it's already too hard as it is.”

Holly assumes he's joking—she pats his shirt pocket to see if the cigarettes are hidden there—and then, realizing he's serious, she looks like she might haul off and hit him. “We had a deal,” she says.

“Yes, we did. To stop smoking.”

She clutches the bag and heads back inside. He figures she's going for her car keys, but when he catches up, she's shoveling ice cream into the kitchen sink with a wooden spoon. When she's done, she grabs a bottle from the wine
rack—a decent cab he's been saving—uncorks it, and begins pouring it over the lumpy mounds. “You keep forgetting,” she says. “This is a lot easier for you than it is for me.” Maybe this is true, maybe not, but as he stares at the soupy mess, all he can think is how easy it would have been to take a seat on that bar stool.

The next morning, as Lyle is hanging the Braves schedule on the fridge and putting an X through each day since they quit, Holly announces that she's going out for a gallon of milk. This is the kind of errand she normally sends him on, so naturally he assumes she's sneaking off to cop a pack. Sure enough, when she gets home, she heads straight for the bathroom and washes her hands forever. But it doesn't stop there. Every night, she has a new errand to run—rent a movie, gas up the car, make a bank deposit—any excuse to get out of the house. She comes home smelling of spearmint gum, the door of her car flecked white with ashes.

Lyle wants to tell her he knows, but he's curious to see how long she'll keep it up. Meanwhile, he makes a point of marking the calendar when she's around. He asks how, on a scale of one to ten, she's holding up, whether the patch and gum are helping, whether she wants to call the hypnotist. He encourages Claire to play with the half-deflated celebra-tory balloon. He insists they go running, and once they're at the track, he pushes Holly to run faster, farther, pretending not to notice her sucking wind. At some point, it occurs to him he's being cruel—and dishonest—but every time he makes up his mind to say something, he puts it off, telling himself he's giving her the chance to come clean on her own.

“Here,” he says, offering the pen. “Want to do the honors?”

It's Friday night, and Holly's just back from returning a video. Lyle searches her face for a flicker of guilt as she puts an X on the calendar. “Two weeks and counting,” she says, reaching into the fridge for a leftover meatloaf. Lyle can't help glancing down the front of her shirt. What they really need is a calendar to track their drought. The streak now stands at three months, four days.

After dinner, they try to get Claire to practice counting, but she wants to do letters instead. She can bang through the alphabet in twelve seconds flat, “—now I know my ABCs, next time won't you tickle me.” She loves to be tickled, so that's what they do. The three of them end up in a pile on the sofa. When Claire's had enough and scoots away, Lyle pulls Holly down for a kiss. “Stop!” she says, laughing. “You smell like a distillery.”