A story inspired by real events
Hal Briggs had not smoked a cigarette in ninety-one days. He knew the number the way he used to know how many miles were left to El Paso.
At ten in the morning, he stood in his own front yard in a clean shirt and waited for his daughter to smell his house.
The semi sat at the edge of the yard, where it always sat. The highway hummed past the fence. In the driveway, Jess’s car idled with the air conditioner running. Her brother Danny sat in the back seat beside the car seat, where a baby girl named June was asleep. Hal had never held her. He had seen her in pictures. Little fists. A lot of dark hair, like her mother’s when she was born.
He had missed most of Jess’s birthdays because he was driving. He had missed the year after her mother died because he didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing, for a long time. Now Jess was thirty-one and worked at a hospital, helping people breathe. She had told him on the phone, flat and calm, “If the house smells like smoke, June doesn’t come in. I’m not mad about it, Dad. It’s just the rule.”
He’d said, “Fair enough.”
He’d meant it.
The week before, his old driving buddy Earl had come over for coffee. Hal made him walk through every room. Earl had sniffed the air in the kitchen, in the hall, in the bedroom. Then he shrugged.
“You don’t smell like anything, man,” Earl said. “Nothing to fix.”
Hal had slept well that night.
Jess got out of the car. Her other brother, Ray, came with her. They didn’t say much. They just started walking through the house, slowly, breathing in through their noses like dogs at a fence.
Ray found the first thing. Hal’s denim jacket was hanging by the door.
“That’s forty years right there,” Ray said, holding it at arm’s length.
Hal took it straight to the washer.
Jess found the second thing, out in the truck. She opened the cab door, and her face changed. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. Hal had spent half his life in that cab with her in the passenger seat, the windows cracked an inch, the ashtray full.
“I’ll do the seats,” he said. “Right now.”
He scrubbed them with vinegar and a brush while the sun beat on his neck. He left both doors wide open.
The third thing was the curtains in the hall. Old brown ones. Ray just tapped them, and a little ghost of stale air came out. Hal pulled them off the rod and stuffed them in the washer with the jacket.
The fourth thing was in the kitchen. It was a heavy glass ashtray, sitting on the counter, full of peppermints.
Jess looked at it for a long time.
“I turned it into a candy dish,” Hal said. “See? No ashes. Haven’t been ashes in it for three months.”
“Dad.”
He dumped the candy into a bag. He washed the dish in hot water and soap and dried it with a towel. He set it back down, clean and shining.
“There,” he said. “It’s empty, so it’s the same as a bowl.”
Jess opened her mouth, then closed it. Danny honked the horn very lightly from the driveway, just a tap, meaning how’s it going in there.
“One more walk,” Jess said. “By myself.”
Hal went out on the porch.
She’d told him it would take about seven minutes. She’d go room to room, slowly, with the windows shut. He didn’t argue. He didn’t follow her in to point things out. He didn’t say Earl said it was fine. He just stood there with his hands in his pockets, and then out of his pockets, and then on the porch rail.
He could hear her footsteps inside. The bedroom door. The bathroom fan clicking on and off. The closet.
A truck went by on the highway and downshifted. He knew the sound of that gear. He’d made that sound ten thousand times, heading somewhere that wasn’t here.
The washer started its spin cycle.
He thought about how much he wanted a cigarette. Then he thought about how he didn’t, really. Not like before. It was more like a tooth that used to hurt.
Seven minutes is long when you are fifty-eight and waiting for your daughter to decide something about you.
The screen door creaked. Jess stepped out. She looked at him, and for a second he couldn’t read her face at all.
“Okay,” she said.
Just that. Okay.
Hal felt something rise up in his chest. It was pride, mostly. Big and warm and a little embarrassing.
“Hang on,” he said. “Hang on, I want to show you something.”
He went inside, fast, and came back with the tin. It was an old tobacco tin, red and gold, the paint rubbed off at the corners. He’d had it since before Jess was born.
“Every pack I didn’t buy,” he said. “Every single day. I put the money in here. Ninety-one days.” He was grinning now. He couldn’t help it. “It’s four hundred dollars, Jess. It’s for June.”
He popped the lid.
For one second, nothing happened.
Then it reached them both. Four seconds, maybe. That old sweet, sour, brown smell of tobacco, rising up out of the tin and out of the bills folded inside it. It was forty years of it, soaked into the metal, soaked into the money he’d saved by quitting.
Jess didn’t step back. She didn’t have to. He saw her nose twitch. Over her shoulder, through the screen door, he could see the kitchen counter, where the clean glass ashtray sat in the sunlight, shining like a trophy.
Hal stood very still.
He could feel a few different men inside him, all wanting to talk. One wanted to say Are you kidding me. One wanted to say So it was all for nothing. One just wanted to get in the truck.
He looked down at the tin.
“Well,” he said. “I quit. The tin didn’t.”
He went back in the kitchen. He got a mason jar from the cabinet and tipped the bills into it, every one. He screwed the lid on tight. Then he picked up the tin in one hand and the glass ashtray in the other, walked them both down the gravel to the trash can by the road, and dropped them in. The ashtray clanked hard against the bottom.
He walked back up and handed Jess the jar.
She looked at it. She looked at him.
And she laughed. It was the first time all day. It came out sharp and surprised, and then it cracked in the middle and turned into something that wasn’t quite a laugh anymore. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, the way her mother used to.
She didn’t go to the car yet.
“Wash your hands again, Dad,” she said.
“I did.”
“Again.”
He nodded. He went inside, past the empty curtain rod and the humming washer, to the kitchen sink. He turned on the tap and pumped the soap twice.
Out in the driveway, the car was still running, the air conditioner still humming. The baby was still inside.
In the kitchen, the water ran.
About this story. Inspired by real events. The people, places and details are invented.