the linoleum. She tapped another cigarette from the pack and lit it. “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” she mused on the exhale.
“Cass, maybe you shouldn’t . . .”
She shrugged and handed me the butt. “Must be your bad influence. I don’t usually smoke this much. Will won’t let me.”
The cigarette tasted stale now. I took a drag and put it out.
“It’s funny,” Cass continued. “Every time I miscarried, I thought of you. Thought of that horrible trip to Pocatello with that teacher—what was his name?”
I felt my heart start to race. She was opening the door to the past, and I was stepping through it. “Elliot,” I said. It had been years since I’d spoken his name, and the syllables tasted as stale and acrid as smoke.
“That’s right. Mr. Rhodes. He was an okay teacher, but what a creep!”
“Whatever happened to him?” I asked, nudging the door open wider. “Did he keep on teaching or . . . ?”
She looked surprised and shook her head. “I don’t know. He disappeared. I figured you guys had it all planned out and lived happily ever after.”
“I never saw him again. Not after that night.” After that night there was no happily ever after.
Cass nodded. “Maybe they ran him out of town or something. He just kind of disappeared. You know, it wasn’t so bad taking a licking for you from Pa over that business, but I never forgave you for leaving without me. I waited for you, but you never even wrote.”
“But I did! I wrote as soon as I got there.” My mind was racing. I wanted to explain. I was living on the street. I had to steal a pen. I panhandled to buy stamps. “I wrote lots of letters. You’re the one who never wrote back!”
Cass shrugged. “My parents must have burned them. I never got a single one.”
“I thought you’d turned against me, like everyone else.”
“Honestly, Yummy, I did. I started to think it was all your fault. Each time I miscarried and saw the blood, it just brought it all back. I felt like God was punishing me for helping you out. Crazy, huh? But if that’s the case, then how come you’re here now with three great kids? You know what I mean? It doesn’t make sense. If anyone deserved to get punished, it was you, right?”
I felt I’d been punished plenty. I started to answer, then realized she was talking mostly to herself, musing into the top of Poo’s head, and when he twitched in his sleep, it occurred to me to wonder how much the infant mind absorbed, and whether this talk of retribution might seep through his thin skull, to haunt me later on. Her voice grew quiet and still.
“My daddy used to say you were a bad seed. You took all the luck away from here, Yummy.” Her breath disturbed my baby’s silky curls. “All the life and the luck. You didn’t leave any behind.”
“Cass, that’s not true,” I started to say, but just then Ocean appeared in the doorway, nose in the air, sniffing.
“Phew,” she said, looking straight at Cass. “It stinks in here. Have you been smoking cigarettes again?”
“Ocean, shut up. This is grown-up time. Go away.”
But Ocean ignored me and walked right up to Cass, pausing to examine the two butts in the saucer on the way. “Listen,” she said, frowning over her baby brother’s head. “I don’t think you should smoke around us.”
“Ocean, I mean it!”
“It’s not good for Poo,” she persisted.
“Damn it, Ocean—”
“And you’re a bad influence on my mother.”
“I was the one who was smoking.”
Ocean turned slowly and stared at me, then looked back at Cass. “See?” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “See what you’ve done?”
“That’s it.” I grabbed her under the arm, fed up with her uncontrollable mouth. She cried out, but I dragged her toward the doorway until Cass spoke.
“Ocean, you’re absolutely right.”
I stopped and looked back.
“She’s right, Yummy. I shouldn’t smoke around all of you. I shouldn’t smoke at all. So how about I quit? Okay? Right now.”
She took the pack of cigarettes and held it out to Ocean, who was sniveling and rubbing her armpit. “Here, you take them. Throw them away for me.”
Ocean looked up, vindicated but still a bit scared, not quite sure this wasn’t some nasty grown-up joke with a punch line waiting to happen to her, but I gave her a little push between the shoulder blades, pitching her forward, and she took the cigarette pack. She looked at it like it contained a great and evil power.
“Where should I throw it?” she asked, voice hushed.
“How about in the garbage?” Cass whispered back.
“Okay.” She tiptoed forward, then stopped. “Where’s the garbage?”
“Under the sink,” I whispered. We were all whispering now.
She carefully opened the cabinet and deposited the cigarette pack in the garbage container, then closed it firmly and whirled around. She leaned her small bottom up against the door, breathless, as though the cigarettes might try to escape again, might pound and scrabble against the inside of the cabinet like wild things. She waited, but all was quiet, so she wiped her hands together with a great sense of closure. Task completed. Job well done.
“There,” she said in a normal voice. “I guess that’s that.” She gave us a great, beaming smile. “I’m so proud of both of you!”
“Oh, God, Ocean! Give it a rest.”
“Mommy, you have a bad attitude,” she said, frowning at me. She walked over to Cass and examined her face.
“Hey!” she said. “I saved your life!” Then she skipped off to watch some more TV.
“Want them back?” I asked, but Cass was staring toward the living room. “You want your cigarettes back?” I repeated, getting up and walking to the sink.
“No,” Cass said. “She’s right. I may as well try and quit for good.”
“You don’t have to, you know.”
“Might as well. It won’t kill me.”
So I sat down, but later, after Cass had left and the kids were asleep, I sneaked back into the kitchen and rummaged through the garbage until I found the pack, a little soggy from a wet coffee filter, but smokable still. I pocketed it and walked outside into the frostbitten landscape. The moon was shining against the ice-covered fields, and the windows of the house glowed yellow. Next to the house, Momoko’s garden was nothing but spectral stumps and stalks and mounds
