Twenty-Two Days

Day twenty-two and Ray lights up right in front of me. We're on the loading dock behind the distribution center, where we have taken our break every afternoon for six years. The dock faces west, so this time of year the sun comes straight at you and there's nowhere to look but down at your boots or out at the parking lot. Ray leans on the rail and pulls a Marlboro from a soft pack and I hear the lighter and I'm a dog hearing a can opener. "You gonna stand there?" he says. "I'm on break." "You're standing next to a man smoking. On day whatever." "Twenty-two." "Twenty-two." He exhales. The smoke goes sideways in the wind and I get about half of it and I hate that I lean in. "That's almost a month." "It's not almost a month. It's twenty-two days." "You counting the hours too?" I don't answer that. Here's how it started. My daughter Bree, who is twenty-six and a nurse in Tulsa, called me on a Sunday and said, Dad, I had a patient today who was your age, and then she didn't say anything else for a while and I could hear her breathing on the line. That was it. That was the whole conversation. She didn't lecture me. She's smarter than that. I threw the pack out that night. Then I went out to the garage at midnight and dug it out of the trash and stood there holding it and put it back. That's day one. That's how I'm counting. The patches gave me dreams. Big vivid ones where I was smoking and it was fine and nobody minded. I'd wake up and check my hands. The gum tastes like a pencil. I'm on the gum. "You know what I did when I quit?" Ray says. "You didn't quit." "Ninety-one. I quit for four years." "And then?" "And then Denise left and I figured, what's the point." He taps ash off the rail. "Point is I did it. Four years. I know how it goes." "How's it go?" "First week you want to kill everybody. Second week you want to kill yourself. Third week," he squints at me, "third week you start thinking you got it beat and that's when it gets you. That's when you bum one off a guy. Just one. Just to prove you can."

"I'm not gonna bum one off you, Ray." "I'm not offering." The sun's in my eyes. Down in the lot, one of the forklift guys is trying to parallel park a pickup and failing at it in a way that's almost artistic. I've noticed I notice things more now. That's a side effect nobody warns you about. Without a cigarette there's nothing to do with the break except be in it. "Twenty-two days," Ray says, more to himself. "What are you doing with your hands?" I show him. Sunflower seeds. A bag in my jacket pocket. I've gone through a bag a day and I've got a sore spot on my tongue from the salt. "Squirrel," he says. "Better than what you got." He finishes the cigarette. He grinds it out on the rail and flicks it into the coffee can we've been using for six years. He looks at the can. There's a lot in there. "Bree doing okay?" "She's good. She's working nights." "She the reason?" "Yeah." He nods. He doesn't say anything for a bit. Then he pulls the soft pack out of his shirt pocket, looks at it, and puts it back. "Tell you what. You get to thirty, I'll try one day. Just one. See how it feels." "You don't have to do that." "I know I don't." He pushes off the rail. "Break's over." We go back in. Twenty-two days. The seeds rattle in my pocket. I have decided to count the hours too, actually, but I'm not telling him that.