They’d been through this routine a few times. She guessed that Jim didn’t know her name, but he consistently recognized her as a reliable touch for nicotine. She was only a social and emergency smoker, but she socialized and encountered emergencies with such frequency, and cigarettes in this state were so cheap, that it made sense to keep a pack on hand, if only to distinguish herself from the parasites who bummed shamelessly the minute they’d had a sip of beer. Jim was exempted from this opprobrium, of course.

“I’ll come out with you,” she said.

On the sidewalk, he waved her away as she tried to light his cigarette, and lit hers first with a trembling hand.

“I said I wouldn’t go to any more readings,” he said. “But, what the hell, it’s something to do.”

“Do you like Cal’s writing?” she said.

“He’s a good kid,” he said. “Doesn’t mess around too much.”

This was interesting as a praiseworthy characteristic—all that most of the people Leslie knew did was mess around too much. She had, not quite consciously, enshrined it as something to be sought out in people, though she knew it was juvenile. Living here had brought out the hedonist in her. She’d never not had a tendency to drink too much, at least since she turned sixteen, but it wasn’t until she got to Montana that she really began to appreciate inebriation in its various forms as an art rather than an obligation. Cal, like a decent person, considered it neither.

“Yeah, I like him,” Leslie said.

“Not much of a writer,” Jim said. “Nobody’s perfect.”

Leslie offered him a big smile in thanks for this assessment, cruel as it was. Older men loved it when she smiled at them. Jim’s face, however, remained set in a scowl.

“Not that I know what the hell I’m talking about,” he said hurriedly. “You write? You want to write?”

“Wish that I did, I guess,” she said. “I’m one of those people with lots of ideas, you know?”

“Just fucking write something,” he said. “Worst-case it’s a piece of shit and you never show it to anybody. That’s what I told my students, at least.”

“Did they find that comforting?”

“A few of them wrote books. Probably no thanks to me. Nobody really cares if you write anything. I’ll be dead, at least. I don’t even know you.”