“Get your auntie a Klonopin,” Beth said, fanning smoke out of the kitchen and through the back sliding door.

Alice sat down in the kitchen, still fanning smoke from her face while Fellis brought her the pill and a glass of water. She took it, and water dribbled down her chin.

“I’m sorry,” Fellis said. “I should have read the labels.”

Alice set the glass down. “You should’ve, but you didn’t. At least I got my bills done.”

. . .

We ate McDonald’s that cloudy summer night. Beth came back with three bags full of double cheeseburgers, fries, three four-piece chicken nuggets, and one fish filet with no cheese that was for Alice. Beth bought Cokes too, which Alice said she couldn’t drink but she drank anyway, and after we ate at the kitchen table among the greasy wrappers—after Fellis bitched and bitched about his treatments, how the nurses said he might have to get a chest port because it was difficult to find a vein—Beth cleaned up the garbage and Aunt Alice put Lily to bed and Fellis went all around the house looking for Transcendence, and when he found it he slid it into the DVD player in the living room, and as he and Beth and Alice sat on the couch—“God, I hate Johnny Depp,” Aunt Alice said, to which Beth said, “Why? He’s a hot Navajo,” and the two argued whether or not he was Native—there was no room for me with them on the couch, and so I told them I’d be right back and went outside to get a chair, but while there in the dark I stepped on something hard. Fellis’s pack of smokes he’d lost. I took one but didn’t have a lighter, and so I stuck the smoke behind my ear and looked at the fold-out chairs in the dark, and I said out loud under the swaying oak, “You should be ashamed of yourself.” I was and I wasn’t. I’d made my choice, knew what I was going to do, yet I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t the right choice either. Keep on with her or don’t—neither was right.

“Movie’s starting!” Fellis yelled to me, but I was already around the side of his house, heading to Overtown, and I wondered if there was a way around those dead caterpillars and the smell of shit, of bait. But I knew there wasn’t.

The Blessing Tobacco

THE BLESSING TOBACCO

Grammy slid the pack of Misty 100s across the kitchen table. Under the ceiling light the age spots on the back of her hand looked like sprinkles of dirt, and like the dirt, the age spots hadn’t always been there.

“Help yourself to a smoke, Robbie,” Grammy said. “I’ll make us some coffee.”