Rummaging in Betty’s open, Aigner purse, the cigarettes sat naked. She smoked them too quickly to bother with silly jeweled or leather pouches. I took one slender Winston and hid it under my dresser, just slightly behind its front leg. I took the purple lighter, too.

Behind the garage, vegetation was extinct. My father’s abandoned bricks and 2x4s created the perfect ecosystem for morning slugs, and our cats used the nearby leftover sand from a forgotten house project as a litter box. I squatted down on my knees and pinched my thumb as I worked out the lighter. Though I was only seven, I knew what to do. I didn’t need a lesson or instructions, or anyone to coach me along or help me out. We all are born knowing how to smoke. Even those who have never touched a cigarette realize, you light, you suck, you breathe. Cigarette smoking is like walking and laughing. You don’t learn. You just…do.

I connected flame to tobacco as I had watched Betty do hundreds of times. In my head, I saw her smiling. I kneeled down in the sand and watched as the familiar, Grandmother Betty smell floated up. My nostrils flared as I caught the whiffs. Alone, I took my first gulp. I didn’t cough. I didn’t puke. I didn’t question it. The ash burned down and flaked off. I tried to catch it in my palm but missed. And so, I sat there and kept puffing.

When the emphysema set in, Betty still couldn’t give up the vice. She downgraded to Carltons, instead. “Lower tar,” she told us. It wasn’t until she started wheeling an oxygen tank behind her and a cot was set up in the large party room that the smoking really stopped. When I visited her, she coughed up what was left of her lungs. With cigarettes, Betty was full of life. Happy. Warm. Optimistic. Without them, the froth in her delicate alveoli took this away and made her someone else.

They say each cigarette takes ten minutes off of your life.

By stealing one out of her bag, I gave her a little more time.

 

John Morgan teaches British Literature in Richmond, VA, at St. Catherine’s School, an all girls, Episcopal prep school. His nonfiction work has appeared in The Pitkin Review and as a journalist in The Richmond Times Dispatch, The Baltic Times, Punchline, and Richmond.com.