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HI GUISE IT'S BEEN AGES RIGHT.

Smoke and Scotch

He smelled of scotch, cigarettes, and lavender most of the time. I always saw him with a cigarette hanging precariously from his mouth and a sweating glass of scotch in his hand, but never any flowers, let alone lavender.

The night he told me that his mother had cancer, he had replaced the glass of scotch with a bottle of it, and the scent of cigarette smoke almost overpowered everything else. There were dark circles under his eyes and he hadn’t combed his hair in days. I didn’t know what to do. He didn’t cry. He didn’t clench his jaw or throw things or punch his wall. He just sat in the dimly-lit dining room and drank scotch straight from the bottle, chain-smoking his way through God knows how many packs of Camels.

“Go,” he said to me. I stared at him, opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. “Just go,” he said again in the same tone of voice.

I left. It was late November, and it was pouring rain. I put my hood up, but the rain soaked through and ran down my neck and back anyways. I stood outside and watched the cars race past me, their lights reflecting harshly on the wet pavement. Behind and two floors above me, he sat alone in his dining room drinking thoughts of his sick mother away.

It took thirteen months for the cancer in her lungs to destroy her completely. When he told me she’d died, I sat in the same dining room and watched raindrops pelt the windows. At the back of my mind, I noted that he held a glass instead of a bottle, and the pack of cigarettes emptied at a significantly slower rate than one year prior. His hand shook.

“What do I do?” he asked me.

“You cry,” I said. “You cry until you can’t cry anymore, and then you cry some more.”

He smiled sadly. “What if I can’t cry?”

“Well, then you just break something.”

Without warning, he swallowed what was left in the glass and threw it. It shattered into tiny pieces against the wall. He stared at the spot it hit and said nothing. He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it. His hand still shook. He stood up.

“Let’s go for a drive,” he said.

He drove through the city, taking what seemed like random turns. I was on edge the whole time because he’d been drinking, but I didn’t say anything. The car was full of the scent of scotch and smoke, and under it all, the faintest hint of lavender.

He stopped at a random street and watched the traffic lights change for what seemed like an eternity, taking a drink from his flask every few minutes. There were no other cars out at the late hour. The rain pounded against the roof.

“What do I do?” he whispered. He didn’t look at me; I’m not sure he even remembered I was there.

“I…I don’t know,” I said.

He opened the door and got out, stepping into the frigid downpour with only a light jacket on. I followed him. We stood on the street corner and he stared at nothing; I watched him. He turned to me and he was close enough for me to feel the warmth emanating from him, the scent of him. Without thinking, I wrapped my arms around him and rested the side of my face against his. He shivered and didn’t return the embrace, but stood there for a moment before pulling away. His eyes met mine, but somehow he still looked right through me.

“See ya,” he said.

He turned and walked away. The rain poured on me, plastering my hair to my head and face, soaking my sweater through so it stuck to my back. I breathed in and caught the scent of smoke and scotch, and a hint of lavender clinging to me, soon to be washed away by the deluge.