Debt Paid

A story about a promise, a pillowcase, and a lime LaCroix.

Photo by Robert Stump on Unsplash

Lena told me about Marco at somebody’s wedding last summer. I didn’t know the bride or the groom. The venue was one of those converted breweries in Brooklyn where they leave the brick exposed and hang string lights to make it look expensive, and the bass from the speakers was so loud the ice in my gin was vibrating. At this point, all these spaces are starting to blur together.

She was on her second glass of a house red she kept forgetting to drink, peeling at the corner of the label until her thumb was stained pink.

“He hasn’t smoked since we broke up,” she said, leaning in so I could hear her over the DJ.

“Who?”

“Marco. Sophomore year. The guy who lived in that basement apartment with the leaky pipes.”

“Was he a heavy smoker?”

“Camel Lights. Like, aggressively Camel Lights. His denim jacket always smelled like a stale bowling alley.”

She had said something to him once, probably outside some dive bar near campus while he was fumbling for a lighter — just that watching guys smoke made her feel a little sick. Maybe she meant it. Or maybe she was twenty and practicing having opinions about things.

Marco wasn’t a guy who took instructions from anyone, but he just shrugged and said, “Fine. Not around you. Ever.” Like she’d asked him to take his shoes off at the door.

They dated for two years. Then they broke up the way twenty-two-year-olds break up, which is to say: loudly, over a missed phone call and a wounded ego and a therapist Lena had just started seeing who was probably giving her terrible advice. It felt terminal at the time.

Seven or eight years later — the math gets a little fuzzy after thirty — there was a college reunion on a rooftop in Williamsburg. She saw him before he saw her. He was standing by the bar talking to some guy from his old fraternity whose hair was already thinning, and he was holding a lime LaCroix.

Lena left to go to the bathroom. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, so I just sat there thinking about — of all things — a pillowcase. My ex from when I was twenty-five still has this faded navy Target pillowcase I bought him. I saw it in his linen closet a few months ago when I went to pick up an old wool sweater I’d left there. I just stood there with one of his mismatched gym socks in my hand, looking at that faded rectangle of cotton. I don’t know. I have nothing smart to say about it. I just stood there looking at it.

When Lena came back, she smelled like that cheap, industrial pink hand soap. She sat down without looking at me.

“His whole crowd still smokes,” she said, squinting through the wedding crowd. “His brother literally owns a vape shop in Jersey. But Marco stopped cold turkey the month we split. I texted his sister at two in the morning a couple of years ago when I was drunk enough to ask. She said he never touched one again.”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

She walked right up to him and told him he still owed her a cigarette.

Marco stared at her for a second, then walked over to the edge of the roof, bummed a smoke off a stranger, lit it with his own hands, took one long drag, and stubbed it out right into a half-empty glass of warm Stella. He walked back, blew the thin stream of smoke away from her face, and said, “There. Debt paid.”

He probably asked something normal after that. “How’s your mom,” or something. It was November and neither of them had brought a coat, so the whole thing was mostly just awkward. But she watched him do it.

He lives in Seattle now with a girlfriend who bakes sourdough on Instagram. Lena is engaged to a structural engineer. He’s nice. He’s never smoked a day in his life. She seems happy, or at least she’s shopping for bridesmaids dresses and talking about floor plans.

She and Marco split the same year I turned twenty-five. Back then, I would have called a story like that a romance. I would have thought a man keeping a promise for seven years meant something monumental. Now I’m thirty-three, and I just think people change their habits because they get tired, or because the girlfriend hates the smell, or because cigarettes got too expensive.

I don’t know. Maybe Lena wasn’t even thinking about any of that. She was just looking at her glass.

I went home after the reception. I lay there for a long time. I don’t even remember what I was thinking. Something about that cigarette on the roof, probably. I kept wondering why Lena chose to say, “He owes me a cigarette,” when she was the one who asked him to stop in the first place. Maybe she never really hated the smoke. Maybe she just hated how easily he gave it up. Or maybe not. Anyway.