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Abby had always thought smoking was a dirty habit.
In college, Frank had never smoked. It was alarming to her that this was something he’d picked up at the hospital. Surely, doctors knew better. She hated when he’d come home from his shifts smelling like it. He would wash his clothes, but she could always tell; it was under his nails, a stain on his index finger, on his breath. She always knew right away if he’d smoked.
Of course, he didn’t do it all the time. She imagined he did it only during very difficult shifts, which softened the image a bit. Her husband, some kind of Byronic hero. Saving people from terrible circumstances, and then decompressing with a cigarette in the ambulance bay. If she was a teenage girl, she would’ve swooned. But she wasn’t. She was thirty-five with two kids. The last thing she wanted was Frank trailing those toxins into the house. Even if he scrubbed it off, she thought of it sometimes while she watched him rock Penny to sleep, that he could stain her somehow, make her sick or asthmatic.
She had complained, bargained, and withheld, but nothing made it stop completely. It wasn’t frequent enough to be a blow-up fight, but sometimes, she made him sleep on the couch when she caught a whiff of it before bed, coming in through the front door with him. Making their house smell dirty.
One day, it just stopped.
Abby thought it was a fluke for a while. A dry spell. But weeks turned into months, and it seemed like he was really done. She avoided bringing it up, not wanting to start up an old argument, but one day, while folding a mountain of laundry, an old sweatshirt made her think about it again.
“What made you finally quit?” She asked, “I haven’t smelled anything on you in months.”
Frank shrugged, “I dunno,” he lied, “maybe it was a… lung cancer patient a few months back.” Then, he promptly changed the subject.
Of course, Abby would think nothing of this until after the fact, when she could trace the day he stopped to the day he found out Mel King was pregnant.