Went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back

by Marie-Helene Bertino

Greg Huffer went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. It was Jennifer’s 5th birthday. Party hats and birthday cake on the floor. The dog was on the floor. His son Jake, 7, on the floor. Goin’ out for a pack of cigarettes, Greg said. Jake held his arm in front of his sister as if protecting her from a sharp stop. Can I come?

Anne Huffer would not let her children cry after their father went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Listen children, she said. Your mother has long legs and you have tongues in your mouths. The cake on the plate in her hand shook. Jennifer, clean the cake off the floor. Jake, run the faucet. Your mother has long legs. Your father is gone.

Jennifer Huffer began doing JC Penney ads a year after her father went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back. Jenny on a bike. Jenny on a horse. JC Penney catalogues slip under every door in America, in every town she couldn’t spell where grown men hide. Jennifer Huffer married a Jehovah’s Witness: a religion with no birthdays. One night they went to a meeting hosted by a man who had gone out for a pack of cigarettes and had never come back. In the kitchen, men were going out for cigarettes and never coming back. In the bedroom, in the dining room, until Jennifer ran outside, in time to catch several men gunning their trucks, on their way out for cigarettes. Where’s my brother? She choked into the exhaust. Where’s my brother?

Jake Huffer had his mother’s legs. He made it onto the football team without trying out. He got bored walking around his town so at 17 he walked to another town. Then, he walked to another town. He hung on the edges of groups. No one lonelier than a good-looking man. He tried to be funny, tried a card trick. Looked up his father who was living with a woman with money. They didn’t let Jake stay; trucked away from him fast at the bus station, the woman’s blue coat sticking out of the cab’s door. Jake doesn’t know how long his father lived with that woman, or why the memory of her coat sticking out of the door comes to him now, watching his girlfriend slice through a party in a blue dress. It’s a blue she’s proud of. It’s a blue for him. Gifts repulse him. He’ll punish her for it later. He will give it to her under the awning, over and over, until she can’t look at the dress without feeling sick. I need a cigarette, he says when she reaches him. Baby, she says. You don’t smoke.

The night before Greg Huffer went out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back, the Huffer family had a party. Greg Huffer picked up a guest’s banjo. Greg Huffer who did not play the banjo played on the banjo an off kilter song and sang along in a dead way. Anne Huffer, smelling like mother perfume and dishsoap, knelt so she was the same height as her children. Look at your father, she said, her breath Christmas-quick. That funny man. The laughter on the tin strings and the jangling of guests. Look, she said, listen. Their mother kneeling behind them, Jennifer and Jake could hear but not see her as all three stared at the same man.

Contact Marie at marie@one-story.com