was smiling at her. She opened her eyes, feeling better. “Did you say something?” Preston asked her, and she shook her head. She picked up a towel from the bar and went to go clean up her table. She had the Ham back. Tomorrow, she told herself. Tomorrow she would quit.
Mary had gone to confession first, and had already said her two Hail Marys and her three Our Fathers. Now there was nothing left for her to do except kneel quietly and blow at the candles. She sent the flame to the left, to the right, and then straight back. It leaned and bounced but always came back to the center, standing straight and tal . And then, it happened. She breathed a little too hard, and the candle sputtered out.
Mrs. Sugar was by her side before she even realized what had happened. She leaned down and grabbed the top part of Mary’s arm, whispering because they were stil in church, but whispering meanly. “Do you know what you did?” she said. “You stole someone’s prayer. Someone lit that very candle with a personal prayer, an intention. And now it’s gone. Vanished. And it’s al because of you.”
Mary cried and was sent to sit on the bench in the vestibule to wait. She sniffled as she sat, wondering what Mrs. Sugar was going to do to her.
But while she was back there, James Lemon farted loudly, making the rest of the class laugh and scream, and Mrs. Sugar got distracted as she ran around trying to calm everyone down. For the rest of the day, Mary waited for her punishment, but it seemed Mrs. Sugar had forgotten al about the candle and the stolen prayer.
Mary, on the other hand, never forgot. Anytime she lit a candle, she felt guilty. She kept thinking that this feeling would go away, that eventual y something bigger and more important would come and take the place of this memory. But it didn’t. For years, anytime that she went to church, she put a dol ar in the box to light a candle. “For the one that I stole,” she would whisper, and then she would light it. She lit a candle in Rome her junior year, and another in Ireland. When she moved to New York, she lit one in St. Patrick’s, and that was her last one. She stopped partly because she was rarely in church anymore, but also because she figured that however big the prayer was that had been attached to that candle, she’d more than made up for it by now.
Mary was quitting. That’s al there was to it. She’d always said that as soon as she passed the bar, she was done. No more cigarettes. She’d never been a real smoker anyway. It was just something she did when she studied late at night. And when she drank. But that was al over now, she told herself. She was a lawyer now. A lawyer who didn’t smoke.
Mary was hired at Slater, a big law firm right in the middle of Times Square. Its real name was Slater, McKinsey, Brown, and Baggot, but no one ever got past the Slater. She was hired along with nine other brand-new eager lawyers, and al of them were taken out on a boat cruise, where they were served pina coladas and reminded that they were incredibly lucky, that this was the job of a lifetime, that they better live up to their promise, and that they must pass the bar.
She spent the summer studying for the bar, holed up in her apartment drinking Red Bul and eating bananas, because she’d heard that they were good for concentration. Her friends sometimes dropped in to check on her, and while she knew they were being nice, she wished they would just ignore her until it was over. “It’s not normal how long you can stay in one place,” Isabel a told her one night. She’d stopped by and found Mary sitting at her desk, where she admitted she’d been since that morning. “I think you should at least get out of the apartment once a day. Maybe we should go for a walk?”
But Mary refused. She didn’t have time to leave her apartment. She went to the store once a week for supplies, jumped rope for exercise, and treated herself by leaning out her window and smoking out into the darkness. “Just until I finish the bar,” she would sometimes say out loud, and then stub out her cigarette with purpose and force, so that it bent in half, as if to say,
After she took the test, Mary thought she would feel relief. But al the weeks of studying had taken their tol and al Mary felt was strange. She could feel al the caffeine she’d drunk stil throbbing through her system, and her hand seemed unfamiliar now that it was no longer holding a pencil al the time. Sometimes Mary was sure she could stil feel the pencil in her hand, the way she imagined people with missing limbs would feel.
It was because of al of this that Mary decided that she would not throw away her half-finished pack of cigarettes right after the bar, as she had original y planned. She would finish this pack she had, and then she would quit when she started at the firm. No sense in making too many changes at once.
But when Mary started at Slater, she found she needed her cigarettes more than ever. Al of the other new lawyers, who she’d imagined would be her friends, were competitive and nasty. Some of them were secretive about their desire to be the best. Others, like Barbara Linder, fol owed Mary around, asking her what she was working on, how many hours she had logged that week, and what the partners had said to her.
Slater had a tradition of announcing congratulations to the new lawyers who passed the bar over the loudspeaker, and then having a cocktail reception. For weeks, Mary wondered what it would be like if she didn’t hear her name, if she was the one person of the group to fail. Until she heard the results of her test, there was no way she could stop smoking. And then when she did find out that she’d passed, the relief was so
immediate and overwhelming that she made a weird noise and got tears in her eyes. Also, she wet herself just a little bit and so she let herself have a cigarette. If you pee in your pants, she thought, you deserve at least that.
Mary was at the office until at least nine every night, and that was if she was lucky. She was exhausted and sad to go to sleep at night because she knew it would mean the whole thing would start al over again soon. Each morning, as she walked from the subway to her building, she thought, “If I get hit by a car today, I won’t have to go to work.” She didn’t want to get seriously hurt, of course. She just wanted a minor bump that would send her to the hospital for a week or two, where she could watch TV and eat Jel -O.
