She stubbed out her cigarette a few steps outside the doctor’s office

a defiant finger at good healthy living

her legs were cratered with sores, scratches, wrinkles

Her thin body spoke eloquently of liquor and smokes and hot dogs and hostess cupcakes and uncontrolled diabetes and a failure of an old man and boys in jail and girls with a mess of kids and who knows the daddies

The daughter was her twenty years earlier with a kid on her hip while she stepped on her smoke

I smelled old smoke, tiredness, failure to find the good life anywhere beside the sweaty validation of sex

It made me sad