Carrie glances over, aware of how she must look with an unlit cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth and too big sunglasses covering her baggy eyes that she didn't have time to fix this morning, and gives her daughter a long stare.

"Don't ever repeat what Mommy just said, okay?" They screech to a halt at the intersection of 165th and Jewel and barely avoid rear ending the Honda in front of them because this intersection is a mess and she's rapidly reaching the limit of how much she can multitask at one time. She opens the glove compartment and starts digging around desperately for a lighter. "That—that was a very bad thing she—I just said, and I—don't ever say that. Promise me."

The girl looks back at her with a look that's astonishingly wall-like for a twelve year old. Where the hell is that lighter? "Promise me, Faith. I want you to promise me that you won't ever—"

"I promise."

And then she's back to staring ahead in what could be a gloomy manner or an angry manner or the manner of a sack of concrete, for all Carrie's getting from it. Surprise, surprise, she can't read her own damn child, the one that's actually from her womb—

"Found it," she mutters, withdrawing a lighter from the small compartment and slamming the door shut. Faith flinches—or not, who knows—but Carrie doesn't see it. All she sees is the lighter, and the cigarette that's repositioned itself to the center of her lips, and how close the tip is to the flickering flame. And all she can do is sit and watch it, like some sort of scene that's supposed to be unfolding before her eyes.

"Mommy—"

—and the end of the cigarette begins to smoke, just barely, and Carrie can only sit there and watch as the lighter trembles and her cig wobbles and they might just get closer and closer to one another—

"—the light—"

—then the blaring sound of a car horn comes from somewhere behind them and makes her flinch so badly that she drops the lighter and almost loses the damn cigarette. It brings her back, and Carrie looks down, looks at the singed cylinder between her lips and the half empty Bic on her lap for only a split second before taking both and chucking them out the open car window. After that, it's a rapid chain of events: She looks up, sees the yellow light, swears, gasses it and only barely gets past the crosswalk when it turns red.

The rest of the ride to Faith's cello lesson is silent. When they get there, Carrie wants to say promise me, wants to ask too much of her daughter, but there's that wall look again, and so she just swallows, smiles, says "have a good lesson, sweetie, and call me if the guy's a creep" before her daughter climbs out. Faith has the decency to wave goodbye before climbing up the brownstone's steps and disappearing behind the door, and Carrie likes to think she has the decency to wait until she's halfway back down 165th before breaking into tears.

A/N: This is old. Really old, actually. But I'm still disappointed that the CW stopped showing King of Queens reruns. Between that and Everybody Hates Chris, there was no better programming block on TV. But times change, I guess. Not always for the better.