You Take It From Here (12 page)

I wasn’t sure how Smidge thought she could just snap me into her place, that I’d be loud enough or big enough to occupy her space in his heart. He holds her everywhere.

I’m not saying I’m jealous, but I
did
find him first.

Not that your mother had a reputation, but I don’t think anybody assumed she’d only been with one man her entire life. Smidge could be surprisingly old-fashioned. She made sure to go out with enough boys who would want to brag about dating her that nobody ever confessed how platonic their relationship actually was.

We were still in college the night your mother pointed toward the slender boy in jeans and slicked-back hair leaning against the bar at The Pantry, the one who was ordering three beers that—unbeknownst to her—he had plans on taking straight to our table.

“Who is that boy?” she asked, her fingernail pointed like it could shoot a web on command. She asked with decision, with finality, and I knew that despite what I was about to tell her, she had found her next big thing.

“That’s my date,” I said. “That’s Henry.”

Smidge leaned back. “What?” she asked. “That’s the guy we’re meeting here tonight? Oh,
nuh-uh.
He is not your date.”

I sighed. “And why would that be?”

“Because he’s now mine. I’m sorry, but that guy is not your type. He is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”

These were about the craziest words I’d ever heard her say, which is how I knew she meant them. I’d never seen her instantly smitten with someone, but she couldn’t stop staring.

“Smidge, I kind of like him,” I admitted.

“Yeah, but you don’t even know if this is a date, which is why I’m here, remember?”

She was right, of course. Henry was in my English lit class, and we’d struck up a conversation when we both showed up too early one day. He asked if I ever went to The Pantry. When I told him I did, he said he’d maybe see me there that next weekend.

Since he didn’t really
ask
me, but instead described a possible bump-into, I felt like I needed Smidge there in case he turned out to have a girlfriend or a group of friends with him. I didn’t want to look desperate or confused.

“But he waved when he saw me,” I said.

“Oh, honey,” Smidge said, “the wave might have been toward you, but that boy was looking right at
me.
”

And he was. I still haven’t seen two people ever fall more instantly in love.

“Why did you two come back so soon?” Henry was asking me in that garage, clearly having had his entire day, if not week, ruined by our immediate rearrival.

“Smidge wanted a short trip,” I said. “It was a surprise to me, too.”

Tucker adjusted himself in his chair, sliding the legs roughly along the concrete, purposely making himself heard.
“Guess you didn’t fight her too hard,” he said into his hands as he worked.

“I packed lots of outfits,” I said defensively. “I’m not happy about this recent development.”

“They still fighting?” Henry asked, glancing worriedly toward his home.

“You could go in there,” I said. “Maybe try to calm them down.”

The withering look Henry shot me indicated he thought I was kidding. But I desperately wanted Henry to step up and stand by his wife’s side as they dealt with their daughter. I wanted him to be indispensable, strong and stern, solemn and calm, powerful and heroic enough that Smidge would realize she needed Henry for everything she was about to face. She needed her husband to be her partner, not me. Henry has always been there for her.

She knows she can’t say the same about me.

Years ago, if someone had asked me how I’d behave if my best friend was diagnosed with stage II lung cancer, I’d have been telling them to immediately place a bet on me winning a gold medal in the Friendship Olympics, Hard Times division. Smidge and I had been through so much, I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t handle.

I was wrong.

You probably don’t know this, Jenny, because a lot of that time was sheltered from you, but I was a shitty cancer friend.

I’m still embarrassed when I think about my behavior over the two years Smidge went through treatment. I try not to think about it, and it’s a testament to Smidge’s character that she didn’t constantly bring it up. It’s the kind of thing you’d
think she’d hold over me. Yet, in all the mean things she’d spat over the years, it was usually about the ugliness of my visible features, not what I had going on underneath them.

When she was sick, when things were really bad, I couldn’t find a way to separate her from me. All the tests and hospital visits, the surgeries, the late nights where she was sleepless, sick, and destroyed from chemotherapy, it felt like it was all happening to me. I was catching her cancer. I could feel my cells mutating, replicating, poisoning me right along with her. I was miserable, and I knew I just couldn’t handle it.

I can only imagine Smidge was as shocked and disappointed in me as I was in myself.

I gave no good excuse for avoiding her, but I offered many, bowing out of Smidge’s next blood test, or another round of chemo. We e-mailed each other as I tried to keep up with everything, calling Henry to ask if there was something I could do, knowing full well he’d tell me everything was fine, and that I shouldn’t worry too much, and to stay on my side of the country tending to my own busy life that was falling apart in its own way. James and I were already having problems.

You were mostly staying with your grandparents, then. Henry’s parents rented a nearly furnished condo so they could pick you up from school and take you to practices, be there while you did your homework. You called it Grampy Camp. They were so good at keeping you entertained, of making this time feel special, not sad.

When your mom was at her worst, when she got down to ninety pounds and they thought maybe she wouldn’t make it, your grandparents took you on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. When she was still in bad shape a week later, they
just kept driving. You went up through Nevada, and over to California. You went up every roller coaster and down each waterslide Southern California had to offer. That’s when you got to pet a baby tiger and hug a dolphin.

You even spent a weekend with me. We went to Disneyland and later the beach, where you didn’t want to get your face wet because you’d gotten a butterfly painted on your cheek that you were trying to preserve.

“I wanna surprise Mama and say it’s a tattoo,” you told me. You went home after eight weeks, most of a summer, once Smidge had turned a corner and put on some weight. Once she was safely out of the woods.

I don’t know if you ever figured out the truth about that summer, but I have a feeling nobody’s ever told you that you weren’t just having Grampy Camp.

One night Henry found Smidge on the floor of the kitchen. Around three in the morning she’d woken up hungry for the first time in days. She was trying to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when she was hit with a wave of pain that lowered her to the floor. Eventually she fell asleep. Henry found her still clutching a jar of grape jelly. He gently woke her, pulled her into his lap, and fed her off a spoon, her weary head tucked under his chin. Neither of them was crying, no words about how terribly unfair life can be.

Smidge’s church organized a spreadsheet so people could come by with food or books, magazines and casseroles.

Millie Mains lived down the street from you and had that dog you said could count to five. She was young—a teacher, I think—and you thought she was the prettiest grown-up you’d ever seen because she had orange hair. You know she’s the one
who brought you those stuffed animals, right? Did someone tell you that?

Millie would come by in the mornings to pick up all your family’s laundry and then she’d leave it folded and clean on the back porch at the end of every day. She always tied the bundle with a green ribbon, sometimes topped with a small stuffed toy. For two years, every day, Millie Mains washed your laundry. Once Smidge was better, Henry got down on his knees and built that woman a new back deck.

Your daddy is a good man. And your mother was being hateful insinuating that Millie Mains was trying to get into his pants. Still, maybe Millie would be more interested in this life-altering arrangement than I was.

After Henry left to find beverages, Tucker and I stayed quiet. He was keeping himself busy with the lamp, but I’d brought nothing to do to pass the time. I found that moments of silence made my brain shift to pondering unanswered questions, so I started pacing, stopping only to lean against various corners of the garage.

“You’re making me nervous,” Tucker said. “It’s like you’re waiting on a baby to be born or something. Or posing for a photo shoot.” Tucker gestured to the chair next to him. “Sit down, California. Tell me what’s been going on.”

“With what?” It was funny how I’d known Tucker almost as long as I’d known Smidge, and yet sometimes when I sat next to him I could feel like a stranger. He often seemed to be trying to figure me out for the very first time.

“I don’t know ‘with what,’” Tucker said, peering at me from underneath the brim of his cap. “That’s why I’m asking. Tell me about your fancy life. How ’bout you start there?”

There were so many things I wasn’t supposed to talk about, I’d almost forgotten there was anything left I could say. No longer nervous, I took the seat next to Tucker and pulled up to his workbench.

“It’s not that fancy.” I watched his solid, callused hands wrap around a complicated-looking metal piece of electronic equipment I couldn’t identify. Dirt and varnish were shoved so deep underneath his fingernails it was like he was sporting a reverse manicure; all the paint was on the wrong side.

I enjoyed watching him work—how his left leg would bounce quietly, making the stool rattle under his weight. It was impressive how much his lower half was in motion while the rest of him remained still and calm, working with screws barely the size of the blackened curve of his fingertip. I don’t know who can resist watching a man work with his hands.

“You got quiet again,” he said, his voice low and steady.

It was like being at the dentist: the foreign tools, the squeaks from his metal stool, all the questions I won’t answer truthfully.

“Work’s been good,” I said. “That’s kind of it.”

“No fella.” A question spoken like it wasn’t one.

“A
fella
?” I teased, eyes wide and in full drawl. “Golly, I don’t know! Lemme just check up under my hoop skirt for a cricket’s breath!” I dropped my head and stared between my knees. “Nope! No
fella
!”

“You like that I say ‘fella.’”

He might have been right.

“What about you, Tucker? You got a dame?”

“No. No dame. And for the record, I like your Yankee voice too.”

“I don’t have a Yankee voice.”

“If she calls a Coke a ‘soda,’ she’s a Yankee.”

Even if my chess club days hadn’t ruined my chances of dating Tucker back in high school, we never seemed to be on the same kind of schedule, even once our two-year age difference didn’t seem as vast. He went away to college at Loyola, and almost always had a girlfriend, a few of which I’d met when we’d all get together for Mardi Gras or spring break.

One Christmas he brought home a girl he’d been seeing for a few months. To this day, hers remains the loudest voice I’ve ever heard.

“I just remembered Loud Loud Shane,” I said.

Tucker’s leg stopped jittering as he dropped his tools like a man instantly regretting having eaten too much food. “Lord,” he said, pinching the space between his eyes as if he could hear her now. “That girl. When she talked, pieces of my inner ear would crumble and fall out of my head. I do not miss her voice.”

“How did she get to be so loud? Did she grow up on an airstrip?”

“To this day whenever I hear an ambulance I am reminded of being with her in bed.”

“I thought Smidge was going to punch her in the face that time—”

“—when we were playing Uno,” Tucker finished, his eyes glassy and distant with memory. “That was when I knew I had to stop seeing her. She was not a nice game player.”

“Really mean. She called Henry an assface!”

“Well, he did make her draw four like a total assface.”

“Poor Henry,” I said.

“Poor Henry,” he agreed. “He’s got that crazy wife and a daughter who’s apparently turning into a punk lesbian. The man spends his day shopping for antiques, arguing with blue-hairs over ottomans. I say if he gets some sort of satisfaction winning a card game based more on luck than skill, then hell. He can make me draw sixteen; it’s the least I can do.”

That was before Tucker was engaged to a girl I never got a chance to meet, back when he was working at his dad’s law firm. I always thought he was going to make an amazing lawyer, what with his skills at having the last word.

They were a few months into planning the wedding, moving into a house in the part of Ogden that was populated with young couples turning into young families, when she got a job opportunity in Germany she either couldn’t pass up or didn’t want to. She also didn’t want Tucker to come with her. The breakup changed him. When life didn’t go according to what he’d planned, he let the rest of his plans fall away, too. He quit his dad’s firm to work with Henry. He didn’t try to date anybody. Tucker stopped doing anything the way people assumed he would, but he never looked like he felt he was missing out on anything. I guess because he didn’t look like he felt much at all.

Tucker kicked my foot. “It’s good to see you again,” he said. “You remind me that I wasn’t always so old.”

“You’ve always seemed old to me.”

“Don’t confuse wisdom with age, young lady.”

The garage door banged and shifted at the handle. Realizing Henry’s arms must be loaded down with beverages, I jumped to help.

“How long you think you’re staying around?” Tucker asked as I reached the door.

I told him the truth. “I don’t know. I have to go back eventually.” I just had to figure out how to get Smidge to understand that.

Henry entered looking stunned and disoriented, like he’d been staring into the sun for ten minutes.