You Take It From Here (10 page)

“Last time I didn’t feel like I had cancer,” she said. “The doctors and tests and X-rays all forced me to acknowledge it was happening. The surgeries and the rounds of chemo made it clear. I remember thinking, ‘Well, let’s just get through this.’”

Smidge stretched her legs, pointing and flexing her toes.

“This time it’s different,” she said. “This time I feel it everywhere. It is weighing me down, and I have been in the worst pain. This is no way to live. It hurts to breathe. It hurts to be me. I hate feeling pathetic. And finally: my skin is disgusting. Cancer sucks. The end.”

“Why is this happening?” I asked, as if there’d be an answer I’d accept. “How?”

“They shipped me with defective parts, I guess.”

It wasn’t fair that Smidge had to come over to the bed and hold my fetal shape while I cried. She shouldn’t ever have been the one to do the comforting. But I was grateful she wrapped herself behind me, pushed back my hair, and clucked into the top of my head like I was her child. I slammed my eyes tight, attempting to keep that moment preserved. I needed it then, because I knew I was going to need to be able to bring back the feeling of that moment for the rest of my life. It was right then I felt our time start to run out.

“Maybe I won’t die,” she whispered. We were like heartbroken teenagers again, just like in high school when some boy wronged us in some way that seemed world crushing. Weeping and exhausted, clutching each other by the bones.

“Maybe I’ll scare death away,” she said, like it was all just a ghost story. “I’ll be mean to it. But, hey, listen. I’m not getting treatment. And I’m not wasting time having to deal with everybody doing exactly what you’re doing right now. They can cry later. I want my last days to be happy ones. So you get to sleep on this tonight, but tomorrow we get to work, missy.”

I don’t know how or when I fell asleep, but at some point I woke to find Smidge sitting at the edge of the bed, appearing to be counting the very same floor squares I’d tallied earlier.

The sound of my stirring pulled her from her thoughts. She turned, her face instantly waking, everything pulling in different directions at once, as she shifted from “neutral” to “on,” like someone had pressed her power button.

“You look like shit,” she said, not unkindly. “That is some serious cry-face you’ve got going on.”

My eyelids were swollen thick; I could see them hovering at the top of my line of vision. My lips were equally puffy, like my mouth had just held a convention for bees. The back of my throat was raw from swallowing down too much information, and my stomach burned with all the things I didn’t know how to say.

“You were talking in your sleep,” she said. “Something about medication, so I’m sure it was me you were talking to.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, it got me thinking, and I want you to know something. You know how you told me sometimes after people die, they come and visit you in your dreams?”

This happened with my grandmother, who showed up in my dream the night after she died to hand me a pinwheel and
tell me always to finish my oatmeal. In college, a professor of mine was in a fatal car accident. I saw him in a dream the following week, where he informed me that he hadn’t gotten around to grading my paper because he left it at Kermit the Frog’s house, but that he called Kermit, who said the paper was a solid B. I remember that dream because I woke myself up by complaining,
“Man, fuck that frog.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, if you don’t say yes to this, Danny, after I’m dead, I’m coming for you. When you sleep. I will haunt you. I will destroy you.”

Smidge could sound like a Southern gothic lady from the past when she wanted to, summoning her ancestors who would cast spells on me from the depths of the swamps and savannah, potions of evil created from the essences of mint juleps, eye of nutria, a scrap of seersucker. Smidge was being as serious as her diagnosis, and I knew there was only one response that would keep us together. Any other answer might result in the immediate, abrupt termination of our lifelong friendship.

“I’ll do it, Smidge.”

It’s what I said, even though I knew it wasn’t going to be true. But I told myself I could fake that promise, at least for the time being. I could go along with it for as long as it took her to realize she was asking me to do the impossible, the ridiculous. She wouldn’t be able to keep this a secret. She’d have to tell Henry, and once she did, there was no way he’d go along with it. It wasn’t like hiding an egg chair; her body would eventually tattle, even if she didn’t. She’d get sicker. He’d notice. How could she ask Henry to be with me once
she was gone? Did she really think her daughter would accept me as her mother once she couldn’t be there anymore?

Smidge was the bossiest person I’ve ever known. I just couldn’t picture her giving up status as the number one person in your lives. I’d more readily accept she’d hired a team of engineers to make a robot version of herself that could give you commands and answer questions, rolling around the house like a sassy Roomba. “Quit doing that! Put that over there! Go change that shirt!”

“Say it again,” she said to me. “Say it with the word ‘promise’ in there.”

“I promise I’ll do it.” My voice sounded ragged, like my throat didn’t want me to lie, afraid of what she’d do if she figured out I was just trying to appease. After all, it was the throat she’d choke first.

“Okay. But remember: if you don’t, I will
haunchoo
,” she hissed, adding a pinch to my thigh, no doubt instantly entering us into some kind of voodoo contract.

I might have made the immediate future a little less stressful for Smidge, but I had just agreed to have that woman endlessly torment me from the afterlife.

NINE

“S
midge, this year’s vacation was kinda bullshit.”

We’d finished driving back from Atlanta, having spent the morning acting as if the night before was well in the past. I guess we’d moved on, a decision having been made, and we were attempting to engage in behavior that seemed normal. Consequently, our ride home mostly consisted of singing along to the radio, eating greasy curly fries out of takeout bags, and creating small dramas and situations for the passengers in the cars that passed us by.

Playing “Did You Hear About?” with our old classmates used to be one of our favorite pastimes.

“Did you hear about Amber Parkins?”

“The girl who scribbled Billy Robbins’s name all over my favorite notebook in the tenth grade? Tenth-grade asshole Amber Parkins? Tell me.”

“She got fat and sells her underwear on the Internet for money.”

The game didn’t have any rules, per se, except for one: no matter what the fake future for the person would be, the first three words were always “
She got fat.”

Due to various online social networks our game had lost its luster; there was no mystery in what happened to the people we hoped suffered endless years of obesity and beyond. Creating elaborate prisons for those who had wronged or slighted us was pointless. Within two or three clicks we could see: she had kids. Sometimes she wasn’t fat. Smidge tried to create an offshoot called “Today Their Evil Children,” but it was never as much fun. I didn’t have kids, so I didn’t care, and Smidge always ended up crying whenever she seriously thought about childhood obesity. That woman loved making people from her past into 700-pound, bedridden pizza lovers, but if you packed one extra pound onto a minor, you’d have to physically stop her from calling Child Protective Services.

“I do owe you a vacation,” Smidge said as we grabbed our suitcases out of the back of the Pickle. “I promise to get one more in before this year is up.”

I didn’t want to know if she was referring to a calendar year or
her
year.

“I still have a couple of days before my flight home,” I said.

Smidge turned to me, brow furrowed. “Oh,” she said. “That’s not happening.”

I followed her inside the house. “I have to go home, Smidge.”

“You’ll see. You’ll be too busy and you won’t have time to go home. You need to be here, now.”

“No, I have clients and—”

“Jennifer Ellen Cooperton! That had better be an ugly-ass wig you’re wearing!”

I might have been temporarily off the hook, but the tone in Smidge’s voice had me instantly frightened for
your
immediate
future. Because, yes, Jenny: this was the day of The Haircut That Almost Got You Killed.

Take the excitement that comes from simply being a thirteen-year-old girl, then add to that the overwhelming freedom of two days without your mother’s constant supervision, and basically what happened was: you went crazy and hacked off a stunning amount of your lovely blond hair. In order to make sure you wouldn’t just be grounded, but grounded in a way that would make it into the record books, you then dyed one side of your hair black. And
then
, since none of the women in your family liked to do anything without going to unnecessary extremes, you shaved sections of the black side into seemingly random stripes and squares.

Jenny, your hair was a carefully constructed flag of teenage rebellion.

You looked like a before
and
an after photo, taped together. Turned to one side, you were a pretty, healthy, lovely girl possibly on her way to church camp. Spin you the other way and you became the sullen, angry skater punk who kept voodoo dolls of that pretty church camp girl hidden in her locker.

“Mama, it’s no big deal,” you said, but I heard the trembling in your voice. You were scared. I bet you’d tried to ready yourself for this moment, but we came back much earlier than you thought. You didn’t know we’d come back wiser, sadder, older, exhausted, and a bit resigned. But not too resigned or exhausted to hate that haircut. Even Smidge’s cancer was saying,
“I’ll just step back and wait for you to deal with this idiot kid for a second.”

You had taken your first, defiant step across the threshold
into the hormonal-land-mine-ridden field of teenage girls. And Jenny, your mother did not like it.

I’d seen Smidge’s parenting technique range from screams to fits. She never gave you more than a firm swat on the behind, and even that was reserved for near-bodily-harm incidents back when you had the added protection of diapers. I know she didn’t really believe in beating a child. But I don’t think, until that moment, she’d ever stopped to consider her thoughts on beating a
teenager.
Somehow that seemed different. More necessary. It just made sense. A baby doesn’t understand why someone’s whacking at her. But you weren’t a baby, and you had done something so stupid. Why shouldn’t she knock some sense into you? I could tell Smidge was weighing her odds in a physical encounter with you. You guys were practically the same size; it seemed a fair fight.

Not wanting to be in the position of having to be a witness at a hearing or a trial someday, I tried to head out of the room, in search of anybody else who might have been in hiding. Henry, for starters. I didn’t get three feet away before Smidge stopped me.

“Danny,” she said, her voice oddly calm and stilted, fake chipper, like she was recording an outgoing message for her voice mail. “I would like you to handle this.”

I stared at her hand, wondering how it had latched itself onto my arm.
Burrowed
into my skin. “Handle what?”

“Jenny. And the hair.”

“Why would I do that?”

She bugged her weird, fake-friendly eyes toward me and shouted, “Jennifer, go to your room!”

You and I both jumped, but then you turned and sped off,
the half of your hair that still had the ability to move trailing behind you like a rhythmic gymnast fleeing in terror.

Smidge’s face had the look of someone who’s just been jilted by a con artist. I couldn’t get my arm out of her vise grip. If I wanted freedom, I was going to have to chew off my own limb.

“I need you to go in there and take care of this situation,” she said. “So that I do not kill my daughter. Although, what are they gonna do—give me the death penalty?” She chuckled.

There was something about ordering me around while simultaneously punishing her daughter that made Smidge positively gleeful. Her murderess smile had turned into an amused grimace, like she’d just been handed a human doll-house. I might as well have been eight inches tall, her giant hand wrapped around my plastic torso as she bounced me over to your room.

I’d never punished a child. I don’t have any siblings, so I had no idea what was supposed to happen when a parent goes into a bedroom to scold a kid.

After his divorce, my dad stopped punishing me entirely. If I messed up at school I took care of it, and I never did anything bad enough in my social life that would warrant getting grounded. In fact, if I’d done to my head what you had done to yours, my dad would have calmly asked, “Was that for school, or something? Are you in a play?”

When I was much younger, my mother’s parenting style could have best been described as one of detached interest. In her defense, she didn’t know she didn’t like kids until she had one. She was so young she probably had a hard time
finding the difference between what I wanted and what she wanted. My mother was an intellectual, an artist, a thinker of big ideas and wild opinions; not really all that interested in messy diapers or stacking blocks. The mundane life of a toddler must have driven her to fantasies of self-mutilation, just to have something interesting to talk about.