You Take It From Here (15 page)

The next morning Smidge seemed ready to start talking seriously about the things she needed me to know in order to take over her life. I’m not sure what brought it on, but I wasn’t about to question her in the middle of her first lecture as we stood in her hallway.

“I have made a list,” she said, punching a fist as she declared her latest achievement. “Let’s get to teaching you how to be me.”

“Okay.”

“Item one: how to fold a fitted sheet.”

“This is where you’re starting?” I marveled. “
This
is the most important thing you can think of right now?”

“Yes. Look, I know you just ball those sheets up in your arms like you’re making a giant wad of cotton candy to stuff
inside your linen closet,” she said. “And that’s not how it’s going to be around here. Not in this house.”

Smidge reached into her linen closet and plucked a perfect bundle the color of a fir tree. She then shook it loose, a queen-size flag unfurling. Like she was about to claim me for her country.

“I know you have a housekeeper,” I said.

“What if you have to fold one when she’s not here? You’ll just leave it in a to-do pile for your help?”

“That to-do pile is called a hamper.”

“I knew it!” Smidge said, rising to her tiptoes in sanctimony. “I knew you didn’t teach those helpless idiots how to fold a fitted sheet. This is why people get divorced, Danny. No offense. But if you can’t stick around long enough to figure out how to wrangle a bit of elastic bedding, then how’s anybody supposed to make it to their second anniversary?”

“Yes, I can see how these topics are directly related.”

She pursed her lips. “You go ahead and stay snarky, but I’m right. From wedding to bedding, you got to learn how to do it.” She fiddled with the fabric in her hands, prepping it for instruction. “See, I put my hands in the corners? Now the right hand goes to the left and you fold the corner in your right hand over the one in your left.”

What was happening in the space between Smidge’s arms looked like an origami dance, as if she were making the world’s biggest cootie catcher. I wasn’t any good at folding those paper toys when I was a kid, either. I couldn’t get the edges sharp enough and I was bad at figuring out how to make the corners meet. In the end, it would look more like a sick bird than any kind of four-pointed fortune-teller.

Smidge continued instructing, faster than I could have possibly understood. “Okay, now you reach down, pick up the front-hanging corner, bring that up. Fold this guy over those two corner guys you’ve got here.”

Her arms opened, she slid a hand through, and then her arms closed again. She bowed with a flourish and came back up, smiling, her dance completed. It was all so fluid and mystical, she could’ve been performing a religious ceremony. Despite her constant narration, the words didn’t seem to match what her body was doing, flipping and folding, weaving around.

“I think we should tell Henry,” I said.

“Okay, now here comes the part where we lay it flat.”

She wandered away to lay the sheet out on the closest flat surface—the desk in the office. She reached over everything on the table to make space, pushing pencils and spine-bent paperbacks out of the way. She stared intently at the sheet in front of her, head tucked at an awkward angle. I realized she was doing that to keep from looking at the framed photos along the back of the desk, an arc of frozen memories. Family pictures. Standing in front of Alcatraz, huddled together in the wind. A close-up of Henry laughing with a pink smear of birthday cake icing clumped to his chin. You in your softball uniform. The newest addition was Smidge leaning against that giant chair. The picture gave me the chills because while Smidge might have been smiling, her eyes were looking past the camera. They were searching me. Even now, in its frame, safely jumbled with other memories, that picture taunts,
“Whatcha gonna do, Danny?”

“Let’s tell your family,” I said.

“Can’t break them down now,” she said, shaking her head, her voice not much louder than a mutter. “I’m not going to be selfish, rob their time with my moaning. I’m dying either way, so why prolong their sad parts?”

“Smeh, they want to be here for you.”

“No. Think of what the Lizard did. She broke our family, and then she had the nerve to be crying about it, trying to be the focus when the entire town knew she had skanked around with the mayor.”

“This isn’t the same, and you know it.”

“Isn’t it? She made us have to deal with her pain, her suffering, her, her,
her
all the time. No matter how much we loved her and wanted her to stay, guess what? She left anyway. She wasn’t strong enough. She made a mess and then disappeared forever. I ain’t going out like that, Danny. No, ma’am.”

I wanted to tell her that, while we can get through this together, that maybe I will do whatever she wanted, she didn’t have to make us do this alone. We needed to tell her husband. I could use Henry’s calm, level head for just a second.

I had a brief flashback to the day I was about to sign my first set of divorce papers; I was terrified and lonely. I needed Smidge to tell me it was all going to be okay. Despite two phone calls and six consecutive texts, she did not reply. Instead, Henry called.

“Smidge left her phone on the edge of the bathtub, it seems,” he said. Henry could sometimes sound like he was trying to solve a puzzle, often ending sentences with “it seems,” or beginning them with “turns out.” He talked through his thoughts, trying the internal words out loud to make sure he’d processed everything he was thinking. “She’s
at the movies with Jenny,” he told me. “Otherwise I’m sure she’d be looking for it. Maybe she is looking for it, but it’s here. She would have Jenny call it, if she knew it was missing. So I’m guessing she doesn’t know it’s gone yet.” Then he asked, “Are you okay?”

I told him how I was staring down a stack of papers that said there was nothing I could do to save my marriage, documenting my intent to have the state of California come in and sever it, to rip it apart in front of everyone, to put in public record that I was finished being married to James and he was finished being my husband and that was it. We were done. Signed and stamped, gavel-dropped,
done
.

“I put my pen to the first place where I’m supposed to sign,” I told him. “But then I couldn’t stop shaking. Then I couldn’t breathe and I lost all feeling in my legs. Either I’m having a panic attack or I’m dying, so I called Smidge.”

“You know she probably would have just made you more upset,” he said.

“That’s true.”

Henry sniffed as I heard him shift the phone in his hands. I pictured him sitting on the lid of the toilet seat, staring at the cabinets filled with zit creams and moisturizers, the mason jars stuffed with cotton balls and Q-tips, the boxes of open eye-shadow samples and shreds of perfume-scented magazine pages. The sink would be snaked with a stringy collection of twelve-inch auburn hairs. The shower curtain would be jerked to the side, possibly still damp from when Smidge ended her call and apparently took off running.

I could just imagine Henry looking over the state of this
bathroom and asking himself,
“How did I end up having to deal with so many damn women?”

“Thanks for calling, Henry,” I said. “That was nice of you. You don’t have to stay on the phone. Tell Smidge to call me when she gets home.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you have a life insurance policy? Some kind of money that goes somewhere after you die? Your next of kin?”

“Yeah, I do. Why?”

“Well, just in case you
are
dying right now, you might want to sign those papers quick so James can’t get a penny of it. Especially since he’s the one who killed you.”

My signature is shaky on my divorce papers, but it’s from laughter.

Smidge had folded her fitted sheet into a tight rectangle. She presented it to me like an award. “Ta-da!”

“I want to tell Henry,” I said again.

“No,” she said. “I can’t do that to him. And if you go behind my back on this one, Danny, I will mess you up. Do you understand?”

She tossed the folded linen at my head.

“Now you do it,” she said as she left the room. “Call me when you get it right.”

“I thought you were trying to teach me!” I shouted toward the hall. “How am I supposed to figure out what you did?”

“Google it!”

The tension in her response hit the little hairs along my earlobes. Before I could say another word, she slammed her bedroom door.

It is no small confession to say I have regrets about how things went down with your mother, Jenny. This moment here I’ll remember, because I should’ve done more. I should’ve forced her to talk. I think it’s when she really needed me, and I was still too scared of her to step up to the plate. All I could hear in my head was this frantic, urgent voice, incredulous with judgment.

This is her last request.

That’s what I kept thinking, mostly because it seemed impossible. How could someone like Smidge ever have
one
final request? There would always be more. This is Smidge. Smidge
wants
things. Random things, big things.
Your
things. How could this be the last thing she’d ever need?

We make our loved ones’ final wishes sacred. We find the exact lake to scatter their ashes, erect park benches under their favorite trees. We name buildings and avenues, libraries and highways after the deceased. We create scholarships and gardens and sometimes even laws. We need enormous monuments to fill the space they left behind. Maybe sometimes it can’t just be a statue. Sometimes you need the real deal. Another life. A living memorial.

At the most, Smidge was asking me to give up five years. Five years she couldn’t have. This is the kind of thing siblings do for each other all the time. It wasn’t Smidge’s fault she didn’t have a sister to step in to help. Of course I was the next logical choice. Who else could do it? It wasn’t like the Lizard was going to be asked back after all this time.

Unless . . .

Unless I could find the Lizard. Had
Terms of Endearment
taught me nothing? No matter how estranged a mother and
daughter could get, this was how they’d patch things up. Maybe I wouldn’t even have to tell her about the cancer to get her here. Mother’s intuition could kick in and save me from spilling a secret. If the last person Smidge would ever expect to be there for her could show up and stick around, maybe she would see it was okay to tell everybody else.

Smidge told me to get on Google. I was just searching for something a little bigger and more elusive than housekeeping tutorials.

It didn’t take long to find her. She had her own website; she was running what looked like both a pageant class and a photography studio. Lots of pink and sparkly graphics, the word
princess
used several times. I clicked Contact and wrote what I hoped came across as a breezy yet intriguing e-mail, asking her to write back when she got a chance. Yes, it had been a while. Still, could she possibly contact me. We could use some catching up.

It wasn’t until I hit Send that I realized I’d been holding my breath. I knew I was doing the right thing, but it still felt like playing with fire.

THIRTEEN

A
s someone who’s been an actual shitty cancer friend, I can tell you with absolute certainty that if you’re going to know someone going through cancer, it’s best to do it with a tertiary friend. There’s just a lot less pressure.

Michelle Stevens was a girl I knew from that hot-yoga class I stopped attending once it gave me a worrisome skin rash. Not long after that, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

I mostly heard about it from friends of her friends. Talk of Michelle’s cancer spread through acquaintances via Facebook updates and the occasional fund-raiser tweet. I’m pretty sure I gave money toward something.

I hadn’t thought about Michelle in a while, but I do know that she survived and for some reason her number was in my cell phone, so the next morning I walked the half mile from Smidge’s house to the coffee shop to try to get some advice without the threat of Smidge overhearing.