You Take It From Here (19 page)

I want a reason to know everything I already know about her cancer. I need her to give me just enough information so
that I can justify the amount of internet research I’ve already done.

“Because I want to
do
something,” I said. “I’ve been here for weeks now and other than rolling your sheets into balls and unsuccessfully grounding your daughter, I really don’t feel like anything has happened.”

“Okay, then. Now you’re talking.” She nodded, folding her arms across her chest. “Get dressed. We’ve got some errands to run.”

I looked down to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. But there I was, in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. Shoes, even. “I
am
dressed,” I said. “These are clothes.”

“Wear something
nicer
,” she said, backing out of the room. “I’ll meet you at the door in ten.” Then, as usual, just when I thought she was finished, she added, “Lipstick, too! And fix your hayir.”

The bank was our first stop, to add me to her accounts. This meant letting me in on a secret: Smidge had multiple accounts, ones Henry didn’t know about.

“It’s funny that he doesn’t know about this money, because he’s the reason I even know how to save in the first place. He taught me. He said we needed to set a good example for Jenny, that ATMs aren’t unlimited resources on the corner, like a water fountain at a park.”

“Money faucets.”

“Exactly.
Sooooooo,
sometimes I get money and I don’t need to be telling everybody, especially my husband.” She stared suspiciously at the bank representative as he clicked away from behind his monitor, like he was entering our dialogue into the public record.

“I don’t understand why you need me on this account,” I said. “Won’t the money just go to Henry after you . . .” I stopped myself, stammered into silence. “Can we have a code word?” I pleaded. “I can’t use the real word for what’s going to happen to you.”

“Yes, well, I’m sorry to be straining your emotions,” Smidge said, patting my arm wearily, with as much condescension as she could muster. “You’re right; it’s just so thoughtless of me. Where are my manners?”

“Smidge, I’m trying. I really am. But I am
messed up.
We’re at the bank, and you are signing your secret money account over to me. Why are you doing this?”

“Marsala.”

“What?”

“The code word. For what’s happening to me.
Marsala.
”

“Why that word?”

“I think it’s real pretty.” She grabbed my fingertips and gave them a tug. “As for the money, consider it your inheritance. No: it’s your paycheck. All this should come with a salary. Lord knows I would’ve liked getting paid for this job over the years. Okay, so you’re getting a husband, a daughter, and a savings account worth thirty-five thousand dollars. You have to admit: you can’t say I didn’t leave you anything, after I marsala.”

“As if there will be anything left after I pay off all the secret credit cards I bet you have.”

There was only the slightest of pauses before Smidge responded with “Touché.”

As she finished signing the last form she told me, “We have plans tonight.”

“We have plans? You and me?”

“You, me, Tucker, and the horndog also known as my husband,” she said. “Let’s get Henry trashed enough so he’ll go right to sleep.”

“We’re going out? Like with drinking?”

“Yep, and I am all rested up for it. Fifteen hours of sleep will do that to you. Jenny’s going to a friend’s house until late, so it’s grown-up night. Promise me you’ll do your hayir.”

“I did my hair before we came to the bank! This is done hair!”

“Oh, Danny,” Smidge said, scrunching her face so that one side of her mouth dropped to meet her chin, “I was worried you were going to say that.”

After the bank and a pickup at the dry cleaner, Smidge stopped the car without warning. I hadn’t been paying attention to the road, so I was unprepared to be sitting in front of Serenity Hilltop, the “fancy cemetery,” as it’s known in Odgen. People with money or even a slight modicum of fame find their way to spend eternity there. You have to
apply.
Whenever a new body is laid to rest, the entire town comes out. It’s quite the event.

“I’ll handle all the arrangements,” she said as I stared through the passenger-side window at the imposing green hill peppered with hundreds of gray memorials. “I know I can get up here.”

I tried to imagine myself soon standing on that hill, wearing black, weeping into a handkerchief. The whole thing still felt completely detached from my real life, like someone was describing the dream they’d had the night before.

It was crazy. Smidge had died, and she had somehow finagled to get herself buried at Serenity Hilltop, and you were there in this amazing black dress, holding Jenny’s hand and crying. And then a giraffe was getting buried in the next plot, and Smidge jumped out of her coffin and yelled at the giraffe for ruining her special day. It seemed so real at the time.

“Why are you smiling?” Smidge asked as she whacked me in the back of the head.

“You’d be so mad if a giraffe tried to get buried here next to you.”

Smidge puffed her lips in exasperation. “Focus, please. And get out of the car.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s happy hour.”

Within minutes Smidge had set up a makeshift picnic on the lawn in front of the car. She was careful to have us sit where we’d be hidden from the main road or the welcome booth, so as not to get caught sipping the mini-martinis she had quickly shaken for us.

“That car cooler is the best idea I’ve ever had,” she said after taking her first, slow gulp.

“Am I driving home?”

“Relax. I’ve got some water, and we ain’t going nowhere for a while. You can’t stop me from having a martini every afternoon at five. That’s my new thing and I love it, so you can suck it if you think you can change that one.”

The afternoon drink was a welcome change. I kicked off my shoes and stretched my toes into the soft grass. It was only once I leaned back onto my elbows that I noticed we were
having our happy hour beside the tombstone of
HARRIET WEINERS 1902–1975, Beloved Mother, Grandmother, Devoted Wife, “GOD NEVER MAKES MISTAKES.”

“Is this weird?” I asked.

Smidge grabbed the martini glass out of my hand and tipped it forward until a small stream dribbled over the edge. “Here you go, Harriet.” She handed it back. “Better now?”

“I do feel better, yes.”

I raised my martini toward the hill in a cemetery-wide toast before taking another sip.

Smidge scoffed. “‘God never makes mistakes.’ Ain’t that some bullshit? First of all, God gave some people the last name Weiners.”

I dropped onto my back, lowered my sunglasses, and closed my eyes. Doves politely cooed overhead. The nearby bushes hummed with insect activity, the cicadas busy making their unmistakable throbbing pulse of a rattle.

“Ooooooookay,”
Smidge sang as she plopped beside me, close enough that one of her elbows dug into the flesh of my left arm. The crinkle of paper in my ear forced my eyes open.

“What are you doing?”

“I told you there was a list,” she said, unfolding a sheet of loose-leaf paper. She paused, staring at me curiously, and then slapped me across the neck.

“Urgh!” I choked out, clutching my throat. “Why?”

“Mosquito,” she said, lowering her reading glasses onto her nose. “Now.” Her accent made her sound like a cat:
“Ne-ow.”

“That hurt!”

She kissed the palm of her hand and rubbed it across my neck. “There,” she said. “All better. Now remember these two
words.” She interrupted herself with a short cough. “
Bort
with a zero,
Jennifer
with a one,” she continued. “The numbers are vowels.” She coughed again, shaking her head.

I rolled over to my side. “Are you giving me your passwords?”

“Yes. Bort is also my PIN number, but when in doubt I probably used Jenny’s name. Vowels are numbers.”

“I can’t believe you use
bort.
”

“I thought you’d like that. I’ve had a lot of the same passwords since college. They make me think of you and how much I love you. Since I love you the mostest.”

Bort stood for “bitch on red time,” which was short for
I’m not nice this time of the month, and won’t be for another three to five days.
Smidge and I started using it back when we were roommates this one morning when Smidge was angrily trying to call me both a
bitch
and a
jerk
, but it came out
bort.

“I’m not done making all the funeral arrangements here, but when it happens I’ll have written everything down for you. It’s going to be a really nice ceremony, Danny. I’m sorry to be missing it. Take pictures.”

She told me to convince Henry to buy a storefront for his furniture business, using the money from the life insurance policies she’d already taken out.

“The rest of the money goes to Jenny’s college fund,” she said. “Make sure she goes to undergrad, and don’t let her waste time in grad school. It’s just stalling real life.”

Smidge’s list was front and back on that page, and while she rattled off items like we were grocery shopping, I noticed her hands were trembling. She paused for a moment to cough, but blamed the fit on allergies.

“My half-a-lung shouldn’t be rolling around in this grass,” she said.

“Should we get back in the car? It’s pretty hot out here.”

“Speaking of the car. It’s a piece of junk. Trash it. Don’t let Henry keep you driving it like he did me. Tell him it makes you think about me and cry, whatever guilts him into letting you get a new one.”

“I have a car, actually. Back in Los Angeles, remember?”

“Hunh,” she said, as if she really had forgotten that I used to have my own life. “I guess you could use that one,” she reasoned. “If you could get it out here.”

“Well,
thanks.
”

“I’m serious about you making sure this family gives to charity every month. And on that note: start going to church. I was bad about it, and now I’ve got cancer, so do what the Lord says.”

I’d never gone to church. It wouldn’t even occur to me to think about going to church, unless someone was getting married or buried.

I said, “This part is where you’re just testing me, right? This part’s the joke?”

“I keep having these dreams, these realizations. My perspective has changed. You’ll know what I mean once you’re dying.
Which will happen.
”

“You mean you have regrets?”

This was a potential breakthrough moment for Smidge. If she could admit she’d made mistakes, perhaps we could veer toward the mistakes she was actively making, the ones involving me, cancer treatment, or the future of her family.

“I should’ve made sure people saw me in church. Because now here I am trying to prove I’m good enough to get my bones stuffed into this hill.” She lowered her reading glasses and sighed into her chest. “Always make sure other people think you’re better than you are, Danny. Your real life doesn’t matter; only the one they imagine for you. You’ll never actually live the life jealous people can dream up, but you can try to live up to it.”

“Sounds like you’ve had a real spiritual awakening.”

“Actually, I have,” she said, staring into the distance. The fading sun set the wisps of her chestnut hair into a golden halo. “The world looks different to me now. I have answers to things I forgot I was pondering. I hear more, you know? Like I can really hear the insects in the trees. I can feel the air between us. Our connection, our pull to this planet.” She drained the last of her martini and said, “
Now
I’m just messing with you.”

“I assumed,” I said, unfazed.

“But you still need to go to church. And not just any church, not some
‘we’re more into the message than the man’
church or whatever fake, dippy, barely legal, Bible-bendy church that’s more of a glorified book club. You have to go to the one Daddy went to. You go to Second Baptist.”

I pushed myself up onto my knees in protest. “No, Smidge, that place gives me the creeps. It’s so big and there’s so many people.”

“Exactly. You aren’t really at roll call unless people who judge you can see you. And the judgiest of Ogden worship over at Second Baptist. You take my family there, and for
good measure you wear one of those giant hats. Raise your hand up and testify every once in a while, like my aunt Elsie used to. Be superchurchy.”

“Please, Smidge. Don’t do this to me. I will get hives.”

“Don’t think I won’t be able to spy on you with my ghost eyes, so if you’re not there I will know.”

She continued through her list, moving into the “Do this or I’ll haunt you” section. I was to make sure Dr. Phil went to the vet at least twice a year, that I renewed Henry’s prescriptions, and purchased a real purse. “Not some kind of hobo bag like you’re the crazy lady on the bus. No more contrasting patterns, or I will haunchoo.”

Other things that would send Ghost Smidge into my life included letting her daughter try out for dance brigade. “She can be a cheerleader if she really wants to do something jumpy and popular, but there’s no way in hell you can let her join the Whore Corps.”

“It might be different from when we went to Neville.”

“I will haunchoo!”

“Fine.”

She may have been berating me, but she was also holding my hand. Her skin felt dry and thin. Her engagement ring, no longer perched atop her wedding band at the center of her finger, had loosened and dropped to the side. The diamond pressed against her pinkie like it was seeking shelter.

“If you let my veggie garden rot or get taken over by the squirrels, guess what will happen.”

“You’re saying you’ll haunt—”

“Haunchoo!”