You Take It From Here (2 page)

This Gallery Books trade paperback edition July 2012

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Designed by Jaime Putorti

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ribon, Pamela.

You take it from here / Pamela Ribon.

    p. cm.

1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Cancer—Patients—Family relationships— Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

PS3618.I24Y68 2012

813'.6—dc23

2012008623

ISBN 978-1-4516-4623-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-4624-5 (ebook)

For Madeleine Chao

Sweet girl.
May you take over the world.

(
Meow
.)

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Acknowledgments

Readers Group Guide

you take it
from here

Jenny,

I’ve got this hunch that if you’re reading this, your other hand is currently holding a lit match. But I think you should try to hold off destroying this letter long enough to read what it says.

I can only imagine you’ve been yearning to know the truth for a long time now. You never did like it when people kept things from you. That pride you got from your mother makes it so you’d rather pretend I dropped off the face of the earth. I’m sure she’s proud of how much you’ve stuck to your guns.

But listen. I know what’s happening to you tomorrow. That’s no small thing, Miss Ma’am. This probably goes without saying, but as soon as I heard your news, I wanted to be there. I know, we don’t always get what we want.

It’s hard not to talk to you like you’re still a young girl, awkward and defiant. I keep reminding myself that you are no longer that person, that there’s a chance you’re nothing like the Jenny I knew, the one I spent so much of my life
worrying about. How did you get to be so old? I can’t even begin to imagine how much I’ve missed.

What you’re about to read won’t be easy for either of us. It doesn’t always paint me in the best light, and I worry it’ll be too hard for you in some parts. I’ll try to warn you when the rough stuff is coming, but I think it’s time you learned it all. Lord knows you’re finally old enough. Most important, I think it’s officially been enough time that your mother can’t find a way to murder me for telling you everything.

I think she’d want you to know now. She’d want you to hear her entire story, all her reasons, and how they became mine.

So let’s get started. We’ll have to take it back quite some time. Back in ye olde 2010. You were thirteen. I think about that a lot, actually. You were only thirteen.

You’ve never left my thoughts. Not for one moment.

So please blow out that match. This is for your own good.

ONE

W
hile it took over two decades to build the infrastructure that could lead to what happened, it all really started the year your mother and I were thirty-five, smack-dab in the lava-hot center of July.

Before I reached that age I couldn’t imagine anything older, but now it seems like I was just a baby. I was balancing an overstuffed purse on my hip, my reading glasses forgotten on top of my head while cheap sunglasses slid down the bridge of my nose. My cell phone was in one hand while the other pulled my limp blond hair into a makeshift knot. All sense of pride in one’s appearance quickly melts away in that sticky, miserable, Louisiana heat.

I was standing in that aggressively carpeted baggage claim area of the Ogden airport, desperately trying to absorb the remaining seconds of air-conditioning. I’d soon be diving into stifling humidity. The weather is half the reason I left Ogden in the first place. Living in that oppressive atmosphere always made me feel like some kind of exotic cockroach, scuttling around, seeking the cool of night.

I already missed the predictable weather back home in Los Angeles, where normally at that moment I’d be in a coffee shop on my computer. If I wasn’t busy drawing up plans for a client, I would be updating my website with an entry boasting of a recent success, or procrastinating my workload via a healthy dose of Web surfing. I knew I’d be fine once I saw Smidge, and I’d be even better once we were off on our trip, but at the time I remember being frantic because my hair was already starting to frizz.

It was important to get in front of your mother’s eyes before my hair went into massive failure, lest I again endure her favorite opening monologue, titled “All This on Your Head Is Wrong.”

Smidge asked me to fly to her that year to kick off our annual trip. I use the word
ask,
but that does not describe what she did. There is no
asking
in Smidge’s world. There is requesting, declaring, demanding, and ordering. And when those don’t work: threats.

I’d been on the ground only ten minutes when I got recognized. In typical Ogden fashion, I probably knew half of the people standing around in that lobby. “Oh, I’d heard you were coming,” some of them had already said to me while I was waiting, as if the local newspaper printed the airport’s daily manifests. I couldn’t figure out how else people always seemed to know when I was visiting. Your dad later told me it’s because your mother would brag to everybody, like a celebrity was touching down in Ogden. It’s still hard for me to imagine that, what with how unfamous I would feel beside her.

“Hey, California!” said the oversize man-boy smirking at me, his voice loud enough that everyone else turned to stare. “Looking good.”

Tucker Collier started calling me “California” long before I moved away. He found out that I lived there for a time when I was three. “That explains it,” he said, back when we were still in college. “Why you’re so different.” About me moving to Los Angeles, he still quips, “She went back to her home planet.”

No matter how many years of my life I invested in Ogden—active, youthful years—no matter how many times I came back to visit, the fact remained that once I arrived I didn’t stay. I didn’t settle in for the long haul. From then on, whenever I was in Ogden, I was a visitor. An other. As much a mystery to those people as California.

Smidge was supposed to pick me up, but she was nowhere to be seen and apparently pretending to have misplaced her phone, seeing as how she wasn’t answering calls or returning texts. Luckily for me, small Southern towns are filled with boys at the ready to swoop in and save the day. Mine had come in the form of a man standing next to me wearing his trademark wicked grin, the one that looks like he’s thinking about a joke he can’t share in public.

“Tucker Collier!” I shouted, because that’s what old friends do down here when we haven’t seen each other in forever. We shout first and last names like we’re taking attendance.

“Danielle Meyers!”

Tucker lifted me an impressive distance from the ground as he squished me to his chest. Since he’s six feet, three inches,
two hundred and thirty pounds, there wasn’t much else to do but take the brunt of the impact and label it “affection.” He was still warm from outside, and there was a sweet stickiness from his damp skin underneath his clothes.

“My spleen!” I managed to whimper as I squirmed against him.

Tucker laughed as he gently returned me to the earth. I’d always been a sucker for his big green eyes and those sandy-blond curls he refused to do anything with other than smash underneath his beat-up blue ball cap. If he were even slightly vain he could have been a model. He had that deliciously careless, homegrown look about him, a dangerous combination of helpful and hell-bent. He’d be the first one to show up at your grandmother’s funeral, and the last to leave the bar on a Sunday night.

I’m sure you know that’s a compliment.

We might have gone to high school together in a town where it seemed everybody was legally bound to date everybody else at some point, but Tucker and I had never gotten around to getting together. I could make the excuse that he’s slightly older than I am, but I think more likely it was because I was in the chess club. That’s not me calling Tucker snobby. That’s me not saying enough about how I was in the chess club.

Like how I was the president. For two years.

And made us wear T-shirts.

T-shirts that boasted
We’ve Got the Rook
.

“Sorry.” Tucker jammed one giant hand into the back pocket of his jeans as he reached out with the other. He gave
an awkward pat to my arm, stroking my limb like Lenny with a rabbit. “Didn’t mean to smush ya.”

He’d get talky after a few beers, but in public, with the “common people,” as he’d like to say, Tucker preferred an air of solemn stoicism. It was as if he was intentionally bad at hiding his superhero alter ego, just to make sure we all
knew
he was a superhero. That way we could all pretend we
didn’t
know so he could go around with that “thoughtful” expression, looking slightly over our heads like trouble was on the horizon, and he was just about to save the day.

But I knew the truth. That his stone-strong look was actually the result of being destroyed by someone he loved. We all knew each other’s secrets and mistakes, but only talked about them when the person with the problem wasn’t around. Some might call that gossip, but we did it out of respect.

“I like the hair,” he said, meaning mine, and I immediately raked my hand through my scalp to unleash the messy bun, before twirling the ends at my shoulder like a fifth-grader. It must be the size of Tucker that always turned me embarrassingly, uncharacteristically girly. Or our history. If I hadn’t known him so long, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered so much that he found something nice to say.

“Oh, thanks,” I stammered, mentally ordering myself to stand still.

“Yep,” Tucker said, clearly enjoying making me turn red. “You’re looking real good, California. Enough that I just had to say that again. Must be all those salads and movie stars rubbing off on you.”

I resisted the urge to tell him all the ways he was wrong
about how I’m “looking.” I could have easily pointed out my various patches of dry skin that were one doctor’s visit away from being labeled eczema, or show him the location of the mini-constellation of brown spots I had recently found near my right temple—some kind of unfortunate birthday present my body gave itself after I turned thirty-five. Honestly, all I really had to do was gesture toward the coffee stain I got on the plane. It looked like I’d painted a nipple onto my tank top. Luckily I’d strategically placed my purse over it, grateful the oversize nature of my carry-on protected me from possible ridicule.