You Take It From Here (23 page)

“Your wife is crazy,” I said.

“She sometimes still feels guilty about James is all.”

“What do you mean?”

Henry cleared his throat. “I don’t know. Just forget that.”

“Forget what, exactly?”

The sudden clamor on the porch announced Tucker’s arrival. “Howdy, ladies! How is your Friday going? Good, good. Henry in here?”

Henry tried to scoot past me, but I stepped in front of him, grabbing his arm.

“What did you mean?” I asked again, a sense of dread rising in my stomach. It felt like I was peeking inside a darkened room with one hand on the light switch, not quite ready to flip. I ducked my head, trying to force him to look me in the eye. His cheeks were flushed as his lips pursed and twisted, searching for some kind of emergency exit.

“Nothing,” he said. “Smidge said you might have left the bathroom door unlocked on purpose, so I figured this was about James. But she was joking; I get that now. I forgot how you didn’t—”

“What is going
on
, people?” Tucker’s booming voice was laced with accusations as he took in the scene he’d stumbled upon in the kitchen.

“Nothing,” Henry and I said at the same time.

“Then why are y’all standing like that?”

Not Tucker’s question. Yours.

I’ll never forget the sound of your voice right then, Jenny, so uncomfortable and unsure. I don’t know how long you’d been watching us, but any length of time was probably too much. Once your father uncharacteristically yelled at you to go to your room, everything looked even more suspicious than it had already been.

“Yes, sir,” you said, your voice already cracking from tears, as you ran full speed into your bedroom, slamming your door with all your force.

Tucker gave me a sarcastic wink. “This place is a whole lot more interesting now that you’re becoming a sister-wife.”

EIGHTEEN

I
had been awake most of the night trying to figure out what Henry was talking about. What kind of secret about James would Smidge be holding from me?

In the morning I stepped out of the shower to find a small, square rash on my back, just to the left of my spine. It extended outward in a small line toward my armpit. I probably should have been instantly alarmed, but all I could muster was a weary sigh.

Considering all the ailments and unknowns I was enduring, a rash seemed like one I could handle. Nothing too serious could come from a visit to the dermatologist.

Dr. Fowler’s eyes bulged behind round, thin glasses with a yellow tint, and she started each of her sentences in almost a whisper, a mumble that built up steam as she tumbled toward the final punctuation. She sounded like a fleet of police cars on the chase.

After giving my back a perfunctory inspection, she said, “
Thrmrrfuhl
say-that’s-either-shingles-or-
HERPES.
”

That has to be pretty near the top of the list of words people don’t enjoy getting yelled at them.

“Herpes?” I asked incredulously, which is the only way anybody ever asks that question.

“
Impra
probably-SHINGLES.”

“I thought shingles was restricted to the elderly.”

Dr. Fowler left the room, presumably to mumble-yell an order to a nurse. A few minutes later I met Glenda.

She was cheerful, the opposite of Dr. Fowler, with a shiny bob that gave a perky swing as she nodded, which was something she did constantly, as if she were continually agreeing with her own happy thoughts. Her dark eyes seemed unnaturally round, as if she had just come back from having them dilated.

“Okay, Danielle,” Glenda said, smiling wide enough that I was tempted to start counting her teeth. “I hear you got the shingles,” she said. She shoved her fists into her lab coat pockets and shuddered, but never once lost her smile. It felt like she was hosting a children’s show and I was today’s special lesson. “I bet you’re in a lot of pain!”

“I thought maybe I was dying,” I confessed.

“I bet you did.” She tsked.

Glenda swabbed the blisters on my back as she told me the test was just a formality; she was pretty sure I had shingles. She gingerly placed a hand on my shoulder. Her eyebrows were plucked to two thin strands, her forehead wide with calm.

“I’m sorry to tell you, sugar kitten,” she said, “but it’s about to get worse.”

“My life?”

She laughed. “The pain! But, yes. Your life, too, I suppose. By the way, the medicine we give you is the same we give people for herpes. So if you use the pharmacist down on the first floor, you pay no attention to the look she might give you.”

Then Glenda turned serious. “This is from stress,” she said. “Something’s going on with you that you can’t quite handle. Your skin looks like someone’s been rubbing sandpaper on a baby lizard.”

That’s when I realized the most important question: “Is this contagious?”

“To people who haven’t had the chicken pox, it is,
immhmm.
But you’d be giving someone chicken pox, not this.”

Smidge had never had the chicken pox. She bragged about this on all of her online profiles.

“Short. Talky. Never eats meringue. Never had the chicken pox.”

As I was getting back into my clothes, the sleeve of my shirt brushed against my arm. It felt like I’d just tried to wear a coat of fire. I became one of those cartoon characters whacked by a frying pan, spine all wiggly, face stretched in pain.

Glenda gave me a comforting pout. “Shingles is an inflammation of a nerve, the whole nerve. On you: your left side, spine to fingertip.” She gestured down my arm, two fingers extended like a flight attendant pointing out the exit doors. “Everything that touches you along this line for the next couple of weeks is gonna hurt like hell. Load up on painkillers, stay inside, and try to sleep this off.”

It is possible that I sounded a little too relieved when I
called Smidge from my car to tell her I needed to fly back to Los Angeles, that I was contaminated and couldn’t be around her.

She didn’t take the news well.

“Oh, so you’re abandoning me, is that it?”

“It’s not abandoning. I’m sick and I can’t be near you.”

“I’ve been sick and near you before. We shared a toilet during the Food Poisoning Epidemic of 1995.”

“This is different. If you caught the chicken pox, it could—I’m not sure, but I know it would probably make things worse.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe get Vikki to help you,” I offered. “She’ll like that, and you can boss her around and she won’t ask as many questions as I do.”

“Ugh,” Smidge grunted. I could hear her washing dishes, the rush of water splashing against the sink, the
clink
of plates piling.

“Besides, I need to check in at home. Business is piling up and I have a few clients I need to tend to.”

“Oh, for your dumb job where you teach people how to open their bills and buy carrots in a bag? You’re right. That sounds
real
important.”

“I’m sick, Smidge,” I whined.

“Are you sick?” she mocked. “Do you have an owie on your arm?”

She interrupted herself with a coughing fit. I could picture her struggling against the sink to choke down the spasm inside her lungs, angry that she’d had to take a break to catch her breath.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You should be.” She waited for me to respond, to take it all back, to drive over wearing a hazmat suit, I guess. It was that time in our fight where I was supposed to bend to her wishes. But I couldn’t.

My e-mails were piling up, clients were starting to get frustrated, my future income was threatening to dwindle away. My website was down for three days before I realized it. No telling how much potential work I lost during that time.

Plus I was just too sick. I didn’t think I could handle anything other than getting into a bed and swallowing a painkiller.

I heard the squeak of her faucet as she closed the tap.

“I’ll come back,” I said. “You know I will.”

“Frankly, I don’t care if you do,” she snapped. “You obviously don’t give a shit about me, or you’d think of something, you quitter.”

And then she hung up on me.

If only Mr. Carlton were still alive, I could call him for advice. He was the one who really knew how to deal with Smidge, who always stuck up for me. “Now you be nice to Danielle,” he’d tell his daughter. “She’s gonna be the only friend you have left one day.”

At this point Smidge didn’t look too terribly sick. It’s not like people were stopping her at the grocery store to ask if she was okay. My point is, Smidge wasn’t dying that day, and she wouldn’t die the next. She hadn’t died in the months I’d been on pause, living under her every whim. I dropped everything because it seemed like after she said she was sick, there was
no tomorrow and even less of a guarantee for a day after that. With a terminal diagnosis, “the end” seems at once an immediate terror pressing down and this fuzzy finish line way out in the impossible distance. When each day passes without death, you start to believe it will never come.

I needed to be by myself for just a second. If I was really possibly going to give up my life and everything in it to morph into someone else’s, at least I could mourn the last of my independence, the shreds of what was Danielle Meyers. I couldn’t ask Smidge for that, but I could take it.

Smidge could probably use some time away from me, too. She should be alone with her family; stop thinking of it as a project that needed finishing. Henry was clearly getting suspicious and frustrated. You were acting up so often at this point you were basically holding a sign that read
I need you to talk to me, Mama.

If I removed myself, not by choice but by doctor’s orders, perhaps the family could return to a unit of three, and I could go back to a life that seemed quite quaint in comparison.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t getting out of Ogden that easily. That podunk, stupid-ass town only had two flights out per day, and I’d already missed my second chance at freedom. That left me with a night where I was effectively, electively homeless.

The cost of a flight to Los Angeles was more than most people in Ogden pay for a mortgage. No wonder people end up staying forever.
I could visit my cousin in Manhattan, or I could feed my family for the next two months. Guess I’ll never leave. I’ve seen New York on the TV, anyway.

The Cottage, Ogden’s only decent hotel since the Chesterfield closed long ago, was booked solid. The only other option, the 75 Motel and Diner, was a known bedbug factory. Not to mention I believe you aren’t allowed a room unless you plan to turn tricks in it.

I just wanted to be somewhere quiet where there was a bed and maybe someone to run a bath for me. I needed someone who wasn’t Smidge. Someone who didn’t mind the attention being placed—even temporarily—on me.

I called Tucker with a single question.

“Have you had the chicken pox?”

NINETEEN

T
ucker answered his front door wearing a surgical mask.

“That’s very funny,” I said.

“Smidge gave me this actually. It’s from that time you guys were traveling in dangerous areas. Jenny got a dollhouse. Henry got a knife. Smidge got me a three-cent SARS mask.”

Tucker welcomed me in with a hospitable pat to my arm, which caused me to double over in pain.

“Ohhh,” I moaned, gripping my biceps as my vision whitened hot into stars. “This thing is terrible.”

“My grandfather had it once, up near his eyes,” Tucker said. “It’s the only time I ever saw that man cry.”

“Please don’t touch me. I’m in so much pain.”

“I think you wrote me a poem that went something like that our senior year.”

“You wish.”

“No, not then. You weren’t the prettiest thing back then, California. No offense.”

“You’re lucky I’m so tired.”

“Your sickbed, ma’am,” Tucker said. “Please take to it.”

The couch was folded out into a bed, complete with clean sheets and lots of pillows. On the side table rested a bottle of Advil and an unopened plastic jug of water. A stack of fashion magazines sat beside a mason jar filled with yellow daisies.