You Take It From Here (7 page)

The second one immediately followed, and for a moment I couldn’t even see Smidge through all the dust kicked up by fifty children tangling over possession of two balls. It wasn’t a game they were playing. This time it was a fight.

“Those are to share!” I heard her yell. As she was getting elbowed out of the crowd, she turned to me with a look of desperation. “What is Spanish for—” She abruptly turned back toward the kids and yelled,
“¡Compartir! ¡Compartir!”

The kids continued fighting, pushing, running, and yelling until the teachers got involved. The children were lined up and severely scolded as Smidge returned the soccer balls to the van.

“I see now why you have a rule,” she said, chin tucked in defeat.

To his credit, fake Sean Penn never said a word the entire drive back to the work site. He just chewed on a toothpick, as if nothing had happened.

Smidge was in the backseat, staring out the window in shock, her face slack. “I didn’t mean to do that,” she said. “I just wanted to help.”

I rubbed her arm. “It’s okay. You were trying to do a good thing.”

“I need to learn Spanish,” she said.

“Probably not. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to get asked back. Not after you gave them sad balls.”

From then on, “sad balls” stood for trying to do a nice gesture, only to end up accidentally causing a shitstorm.

I would have never guessed in a million years that the king of all sad balls was about to smack me right in the face.

SEVEN

A
bout seven hours into our road trip, just outside Birmingham, Alabama, Smidge abruptly yelled, “Okay, we’re pulling off here!”

“How can you have to pee again? We just stopped like—”

“No, no, we’re here!”

“What do you mean, ‘here’? We barely left Louisiana!”

We were in some place called Anniston, Alabama, and I was confused. It was just a little suburb, and as Smidge directed me off one street and onto another, I started getting suspicious. What could be at the end of this map? Judging from the lack of anything you couldn’t find in your typical small-town-off-a-highway, I was concerned our destination might not be an airport.

“Okay, park here,” she said, just past a hotel.

It was a parking lot near what appeared to be a furniture store. “Are we doing something for Henry?” I asked.

Smidge laughed, pointing at something on the other side of the windshield. “You still haven’t seen it! Look up.”

I craned my neck to look out the window. Towering above
us was a giant office chair. It was bigger than the building, probably thirty feet high.

“Smidge, what is this?”

“Duh! It’s a gi-
normous
chair!”

“I can see that.”

Smidge was already out the door and on her feet. “Come on! Grab your camera!”

I did what I was told, but I felt a growing knot of anger in my stomach. I’d been looking forward to this vacation. I’d even figured out how I would enjoy the cruise ship, if that was where she was forcing me to go. I was going to pretend we were an old lesbian couple on our first trip away after the kids were grown. It wasn’t ideal, but I could have worked with that, had a little fun with it, maybe made Smidge rub my feet by the pool, just so we seemed more legitimately like lady lovers.

I’d been busy and I’d been sad. I needed our vacation, our escape from our lives. I wanted to be far, far away. But there we were, staring at a giant chair, still in the
South.
You can’t vacation in the South when you’re from there. And listen: I’d rather walk from here to Los Angeles than step one damn foot into Florida.

Smidge looked elated standing underneath that gigantic chair, like she’d reached an important milestone, as if we’d walked the entire Great Wall.

It might have been just another prank. Maybe she was about to tell me there were plane tickets taped to the bottom of that chair.

“Can you take a cell phone picture for Henry?” she asked. “You probably have to go way back to get everything in the frame.”

“Smidge.” My voice warbled as I tried to hide my impatience.

“I’m gonna tell Henry I bought this chair, too.” She posed, one hand behind her head, leaning sassily against a thick leg beam. “That’s why we’re here! Because this is the funniest thing I’ve ever thought of.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it! Well, and you’re looking at the World’s Largest Chair, so you can cross that off your to-do list.”

“We’re not going anywhere else? I packed half my life into a plane so that I could drive to a giant chair and take a picture of you?”

“Yes! I mean, fine, we can drive to Atlanta if you want and get a drink.”

My jaw clenched tight as I hissed through my teeth,
“Smidge.”

I wonder how many people have forgotten that her real name’s Farrah. She never seemed like a Farrah. Nobody called her that, not in as long as I’d known her. Not even her father called her that, and he named her after his sister.

Your mom had what she referred to as a “sad puberty.” She was a big girl, too big for her small size. I’ve seen the pictures she threw away before you were born. She had a stomach that would sit high up over her shorts, like she was playing make-believe pregnant lady with a basketball stuffed under her shirt.

Her mother named her Smidge. It originated with “Just a smidge more,” as in, that’s what she would always eat. “Just a smidge more than a normal girl should.” Than a thin girl would. Your grandmother’s relationship with your mother was a complicated thing.

Smidge’s mother once said to one of her friends, “I don’t know how that pudgy thing shares my genes.” She didn’t care that Smidge was standing right there. “But that’s my daughter. Squat and stunted. The Smidget.”

Smidge dumped all that weight once she turned twelve and discovered the glamour and camaraderie that came with preteen eating disorders. After Smidge got tiny she embraced the nickname and grew a personality to match it. By the time I met her she was small, sassy, and proud. I think she liked how the name made her seem like she was already everybody’s best friend.

Sometimes when we got drunk I called her Smidget Jones. Occasionally I got away with calling her Midge. Smidgeriffic. Smiddy. Or simply Smeh, which is what I used when I ran tired of words and just needed her to give me a beer or a hug. I said it like a sigh. “Smeh.”

“Smeh, I need you.”

“Smeh, I love you.”

To which she would reply,
“Danny. You know I love you, too. I love you the mostest.”

But the woman standing underneath the World’s Largest Chair, I was not calling her Smeh. That woman was Smidge, and about thirteen seconds from being Farrah.

“Do it, Danny. Go take a picture!” she shouted.

“No!” I threw my cell phone to the ground like a petulant child. I was done with feeling like I was the only one not in on the joke. I didn’t want to be the last to learn the truth again. “This can’t be about the chair, I know it. What is going on? Why aren’t we on a plane? Why aren’t we having fun somewhere with drinks that have umbrellas or taking pictures
of churches and
real
monuments? What are we doing in Alabama, Smidge? Can you at least tell me that?”

“Fine!” Smidge clenched her fists and practically doubled over. “I have taken you to the middle of nowhere so I can tell you that the cancer is back!”

I felt it first in my knees. They went numb, liquefied, stopped working entirely. My lungs paused, leaving me frozen in time.

Her cancer was back.
Her
cancer was back, as if it was something she used to own, something she had sent off to boarding school. But it wasn’t supposed to be here ever again. Not after she beat it. Not once we called her a survivor. We had a party. We wore T-shirts. There was a cake. Once you’ve eaten your survivor cake, that’s supposed to signify an ending. That time was supposed to be over.

So how was it here again? Why would cancer rear up like a phoenix?
This
should be the twisted joke. I wanted her to bust into a grin, shocked that I once again fell for something that couldn’t possibly be true.
You can’t get cancer twice, silly! That would be so unfair!

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that your mother didn’t start crying. Even in that moment she wouldn’t let her face get wet. Rather, she was slapping a pillar of the gigantic chair’s leg, batting at it like a vending machine that stole her money. A tiny little lady battling an enormous piece of furniture as she invented curse words for this situation, barking in furious gasps.

“I just wanted to see this . . . suck-crap chair because . . . I’m trying to get some . . . goddamn things done before I’m . . . shitballs dead!”

“Smeh,” I said, but I could hardly hear myself. “Smeh,” I tried again, but I knew if I kept talking, I’d cry.

Smidge threw herself back against the chair leg. She swallowed and punched her thighs before staring me down. “My stupid cancer is back,” she said. “And now I’m going to be dead just like my daddy. I can’t believe it. Fucking cancer. Fucking cancer, Danielle! Again!”

Cainsir.
That’s how she said it. Hospitals and needles and vomiting and tests and
no, please, not this again.

I forced a question past my lips. “What can I do?”

All the little muscles in her face relaxed as she resumed control. “I’m glad you asked,” she said, as she folded her arms across her chest. I was right; they were thinner. “I have a job for you,” she said, all business.

“Anything.”

“Can I get that word in writing?”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“Get me to a drink, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

I stumbled over to my small friend and pulled her in tight. I hugged her as hard as I could, until I worried I was pressing tiny tumors into her heart.

“I still need you to take a picture of this chair. I mean, we drove all this way.”

EIGHT

I
’d known Smidge longer than I’d known how to use a curling iron. I know that’s a fact, because Smidge is the one who taught me.

I was fourteen when my dad moved us from Brooklyn to Ogden. I remember being so pissed off my first day at Neville High. All my preconceived notions of what living in the South was going to be like were bouncing around in my head, notions that were mostly acquired from television shows. I assumed everyone would own a horse; they’d all get into their cars by jumping through the windows. I figured everyone I’d meet would have a lump of tobacco jammed in his cheek.

My mother takes some of the blame for this. Right around the last time I ever saw her, she told me she was leaving and had absolutely no desire to haul her ass down to a “po-dunk, racist-ass, shit-kicking, cousin-fucker town just because your father thinks he owns me.”

You never met my mom. I don’t really talk to her all that much. Never to her face, anyway. I sometimes talk to the idea of her, when I get really frustrated. I talk to the memory of
her, ask why she didn’t care to find out what happened to me once I left Brooklyn. I ask her if she started doing drugs and that’s why she forgot about me, or if she reinvented herself and became a happy homemaker with three kids and another on the way. That last one I could almost understand. Maybe for her it’s just too painful that even though she eventually got it right, there’s a little girl in her past for whom she got it spectacularly wrong.

My parents were very young when they had me, as it wasn’t something they were planning on doing. They got married because that’s what you did, that’s how a man was a good man to a girl who was suddenly going to be a mother. They got married and tried to pretend they were in love with each other. It never caught on between them, never tricked their emotions into believing it. Therefore, I was pretty much a sentence they were serving. My mom got out early for terrible behavior.

She defected from the family, declared herself a “roving artist,” a woman who only wanted to be married to “Our Lady America.” I’m going to go ahead and guess that’s an area that never went past the five boroughs.