You Take It From Here (17 page)

“My arm hurts when I lift it,” she admitted, whacking at her right limb.

“Where does it hurt?” I asked. “I mean, is it your arm or your shoulder or—”

“I guess you could say it hurts in my
cancer
,” she said, effectively shutting me up.

Smidge then sang us to a new topic. “
Sooooo
, I am going to call Tucker. Tell him that Henry is driving me crazy and I want him out of the house. Make him—I don’t know—build me a new garage, or something. Something that will have him busy all day chopping trees and hauling heavy things. Whatever will get him as exhausted at night as I am.”

“I could call Tucker,” I offered, but the second the words left my mouth I knew I said them with way too much enthusiasm.

Smidge was on it immediately. “You sure volunteered for that quickly, missy.”

“No, I didn’t.”

Smidge coughed into her fist, the world’s tiniest lawyer forming her closing argument. Wagging her index finger, she said, “Don’t you get any ideas that involve Tucker Collier, do you understand? You are mine.”

“I don’t have any ideas, Smidge.”

“Better not.” Satisfied, she rolled her shoulders before giving a small shudder of a cough. “Danny, I have been thinking that we do not devote enough time, as a people, to the glory that is napping.”

“I think you’re right,” I said.

“It’s just a smart thing to do. Recharge. Animals know to do it.” She raised her head toward me, but her eyes were closed. “Who are the people who
siesta
?” she asked. “Mexicans? The Spanish?”

“Actually, I think several cultures—”

“Well, I’m fixing to
siesta
up in here,” she said, turning from the counter to bend forward at her waist. She dropped her head, stretching out her back.
“Poquito siesta por moi.”

It was 8:30 in the morning. She couldn’t have been awake for more than an hour.

“Okay, you nap,” I said. “And then I’ll call Tucker for you.”

“That sounds like a lovely idea,” Smidge murmured. She must have been tired, as her voice hadn’t been that sweet to me in a while. She was looking around the kitchen as if trying to determine which countertop would provide the most comfort.

I eased a gentle arm around her waist. Smidge folded herself into it, dropping against me. She fit so perfectly into my curves you could almost hear the
click.
Careful not to go anywhere near her bruise, I slowly walked her toward the couch.

Just as easily, we could have been back in college, Smidge coming home too late and too drunk as I guided her toward her future hangover, foot over foot. We could have been twenty. We could have been thirty. We could have been in Costa Rica drunk on what we thought was a mixed drink that turned out to be pure tequila. We could have been walking Smidge as we did when she was in labor. We’d been here so many times.

But this time, we were almost thirty-six and headed toward a couch so Smidge could nap before most people had finished their first cup of coffee.

It was too early to call Tucker, but I’d already picked the skin around my fingernails and chewed off the inside of my bottom lip. I needed to find something else to distract me. I turned to the internet, where hours can pass like seconds, when one question leads to ten answers and paths you couldn’t possibly predict.

This is when I did something I’m not exactly proud of, but I would never take back.

I read through Smidge’s cache. I clicked every website she’d gone through recently. If she wouldn’t tell me what was going on with her, I’d let her internet history give me some answers.

She’d searched
non-small-cell lung cancer
and
adenocarcinoma
.

She’d searched
metastasizing
.

I selected pages at random and dove in.

“Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths in women, and the second-highest cause of all deaths in the United States.”

I was looking for answers, not facts. I wanted the loophole, the excuse, the way out, the reason this wasn’t one of those numbers. That
she
wasn’t like all the others. How her cancer was different.

“Almost a third of lung cancer patients never smoked, and one in five women with lung cancer never smoked.”

I felt like I was groping through darkness, clicking from one bleak page to the next. If Smidge had read all of this, no wonder she had no hope. No wonder she was past all this and on to her plans for what would happen after she was gone.

“Survival rate hasn’t improved in decades.”

“Not enough funding.”

“Not enough answers.”

After an hour of letting one page take me to another, I could tell you that her adenocarcinoma probably started in tissue of the outer parts of her lung, that it might have taken a long time to develop, and she probably didn’t feel the tumor growing. Eighty percent of lung cancers are non-small-cell lung cancers like hers, and it’s the most common lung cancer
to affect women, often in nonsmokers. The survival rate can be good, but when it recurs, as Smidge’s had, and spreads outside the lung (they call that “metastasizing”), the survival rate is about the same amount as my dear friend’s nickname.

“If you’ve never known someone with lung cancer, it’s because they didn’t make it.”

I got to where I could spell
adenocarcinoma
without checking. I could tell you that it is the most common type of lung cancer in people under the age of forty-five and the most common type of lung cancer among all Asians.

I became the equivalent of a human search engine with what was killing my best friend, but I couldn’t find anywhere in the whole wide Web or world that could tell me how to make it stop.

Needless to say, by the time you skipped into the kitchen, I was grateful for the interruption. You didn’t notice me, as you had earbuds in and you were bopping around to some song, having just come back from a jog around the neighborhood. Your skin was a refreshingly youthful pink, rosy and glistening with sweat. The back of your shorts and halter bra were damp and you were light on your feet in running socks with small white balls at the heel. Now that we’d bleached everything on your head back to blond, and cut the longer half, you found a way to wear your hair pushed back with a silver headband.

Your back was to me as you took a long gulp straight from the milk carton. Where you once had chicken pox, now you had hips. You had definition in your arms; perspiration had collected beneath your breasts, pooling in the curve of your lower back—you had lost the allover shine and stink of a kid.

You spotted me as you closed the refrigerator door. “Stare much, pedo?” You grinned, pulling your earbuds out by the cord. “I want food.”

I took you to the Office, our nickname for Waffle House since you were six, when you declared it to be the best restaurant in the world, so much so that you planned on working there as soon as you grew up.

“I will be head waffler,” you proudly proclaimed that day. “And they’re going to put my picture over the door and start calling waffles ‘Jenny Squares.’”

“Aim higher, darlin’,” your mother had said.

I argued with Smidge that getting people to change what they call a waffle seemed a rather lofty goal.

We threw one of your birthday parties there. I flew in for it once I found out that they were going to let us replace one of the songs on the jukebox with “Jenny Squares,” a number Henry had commissioned Sweet & Lowe to write. They played that tune at The Pantry for years after. They might still play it, for all I know. I can’t go back to The Pantry. Have you been there? Do they still do the Smidget Special on Tuesdays?

We sat at the booth closest to the griddles so you could guess which part of our order would arrive first. You were never wrong.

“Here come your hash browns,” you said, and within fifteen seconds they were placed in front of me, long before my eggs or bacon would arrive, in typical Waffle House fashion. Food comes strictly on a this-part-is-finished-cooking basis.

You hovered over an overbuttered piece of toast with two hands, your wrists bent inward, shoulders hunched forward, as if everything was just so much heavier when you are thirteen.

Suddenly I felt, for the first time in my life, completely uncool. You were sitting there with your distant stare and your weighted toast and I just couldn’t compete. All of me was lame, every part. I was like your dorky aunt with a pilly sweater and a cat-shaped purse, someone who says things like “You’ll understand when you’re older,” and asks unimportant, time-filling questions like “How’s school?”

It was one thing to be intimidated by your mother. I knew why she could get inside my head and make me question myself. But to be nervous around you, to feel as awkward as the new girl by your locker, it threw me off. How could you have that much power and at the same time not care even slightly that you had it? Your lack of concern only made you stronger.

I found myself treating you like you were a sunglasses-wearing celebrity, and I was on your press junket. Despite desperately searching for topics, all I could think to do was compliment your shirt and ask if your food was good, working hard to keep myself from fawning:
“What’s it like to be so cool?”

“You guys weren’t gone for very long,” you noted while making brief eye contact, letting me know you were searching for information. I wasn’t about to bend.

“I know.” I craned my head back as if I needed something that wasn’t just a change of subject. I asked, “How’s school?”

Dammit.

You shrugged. “Why do people always ask that?”

“I know, right?” I said. “What is that, exactly?
School.
That’s a lot of things. Classes. Teachers. Other people. After-school activities.”

You busied yourself studying that bread you still hadn’t eaten, staring at it like there was something to read across the front. Finally you chose to pull at a crust corner, breaking off a crumb to lick from your thumb. Your voice rose as you asked, “I mean, what is the
deal
with
school
? Eggs.”

The waitress dropped a plate of eggs in front of me.

“Are you making fun of me?” I asked. “Did you just do a
Seinfeld
impression?”

“Yes, I am making fun of you, and I’ve seen that show. It’s only on a million times a day, even though it’s old.”

“It’s not old,” I snapped.

“Old like you.”

“How’s school?”

“It sucks.”

“How are things going with that boy you shaved your head for?”

“Bacon.” You reached across the table to snatch a piece before the waitress finished placing it in front of me. “What’s going on with my mom? She’s been weird lately.”

“Oh, you know your mom. She’s just being your mom.” I added a quick, “I bet they forgot your biscuit.”

You had something on me. You knew it, even though you didn’t know what it was you had yet. But you knew I was stammering for a reason. You slowly, deliberately, placed your chin into your right palm, settling in for a good, long stare.

It was my turn to examine toast. “A little burned,” I meekly stated.

I will not get itchy. I will not turn red. I will not let this child smoke me out. I will not remember the time she got me to accidentally tell her what she was getting for Christmas. I will not
think about the time she got Henry to admit he was the Tooth Fairy. I will not—

“Your eggs are getting cold,” I said.

“So are yours,” you countered, pointing toward my stomach, referring to the eggs
inside
my body. “At least, that’s what I hear.”

“Jennifer Cooperton!” I gasped as I placed my hands protectively over my hips, sheltering my ovaries from such insulting talk. “You are not nice.”

“Mom told me how you’re thinking of having a kid. Adopting? I don’t know, I was only half listening. Did you catch baby fever? Is it because you’re old? Is that what happens?”

I found a way to close my mouth before I spoke again. “Your mother thinks she’s being funny. She wants me to have a family. A husband. A kid. The whole shebang.”

You pushed your eggs into a pool of ketchup, rotating them until they were coated red. “
Tsh,
I don’t want a baby. Or a husband.” You continued to torture your food as you added, “Never ever.”

“Why not?” I signaled for the check, intending to keep the conversation firmly fixed on you for the rest of our time there.

“Because it basically destroys your life. You never get to be what you want to be.”

“What if you want to be a mom?”

“Then I hope I also want to kill myself, because that’s what I’d rather do first.”

I rolled my eyes. “You might think differently when you’re older.”

That’s when you sneered.

But what else was I supposed to say to you? I knew I was saying all these things that people say to younger people, and I never thought I’d be this person, that I’d resort to these stock phrases, but also it was the truth. Not
my
truth, but some people’s truth.

I could have told you about women I’d known who swore they’d never have kids but then met the right man or woman and from that second on all they wanted to do was stuff their house full of children and toys and pets and become a huge group of people who share the same last name and get discounts at amusement parks, who enjoy taking vacations in RVs and “roughing it” out in the woods, who gather around a worn-in sectional sofa to watch “their shows,” who have game nights and compost piles in the backyard next to their chicken coops even though they live in a major city.

But I’d never related to those women, I didn’t know how to communicate with them when it came to daily life, as mine never involved cutting up food for another person to eat, or wiping the butt of any living creature, including a cat. I wasn’t convinced that you were wrong, honestly, but I felt like I wasn’t supposed to give you that kind of life advice. I was really worried that anything I said would change your life permanently, and any stripping or pole dancing in your future could be traced squarely back to something I said to you.