You Take It From Here (35 page)

“Where are you going to go?”

“My ex lives in Kentucky, so I figure I’ll start with whatever is the very opposite side of the planet from there. Which is kind of in the middle of the Indian Ocean. But Australia’s close enough. Maybe you’ll come visit,” he added.

“Maybe,” I said. “I wish I could make you stay here.”

“You don’t mean that. And you don’t have to stay here either,” he said. “They won’t make you stay.”

“Nobody’s making me do anything.”

“You’re a good girl,” he said, leaning forward to give me the lightest of kisses.

I slid my hand down his arm until I found his hand. “Hey, do you know where I can score some Seconal?”

THIRTY-FOUR

V
ikki led the hospice. Turns out she was an expert at palliative care. She taught Henry how to bathe his wife, when to give her which medicine, how to prop her up at night so she could sleep without feeling like she was collapsing into her tumors. She refused to move into a portable hospital bed, insisting on staying in her room, on her mattress. There were many medicines, some of which Smidge didn’t want to take. Her doctor came by, bringing even more. He charmed her until she agreed to take most of them.

I’d always heard people referring to their loved ones in end-stage care as having “good days and bad days.” I quickly learned what that meant.

The good days were when people came to visit. Nobody ever came empty-handed. To this day, I can neither smell lilies nor eat macaroni and cheese without thinking of your mother’s final days.

The Christmas season entered quietly, and we were all intent on ignoring it, except that Smidge wouldn’t have it. “Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for Christmas. Bring on the presents.”

Seth Sampson brought your mother an enormous stuffed giraffe. It was apparently an inside joke between them, because Smidge let out a scream of laughter so loud and sudden that everyone came running to check if she was okay.

Thankfully, she didn’t have too many bad days. Maybe because she had too many people ready to assist the second she felt any discomfort. We weren’t going to let cancer be in charge. Henry and I took shifts. When one of us was with her, the other tried to be with you. Your grandmother did everything else. She was an excellent cook.

One day I found Henry in his shed, staring at his tool box. “Nothing here will fix it,” he said. He was pale as a moth wing, quietly shaking.

I went searching for you, and made you do that dance number you were learning for jazz. It was soon apparent that you hadn’t learned it all the way, but you kept your eyes on your father as you moved your feet. “See, and then I do this!” It wasn’t until you were on your fifth encore he realized you had long ago run out of steps and were stalling.

You kept that house alive during that time, Jenny. I don’t know if anyone told you that. It would have been so easy to wallow, to fall into that pit of anguish, but you were someone to protect, someone who nurtured us when we hit our low points, and you seemed so grateful to have us all together.

Which is why I was so shocked when you decided to have a “Come to Jesus” moment with me. You cornered me in the kitchen, trapping me between the island and the refrigerator.

“She’s waiting for you,” you said. “It’s not about Christmas. It’s you.”

“Jenny, don’t make it sound like it’s up to me.”

You sneered like I had stepped in something and dragged it through the carpet. “Don’t be a chicken. She’s going to wait as long as she thinks you need her.”

There was no way it was my fault that Smidge was still holding on. Vikki kept insisting it was just a matter of time—no matter how many good days would convince us that she might live another month, another year, maybe turn around and cure herself once again—a bad day would always follow, one where she would falter, grow weaker, sleep most of the day away, and cough through the night.

“If I can say good-bye to my mother,” you said, “then you can say it to yours, too.”

You were right. All those years I let Smidge boss me around, be the overprotective pit bull by my side, was because I needed her to be the one coming out swinging when life dealt me its biggest blows. That’s why I couldn’t handle her cancer the first time around. It was too scary to have my surrogate mother leaving me, to be abandoned yet again. It wasn’t fair that no matter how obedient I was, no matter how much I did everything right, she could still go away at any time.

Having a mother is only a guarantee until the day you are born.

Tucker got the Seconal. He pressed a paper bag into my hand, and like a good Southern man, he wouldn’t tell me how he got it, or where it came from. His only concern was that I understood that he’d done it. The directions were on a piece of paper inside.

When I told Smidge that Tucker had scored her the “
suicider
,” as she liked to call it, I saw the relief soothe every part of her body.

“That man’s a good man,” she said.

“He is.”

“I shouldn’t have said such hateful things about him.”

“Well, you’re hateful.”

“Hmph. You’re the one who dumped him.”

“Lady, don’t make me smother you with this pillow before you get to taste your
sui-cider
.”

She mumbled a laugh, reached up, and wiped her mouth. Her breath was slow, rattling.

“Henry is a good man, too,” she said.

“He is.”

“Then why won’t you be with him?”

I stroked her arm, careful to be gentle. “Because he’s
your
man.”

She looked off toward the window. Creaks and moans escaped her body as she seemed to be searching for something. “What if he doesn’t find someone? Or what if he does and she’s an asshole?”

I knew this was what you meant, Jenny. This was the moment you were asking me to have with your mother. She was waiting to hear everything was going to be okay. She needed proof before she could leave.

So I did what you told me to do. I said, “You have to let us go, Smidge. You have to let us bumble around and make mistakes and miss you.” Then I cried. “I am really going to miss you.”

“Good,” she said. “There’d better be a planet-size hole in this world after I’m gone. That’s why I stayed alive long enough to ruin Christmas forever.” All that time I’d wanted her to fight, to stay around longer, but up until that moment I hadn’t noticed she was doing exactly that.

She was fuzzy, blurred out through my tears as I said, “I hate that you’re leaving. I hate that it’s so soon.”

“Then you’re really going to hate that it is now.”

“Now?”

“You go call in my family. I am going to say some goodbyes while you fix Mama one last drink. I’d like some apple-juice with a hell of a mixer.”

“But.”

“And I’m going to drink it alone. I don’t want anybody getting in trouble. After you hand me that glass, you leave and don’t let anybody come back here until I’m dead.”

There’s never the right last moment. Even if you get to say good-bye, even if you get to say “I love you,” even if you jump off a plane and get a tattoo and hug everyone you’ve ever met right before you drift off with a smile, it is never the right last moment. There is always more to say, somewhere to go, something to remember. Another discussion, another fight. Another day. There is always supposed to be another day.

She had her last moment with Henry, and she had her last moment with you. I don’t know what she said to either of you when she took you alone in her bedroom. It’s none of my business, and it’s not my memory to share.

My last moment with Smidge is enormous in my heart. It has expanded to fill all of the space inside of me where she
is missing. I know it was her time, I know it was what she wanted, even though it sometimes seemed like it was taking forever for her to get to the end. It really seemed somehow she’d find a way to stay alive, because she always got what she wanted. Once her last day came, I couldn’t believe how fast she was gone. Just like that. Thirty-six years of that tornado of a woman on this planet and then she was gone. Forever.

It’s never the right last moment.

THIRTY-FIVE

A
s well as you took it at the time, as much as you surrounded yourself with the friends and family who supported you during Smidge’s final days and up until the memorial on Serenity Hilltop, the day had to come when the mourners weren’t as plentiful, when you took off your black clothes and realized your mother was never coming back. I resolved to do whatever it took to make sure you never resented or hated Smidge for leaving you so soon.

Dissolving your life into someone else’s can’t be a process. It has to just happen. That way, everyone just deals with it and makes it work.

I sold most of my things in Los Angeles and moved only the essentials into the Ogden house. I was careful with Smidge’s money, and I made sure Henry did what she wanted. You might remember he opened Henry’s House not too long after that. I helped with inventory and acquisitions, filling in where Tucker would’ve been. Supporting Henry where Smidge would’ve stood.

But always at a bit of a distance.

I stayed in the guest room for the next five years. I think you two let me stay mostly out of our mutual sadness, our loneliness. Not having someone to boss us around was difficult to get used to for a while. With Henry and me both able to focus on you, it kept us from feeling so lost.

I like to think we made the most of it. There were good times in there. We took trips, lighting memorial candles in cathedrals for your mother on more than four different continents. You let me be the shoulder to cry on for your first heartbreak. I taught you how to drive a stick shift. Every year on your mother’s birthday we made cookies from her recipe, and left some out for her like she was Santa. We even went to church that one time. Your genius brain got you into college all by yourself, but I like to take at least a little credit that you applied to more than just that one where your boyfriend was going.

And then suddenly you were all grown up and beautiful, with as many of your belongings as possible stuffed into the back of the Pickle as you headed off to Austin for college. You waved good-bye toward your father and me where we were standing on the porch. As we waved back, Henry brought an arm around me, and I realized what was happening.

It was your mother’s dream, her vision, just as she’d described it so long ago. She was right, once again. That stubborn woman always got what she wanted, even from her bossy porch swing in Heaven.

That’s when it ended for me, Jenny. My promise was over. The job fulfilled. You were raised and you were thriving. I had
done everything your mother wanted, everything your father needed.

I know it’s hard for you to understand, but as much as Henry and I cared for each other, we never fell in love. We were never going to. We weren’t attracted to each other, and he deserves a woman he wants to cook for and care for, as much as he did for your mother. Henry’s love makes the sun wake up and circle the woman he desires, and that’s part of what makes him such a wonderful man. I couldn’t sit in some other woman’s place, a woman he had yet to meet. His love, as you know, is a special thing.

That’s why I immediately went to find Tucker, who at that point was living in London. If I fell in lust for that man when he was in a ball cap, I fell in love with him the second I saw him in a peacoat. He met me at the airport, once again, but this time when he held me, I asked him not to let go.

Sometimes our hearts make decisions long before our heads get into the game.

I know you felt like I left your daddy, that I abandoned your family, but you have to know that I couldn’t have. I was your family, and I still am your family.

You got so angry with me. I know you had to. I had a feeling it was coming. Both Smidge and I lost our mothers young, too, remember. We all felt abandoned and needed someone to take the blame.

In a last act of love toward your mother, I stood in the way of your hate, and let you blame me for everything instead. I let you hate me as if my name was lung cancer.