You Take It From Here

by Pamela Ribon

  “You’re making me nervous,” Tucker said. “It’s like you’re waiting on a baby to be born or something. Or posing for a photo shoot.” Tucker gestured to the chair next to him. “Sit down, California. Tell me what’s been going on.”

  “With what?” It was funny how I’d known Tucker almost as long as I’d known Smidge, and yet sometimes when I sat next to him I could feel like a stranger. He often seemed to be trying to figure me out for the very first time.

  “I don’t know ‘with what,’” Tucker said, peering at me from underneath the brim of his cap. “That’s why I’m asking. Tell me about your fancy life. How ’bout you start there?”

  There were so many things I wasn’t supposed to talk about, I’d almost forgotten there was anything left I could say. No longer nervous, I took the seat next to Tucker and pulled up to his workbench.

  “It’s not that fancy.” I watched his solid, callused hands wrap around a complicated-looking metal piece of electronic equipment I couldn’t identify. Dirt and varnish were shoved so deep underneath his fingernails it was like he was sporting a reverse manicure; all the paint was on the wrong side.

  I enjoyed watching him work—how his left leg would bounce quietly, making the stool rattle under his weight. It was impressive how much his lower half was in motion while the rest of him remained still and calm, working with screws barely the size of the blackened curve of his fingertip. I don’t know who can resist watching a man work with his hands.

  “You got quiet again,” he said, his voice low and steady.

  It was like being at the dentist: the foreign tools, the squeaks from his metal stool, all the questions I won’t answer truthfully.

  “Work’s been good,” I said. “That’s kind of it.”

  “No fella.” A question spoken like it wasn’t one.

  “A fella?” I teased, eyes wide and in full drawl. “Golly, I don’t know! Lemme just check up under my hoop skirt for a cricket’s breath!” I dropped my head and stared between my knees. “Nope! No fella!”

  “You like that I say ‘fella.’”

  He might have been right.

  “What about you, Tucker? You got a dame?”

  “No. No dame. And for the record, I like your Yankee voice too.”

  “I don’t have a Yankee voice.”

  “If she calls a Coke a ‘soda,’ she’s a Yankee.”

  Even if my chess club days hadn’t ruined my chances of dating Tucker back in high school, we never seemed to be on the same kind of schedule, even once our two-year age difference didn’t seem as vast. He went away to college at Loyola, and almost always had a girlfriend, a few of which I’d met when we’d all get together for Mardi Gras or spring break.

  One Christmas he brought home a girl he’d been seeing for a few months. To this day, hers remains the loudest voice I’ve ever heard.

  “I just remembered Loud Loud Shane,” I said.

  Tucker’s leg stopped jittering as he dropped his tools like a man instantly regretting having eaten too much food. “Lord,” he said, pinching the space between his eyes as if he could hear her now. “That girl. When she talked, pieces of my inner ear would crumble and fall out of my head. I do not miss her voice.”

  “How did she get to be so loud? Did she grow up on an airstrip?”

  “To this day whenever I hear an ambulance I am reminded of being with her in bed.”

  “I thought Smidge was going to punch her in the face that time—”

  “—when we were playing Uno,” Tucker finished, his eyes glassy and distant with memory. “That was when I knew I had to stop seeing her. She was not a nice game player.”

  “Really mean. She called Henry an assface!”

  “Well, he did make her draw four like a total assface.”

  “Poor Henry,” I said.

  “Poor Henry,” he agreed. “He’s got that crazy wife and a daughter who’s apparently turning into a punk lesbian. The man spends his day shopping for antiques, arguing with blue-hairs over ottomans. I say if he gets some sort of satisfaction winning a card game based more on luck than skill, then hell. He can make me draw sixteen; it’s the least I can do.”

  That was before Tucker was engaged to a girl I never got a chance to meet, back when he was working at his dad’s law firm. I always thought he was going to make an amazing lawyer, what with his skills at having the last word.

  They were a few months into planning the wedding, moving into a house in the part of Ogden that was populated with young couples turning into young families, when she got a job opportunity in Germany she either couldn’t pass up or didn’t want to. She also didn’t want Tucker to come with her. The breakup changed him. When life didn’t go according to what he’d planned, he let the rest of his plans fall away, too. He quit his dad’s firm to work with Henry. He didn’t try to date anybody. Tucker stopped doing anything the way people assumed he would, but he never looked like he felt he was missing out on anything. I guess because he didn’t look like he felt much at all.

  Tucker kicked my foot. “It’s good to see you again,” he said. “You remind me that I wasn’t always so old.”

  “You’ve always seemed old to me.”

  “Don’t confuse wisdom with age, young lady.”

  The garage door banged and shifted at the handle. Realizing Henry’s arms must be loaded down with beverages, I jumped to help.

  “How long you think you’re staying around?” Tucker asked as I reached the door.

  I told him the truth. “I don’t know. I have to go back eventually.” I just had to figure out how to get Smidge to understand that.

  Henry entered looking stunned and disoriented, like he’d been staring into the sun for ten minutes.

  “You okay?” I asked. “Did you break up the fight?”

  “I’m okay,” he said, brow furrowed as if he was working out a math equation. “Nobody got beat in there, it seems,” he said. “So that’s good news.”

  Tucker asked, “Then why do you look like you just witnessed a murder?”

  Henry took a few seconds before answering.

  “I know this might sound crazy, and I guess it’s a recent thing, but . . . I might have developed a legitimate phobia of my own daughter.”

  ELEVEN

  I think of Smidge as family not just because we’re close; when I was younger, her family ended up adopting me like I was a runaway. In turn I later played the role of mother when the one they had gave up on the job.

  Once my father and I had been in Odgen for about two years, it was pretty clear my mother wasn’t going to have a change of heart and suddenly appear on the doorstep with a suitcase filled with presents and apologies. Dad worked long hours, often overnight, and wanted me to be adult with him so that he could be less parental.

  I cooked my own meals. I did the laundry, set out the trash cans, made dinner complete with reheating instructions on the plate in the fridge for when Dad came home. When he was on the graveyard shift, we’d often have an hour or two between when I got home from school and he left for work. Sometimes I woke up extra early to catch him at the kitchen table before he went to bed. We’d sit together, each with a cup of coffee, reading our respective books, sharing a plate of buttered toast. Sometimes he’d sign a permission slip for me or I’d remind him of an upcoming doctor’s appointment. Those breakfasts were more like bookkeeping sessions than family meals, but I loved them. I was proud my dad never thought of me as a baby. I liked that he knew how I took my coffee. After I turned sixteen he never said a word if I had my own six-pack of beer in the fridge. I didn’t have an allowance; I had a part-time job. Sometimes I used that money to buy us pizza, my treat. Not out of sacrifice, but responsibility. It meant I was grown-up.

  I should have seen it coming, but I was still surprised when my dad told me one Sunday morning that he was done, too. He was moving to California, curious if he’d look better in tennis shorts and a polo shirt. I was almost seventeen. My father was thirty-four and feeling antsy, lik
e the best years of his life were quickly coming to a halt. That’s amazing to me, picturing my dad that young, thinking, “She’s raised enough. I’ve got to find a life for myself now.”

  He wasn’t inviting me to California with him. He was informing me that he was leaving. He had come into some money, an inheritance, and was leaving me a chunk of it. That would be the arrangement. He would pay for my living expenses until I was eighteen. He said that’s how old he was when he was on his own and raising me, so I actually had it easy by comparison.

  Louisiana has a lot of laws that let minors do a lot of grown-up things. You can drive a car, have a job, and get married much younger than one would think is a good idea for a kid. When you’re too young to drink in Louisiana, you quickly learn words that give you adult privileges—like emancipation and hardship—words that equate you with farmers and slave hands. You can drive a tractor if you want to; you can live in a carport. You can be your own person at an age when you have no idea who you are. But at least I had finally run out of parents to abandon me.

  Or so I’d thought.

  Life with Smidge started with lots of sleepovers. Eventually I stopped going home to change. Once my father figured out I wasn’t at the apartment he was paying for, he cut that off. Then I was a full-time resident of the Carlton household. Nobody ever seemed to mind.

  It was perfect that first year. Smidge’s parents both worked, so we had the run of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Carlton put in long hours in a way that made them seem exotic. I don’t know what Mrs. Carlton did for a living, but it had her wearing some of the most beaded and sparkly dresses I’ve ever seen. I once asked Smidge if her mother was a professional pageant contestant. She replied, “No, ma’am, just an overdressed drunk.”

  Louis Carlton, affectionately known as Lou-Lou to his oldest and bravest friends, owned the upscale restaurant inside the Chesterfield, the nicest hotel in Ogden. He’d come home every night with stories of politicians or musicians passing through who’d sat at his bar for a drink or stopped inside his restaurant for dinner and directions. The Chesterfield was proof there was life beyond Ogden, that people got out of this town and lived exciting, vibrant lives.

  Left with the run of the house, Smidge and I would down Shirley Temples spiked with a dash of vodka and consume endless hours of terrible television. As soon as the days turned warmer, we would lie out in the backyard coated in baby oil until we were the color of Hershey bars as we made our plans to take over the world. Smidge was confident she would run some kind of empire; I had dreams of working for a news station, ultimately leading to my own hour on CNN. The only thing standing in the way of our destiny was our reality.

  Senior year of high school, Smidge’s family fell apart. Since it’s your grandparents I’m talking about, I don’t know if it’s right for me to tell you what had happened, but know that it was rather public and quite scandalous, and resulted in Smidge’s mother having to move out.

  I’d started feeling like it was my fault; that I was the reason any parent left home. I worried if I stayed, Smidge would lose her father, too, but she wouldn’t let me go anywhere. “Daddy’s not going to be able to handle this,” she warned. “We’ll need you.” She was right.

  After Mrs. Carlton and her fancy dresses left, things got bleak. Mr. Carlton, once barrel-chested and boastful, withered to a skinny, solemn man. He was home all the time, no longer interested in the life at the restaurant. He soon sold it for next to nothing. He didn’t care. He talked quietly, called us “girls.” It was like he’d screamed the life out of himself. Smidge’s mother took everything great about that man, stuffed it into her suitcase, and moved it with her to Florida.

  That’s when your mother started calling her the Lizard. And for the record, she made me call her that, too. I’m pretty sure Henry told you we all called her that because she collected lizards. Another untruth.

  After the Lizard left, I used all my grown-up skills to fill in where she left holes. I cooked meals, cleaned the house, did the laundry. I taught Smidge how to hem her jeans. I am onehundred-percent positive she would never cop to that, but it’s true. Using some of the guilt-money my father was shoving into my bank account, I made sure the pantry was stocked, and I never let Mr. Carlton go through the uncertainty of answering a ringing phone. It was the least I could do to repay them for letting me take refuge during my lost and lonely time. They helped me finish growing up. They showed me that sometimes people stay with you even when their instinct is to run as fast as possible in the other direction.

  Mr. Carlton died of a heart attack long before you ever got the chance to meet him. That’s when Smidge and I started taking our trips, one almost every year, in order to see all the things he never did.

  When my dad first moved me to Ogden, I remember tearfully telling him that I would never forgive him for displacing me, for making me start all over. He ripped my life to shreds. But then I found Smidge, and I didn’t want to go anywhere else. Not without my best friend.

  It was Smidge’s idea to stay in Ogden for college. I was okay with it because I could barely afford in-state tuition. Your mom claimed it was so we didn’t have to be apart, but I knew that wasn’t exactly the truth. She was scared to leave the safety of her city, the place where people knew her so well she didn’t have secrets. Smidge probably felt if she’d left for even a second, there was a chance somebody could do something she hadn’t sanctioned, and she wasn’t interested in getting shafted ever again.

  Smidge had only enough strength inside her to cut one person out of her life forever, and that was her mother. I think that’s why as soon as she felt safe with Henry, she didn’t hesitate to ask him to ask her to marry him. She told that sweet, patient, handsome man to find them a nice house with a big yard and get her pregnant with a beautiful daughter as soon as possible.

  As with anything Smidge wanted, that’s exactly what she got.

  Smidge developed her own sense of how to do things, of how to run a home. Once she was married and had you, she distanced herself from anything I had to do with her learning it in the first place. She did it with an abundance of pride and protection. This was her family, and she’d never leave it.

  The more Smidge fell into married life, the more she focused on raising a baby, the more I found I wanted exactly the opposite. Plus I often felt like the fifth wheel; there was no reason for me to be a part of your family’s firsts.

  Eventually I just wanted out, to get away, go somewhere big where I could be anonymous. I had become too fused to my best friend, this woman who was no longer able to be my second half. I needed to move to a place where I could find out exactly where Smidge ended and I began.

  I moved to Denver. Then San Diego. Then a weird year in Phoenix that led to a job in Las Vegas, which turned into a career in Los Angeles. A strange career, but one that earned me more money than I could have imagined possible, considering it required little more than my laptop and spreadsheet software.

  Smidge might have called my job “sad balls,” but my business card said I was a homemaking consultant.

  Not a nanny, not a chef, not a designer. Not a decorator or a landscaper. I can barely keep a plant alive.

  I knew how to make a house function. How to cook, keep a place clean, and schedule multiple hectic lives. I was good at finding sales, at stretching a dollar. I could declutter even if I chose not to in my own life. I could make a family run smoothly. I looked at everyone’s strengths and divided the labor so everyone felt useful and appreciated. I could teach a teenager how to cook a simple, one-pot meal for a family of six before his or her hardworking parents got home from work. I could help a family overcome a seemingly insurmountable debt while keeping them from being reliant on outside labor—nannies, accountants, personal assistants, housekeepers, gardeners, and sometimes marriage counselors. I could do it in person, or I could do it online. I was helping to restore order.

  It started small. My friend Rainey knew a couple struggling to stay sane while caring for th
eir newborn. I organized their kitchen, created a monthly meal plan, and set aside nights where friends of theirs volunteered to come over with a cooked meal. Soon the word spread among their friends that there was a way to help the new family, and before long there was a visitor each day at the door offering to help with the dishes, the laundry, to get the car washed, to run a simple errand while already on their way to do their own shopping.

  Rainey was a professional blogger. Her website specialized in self-help and personal growth, and she often wrote about little things women could do to make a big difference. Rainey asked me if she could feature what I’d done for the young family on her site, and if I ever thought about using my talents to start a business. When I didn’t understand how that was possible, she insisted on creating my website.

  It seemed absurd that anyone would want to hire me out to do these things, and even crazier that there would be an audience who wanted to read stories about the people who hired people to do these things. I was never much into reality shows. I didn’t get that involved with strangers’ lives. Until suddenly, that was my job.

  Rainey was savvy. She knew how to make everything look beautiful. She had a way of turning my work into something soothing. Calming. Whether or not I was making your meal plan, just looking at a photo of one tacked to somebody’s refrigerator made it seem like everything was going to be okay. Rainey gave me her old digital camera, showed me how to style a room for taking photos, and how to post those pictures on my site. She talked me through my own blog, instructing me to diligently keep my copy short and my identity perky. I was to be a West Coast Mary Poppins, without all the nannying.

  She bet me fifty bucks that I would be able to quit my job in retail within five years. I handed Rainey her cash in just over half that time.

  Thanks to Rainey’s connections, including a PR firm that boasted a roster heavy with professional bloggers and unique specialists, my website, HowToGetYourHomeBack.com, got over half a million hits a month. I lived off the revenue from ads, sponsors, and my personal clients. I was featured on a few talk shows and magazines. I was known as the House Whisperer. I was sort of like a semi-expensive domestic stage manager. Sometimes I even wore a headset.