by Pamela Ribon
She tossed that aside with a grunt. “Don’t be so dramatic. I’ll find a way to make sure you don’t get in trouble. But I like how you’re immediately making this all about you.”
“It’s not about getting in trouble. Morally—”
“Soooooo,” she sang as she lifted the shade on her window to watch the landing. “I don’t think you get to have an opinion about this.”
“Of course I do,” I said to her back.
“You don’t.” She didn’t look at me when she said her next sentence, and that’s how I knew it was the most honest thing she’d ever say to me. “You skipped out on me last time, Danielle. You weren’t there. I’ve said nothing for years. I know you feel guilty, so here’s your punishment. This time it’s on you. You said you’re in control of my life now? Then you have to be the one to end it.”
I lurched forward to grab the paper bag from the seat back in front of me, flipping it open just in time before I threw up all over myself.
Smidge went back to studying her nails. “So dramatic.”
TWENTY-SIX
It seemed like everybody in Ogden had a secret they were keeping both with me and from one another. I felt like the center of a sticky web. Surely it was only a matter of time before something got caught in it, but I had no idea how I was going to react when that happened.
I felt like all of you were in denial. I kept assuming someone would ask, someone would say something, someone had to make the truth come out. But when nobody wants to know anything the truth stays hidden much longer than it deserves. I was desperate for one of you to turn to me and ask, “What exactly is going on?”
I knew Tucker had said something to Henry, because both of them were carefully avoiding me. Tucker wasn’t calling, and Henry would find an excuse to leave the room the second I entered it. I didn’t know what to say to either of them, but I felt like it was time to start preparing people.
There was a new sound in Smidge’s cough, a lurch right in the middle of her hacking that was followed by a quick sniff, a gasp. Her doctor gave her an oxygen tank, but she would sneak away to use it, driving to the parking lot behind the library. She chose a place where Ogden’s homeless gathered, as it was the only spot she knew she wouldn’t run into anybody. But someone had to have seen her, if not in her backseat, pulling breaths from a plastic tube in her nose, then when she was hauling an oxygen tank out of the Ogden Medical Center. I bet she told people she was volunteering at a senior citizen home.
“I’m trying to get some morphine off the internet,” she told me. “And I wrote up a DNR.” Her voice was icy with decision. “Not long now.”
Something had shifted in Smidge since we got back. A hardening. She had a look I recognized from when she drank too much. She could get mouthy; a careless fearlessness would overtake her, ensuring she would piss off at least one person in the room. I knew she had the potential to be even more unpredictable.
“Henry isn’t happy to see you,” Smidge admitted.
“I bet not. He doesn’t know why I’m here. You need to tell him. You need to tell him first and then everyone else. It’s time, Smidge.”
She folded her arms as she stared at the floor. “You’re right,” she said. “I will do it right after the party. Let me get one last memory of everyone happy before they all start looking at me differently, okay?”
I decided to give her that one last request. A last last request. At the time, it didn’t seem to be an outrageous one. I also knew Smidge would find some comfort in the process of planning. Party prep always made her happy. She got adrenaline jolts from crossing things off a list. Any list. And this party had lists. The invitations, the decorations, the food.
Since she didn’t have the stamina to run these errands, she’d send me out to do the work. If I wasn’t heading toward Lavender’s Flowers and Stems ordering a massive delivery, I was at Brandy’s Baked Goodness making a deposit on a cake. Often I was on the phone with Smidge listening to her mentally process which runner would look best on the entryway table.
I faded out during a particular one-sided phone conversation as I watched dark clouds swirling overhead. The skies turned an ominous green color, making me wonder if I was about to become the center of a natural disaster. I knew if I returned to Smidge empty-handed, having to inform her that a tornado stole the helium tanks, she’d spin me right back out with her own funnel of energy.
A thunderclap so loud it sounded like someone had shot up my car interrupted whatever it was Smidge was saying.
“I am going to die!” I shouted into the phone.
“Not before you go get cupcake papers!” Smidge shouted back. “I need them pronto!”
The world overhead broke open as the storm hit. Sheets of rain pelted my car. It sounded like I was inside a popcorn maker. Visibility shot, I dropped the phone into my lap and slowly made my way to the side of the road.
I checked my e-mail, and was shocked by the number of requests and questions. Rainey must have put out some kind of call for new clients.
A mother who “desperately needed” me to help her solve a problem with her daughter biting other kids on the playground asked if I would e-mail her toddler a video request to behave. “She responds well to things she sees on the computer,” she had written.
Before I had a moment to second-guess myself, I wrote back, “I’m sorry. My best friend has terminal cancer and I am unable to attend to your request.”
Send. I just did it, before I could stop myself.
Trembling, I pulled up another e-mail. This client was furious that I hadn’t called her florist to stop her weekly delivery. “You can tell me that I can’t afford it, but you can’t find the time to make it stop? You want me to humiliate myself by admitting to this flower-pusher that I can’t have nice things?”
I wrote back, “I’m sorry. My best friend has terminal cancer and I am unable to attend to your request.”
Send.
I went down the list, sending the same response to client after client, feeling nothing but the empty ache of freedom that comes with the truth. From food issues to construction woes, from the parents who felt pressure to have cloth diapers to the parents who felt pressure to tell their neighbors to have cloth diapers, I e-mailed each and every one, “I’m sorry. My best friend has terminal cancer and I am unable to attend to your request.”
This decision was final. I couldn’t do those things anymore. I didn’t want to. I didn’t care about them because my best friend had terminal cancer and I was unable to attend to their requests.
I’d never made a peanut butter sandwich without the crusts for a small child. I’d never carried a feverish baby to the hospital in the middle of the night, terrified that something was wrong. But I went on television with these opinions on homemaking and childraising like it was easy. I made money off people who were feeling lost and helpless, and I never thought before about why people were willing to do that.
When you feel that helpless, that useless, you desperately want to find a right answer. I’d told married couples how to work out their sex lives when I knew next to nothing about the sexual history of either person. I had no training in therapy whatsoever, and yet at one point I felt qualified to create calendars for people with date nights and “sexy time.” I recommended lingerie and games. How bold I was, thinking I knew anything about the lives of strangers, as if coupons and chore wheels were all anybody needed to save their relationships. I sold a fantasy and even worse, I made it seem like any life could be had, if you just chose it.
Maybe it’s true I never asked for the job, that originally I was just trying to help a friend, but as my client list grew and people had more and more outrageous requests, I tried to fake it until I made it. I should’ve stopped when I knew I was bluffing. People just kept thanking me, and then referred me to their friends. Why could I do what Smidge did, but only if I was talking to people who weren’t really in my life? And why didn’t I ever see I was being exactly like her?
T
he culture I’d created for myself as someone who knew how to make hard things look easy was just that: an illusion.
I couldn’t fake it anymore. Real life was much harder than achieving perfection.
I pressed the button for my website app on my phone and began drawing up a new entry. It was an open letter to my clients, past and present. I let them know that I had a newfound respect for what they’d done to get this far with each other, how they stay together even though life gets scary and sad. That while I appreciated our time together, and it’d been an honor coming into their homes, getting to know them, they had the power to fix themselves. They always did. They just forgot to trust it.
I finished with, “I’m not trying to get preachy here. I want you to know that you can do this. Do not spend your life worrying what others think of you. They aren’t in your house. Only you are. Fill it with love, and don’t worry how many crumbs are on the floor. That just proves you lived there.”
When I hit Send I realized I’d effectively destroyed my own business. And not to get too mystical about it, but at the same moment, the rain abruptly stopped. It got silent in my car, quiet enough that I looked around, spooked. Had I just gone deaf? Had my life been put on pause?
Down South, Mother Nature was just like any other Southern lady. All hellfire and crazy for five minutes, making you worry everything you love is about to catch on fire from a lightning bolt. But then, just as suddenly: sunshine and breezes. Everything’s a little cleaner and the sky looks like it has no recollection of what it just did.
I’d pulled my car to the side of the street, but only now was I given the chance to gather my whereabouts. Turns out I wasn’t too far from the party supply store; it was just up ahead a couple of blocks. I leaned forward to peer at the sky. That’s when I saw another looming pool of darkness headed my way at a steady clip. When I looked back at the road, there was Tucker, running down the street in his escape clothes.
I got out of my car and headed toward him.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It isn’t easy to run alongside a man who’s pretending he’s not trying to outrun you. I wanted it to come off like it was no big deal to trot alongside of him, but I was in a pair of Chuck Taylors, feeling the gritty, slippery concrete through the thin rubber bottoms.
Tucker seemed torn between showing off and keeping pace to hear what I had to say. He opted to stare straight ahead, soaking wet, rainwater dropping from his curls like he’d just stepped out of a shower.
“I wanted to apologize,” I said, already feeling the burning in my lungs. Fifty yards in and it was the most exercise I’d done in months.
Tucker didn’t respond. He just kept jogging, his tongue jutting a lump from the inside of his left cheek.
“You’re not going to talk to me?” I asked.
I stopped running and had to drop my hands to my knees. “I cannot believe you’re letting a girl chase you down the street.”
Tucker swung back around to me, stretching his arms behind him. “You aren’t the first.”
We took a moment to catch our breath.
“Thanks for stopping,” I said.
“Hey, what’s your business is your business. I no longer care.”
“Please don’t be like that.”
Tucker walked in a circle, hands on his hips, his breath quieting as he shook his head in amazement. “I have a feeling you are about to ask if we can just be friends,” he said.
“I don’t even mean it that way.”
He flipped his head back toward the darkened sky as the wind picked up around us. “Why do women always need to decide on everything?” he asked. “Why must it be discussed until it is boring? Can’t some things just suck or be broken and then we leave them alone?”
“Are you talking about us?” I asked, confused.
“Us? What us? You haven’t even called me.”
“I wanted to.”
“She wanted to,” Tucker said to a passing mother seeking shelter. She was frantically pushing a stroller toward the nearest building, unaware Tucker was talking to her. “I like how you wanted to. That’s touching, really.”
My skin was sweaty from the jog and damp from the humidity. I always forgot how the heat could stick around until November sometimes. Just under my right knee, a mosquito bite was reddening on my shin. “I did want to, Tucker. I thought about it.”
“I feel stupid for thinking things were better when I was with you,” he said.
He started walking away, but I followed. “It’s not stupid,” I said. “I feel better when I’m with you, too.”
“That’s because you’re away from Smidge. Henry’s miserable, do you know that?” A breeze flipped his hat, exposing swirls of damp hair clinging to his forehead, his neck. Before it hit the ground, Tucker bounced the hat off his knee and caught it. “You two aren’t fooling anybody, and I just hope you know what you’re doing. Because it sure does seem like . . .”
“Like what?”
He exhaled here, incredulous. “I don’t know. Forget it.”
Heavy drops of rain started to fall, pelting the back of my head, gaining intensity by the second.
“What do you think it is, Tucker?” I asked, hoping he’d say it. Just say it, and we could move on, we could get to the part we all needed to get to.
Suddenly the sky lit white, flashing like the gods were taking our picture. A thunderclap immediately followed. But we didn’t move. We didn’t stop standing at that curb, not fifty feet from a convenience store where we could have safely waited it out.
“Do you like me?” he asked, a surprising change of subject. “Seventh-grade-question time. Do you like me?”
I nodded. “I do.”
“Good, because I like you, too.” Tucker put his arm around my head and clamped his hand over my mouth. “No more talking. Drive me back to my house, let’s get in the shower, and then you are going to get in my bed.”
I moved his hand. “But I have to pick up cupcake papers.”
“Woman, don’t make me do this!” He picked me up and carried me to my car, splashing through every puddle.
This time I didn’t resist.
TWENTY-EIGHT
I thought I’d be so strong, all business, when I got back to Ogden, but your mother and I were both dragging out the part before things had to get real, pretending we didn’t have something looming. I was sleeping with Tucker again, and from the smell outside the house as I walked up, Smidge was busy making cookies.
She didn’t ask where I’d been all day, even though it was after dark when I walked in wearing slightly damp, wrinkled clothes, holding a definite lack of cupcake papers. It didn’t take long to see why I was the least of her concerns.
She was firmly in the middle of an enormous fight with you.
You were both in the kitchen, standing on either side of the island, arms up to elbows in brightly colored mixing bowls. You were crying and Smidge was as close to it as she got, her face orangey-red.
“Why are we crying and making cookies?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
Smidge shouted, “Because it’s important to make memories!”
“Just let me leave!” you screamed.
“No!” Smidge shouted back. “Not until we’ve made six dozen cookies for my birthday party!”
Face streaked in tears, cheeks flushed pink, a glob of something that looked like butter stuck to your cheek, you turned to me and screeched, “Why is she being so mean to me?”
“Danny,” Smidge said, “tell this fool child that she needs to learn her mother’s cookie recipe and to stop being an asshole.”
This was not a good situation I’d walked into.
“Mom said I could go over to Mandy’s party and now she’s making me stay in just to make stupid cookies with her! On a Friday night! She’s so unfair!”
“Maybe I just grounded you again, how about that? Maybe I’m not done being mad at you for parading around with boys, lying behind my back, and going out asking to get pregnant
.”
“That was forever ago! You go wherever you want. All the way to Los Angeles. You’re selfish, skinny, and gross, and I hate you!”
My heart was whacking against my chest. I had no idea what to say or do here, but I knew this was an important moment for Smidge, and one you’d remember forever. I had to do something.
“Okay,” I said, hands outstretched like I was entering a lion’s den. “There’s a compromise here.”
“Agreed,” said Smidge. “Remind this hateful, evil little girl that I’m her mother, so she should compromise to what I say.”
I peered inside your mixing bowl. “Chocolate chip,” I said. Sweetly, like I was talking to a kitten. “Those look good.”
“They look stupid,” you said. “I hate cookies.”
“Okay, that seems like a lie,” I said.
“Danny, tell my child to behave,” Smidge said.
“You could be a little nicer to your mother,” I admitted.
You looked at me like I’d just slapped you across your face. “She called me an asshole!” you said, eyes wide and mouth flapping like a giant trout who just realized he’s not in the water.
Smidge was licking cookie dough off a spoon, one bare foot crooked up against the inside of her thigh. “Did you get cupcake papers?”
I gave her a warning look that made her straighten up.
“Jenny, look. You only have to do this until the cookies are done,” I said. “Then you can go to Mandy’s party. Okay? I just declared that, and your mother’s going to agree to those terms.”
“But I’m supposed to be there already,” you said, chin quivering as your tears resurfaced. “I don’t want to be late. This isn’t fair.”
“Life ain’t fair,” Smidge said, leaning over the counter, taunting you like she was by your locker at school. “You’d better learn that right now.”
“Make her stop,” you begged me, tugging at my arm, wailing as if you were going to be forced into the oven with the cookies.