Read Online You Take It From Here by Pamela Ribon - Free Book Online Page A

smart plan. Look, you don’t have to do this forever, just a few years. Until Jenny gets to college.”
    “Just live with them?” I asked. “Be a nanny, kind of?”
    She shook her head. “No, that won’t be enough. Henryneeds a partner. Jenny needs a parent. They need you to fill my spot. Be a mom, be a wife, be a good woman.”
    “A good woman ?”
    “Get that look off your face. You know what I mean. It’ll be like it’s me, but you’re doing it. Do it right and finish the job.”
    “I think they’ll notice it’s not you as soon as I try to fit into your clothes.”
    “You can get your own clothes.”
    “Oh, thanks. ”
    Smidge rocked from one side to the other, a sign of discomfort. She knew she didn’t have me yet; perhaps it never occurred to her that I might have reservations.
    “You’re out of your mind,” I said. “Is the cancer in your brain this time?”
    Smidge cocked her head like I’d slapped her, but she was grinning. “I like that you’re getting a little angry. It means you know I’m serious.”
    “You’re seriously sick. I’m not going to have sex with your husband and have Jenny call me Mom and walk around your house like your ghost is commanding me to make your lemon bars every Labor Day weekend.”
    “First of all, I’m really glad you know you’ll have to keep making those lemon bars.”
    “Smidge, this is the dumbest, the stupidest, the—”
    “I can’t just be missing. I can’t just disappear , Danny. Too many people are counting on me.”
    “And nobody’s counting on me? I have a life, too!”
    I hated how sometimes when I stuck up for myself I sounded like a kid sister complaining she didn’t get as much candy as her sibling.
    “Look. I’ve thought about all of this, and if you just shut up and let me talk, it’ll make sense. Just make sure they . . .”
    Smidge stopped here, her eyes filling up with what appeared to be real tears. Her face began to twitch as her words turned to mumbles, the corners of her mouth pulling down. She sucked in a deep breath to knock that emotion out before forcing herself to continue. “See that they get breakfast every day and look nice and . . . that Henry doesn’t get fat and . . . Jenny only dates nice boys and—Excuse me.”
    Smidge jumped off her bar stool and quickly wove her way through the crowd to the bathroom.
    I didn’t follow, mostly because she would’ve pushed me out the door and told me to leave her alone. But I wanted her to have a moment, so she could come back with a huge grin on her face, boasting that she’d just gotten me good. I was still holding out for a prank. I needed Smidge to take it all back. “Even better than Big Count Road,” she’d brag.
    Maybe anger and resentment weren’t the first feelings most people would have if their best friend had just asked them to take over once they die of terminal cancer, but I had previous experience with Smidge stretching things out of reality, exaggerating the extent of the situation. Smidge could be rather dramatic. Maybe she’s saying “cancer,” but she really means a kidney stone. Instead of willing me her life, maybe she just needs me to babysit for a month.
    And honestly, it wasn’t the first time she had tried to hand her daughter over to me without much of a warning.
    You were about seven when your mother called me one morning, calmly informing me that you were on a planeheaded straight to my apartment, where I was to continue to raise you for the rest of your life.
    You wanted to have all your clothes in your favorite color, but when Smidge refused to buy purple underwear, somehow you figured out how to use fabric dye and tossed your entire wardrobe into the washing machine with a box of purple. I still think it was rather clever for someone who was only in the second grade.
    Smidge was icy calm as she informed me she had just shipped her offspring to California, so much so that I wasn’t absolutely sure you weren’t sitting on a plane