You Take It From Here
Page 1
FEATURING A GALLERY READERS GROUP GUIDE
Just because you’d give your best friend everything doesn’t mean she has to take it.
On the heels of a divorce, all Danielle Meyers wants is her annual vacation with sassy, lifelong best friend, Smidge—complete with umbrella cocktails by an infinity pool—but instead she’s hit with the curveball of a lifetime. Smidge takes Danielle to the middle of nowhere to reveal a diagnosis of terminal cancer, followed by an unusual request: “After I’m gone, I want you to finish the job. Marry my husband. Raise my daughter. I’m gonna teach you to how to be Smidge 2.0.”
As Danielle wrestles with this major life decision, she finds herself torn between being true to her best friend’s wishes and being honest with herself. Parenting issues aside, Smidge’s small-town Louisiana world is exactly the one Danielle made sure to escape. Danielle isn’t one for playing the social butterfly, or being the center of attention. And when your best friend tries to set you up on a date night with her husband, it might be time to become the bossy one for a change.
In the spirit of Beaches and Steel Magnolias, You Take It from Here is an honest, hilarious, and heartbreaking novel that ultimately asks: How much should we sacrifice for the ones we love the most?
“Pamela Ribon takes you on a colorful, rich, and unforgettable journey.” —Kristin Harmel, author of The Sweetness of Forgetting
“Ribon is a sparkling talent.” —South Florida Sun-Sentinel
PAMELA RIBON is the bestselling author of the novels Why Girls Are Weird, Why Moms Are Weird, and Going in Circles. A writer for stage, screen, and television, her credits include the Emmy Award–winning Samantha Who? Visit her popular blog at pamie.com, or find her in the dictionary under “muffin top.” (That is not a joke.)
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COVER DESIGN BY REGINA STARACE • COVER PHOTOGRAPH OF WOMEN WALKING BY EDVARD MARCH/CORBIS; ROAD AND FLOWERS BY MASTERFILE; HOUSE BY JOHN ELK III/GETTY IMAGES; AUTHOR PHOTO BY JESSICA SCHILLING PHOTOGRAPHY
Raves for Pamela Ribon’s “witty, wonderful, and wise” (Maryland Gazette) novels
YOU TAKE IT FROM HERE
“Hilarity and heartbreak compete, but ultimately hope wins in this thoroughly delightful story about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a best friend. I can’t wait to pass this book along to every woman who ever mattered to me. Pamela Ribon has a huge, fresh voice, and this is her best book yet.”
—Joshilyn Jackson, New York Times bestselling author of Gods in Alabama and A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty
“One of those rare books where the characters feel like your best friends from the first page. You’ll laugh and cry as Pamela Ribon takes you on a colorful, rich, and unforgettable journey of friendship.”
—Kristin Harmel, author of The Sweetness of Forgetting
GOING IN CIRCLES
“Pamela Ribon’s hilarious and touching writing makes you think, feel, and wish you still knew how to roller skate. Her best work yet.”
—Caprice Crane, international bestselling author of Family Affair
“If Pam broke my heart with Why Girls Are Weird, she completely pulverized it with Going in Circles. . . . I’m not usually one to force people to read books, but seriously people, if you don’t pick up Going in Circles this summer, you clearly don’t love books enough.”
—Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic, for BlogHer
“Few writers are as funny as Pamela Ribon, who infuses her novels with satirical humor alongside honest glimpses into our most intimate relationships. . . . One of summer’s most absorbing reads.”
—largehearted boy
“It’s refreshing to see a chick lit heroine who isn’t just a designer label whore. Charlotte has depth. Sometimes she’s wise, and sometimes she needs a guide to see the obvious—just like a real person. Ribon has taken us back to chick lit basics, and the floundering genre is all the better for it.”
—All About Romance
“A more intense read than you’ll get from something with a pink cover. Which is as it should be.”
—Lainey Gossip
“Totally enjoyable reading. . . . I read it in a day and I learned about roller derby and I laughed out loud once and cried a little, and what more do you really want in a book?”
—The Unimaginary Book Club
“This book surprised and delighted me. . . . A highly enjoyable novel by a talented writer whose time has come.”
—Fierce & Nerdy
“This is a fantastic book. I’m really going to attempt to rein in my enthusiasm. Really! This is me attempting to sound like I’m not pushing a book at you.”
—Book-Addicts.com
WHY MOMS ARE WEIRD
“A rollicking page-turner. . . . Fantastic and satisfying.”
—Albuquerque Journal
“Compassionate. . . . Fans will identify with this kind, imperfect heroine.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This joyous, single-sitting read is as bright and witty as it is wise and bittersweet. . . . Ribon is a sparkling talent.”
—South Florida Sun-Sentinel
“Hilarious and heartfelt. Why Moms Are Weird tackles the absurd morass of family with joyful wit and brutal honesty. I barreled through this book.”
—Jill Soloway, Emmy-nominated writer for Six Feet Under, The United States of Tara, and author of Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants
WHY GIRLS ARE WEIRD
“Chick lit at its most trenchant and truthful.”
—Jennifer Weiner, New York Times bestselling author of Then Came You
“Light and entertaining.”
—Booklist
“A whole lot of good reading.”
—Miami Herald
“Irresistible. . . . [L]ike hanging out with your best friend just when you need to most.”
—Melissa Senate, author of The Love Goddess’ Cooking School
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Pamela Ribon
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Gallery Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
This Gallery Books trade paperback edition July 2012
GALLERY BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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Designed by Jaime Putorti
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ribon, Pamela.
You take it from here / Pamela Ribon.
p. cm.
1. Female friendship—Fiction. 2. Cancer—Patients—Family relationships
— Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3618.I24Y68 2012
813'.6—dc23
2012008623
ISBN 978-1-4516-4623-8
ISBN 978-1-4516-4624-5 (ebook)
For Madeleine Chao
Sweet girl.
May you take over the world.
(Meow.)
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Acknowledgments
Readers Group Guide
you take it
from here
Jenny,
I’ve got this hunch that if you’re reading this, your other hand is currently holding a lit match. But I think you should try to hold off destroying this letter long enough to read what it says.
I can only imagine you’ve been yearning to know the truth for a long time now. You never did like it when people kept things from you. That pride you got from your mother makes it so you’d rather pretend I dropped off the face of the earth. I’m sure she’s proud of how much you’ve stuck to your guns.
But listen. I know what’s happening to you tomorrow. That’s no small thing, Miss Ma’am. This probably goes without saying, but as soon as I heard your news, I wanted to be there. I know, we don’t always get what we want.
It’s hard not to talk to you like you’re still a young girl, awkward and defiant. I keep reminding myself that you are no longer that person, that there’s a chance you’re nothing like the Jenny I knew, the one I spent so much of my life worrying about. How did you get to be so old? I can’t even begin to imagine how much I’ve missed.
What you’re about to read won’t be easy for either of us. It doesn’t always paint me in the best light, and I worry it’ll be too hard for you in some parts. I’ll try to warn you when the rough stuff is coming, but I think it’s time you learned it all. Lord knows you’re finally old enough. Most important, I think it’s officially been enough time that your mother can’t find a way to murder me for telling you everything.
I think she’d want you to know now. She’d want you to hear her entire story, all her reasons, and how they became mine.
So let’s get started. We’ll have to take it back quite some time. Back in ye olde 2010. You were thirteen. I think about that a lot, actually. You were only thirteen.
You’ve never left my thoughts. Not for one moment.
So please blow out that match. This is for your own good.
ONE
While it took over two decades to build the infrastructure that could lead to what happened, it all really started the year your mother and I were thirty-five, smack-dab in the lava-hot center of July.
Before I reached that age I couldn’t imagine anything older, but now it seems like I was just a baby. I was balancing an overstuffed purse on my hip, my reading glasses forgotten on top of my head while cheap sunglasses slid down the bridge of my nose. My cell phone was in one hand while the other pulled my limp blond hair into a makeshift knot. All sense of pride in one’s appearance quickly melts away in that sticky, miserable, Louisiana heat.
I was standing in that aggressively carpeted baggage claim area of the Ogden airport, desperately trying to absorb the remaining seconds of air-conditioning. I’d soon be diving into stifling humidity. The weather is half the reason I left Ogden in the first place. Living in that oppressive atmosphere always made me feel like some kind of exotic cockroach, scuttling around, seeking the cool of night.
I already missed the predictable weather back home in Los Angeles, where normally at that moment I’d be in a coffee shop on my computer. If I wasn’t busy drawing up plans for a client, I would be updating my website with an entry boasting of a recent success, or procrastinating my workload via a healthy dose of Web surfing. I knew I’d be fine once I saw Smidge, and I’d be even better once we were off on our trip, but at the time I remember being frantic because my hair was already starting to frizz.
It was important to get in front of your mother’s eyes before my hair went into massive failure, lest I again endure her favorite opening monologue, titled “All This on Your Head Is Wrong.”
Smidge asked me to fly to her that year to kick off our annual trip. I use the word ask, but that does not describe what she did. There is no asking in Smidge’s world. There is requesting, declaring, demanding, and ordering. And when those don’t work: threats.
I’d been on the ground only ten minutes when I got recognized. In typical Ogden fashion, I probably knew half of the people standing around in that lobby. “Oh, I’d heard you were coming,” some of them had already said to me while I was waiting, as if the local newspaper printed the airport’s daily manifests. I couldn’t figure out how else people always seemed to know when I was visiting. Your dad later told me it’s because your mother would brag to everybody, like a celebrity was touching down in Ogden. It’s still hard for me to imagine that, what with how unfamous I would feel beside her.
“Hey, California!” said the oversize man-boy smirking at me, his voice loud enough that everyone else turned to stare. “Looking good.”
Tucker Collier started calling me “California” long before I moved away. He found out that I lived there for a time when I was three. “That explains it,” he said, back when we were still in college. “Why you’re so different.” About me moving to Los Angeles, he still quips, “She went back to her home planet.”
No matter how many years of my life I invested in Ogden—active, youthful years—no matter how many times I came back to visit, the fact remained that once I arrived I didn’t stay. I didn’t settle in for the long haul. From then on, whenever I was in Ogden, I was a visitor. An other. As much a mystery to those people as California.
Smidge was supposed to pick me up, but she was nowhere to be seen and apparently pretending to have misplaced her phone, seeing as how she wasn’t answering calls or returning texts. Luckily for me, small Southern towns are filled with boys at the ready to swoop in and save the day. Mine had come in the form of a man standing next to me wearing his trademark wicked grin, the one that looks like he’s thinking about a joke he can’t share in public.
“Tucker Collier!” I shouted, because that’s what old friends do down here when we haven’t seen each other in forever. We shout first and last names like we’re taking attendance.
“Danielle Meyers!”
Tucker lifted me an impressive distance from the ground as he squished me to his chest. Since he’s six feet, three inches, two hundred and thirty pounds, there wasn’t much else to do but take the brunt of the impact and label it “affection.” He was still warm from outside, and there was a sweet stickiness from his damp skin underneath his clothes.
“My spleen!” I managed to whimper as I squirmed against him.
Tucker laughed as he gently returned me to the earth. I’d always been a sucker for his big green eyes and those sandy-blond curls he refused to do anything with o
ther than smash underneath his beat-up blue ball cap. If he were even slightly vain he could have been a model. He had that deliciously careless, homegrown look about him, a dangerous combination of helpful and hell-bent. He’d be the first one to show up at your grandmother’s funeral, and the last to leave the bar on a Sunday night.
I’m sure you know that’s a compliment.
We might have gone to high school together in a town where it seemed everybody was legally bound to date everybody else at some point, but Tucker and I had never gotten around to getting together. I could make the excuse that he’s slightly older than I am, but I think more likely it was because I was in the chess club. That’s not me calling Tucker snobby. That’s me not saying enough about how I was in the chess club.
Like how I was the president. For two years.
And made us wear T-shirts.
T-shirts that boasted We’ve Got the Rook.
“Sorry.” Tucker jammed one giant hand into the back pocket of his jeans as he reached out with the other. He gave an awkward pat to my arm, stroking my limb like Lenny with a rabbit. “Didn’t mean to smush ya.”
He’d get talky after a few beers, but in public, with the “common people,” as he’d like to say, Tucker preferred an air of solemn stoicism. It was as if he was intentionally bad at hiding his superhero alter ego, just to make sure we all knew he was a superhero. That way we could all pretend we didn’t know so he could go around with that “thoughtful” expression, looking slightly over our heads like trouble was on the horizon, and he was just about to save the day.
But I knew the truth. That his stone-strong look was actually the result of being destroyed by someone he loved. We all knew each other’s secrets and mistakes, but only talked about them when the person with the problem wasn’t around. Some might call that gossip, but we did it out of respect.
“I like the hair,” he said, meaning mine, and I immediately raked my hand through my scalp to unleash the messy bun, before twirling the ends at my shoulder like a fifth-grader. It must be the size of Tucker that always turned me embarrassingly, uncharacteristically girly. Or our history. If I hadn’t known him so long, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered so much that he found something nice to say.