You Take It From Here Read Online Free PDF

more to do but obey.
    “ You know what’s best for you,” she’d say, not as a question, but a shocked statement. “I’m sorry. Did you just say you know what’s best for you?”
    Smidge would turn indignant, about to say the very last word on the subject. Pressing the fingertips of her left hand with the perfectly painted index finger of her right, she’d count off with her bony fingers, getting to the heart of exactly what she felt was wrong with me.
    “No husband. No kids. You ain’t got a house.”
    Smidge wouldn’t say the word ain’t around most people, but I’m hardly people. I’m a constant. I’m expected, like ground under your feet when you get out of bed. Smidge never saw me as someone else, this other human. I’m an extension of her. I’m extra Smidge. So when she called me out, it’s because she saw something she didn’t like about the entity that is Us.
    Usually it was better to deflect her hits and blows one by one, like Wonder Woman using her steel cuffs. But in a situation where she’s listing my flaws, it doesn’t matter why I don’t have those things. I don’t have them. And to Smidge, havingthose things would prove I’d done something right with my life. Husband. Kids. House. They’re the merit badges earned by grown women.
    I suppose I could have tried the truth, something like: “Well, I got separated before we ever had enough money to even think about buying a house, and real estate is rather expensive in Los Angeles. I’m only newly divorced, not that I’m counting the months, or anything. But I’ve been pretty busy with my career to have kids, with or without a boyfriend or husband or even a nanny.” Perhaps I’d end with a very quiet, very quick: “It’s also possible that I have different goals for myself than you have for me.”
    But saying all those words would risk too big a fight, so what I’d say instead would be a very levelheaded, “Smidge. You know you’re the only one who knows what’s best for me.”
    “Cor- rect ,” she’d say, leaning over to rub my arm while handing me a glass of wine she’d somehow magically make appear via her powers over the space-time continuum. Then, unable to keep from having even more of the last word, she’d cluck, “Honestly. What would you ever do without me?”
    We were about thirty minutes out of town, driving past a whole lot of nothing, when we passed an empty road lined thick with trees in bloom.
    “That’s a pretty road,” I said, pointing. “Look at all those purple flowers.”
    “You don’t know that road?” Smidge asked, crinkling her forehead until she cut her freckle number in half. “That road’s famous. Some man did this thing where he would film every person in this parish walking down this one street. Every yearhe’d come back and do it again. I think it’s in some faincy-paints museum.”
    “That sounds cool.”
    Smidge’s eyes widened. “I can’t believe you don’t know this!” she said, her excitement growing. “Every year for like, sixty years now or something, he comes back to film them again. Everybody. From babies to old people. They say if you missed the day the man came to town and didn’t get filmed walking down that street, it’s like you didn’t live here. Like you didn’t count.”
    I could picture the scenes. Bodies shifting from tiny to big, sometimes disappearing, sometimes new ones showing up. People moving away, coming back, making families. “I bet that’s so neat,” I said. “Watching all those people grow up on camera.”
    “They call it Big Count Road,” she said, nodding. “In fact, that’s how the Count on Sesame Street got his name.”
    “What? Seriously?”
    “No!” Smidge yelled, pushing my arm so hard I swerved the Pickle and had to wave an apology to the driver in the next lane. “How could any of that be true? You’re so dumb sometimes, Danny, I swear! Oh, my God.”
    You might think the tendency to believe the things people say is a normal