The Book of Bright Ideas (29 page)

27

The next morning when Ma and I went to check on Freeda and Winnalee, she slowed the car down and we both looked out at the empty spot where the red pickup and wagon always sat. Aunt Verdella stepped out of their house then, moving like the wind had just gotten knocked out of her. She shrugged and held up her hands, palms up to the sky, as if she expected some explanation from God Himself to drop onto them. Ma pulled in the driveway. “They're gone,” Aunt Verdella said.

We got out of the car and followed Aunt Verdella inside. “Freeda's coffee cup's still on the table, and the milk was left out. It's room temperature, so I think maybe they left in the night. They didn't even bother taking their bigger pieces of furniture, just their personal things. And not all of those either.” Aunt Verdella put her arm around me and patted my upper arm a couple of times, while she dabbed at her eyes.

“Maybe they just went somewhere,” I said.

Aunt Verdella shook her head. “No, Button. All of Freeda's clothes are gone, and most of Winnalee's.”

Once, on the local news, I saw a family whose house just burned down. The news guy showed them walking through the rubble, picking at this and that, trying to find anything that the fire had left behind. We reminded me of those people as we wandered through the house to see what was left, our faces pale and our eyes teary. Ma followed Aunt Verdella into the kitchen to see the half-filled coffee cup and milk that was left out, and I tagged after them.

Aunt Verdella looked at Ma. “It's my fault,” she said. “If I hadn't stuck my nose where it didn't belong, they'd still be here. I was just trying to do something nice for them…”

Ma bent to pick up an empty box of Saran Wrap and the brown paper tube that had fallen out of it and rolled across the floor to rest against the bottom of the stove. “Of course you were,” she said. “Verdella, don't blame yourself for any of this. You've spent almost a lifetime blaming yourself for something you couldn't help already. Don't do it again.”

I left Ma and Aunt Verdella to rummage through the downstairs, while I ran up to Winnalee's room.

The lid to the window seat was propped open, but I didn't go look inside. Instead, I went to the bed and pulled up the pillow. Our Book of Bright Ideas was gone.

I crossed the room, which was littered with a pair of shorts, a dress-up blouse, and a stray sock. My foot stepped on something lumpy and poky under the forgotten blouse. I bent over and tossed the shirt aside, then picked up Winnalee's hairbrush. A few loopy strands were wound around the bristles. I kept the brush in my hand and went to the closet, which was mostly empty, except for a girl's dress Winnalee never wore. I hopped in place, my neck stretched as far as it would go. The shelf was empty: Winnalee's shoe box, gone.

“Button? You up there?” Aunt Verdella called.

“Yeah.” My voice sounded like I had a sore throat, but I didn't.

I heard two pairs of footsteps trudging up the stairs, and then Aunt Verdella and Ma were in Winnalee's room too. Ma went over to the bed and tossed the blanket back in place. She didn't bother making neat corners.

“I can't believe they're gone,” Aunt Verdella said. She crossed the room and went to the window, looking out at nothing first, then looking down. “Ohhhhhh,” she said. She bent over and reached inside the window seat. When she straightened up and turned around, she was holding the urn in one hand and the lid in the other. She tipped the urn upside down and a few specks of ash drifted out and floated to the floor. “She emptied it in the window seat,” Aunt Verdella said, her eyes filling with brand-new tears.

We looked around the room some more, not talking. I think Ma and Aunt Verdella felt just like I did. Like a pumpkin after the insides have been scraped away. Ma and Aunt Verdella walked in front of me down the stairs, moving slow, just like me. I guess at that moment I learned that there's nothing heavier to carry than emptiness.

We were just about to walk out of the house when Aunt Verdella stopped. “Oh no! Look.” She pointed to her driveway, where Hannah Malone's white car was parked, Uncle Rudy standing next to it.

“Let's wait a bit,” Ma said. “Rudy will explain things to her.” Aunt Verdella closed the door again, and we stood without talking, waiting until the whirr of Hannah Malone's engine sounded and the crunching of gravel told us she'd gone. Aunt Verdella didn't say a word, as she locked the door behind us.

 

For a long time after they'd gone, our world was like that parched land Uncle Rudy once talked about: bare and singed gray. We went about our business, Aunt Verdella knitting baby booties and afghans, and filling in again at The Corner Store for Ada Smithy when Ada went out east to visit family, and Ma going to work and coming back to make supper and cleaning on Saturdays. Ma dropped me off at Aunt Verdella's every weekday morning to catch the bus, and sometimes while we ate our pancakes, we'd hear a noise on the porch and we'd both look up, as though we were expecting Winnalee's face to be pressed up against the screen, that urn in her arms. But it was never her, of course. Just Knucklehead or the wind. Then Aunt Verdella would look at me and get teary-eyed, and she'd say, “They were like family, weren't they, Button?” And then I'd get teary-eyed too.

It rained for days after Winnalee and Freeda left, and on the first sunny Saturday, Uncle Rudy came from the barn and found me in the yard doing nothing. “Where's your ma and dad?” he asked, and I told him they went shopping. Uncle Rudy patted me on the head, then he told me it was time for lunch, so I followed him inside. As soon as we finished eating, he said, “Okay, girls. Go pretty up your hair, or whatever it is you girls do before you leave the house. I'm taking you two into town for ice cream at the A&W.”

Aunt Verdella blinked at him. “You have to go to town for something? You were just there yesterday, Rudy.”

“Yep,” he said. “I've gotta go to town for ice cream.”

Aunt Verdella tilted her head to the side and gave him a closed-mouth smile. She knew, same as I knew, that Uncle Rudy was just trying to help us feel better.

“The weather pattern's finally changed,” Uncle Rudy said as we sat three-close in the front seat of Aunt Verdella's Bel Air. “It looks like we'll see some cooler days now.”

When we got to the A&W, Uncle Rudy ordered a strawberry malt, Aunt Verdella got a hot fudge sundae, and I got a big vanilla cone dipped in that waxy cherry stuff. We each got a root beer too.

Uncle Rudy wanted to sit in the shade on the picnic table behind the A&W to eat our ice cream, so that's what we did. While we licked and made those moans people make when their tongues get happy, Uncle Rudy watched me. “You miss your little friend, don't you, Button?”

Aunt Verdella reached across the table with a sad smile. “She barely does anything since little Winnalee left.”

I cracked off another bite of cherry coating and popped it in my mouth.

“I miss her too,” Uncle Rudy said. “She was quite a little ray of sunshine, wasn't she?”

“I miss them both,” Aunt Verdella said.

I was sitting beside Uncle Rudy because the bench had less bird poop on his side. And while I licked my cone, I watched Uncle Rudy suck on his straw as he looked at this and that before settling his stare on the sweating mug in front of him. While he stared at his root beer, I stared at him. I liked the way his wrinkles reached out like sunbeams from the corners of his eyes and curled around his cheeks like one of those oval frames that hold special old pictures. He must have felt me watching him, because he looked down at me and smiled. “Button? You ever see a stick caught in an eddy?”

“What's an eddy?” I asked.

“Well, take down at Dauber Falls, for instance. Remember when you and me and Verdie went there last summer to pick raspberries, and you said that the water looked like the foam on root beer when it crashed against the rocks?” I nodded. “Well, sometimes you'll see a stick float down the rapids, and now and then, when the water's movin' it around a boulder, that stick gets caught in the swirl just below the rock. And it stays there, just twirlin' and twirlin' in that same stuck place.”

“And it twirls there forever?”

“Well, it seems likes it's gonna. After all, a poor little twig ain't got no arms and legs to swim his way out of that whirlpool, now, does he?”

Aunt Verdella and I giggled.

“So there that poor little stick is, caught up in a swirlin' eddy, spinnin' and spinnin' until it's sure it's gonna be stuck in that one spot forever. But then a most amazing thing happens. For no reason that anyone can really be sure of, the water spits that little stick right out of that stuck place and off it goes, floatin' on down the river to find new adventures.”

I put my cone straight in my mouth and sucked on the ice cream, moving it in a quick circle to try and make the top get a curlicue again. I thought Uncle Rudy was done talking, because usually he didn't say any more once he told me how something worked, but instead he looked right at me and said, “Button? Right now you're swirlin' in a sad eddy, but you ain't gonna stay stuck in that place forever. Sooner or later, somethin's gonna happen to spit you out of it.”

“You ever been stuck in a sad eddy before, Uncle Rudy?”

“Yep. Course I have. We all have.”

“One you got stuck in because your best friend went away?” I asked.

Uncle Rudy used his thumb to swipe at the sweat drops that ran down his mug, though I don't think he knew he was doing it. “Yep.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“Well, I guess in time, life just spit me out of that place and moved me on downriver, where I found a new best friend.” He glanced at Aunt Verdella, his wrinkles sinking deeper as he smiled.

Aunt Verdella's mouth puckered up then, and her eyes teared up. She didn't look sad though. She looked happier than I think I'd ever seen her.

 

Once Aunt Verdella got her ha-has back good, me and Uncle Rudy went with her over to Porter to buy that color television set she wanted forever. She insisted that she drive herself, even though we were taking Uncle Rudy's truck so the new console could ride in the back. And when Uncle Rudy lingered out in the driveway to wave her out, she told him to get back into the truck. That she'd use her rearview mirror, same as everybody else.

Me and Ma and Daddy went over to watch TV that night after supper, and we sat till the stations went off the air, flicking around the knob so we could see every program on all three channels, to see which of them were in living color. Aunt Verdella didn't seem to notice that everybody's face was blue, or if she did, she didn't care. She just grinned from ear to ear, then went to make us some Jiffy Pop popcorn and lemonade.

 

For a time after Freeda left, Ma stopped wearing eye shadow, and before long, she didn't put on lipstick unless she was going out at night, which wasn't often. And when her roots grew out, she colored her hair again, but this time a color more like oatmeal. She stopped making it puffy too. Soon she was cleaning like we were getting company, even though we weren't, and harping at me again to make neater corners with my sheets and to take more care with my cleaning. She started harping at Daddy again too, asking him where he was going, and when he would be back, and where he'd been.

Her mouth pulled so tight that her lips turned as white as her face when Daddy came home one day and told her that he'd gone to Adam's Music Store in Porter and ordered himself a new guitar: a red-colored Epiphone, with an amplifier to go with it, since they didn't have what he wanted in stock. Ma watched his back as he talked on the phone with Owen, telling him when it would be delivered and that he cleared out a spot in the garage so they could start practicing again. Just looking at Ma's mad face made me scoot my mouth over to the side so my teeth could grab some skin, but then I stopped myself. The insides of my cheeks had healed smooth and soft, and I thought maybe I'd like to keep them that way.

Ma stayed crabby until Owen came to practice, bringing with him a guy named Al who was going to be their drummer and a lady named Linda who was going to be Al's wife. Linda had bouffant hair and the kind of face that looked like it could only smile.

Ma liked Linda, I could tell, and while Daddy and Owen and Al played songs in the garage, Ma and her talked about wedding dresses. Ma got hers out of a big box in the attic and unwrapped it so Linda could see it. “I took a pattern and altered it how I wanted it,” she said.

“Oh my, it's lovely!” Linda said, and then she asked Ma if she'd sew her a wedding dress, since she still hadn't found exactly what she was looking for. Ma said she would.

That night, after Owen and Al and his girlfriend left, and Ma was clearing away the coffee cups and dessert dishes, Daddy told Ma that he was taking some days off from work. “I have a couple of vacation days comin', so I thought we could head out Friday afternoon and go set up some bookings. We just have to call the places where we used to play, but I'd like to hit some new places too. I want to head over to Pine Lake, stop at Porter, and hit a few more bars south of that. Pine Lake has a new supper club and dance hall called The Rusty Nail. They're looking for bands, and a guy at work said they're already packing them in. We'll be ready for bookings in a month's time, easily.”