Read The Luck of the Buttons Online
Authors: Anne Ylvisaker
The Luck of the Buttons
Tugs Button darted past Zip’s Hardware, stumbled over the lunch specials sign at Al and Irene’s Luncheonette, and pushed through the door of Ward’s Ben Franklin as if the devil himself were chasing her. She ducked behind Aggie Millhouse and Aggie’s mother, hissing, “Save me from the Rowdies!” as G.O. Lindholm burst in, looking around wildly.
Tugs sidled up close to Aggie, trying to melt into her back, and just as G.O. spotted her, Lester Ward, the oldest Ward boy, pointed at him from behind the register and hollered, “Out, Lindholm! Take your thieving fingers and get outa my father’s store!”
“And stay out!” echoed his younger brother Burton, who was stocking the sundries shelves.
“You’re such a Button,” G.O. spat as he banged out the door.
“Button,” mimicked Burton.
“G.O.’s not a Rowdy,” said Aggie, turning to Tugs.
“But he wants to be, and wanting to be a hoodlum is almost the same thing as being a hoodlum, or worse, now that I think about it, because what did the Rowdies ever do except lump around looking tough, whereas G.O. . . .” said Tugs. “You saved my hinder for sure.”
Mrs. Millhouse gasped at Tugs’s crass language, but Tugs was loquacious in her relief. “I popped the tire on his bike, but I didn’t mean to. I mean, I was putting nails in the street just to stop, well, never mind. I see you got lots of fun things in your basket, Aggie. Looks like a party. Looks like your birthday. Twelve, huh? I turned twelve weeks ago. I would have invited you to my party, only it’s an even year, and I only have parties on my odd birthdays, though they aren’t really odd — ha, ha, ha! Guess you’re going to have fun, huh?
“Look,” she said, picking up a whistle out of Aggie’s mother’s basket. “Mrs. Millhouse, you are one mighty good mother to let your daughter have something as loud as whistles at her party.”
Mrs. Millhouse stared dumbfounded as Tugs kept rambling, but Aggie interrupted.
“I’ve never stood quite this close to you before, Tugs. We are exactly the same height. And you came running in that door awfully fast. You gave me an idea.”
That stopped Tugs midsentence. Aggie Millhouse, of the Millhouse Bank and Trust family, got an idea from her, Tugs Button, of the . . . just Button family? She wiped her nose on the inside of her arm, then across the front of her overalls. She admired Aggie in her pressed dress and shiny shoes.
“You should be a dancer, Aggie, with your long legs and your long hair.”
“I’d rather play basketball,” said Aggie. “But listen to my idea. We should be partners for the three-legged race.”
The Independence Day three-legged races were the stuff of legend in Goodhue. Children remembered the winning teams the way they remembered who won every Iowa Hawkeye football game. Tugs had been paired with her cousin Ned for the past hundred years, and she was resigned to the same fate this year.
“What about Felicity?” Tugs asked. “You always race with Felicity.”
“She’s going to Cedar Rapids for the auto races. Besides, we never win. Do you have a partner?”
Aggie’s question took the fuel right out of Tugs’s motor. It was assumed that she would run with Ned, but the words had never been spoken. Ned and Tugs had the same birthday one year apart, which made them kind of like twins, except that they had different parents and were born in different years. Tugs was an only child, so they’d grown up playing together by default.
Family first
was the Button credo.
They made an awkward pair, Ned and Tugs, he short, she tall, and being from nearly the same gene pool, neither one was blessed with coordination. She’d try to take shorter strides, he’d try to take longer strides, and they usually ended up in a lump about five feet from the start line. Buttons were not, as a rule, graceful.
Aggie Millhouse, with her straight teeth and wide circle of friends, would race with her, Tugs Button? Still, Ned was her cousin.
“Ned,” she said.
“Do you have to?”
“Well, I . . . he’s my cousin and you’re . . . I mean, me and you, we never . . . and besides, it’s next week.”
“Yes, well,” interrupted Mrs. Millhouse. “That’s that, then. Come along, Aggie.”
“Hmm,” said Aggie, and pressed on. “What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?”
Tugs scratched her nose. “Probably just studying my belly button, as Granddaddy Ike says. He’s really my
great
granddaddy, because he’s the granddaddy of my own dad, but everyone calls him Granddaddy Ike.”
Mrs. Millhouse raised her eyebrows at this outburst and put her arm around Aggie, leading her toward the door.
“You can do that another day,” said Aggie. “Come to my birthday party. Two o’clock. Do you know where I live?”
The invitation rendered both Tugs and Mrs. Millhouse speechless, and before either could respond, Aggie and her mother were out of the store, leaving Tugs looking after them. Absently, she picked up a statuette of the real Ben Franklin and turned it over in her hands.
“Are you buying?” said Lester. This startled Tugs so that she dropped Ben, and as she stooped to pick up his separated head and body, Lester barked, “You break it, you buy it!” Tugs hastily deposited both pieces on the shelf and ducked out the door.
“Rapscallion!” Lester hollered after her.
There was pie on the table when Tugs returned. Pie in the Button family meant trouble.
When Uncle Norton sliced off his left foot with the scythe while trying to mow hay for the horses after having gotten into the cups, the Buttons baked pie-plant pies and gathered at Uncle Norton and Uncle Elmer’s farm to carry on about the sorry state of farm utensils and the difficulty of working the land. Now Uncle Norton spent his days sitting on the porch spitting sunflower shells over the rail while Uncle Elmer wrestled the farm by himself.
When a card-playing con man suckered Uncle Elmer out of his seed money and he had to plant with last year’s leftovers, which he did too hastily, and a storm washed all those seeds away, the Buttons baked up oatmeal pies and cursed the queen of spades, Mother Nature, and even Mother Goose for good measure.
There were apple pies for fall funerals and custard pies for the measles, mumps, and broken bones. Fiona Button, like Aunt Mina and Tugs’s own mother, technically only a Button by marriage, had once traveled all the way to Georgia and returned with a suitcase full of pecans begging to be baked into flaky crusts. It was nearly a month before anything pie-worthy happened, and when it did — marital trouble, Fiona and Albert — the pecans were passed around, and the family was together eating pecan pie for enough evenings in a row that Fiona and Albert called a truce and mended their differences.
Now not only was there pie on the table, but Aunt Mina was there with a fork in her hand and eight-year-old Gladdy by her side.
“Tugs Button. Where have you been? Your mother’s been worried sick. Gladdy and I brought pie, and now I’ve got a mind to just take your piece straight on over to Uncle Wilson and let him eat it instead.”
“But Aggie Millhouse asked . . . Pie?” said Tugs. “Did someone die? Where’s Dad? Is Granddaddy Ike all right?”
Mother Button interrupted. “I’m not worried sick, Mina. I just said . . .” But Aunt Mina wasn’t finished.
“Not only are you late, off getting up to who knows what kind of mischief, but my Ned is home moping because he’s got no one to toss a ball with. And that, Tugs Esther Button, is your fault. With you off doing heaven knows what this morning, Ned tried to take up with Ralph Stump. And you know as well as I do that I won’t let Ned cavort with a Stump. Next thing you know he’ll be smoking cigarettes behind Zip’s with the Rowdies. I knew I should have sent him to help Elmer on the farm this summer.”