The Luck of the Buttons (8 page)

“I understand Tugs was paired with the sixth grade’s top athlete in that race,” snapped Aunt Mina. “My Ned could have won if he hadn’t been strapped with that shrimp Ralph Stump.”

Cousin Gladdy was indignant. “I heard Mrs. Potter telling Mrs. Winthrop that
my
essay was best, and I’m only eight,” she said. “I bet it was rigged.”

“She’s made a pact with the devil,” screeched Grandmother Adeline. “No one’s ever won a dang thing in this family. Who does she think she is, one of the Floyd girls?”

“Aw, Granny,” said Tugs, patting Granny’s stooped shoulder. “I’ve got two left feet like everyone else in this family. Come on, I’ll take your picture.”

“Humph,” said Granny, and poked Tugs with her cane. “Get away from me, devil child.”

Tugs swatted the cane away and held the Brownie in front of her belly. She saw through the viewfinder a square of Granny coming closer. “Wait, Granny,” Tugs said. “Just smile.” She saw Granny’s scowling face, then Granny’s bony hand, then with a yank, Granny grabbed the camera from Tugs and held it to her own chest, letting her cane fall to the ground.

“I said. I do not. Want my image taken.”

“Hey!” Tugs protested, and reached for the camera in Granny’s clutches. Granny teetered, then toppled over, and the Brownie flew out of her hands. Aunt Mina, rushing to help Granny, didn’t see the camera and tramped on it with her sturdy shoes. The softened ground gave a bit, but not enough to keep it intact under the weight of Aunt Mina.

Aunt Mina lifted her foot and looked at the dented cube.

“Really!” she said, shaking her finger at Tugs. “Cameras are little glass boxes. You can’t go
dropping
them, Tugs. What do you expect?”

Tears welled immediately in Tugs’s eyes. She wiped her hand across her face.

“But I . . .” Tugs started, but by then Granny had set up a wail.

“Old lady on the ground here, people! Oh, me! I might be broken!”

Granny was a tiny bit of a woman, and Ned was able to lift her to her feet. He handed Granny her cane and stepped back, in case she decided to poke him, too.

As Tugs bent down to pick up her camera, she overheard one of the Swisher Buttons say, “That’ll teach her to show everyone up. I mean, two blue ribbons
and
a Kodak? Serves her right.”

Something snapped in Tugs then. Why shouldn’t she have a brand-new camera? Why shouldn’t she be the lucky one? She was tired of being a Button. Tired of being the one who comes up short, loses the ball for the team, gets blamed for everything. She stood and faced her grumbling kin.

“Would all you people just . . . CLAP your TRAPS!”

There was a collective gasp and then a stunned silence. Aunt Mina put her hands over Gladdy’s ears. Tugs had surprised herself, too. But she stood tall and spoke into the hush.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. All you do is complain, every one of you.”

“What kind of parents are you?” Granny hollered to no one in particular. “Shut her up, will you?”

“Granny!” Aunt Mina exclaimed, and clamped her hand over Granny’s mouth.

Tugs ignored them. “Burton was wrong. I am
not
such a Button. I am lucky. And I’m going to go on being lucky. You just watch.”

The Buttons gaped at Tugs as if she’d declared herself Swedish, or musical, two of life’s many impossibilities.

“Hear, hear!” exclaimed Granddaddy Ike, waving his cap while the rest of the Buttons resumed their squawking.

“Well, now,” said Father Button. “Well. There’s our girl. Well.” He put his arm around Tugs’s shoulder and they walked out from under the tree. “Come on, Corrine,” he said to Mother Button. “Let’s go home now. Mina, you can drop Granny off later.”

“What did she say?” demanded Granny. “
Plucky?
She’s not a plucky Button. I’m pluckier than the whole lot of you nincompoops. Why, I’ve been a widow since aught seven, and . . .”

“Bring that girl back here to apologize,” interrupted Aunt Mina. “Shoving and sassing and foul language cannot be tolerated!” But Tugs and her parents trod on.

Tugs was rolling down her window when Ned ran up.

“Me, too!” he whispered into the car. “Help me be lucky, too!” Then he turned and said, so that everyone else could hear, “And don’t you ever mess with our Granny again!”

Tugs sank into the backseat, her Brownie on her lap. The silver exposure lever was stuck. The tiny glass viewfinder was cracked. The side was dented. But remarkably, when she held it up to the window, she could see Buttons large and small, all split and angled like a kaleidoscope.

“Click,” Tugs said. There was her family. Then the car lurched forward and she saw fractured fields of corn fly by. She angled her Kodak upward and saw the weight of the fractured clouds. A dismembered crow crossed the frame.

The Buttons bumped along the muddy rutted road, windows down to lure a breeze. Tugs waited for reprimand, but none came. She supposed it wasn’t the best luck to begin her lucky life by yelling at her elders. But it was done, and despite the ache her damaged camera produced, she felt surprisingly free and light. Lucky. She was lucky. Her heart sat high in her chest, and she would have sung a tune if she could have thought of a tune to sing. Buttons were not singers.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of things the Buttons weren’t. Buttons weren’t dancers. They weren’t athletes or readers or jokesters or artists. They weren’t good students or good listeners or standout citizens. The only time a Button had made the
Goodhue Gazette,
back when there was a
Goodhue Gazette,
was when Granddaddy Ike accidentally set the town hall on fire with a cigarette, when he nodded off in the lobby next to a full trash can. Not much chance of Buttons appearing in the new
Goodhue Progress,
either.

Just as quickly as it came, Tugs’s euphoria evaporated. Was she just a Button, as Burton said? She looked at her mother’s long neck, her father’s unruly hair, and recognized herself as their miniature. But while she couldn’t name it, Tugs had felt a sense of possibility today as she made that small speech, and there had to be a way to get that feeling back.

It was while lying atop the covers the next morning, mulling over Aunt Mina’s admonishment that cameras were little glass boxes, that Tugs remembered what she’d left at the park on the Fourth of July: the Kodak box and the manual with it. If she had the manual, maybe she could fix her camera.

Tugs played over the scene again in her mind.
The new aluminum model,
Mr. Pepper had said. Aunt Mina was wrong. Cameras were not little glass boxes. And there was an instruction manual somewhere to guide her.

Tugs smoothed out her bedspread and laid her Brownie on it. She got a butter knife from the kitchen drawer and pried the exposure lever back to its correct position. She tried turning the winding key, but the dented side was stopping things up. It wasn’t split open, though. So it wasn’t technically
broken,
and that was lucky. Her fingers itched to open the back and see what was inside, but she remembered Mr. Pepper’s words and resisted.

How did the picture making happen? The viewing window was a problem. Would the cracks show up in photos? Could the Brownie still take photos? Tugs studied the camera’s face, running her finger over the ridged eye of the lens opening. Even the lens cover was green, a detail that delighted her. There were two tiny glass windows down in the corner, with a tiny silver nail between them. What were they for?

The front cover must come off. Mr. Pepper hadn’t said it wouldn’t. She pulled on it cautiously but didn’t dare pry too hard. She held the cube of it between her two palms. It was cool to the touch and nearly smooth, the pine green of the surface mottled by thin lighter green lines running in random paths.

Oh, the beauty of it. This little box could capture the world. How had she not known that she needed just this very thing in her life? Just the owning of it made her forget her ornery relatives, her jaggedy grin, the way Bess had turned away from her at the park. She felt important.

Tugs was not generally one to take good care of things. Her clothes lay in a heap on the floor. The doll she’d had since she was six was missing an arm, and its tiny checked dress was torn. When she’d gotten Swisher cousin Nora’s hand-me-down bicycle last year, she’d left it on the front porch and it had been stolen in the night.

But the camera would be different, she vowed to herself. Her name had been drawn in that raffle, as if the hand of Luck herself had chosen her — Tugs Esther Button. Tugs imagined Luck as a kindly ancient grandmother, a sweeter version of her own tart wrinkly Granny, but just as feisty in her ability to turn events to her whim. And if Luck wanted her to have a green Kodak No. 2 Brownie F model, Tugs would stand up to the task.

Too bad she’d already mismanaged the box and instruction manual. There was no chance it would still be at the park two days later, what with G.O.’s family and their scavenging obsession. Couldn’t drop a Hershey’s wrapper without some Lindholm sweeping in to claim it for a wrapper sculpture or some such. They would have been over and through that park quick as a wink, picking up trash and claiming anything left behind. No such thing as a lost and found department in a town inhabited by a clan of finders keepers. And even if they did find the manual, G.O. certainly wouldn’t give it to her.

Tugs had yet to need information that couldn’t be found at the library. She could find a camera instruction book there, sure. First thing Monday morning, Tugs scoured the house for
Rootabaga Stories.
She wore her blue ribbons pinned to the front of her overalls and carried her Kodak by its little leather strap.

Miss Lucy was busy with the Thompson twins, sisters who lived together in the little house next to the library and still dressed identically, though they were old ladies. Tugs put her book on the returns shelf and went to the dictionary while she waited.

Lucky,
said the dictionary, meant
favored by luck; fortunate; meeting with good success or good fortune.

Tugs flipped to
fortune.

Luck, fortune, destiny, fate, doom. It was a perplexing circle.

“What’s the word of the day?” asked Miss Lucy.

“Oh!” said Tugs a little too loudly. “Nothing!” She knocked her camera off the table, scooted off the stool to pick it up, and stood, blushing.

“Well, Tugs Button, would you look at those ribbons. Aren’t you the cat’s meow?” said Miss Lucy. Tugs turned redder yet. She tried to think of something clever to say, but could only come up with, “You got a coffee spot on your blouse, Miss Lucy.”

“Why, so I do. I must have been in a hurry this morning. Now, tell me about those ribbons.”

“Three-legged race. Aggie Millhouse,” Tugs said, pointing to the first ribbon. Then she unpinned the second ribbon and handed it to Miss Lucy. “Essay,” she said, and her chest filled so fast she was sure the whole of Goodhue could hear the air rush in. She was getting not only the swell head her father warned against, but a swell chest as well. It was impulse, but she wanted Miss Lucy to have that essay ribbon. “Keep it.”

Miss Lucy opened her mouth to protest, but then shut it again and held the ribbon aloft, as if inspecting a sweet summer tomato. “I know just what let’s do. Come on.”

Tugs followed her to the office, where Miss Lucy rummaged for the key to the display case and stuck a pin between her teeth. Just inside the foyer, she unlocked the case and pinned Tugs’s ribbon next to a small American flag and a feature on Betsy Ross. Then she plucked a pencil from behind her ear and printed neatly below it,
TUGS BUTTON: PATRIOTIC ESSAY WINNER 1929.

“There,” said Miss Lucy. “Now, bring that essay next time you come in and we’ll hang it with the ribbon.”

Tugs nodded, but she knew she wouldn’t. The ribbon was enough. Probably too much, even. Displaying the essay would certainly be putting on airs.