by Sandra Kring
“Did I tell you what he did when I dozed off watching TV last night?” Aunt Verdella asked. “He wrapped me up like a mummy in a good three, four skeins of yarn—my two new avocados, to boot! I woke up because I had to tinkle, and almost peed my pants trying to get my ankles free so I could get to the bathroom. My bladder isn’t what it used to be, you know. That boy had the yarn so tangled that Rudy had to get the scissors and cut me loose. Course, all that little stinker did was laugh.”
“That’s what you get for telling him that bite on his leg this spring was a spider bite,” I teased. Aunt Verdella chuckled and lifted her palms as if to say, Well, what you gonna do about it now?
“While they’re fishing, how about I give you a hand unpacking?” Aunt Verdella didn’t wait for me to answer. She just linked her arm with mine and headed me across the road.
“My little Button,” she said, pulling me so close that our sides bumped. “All grown up and moving out of her childhood home … living right across the road from me.” She got quiet suddenly, and stared down at her feet as we headed up my drive. No doubt, because she was thinking of how my move meant Dad would be living alone, with no one to make sure he ate, and to keep him from feeling lonely—as if I had the power to do either.
Aunt Verdella reminded me of a baby, the way her moods could go from sad or scared and circle back to happy again as quickly as a head turn. And that’s exactly what happened when we stepped inside Grandma Mae’s house.
“You know,” she said, her whole body smiling, “after your grandma Mae passed, I couldn’t come in here without getting all tensed up, remembering her with that frown pickled on her face. But when I brought over Rudy’s tomato starter plants—I hope you don’t mind. I don’t have the window space at home—I just smiled, thinking of Freeda and Winnalee and the life they brought to this house. I was sorry, when after they left, your ma said she didn’t want any more renters in here. I always thought having a young family across the street again would be nice. But now you’ll be here.” She wrapped her arms around her fat middle and shimmied gently.
Aunt Verdella followed me upstairs and took the shirts I’d flung on the bed, heading for the closet. “I’ll bet every piece of clothing you own is something you sewed!” she called, her voice so loud that I swear I could see the windows vibrating. “Your ma would be so proud of you, Button.”
Would Ma be proud of me? I wore that question at the back of my head like a ponytail. It was there when I’d packed Dad’s lunches with store-bought bread instead of homemade because my crust always chewed like taffy (not that Ma was a good cook. She wasn’t. But I knew she wanted me to be), and the question was there on nights Aunt Verdella and I tucked Boohoo into bed with sand in his hair and streaks on his legs, because time had gotten away from us and we were too tired to wrestle him to the tub. Sometimes, like when my English teacher complimented me on my latest essay, or when someone said what a sweet girl I was, I knew Ma was smiling down on me with pride. But other times, I knew better.
Like the night my friend Penny convinced me to lie to Dad that I was going to her house to help her paint her bedroom, and she told her mom the reverse. Instead we slipped off with a twenty-year-old guy Penny had the hots for, and his friend, even though both of us had a few weeks to go before we turned sixteen and neither of us was allowed to date until then. And certainly not guys that old.
That night, Penny talked me into rolling the waistband of my skirt like hers, making them minis that barely covered our butts. I didn’t want to because of my skinny legs, with knees lumpy and big as cauliflowers, but she lifted a copy of her Teen Beat magazine to show me a picture of Twiggy, the model whose doe-eyed face and string-bean body was plastered everywhere. “She only weighs ninety-eight pounds,” Penny said. “Girls are starving themselves to get as skinny as her—be glad you don’t have to!” I could almost feel Ma’s eyes burning two holes into the top of my head as I cuddled in the backseat with Trevor, who was cuter than I had ever imagined one of my dates could be, and drank the bottle of Pabst he shoved into my hand. He thought I was just chilly when I asked to wear his sweatshirt, pulling the hood up over my head so that it drooped down over my eyes, before letting him run his hand up my shirt and stroke my breasts a couple of times before I pushed him away.
No. I didn’t think Ma was all that proud of me.
“How about this drawer for your socks?” Aunt Verdella asked.
I looked up and nodded.
“You tie your socks together. Now ain’t that interesting,” she said. “I always make balls. But then I guess your ma tied socks, too, didn’t she? Course, she would. Balls make the tops stretch out, and your ma had those skinny ankles. Isn’t it something how many things we learn from our mothers, though? I do all sorts of things like mine. Like cutting the ends off of bread when I bake it, and eating them while they’re still hot. Even if I make four loaves!” She giggled. “And the way I can’t throw nothing away. My ma was just like me. A real clutter-bug.”
Aunt Verdella had always slipped little things about her parents into our conversations, but until Ma died, I never paid all that much attention to them. Now I looked at things differently. It did me good to see her remember times without tears, because although I didn’t cry every time Ma’s name came up anymore, I’d still feel that horrible ache pooling in my center.
I smiled at Aunt Verdella as I picked up a box of my personal things, wanting to put them away myself. “I’m so glad your ma was good to you,” I said.
Aunt Verdella pushed down the mound of socks and closed the drawer with her hip. “Oh, she treated me like a little princess. And Lord knows, it wasn’t because I was so cute she couldn’t take her eyes off of me, either! Though to her, I probably was.”
Aunt Verdella noticed the leaning stack of sweaters I’d left on the window seat, and she hurried to grab them. “I’ll put these on the shelf in the closet. How about that? The dresser’s already full.” I told her that would be fine, then opened the box of mementos I had wedged between my feet. Winnalee’s Book of Bright Ideas was on top, alongside the empty urn Winnalee had left behind. I took the urn out of the box and set it on the floor, then picked up the book and sat down, smoothing my fingers over the embossed letters: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Aunt Verdella was still chattering about my sewing when she stepped out of the closet and spotted the urn. “Oh my,” she said as she crossed the room and picked it up. “I didn’t know you had this, Button.” She turned the urn in her hands, her eyes puckering with empathy. “I’ll never forget the sight of that sweet little thing pulling this out of their truck and telling us her dead ma was in it.”
Aunt Verdella looked like she might cry, so I lifted the Book of Bright Ideas to show her.
“Oh, I remember you two toting that book around! You girls were what, eight, nine years old?”
“Nine.”
Aunt Verdella sighed wistfully. “I remember the day you found it in the bottom of the tree the two of you used to play in. You were so touched that she’d left it behind for you.” Winnalee’s “bright ideas” were written in chubby, irregular letters, the i’s dotted with circles and sometimes hearts. Aunt Verdella gave one long awwwwww at the sight of them.
Aunt Verdella sat down on the bed beside me, the urn cradled in her arms. “Now refresh me Button, ’cause my memory only holds things about as long as my bladder. Where’d she get that book from? And the things she’d write … what exactly was that about, again?”
So I reminded her of how Winnalee had swiped the book from a rich lawyer’s house where Freeda cleaned. How he had a whole collection of the classics in his library, all of them leather-bound prop books with blank pages.
“Now why would he have books like that?”
“For looks, I guess.”
Aunt Verdella shook her head. “He must have been a little goofy in the head,” she said.
I started to explain the notion Winnalee had that launched the bright ideas, then decided
to just read the first entry, because it said it all: “Bright Idea number one: If you don’t want to keep making the same mistakes over and over again like Freeda says big people do, then you should find a book with nothing inside it and write down the things you see and hear that you think might be the secrets to life, because nobody’s going to tell you shit. By the time you get to 100 you’re probably going to know everything there is to know about how to live good.”
“Ohhhh, isn’t that precious,” Aunt Verdella said, her hand warm on my arm.
My stomach suddenly got that hot sensation in it. The same one you feel when your eyes warm before you cry. “Aunt Verdella? Do you ever wonder why we think of the Malones so often, and still miss them? They were our friends over one summer. That’s all. Penny was my friend for six years before she moved, and though I missed her for a time, I hardly ever think of her anymore.”
“Oh, Button. It’s not the length of time we knew someone that makes them so special. It’s what they brought to our lives.”
Aunt Verdella rested her head against mine. “You know, when the picture on your TV screen starts rolling. Or when your bread’s coming out of the toaster with only one side brown, you admit the dang things are broken, and you either fix them, or you get a new one. But when your life is broken, you’ll let that misery roll by for years, and ignore the side of you that isn’t finished. Your uncle Rudy, who is, as you know, smart as a whip about most everything, says that’s just human nature. And I suppose it is. But still …”
Aunt Verdella straightened up and stared across the room at nothing. “When Freeda and Winnalee pulled into town—Freeda with that fiery red hair and temper to match, and Winnalee, cute as a bug’s ear in that big mesh slip and ladies’ blouse, carrying this urn and that book—I brought them back to rent your grandma’s place because I saw something in them that was broken that I wanted to fix. I don’t know that I fixed even one thing in their lives, but what I do know, is that they fixed plenty in ours. Without even tryin’.”
She made a soft hmmmm in the back of her throat. “I don’t like thinking about those times, back before Freeda and Winnalee came and changed our family for the better—we were so broken then—but I can’t help it sometimes. Your ma and dad’s marriage had gone sour so long ago, that I doubt they even tasted the bitterness anymore. And your ma, so judgmental and jealous, and cold to you and your dad. I told myself that’s just how she was made, because nothing ever seemed to change it. It broke my heart, though, the way she had you so scared of doin’ something wrong, that you couldn’t stop scratching yourself. Remember how you used to chew the insides of your cheeks until they bled?” I slid my tongue over to cover the jagged, tender skin in my mouth, as if she’d see the damage right through my cheek if I didn’t.
“Auntie tried to help you loosen up—you were such a serious little thing. Like a little old lady in a child’s body. But I couldn’t do nothing to change that, any more than I could change Jewel’s behavior. All I could do was love you both. But Freeda? She knew what to do.”
“Yes,” I said, remembering how, after Ma accused Freeda of having an affair with Dad, Freeda had flown into a rage and yelled at Ma for her jealousy, and for how she treated her family. Ma had cried so hard Freeda had to help her to a chair. That’s when it came out that she felt ugly and undeserving of Dad, and Freeda helped her understand that she was putting those feelings about herself onto me. “But after Freeda took Ma under her wing, helping her fix up, loosen up, and feel better about herself, Ma turned butterfly bright and wasn’t so hard on herself—or us—anymore.” Of course, she never became as vibrant or as much of a free spirit as Freeda—nobody probably could—but she started giving Dad back rubs and me hugs. And when Boohoo came along, she cuddled him just like Aunt Verdella did, melding his little curled body against her every time she held him.
“Yep. Your ma was like a new person, after Freeda got done with her … and you got happier and more outgoing after Winnalee got done with you, too.”
Aunt Verdella sighed. “That’s why I got my heart so set on buying Hannah Malone a final resting place, like Winnalee wanted her to have. So that sweet little girl could set down this urn, and we could show the Malones how much we appreciated them. Remember when you and me went to Hopested, Minnesota, to buy the plot and stone, and how shocked we were when the funeral director told us that Hannah Malone was still alive? Lord, I couldn’t hardly believe my ears! And then a few days later, after the funeral director told Hannah Malone that we’d come and why, there she was on our doorstep, wanting Winnalee back.”
I flinched at the memory of Aunt Verdella and me learning—along with Winnalee—that Freeda was not Winnalee’s sister after all, but her mother, and that she’d returned to Hopested to take Winnalee, only after she’d learned that her uncle Dewey was back living with Hannah. Freeda didn’t want Dewey molesting Winnalee as he had her, and she was going to get her out of there even if she had to lie to Winnalee and tell her that their mom was dead, and put woodstove—fireplace, cigarette, whatever kind of ashes they were—in an urn for Winnalee to carry so she’d go willingly, or not. And that night, after the secrets came out, Freeda and Winnalee pulled out of town. Without saying goodbye.
“I just wanted to do something nice for those two, you know?” Aunt Verdella repeated.
I nodded.
“We were so broken then,” she said with a sigh.
I stared down at the Book of Bright Ideas. Then I asked in a whisper, “Do you know that we’re broken now?”
Aunt Verdella put her arm around me and rested her head back against mine. Then she said, “Yes.”
CHAPTER
2
BRIGHT IDEA #86: If you’re scared of dead people, then you’re probably scared of live people too. But you don’t need to be scared of either.
On my first morning waking up in Grandma Mae’s house—my second day of freedom from Dauber High—I stepped outside, my skin still damp from my bath, and checked the sky as I headed across the road. Boohoo was digging in his tractor tire sandbox. Uncle Rudy’s truck was gone, and Aunt Verdella was coming around the side of the house with an empty laundry basket. “I need to go to Dad’s to find my good sewing scissors. Do you think you could give me a lift?” I asked. “I went to get them late last night, but a warning light came on the dash and the car started smelling burny. I didn’t know if I’d make it the six miles to Dad’s house, so I turned around. Smoke was rolling out of the hood by the time I got home.”
“Oh, I wish you had a more reliable car,” Aunt Verdella said. “That thing you’re driving is nothing but a pill.” Who knew what that expression meant, or if she was using it correctly. But if “a pill” meant an old, rusted heap of ugly maroon junk, then she was using it accurately. Dad had picked up the Rambler Classic right before I got my license. He paid two hundred for it, which is about how many times he’d had to fix it since then. “Course, I’ll run you, dear. I could use some milk from The Corner Store, anyway,” Aunt Verdella said. “Hopefully your dad will be home so you can ask him to look at your car.”
“Yeah,” I said. What I didn’t say, though, was that I was relieved she’d be with me when I brought it up. Not that I anticipated Dad yelling if I was alone—either way, he’d only stare off and say with a sigh, “Well, bring it over, then”—but with her there, I knew I was less likely to turn into the big-eared kid I’d been, too mousy to talk to her dad.
“We going to Dad’s?” Boohoo asked. I nodded.
Aunt Verdella told him to empty the dirt from his shoes and brush the sand off his bottom, then went inside to put the basket away. I watched Boohoo as he upside-downed his sneaker, letting the sand filter through his fingers as he made cartoonish sounds of a plane plummeting toward earth.
Once, Verdella had told me that Dad was a “change of life baby,” meaning my grandma Mae—Dad and Uncle Rudy’s mother—had him when she was old (forty-four, I think) and that she “never had the time of day for him.” Some years after
Uncle Rudy’s first wife died, Uncle Rudy and Aunt Verdella got married and built a house across the road from Grandma Mae’s. Dad was still just a kid, and he began hanging around more and more, and little by little, his toys and clothes moved across the road, until, without anyone verbally agreeing to anything, Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy were raising him. Just as now they were raising Boohoo.
Boohoo was too little to understand death, but the grief he absorbed from the rest of us when Ma died, along with his missing her, caused him to wake and cry in the night. Nobody could comfort him except Aunt Verdella. Probably because after Ma opened her bridal shop, while Boohoo was still in diapers, Aunt Verdella took care of him during the day. Dad didn’t seem to notice that Boohoo never came home after Ma’s death. Same as he didn’t notice that each night after our supper was finished and the dishes done, I got in my Rambler, crossed Highway 8, and drove down Peters Road to Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy’s house, where I stayed until bedtime. So to Boohoo, it was “Dad’s house,” not his, and “Dad” was just a name. Obviously. Because when Aunt Verdella helped him make a Father’s Day card last summer, he gave it to Uncle Rudy, and Uncle Rudy had to explain to him that it belonged to Dad.
After Ma died, her sister Stella came, wanting to take Boohoo. She claimed I was old enough to get along without a mother, but that Boohoo wasn’t. Dad threw her out of the house, shouting, “Are you fucking nuts? You think I’m going to give my son away?” I wondered if Dad realized by now that he had given Boohoo away.
As far as Boohoo went, it was déjà vu all over again, proving that not only do people repeat the same mistakes they already made, but sometimes, the same mistakes their family already made.
“Okay, I’m ready,” Aunt Verdella called as she came down the steps, swinging her crocheted purse, and carrying a paper plate covered with Reynolds Wrap. “How you coming there, Boohoo?” she called, and he answered, “One down, one to go!” Aunt Verdella sent a string of ha-has floating through the air like pollen.