A Life of Bright Ideas Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF SANDRA KRING

  “Touching … surprisingly poignant … builds to an emotional crescendo … The book becomes so engrossing that it’s tough to see it end.”

  —The Washington Post

  “A beautiful, witty story that rings with heartbreak, hope and laughter … Kring’s brilliance lies in her powerful reversals and revelations, taking readers and characters on a dramatic, emotional roller coaster.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Sandra Kring weaves an intricate and heartwarming tale of family, love, and forgiveness.… Kring’s passionate voice is reminiscent of Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck.… She will make you laugh, have you in tears and take you back to the days of good friends, good times, millponds and bonfires.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “A touching novel … Kring explores the far-ranging effects of family trauma with a deft hand as her child narrator uncovers the past, bringing light and hope.”

  —Booklist

  “Sandra Kring’s delightful and nuanced take on Midwestern America … feels real and moving—perhaps because it is so unpretentious.”

  —Salon

  “Sandra Kring writes with such passion and immediacy, spinning us back in time, making us feel the characters’ hope, desire, laughter, sorrow, and redemption.”

  —LUANNE RICE, New York Times bestselling author of The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners

  “Sandra Kring never fails to impress me.”

  —LESLEY KAGEN, bestselling author of

  Whistling in the Dark

  “Sandra Kring has written a funny, deeply satisfying book; her characters finagle their way into your heart and when their story ends, you can’t help but feel, ‘ahhhh.’ ”

  —LORNA LANDVIK, author of

  Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

  A Life of Bright Ideas is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A Bantam Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2012 by Sandra Kring

  Excerpt from The Book of Bright Ideas copyright © 2006 by Sandra Kring

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Kring, Sandra.

  A life of bright ideas: a novel / Sandra Kring.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-553-90802-2

  1. Families—Fiction. 2. Wisconsin—Fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.R545L54 2012 813’.6—dc22 2011017440

  www.bantamdell.com

  Cover design : Melody Cassen

  Cover image : © Henry Arden/Gettyimages

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue—1978

  Bright Idea #100:

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Reader’s Guide

  Excerpt from The Book of Bright Ideas

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Prologue

  I’ve always had an attachment to trees. Most likely because of my uncle Rudy, a farmer who knew the secrets of trees and seeds and wind and water every bit as well as my aunt Verdella knew the secret of how to love. He was always there to pluck an analogy from trees with which to assure me that hearts can sustain themselves in even the longest droughts of hope, and that something beautiful can take root and bloom in lives that have become wastelands. I clung to every one of his stories—dropped into my days like simple trivia—because, well, I guess it’s like my first (and really, my only) true best friend, Winnalee Malone, said: “You have to believe in something, or what’s the point?”

  . . .

  I don’t remember much about the day my ma died, but I remember that night. Aunt Verdella stretching a sheet across the couch near midnight, and bringing Uncle Rudy a pillow. My two-year-old brother squirming himself to sleep between Aunt Verdella and me on a bed that smelled like vanilla and work clothes and sunshine, her hand bridged to my arm, stroking it when I cried softly, and squeezing it when my sobs jiggled the bed.

  Aunt Verdella’s hand didn’t drift off until she did, and she moaned in her sleep. I lay still at the edge of the bed for hours, my eyelids slammed shut to keep in the tears. And when sobs formed in my chest, I bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood, which felt easier to swallow than grief. I knew that if Aunt Verdella woke, she’d only start crying along with me, and she’d already cried a river’s worth of tears. Finally, when I couldn’t keep quiet any longer, I slipped out of bed, circled the couch so I wouldn’t wake Uncle Rudy, and went outside.

  It was almost dawn and the sky was still wearing the stains of yesterday’s storms. It was misting and foggy, and wet grass clung to my bare feet like hair clippings as I hurried to the tree that had been every bit a part of my childhood as Winnalee.

  We called it our “magic tree” because it spun us off to faraway places, and brought us home by lunchtime. It kept our “adventure bag” (an army knapsack that held the items we believed we’d need when we snuck off to Dauber Falls in search of the fairies Winnalee was convinced lived there) hidden in the hole at its feet, safe from Tommy Smithy, Uncle Rudy’s fourteen-year-old farmhand. And after the Malones left without warning, our magic tree kept Winnalee’s Book of Bright Ideas for me until I found it. I’d read that book so many times since that summer, that I knew every “bright idea” by heart. Just looking at the tree that had been the keeper of our innocence that summer of 1961 made my tears run like sap, and I ran stumbling to meet it, like people do when they’re being reunited with family from across a sea.

  I hadn’t climbed that tree since Winnalee left, and my fourteen-year-old body, skinny and gangly as it was, felt heavy and awkward as I reached around a thick, low-hanging branch and swung my legs up to wrap around it. The bony bark scratched the inside of my thighs as I scooted down the limb, Aunt Verdella’s nightie bunching around my hips.

  The barkless platform in the fork of the tree that once held two pairs of dusty feet couldn’t contain my ladies’-size-eights, but cupped my heels. I leaned back against one of the three thick li
mbs and looked up at branches that stretched toward Heaven, as if they, too, were reaching for Ma. Questions about why she had to go into the basement when she did played in my head like taps, and I had to bend my head forward or drown. I cried for my ma. I cried for my brother. I cried for my dad, my aunt, my uncle. And then I begged the magic tree to take me away. Far away, to lands where fairies played, and Winnalee waited. Where nothing could find me but innocence.

  Instead, it was Uncle Rudy who found me. Sitting in the fork, straddling the limb I’d leaned against, my arms and legs wrapped around it like a child being carried. “Button?” he called.

  I blinked awake and saw him below me, one hand extended and the other dangling at his side. The grass was bright from its washing and Aunt Verdella’s nightgown was damp on my skin. “Come on, honey,” Uncle Rudy said.

  As he helped me down, I could see Aunt Verdella standing at the kitchen window, her hand pressed to her mouth.

  Uncle Rudy put one arm around me and took a photograph out of his pocket. “I ever show you this, Button?” he said, handing it to me. “I took it up on Lake Superior, when your dad and I went up there on a fishing trip, right after he graduated.” I stared down at the photo with the same skeptical wonder with which I once gaped at what appeared to be photos of real fairies. I squinted at Uncle Rudy, who had shrunken to five feet seven while I was growing, his eyes now level with mine.

  “I know. I know,” he said, nodding. “Looks impossible, don’t it? A tree that size growin’ on the top of a big rock jutting out of the water, no soil beneath it. But lookie here,” he said, tracing his stiff finger along a thick rope that ran from the base of the tree across thin air, then disappeared off the edge of the page. “I didn’t get it in the shot, but over here was a bluff some twenty feet from the rock, and these roots were stretched to it like an umbilical cord.” He took his cap off, rubbed the top of his half-bald head, and pumped it back in place. “Anyway, I want you to have it,” he said, giving me a pat.

  I didn’t get the chance to ask him how that tree knew which direction to send its roots in, or how it survived until it reached solid ground, because Aunt Verdella was already on the porch, her arms reaching, and all I wanted was to get to them. But later, four years later, to be exact, I came to understand for myself how that tree survived. And then, how it thrived.

  CHAPTER

  1

  BRIGHT IDEA #62: If you want to go to Detroit because you think it might be a fun place to live, but you end up in Gary, Indiana, instead and your sister says, “Well that’s life,” then you might as well just accept that you are where you are for now.

  I was upstairs in Grandma Mae’s old house, in the room wallpapered with army-green ivy and a window seat, a stack of shirts on hangers bending my wrist, when Aunt Verdella shouted my name. She didn’t call out “Evy”—short for Evelyn, which is what most people called me—but “Button,” the nickname Uncle Rudy gave me when I was little. My stomach tightened from the fear in Aunt Verdella’s voice, and I tossed the shirts on the bed and jumped over a row of cardboard boxes. I raced across the hall to the window in the pink flower-papered room facing my aunt and uncle’s house, and butted my nose against the rusty screen. Aunt Verdella, shaped like a snowman made wrong for as long as I could remember, with only one big ball for her body, instead of two, and normal-sized limbs that looked stick-skinny in comparison, was almost to the dirt road separating her house from Grandma Mae’s. “Aunt Verdella?” I called.

  Her arms were going like two twigs caught in a windstorm as she gestured back toward her house, pointing high. “Boohoo!”

  I looked straight ahead and saw my six-year-old brother, Boohoo (Robert Reece until Uncle Rudy dubbed him Boohoo, because of his ability to use a pout to get his way), walking along the peak of her roof, a red towel faded to pink draped over his shoulders—he thought Spider-Man wore a cape like Superman. Boohoo held a skein of pumpkin-orange yarn above his head. “My God!” I cried, then flew down the stairs like I was on fire.

  I tore across the yard and into theirs and veered around Aunt Verdella, shouting at Boohoo to stand still and to get down—as if he could do both at the same time. He was twirling the yarn, sending long strands floating down over the gray shingles. My skin dampened with scared.

  “He must have crawled out the attic window while I was on the phone,” Aunt Verdella wailed, holding her pillowy, freckled chest. She pressed her hands to her flushed cheeks. “Boohoo, you’re gonna fall and break your neck!”

  “I’m not Boohoo,” he said, “I’m Spideyman. And I’m making a web.”

  Boohoo walked with one sneaker “suctioned” on one side of the peak and one on the other, twirling the wad of yarn as he went. “Oh Lord, he’s gonna fall!” Aunt Verdella cried, ducking, like each step he made was a boxer’s jab.

  “I’ll go up after him,” I said, because it was the only solution I could think of, even though I got woozy if I was more than a few feet off the ground. “Oh dear, oh dear,” Aunt Verdella said. “Don’t chase him or he’ll run. Oh Lord. You’re both gonna be landing on your heads!”

  I’d just reached the front door when Aunt Verdella stopped me with a loud squawk. She pointed down the gravel road at Uncle Rudy’s beat-up pickup lazily moving toward us in a haze of dust. I looked back up at Boohoo, who glanced down the road, too, then went back to his web-making. It was one of those moments when I just wanted to go back. Back to when our family worked as smoothly as the gears on the clock that Ma kept oiled.

  Aunt Verdella ran to the truck, jogging alongside it before it could stop, huffing as she chattered, her finger jabbing at the roof. Relief pushed me to the truck, too. “Yeah, I see him … I see him,” Uncle Rudy said as he opened the truck door, speaking in his usual still-as-a-lake-on-a-sunny-day voice.

  “Hurry,” Aunt Verdella said. “Do something before he breaks his neck.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what Aunt Verdella expected Uncle Rudy to do, since he was even older than she—him sixty-nine, her sixty-eight—and with a back that had him stiff and curled like the letter S. Uncle Rudy grabbed a hardware store bag off the front seat and waited for his half-blind, all-deaf lab, Knucklehead, to climb down from the seat. My uncle didn’t look up. Not once. He just shuffled toward the house.

  “Hi, Uncle Rudy!” Boohoo shouted. Uncle Rudy gave him a slow wave, still without looking up, while Aunt Verdella buzzed around Uncle Rudy like a housefly, verbalizing what I was thinking. “Where you goin’, Rudy? You gotta do something! How’s he gonna get down by himself?”

  “Same way he got up, I suppose,” Uncle Rudy said as he pulled the screen door wide open to let Knucklehead in. We followed them into the kitchen, where Uncle Rudy set his bag down on the cluttered counter, patted Knucklehead once he flopped down on his hair-matted rag rug, then went back outside.

  Uncle Rudy was the only one who could make Boohoo do anything. And Boohoo (when he was on the ground anyway) tagged after Uncle Rudy like Knucklehead used to. So when Uncle Rudy headed for the shed, Boohoo called down to ask him what he was doing. Uncle Rudy didn’t answer. He just scraped open the wood-slatted door and slipped inside. And when he came out, he had his fishing pole and creel. “Rudy!” Aunt Verdella cried, flabbergasted. “You’re not goin’ off fishing and leave us in this predicament, are you?” Uncle Rudy just kept walking, his work boots crunching gravel as he made his way down the driveway, whistling as he went.

  Aunt Verdella stopped, propped her freckly fists about where her waist should be, and watched him, her eyes stretched wide, her jaw dangling.

  “Hey, Uncle Rudy?” Boohoo called, his voice thin and anxious. “You going down to the creek?” I glanced back at the roof. Boohoo was staring down the drive, the wad of yarn hanging limp alongside his knee. Uncle Rudy didn’t even turn around. “Evy? He going down to the creek?”

  Boohoo didn’t wait for me to answer. He crouched down, and while Aunt Verdella and I held our breaths and pinched each other’s arms, Boohoo shuffled his way down
the sloped roof, his makeshift cape fanning the shingles at his back. He curled his leg into the opened attic window, tossed the skein in, grabbed on to the sill, and slipped inside.

  Boohoo was out the front door in a flash. I gripped his forearm and jerked him to a stop before he could jump off the porch. I didn’t know whether to spank him or hug him. Not that I had the chance to do either, because Aunt Verdella grabbed him and squished him against her belly. “Oh, Boohoo. You scared the dickens out of us! Don’t you go on that roof again, you hear me? You could have broken your neck and been killed, or paralyzed, or—”

  Boohoo squirmed as Aunt Verdella smothered his sweaty dark hair with kisses dropped like commas, in between a long list of near-fatal injuries he could have sustained had he fallen. He wormed his face free. “Hey, Aunt Verdella, Aunt Verdella,” Boohoo said, patting her arm to get her attention. “Did you know that when you run, you don’t go any faster, just higher? You do. Like this,” he said. Boohoo demonstrated, his dirty sneakers scissoring baby-sized bunny hops, his head bobbing on a neck not much bigger than a wrist. Aunt Verdella looked at Boohoo, then at me, “I don’t run like that, do I?” Boohoo assured her that she did, then headed for the shed, calling to Uncle Rudy to wait up.

  Aunt Verdella mopped the fear off her brow as Boohoo raced to catch up to Uncle Rudy, then skipped down the drive alongside of him, his fish pole in one hand, his other hooked on the back of Uncle Rudy’s suspenders. Aunt Verdella shook her head. “That boy’s gonna give me gray hair yet,” she said, as though she’d forgotten the duct-tape-width strip of silver that ran down the part of her Shocking Strawberry colored hair. “I swear, watching every child I ever babysat in one room, at one time, would still be less work than that one. He’s a handful!” It didn’t matter how upset Aunt Verdella was, her words always sounded like one long string of ha-has.

  Aunt Verdella’s eyes lifted then, and she said, “Sorry, Jewel, honey. Button and I are doing our best, but that boy is a handful!” Aunt Verdella did that often, talking to Ma as though she was standing right next to her.