A Life of Bright Ideas Page 13

  “Hey, Evy. Can I go by Aunt Verdella now? She’s coming.” Boohoo pointed down the road.

  “No. You were very naughty when Winnalee watched you. You chased her with this,” I said holding up the broom, “and turned the house into a pigsty. You are going to stay right there until I say you can move. And I mean it, Boohoo.”

  Boohoo started to get up. “Yeah, but—”

  Tommy cut in, giving him a glare. “Didn’t your sister just tell you to stay put?” Boohoo sat back down.

  “I don’t need your help, Tommy Smithy,” I snapped.

  “Seems to me you do.”

  “Did you want something, because I’ve kind of got my hands full here right now. And it hasn’t exactly been a good morning. I just got back from the hospital. I drove Marls there.”

  “Marls?”

  Granted, Tommy delivered cows all the time, so he probably knew more about bleeding vaginas and birth than most women, but those were cows, and I couldn’t get myself to say that Marls was hemorrhaging. “She was having some problems,” is all I could say.

  “Jesus,” Tommy said.

  “Brody was nowhere to be found, of course.”

  “He never showed up this morning. He’s probably fishing. Is she gonna be okay?”

  “I think so, but they’re keeping her overnight. Anyway, what did you want?”

  “I came to see if you were home. I had something to show you.”

  As Tommy headed for his truck, he glanced to the field, where a couple of cows were slopping water at the stock tank. “I’m not even gonna ask why Boohoo’s cow is wearing yarn around his neck,” he said, shaking his head.

  I expected Tommy to grab whatever he wanted to show me from his truck, but he didn’t. He just jumped in and drove off, leaving me wearing a thin film of guilt for being so short with him. I headed for the house, giving Boohoo yet another warning to stay put, and to stop throwing rocks at ants.

  Winnalee was in the kitchen, smearing peanut butter on the table with the dishcloth. “Is Marls okay?” she asked.

  I repeated what little I knew, and Winnalee didn’t say anything. She just kept cleaning.

  “Winnalee?” Boohoo shouted. “I can’t get up, so could you come out here so I can say some sorrys?”

  “Man,” Winnalee mumbled. “Now he’s gonna be all sweet and I’m gonna have to forgive him.” She dumped a dustpan full of confetti into the trash can, then headed outside. A few minutes later, I heard the two of them, their shouts nothing but excited gibberish.

  Boohoo was in the middle of the yard, bopping up and down and screaming as he jabbed toward the sky. Winnalee was beside him, her hands cupped above her eyes to shield them from the sun.

  “Holy shit!” Winnalee cried. “It is Tommy’s plane!”

  “I told you!” Boohoo shouted. “It’s Tommy’s Piper! I could tell!

  “Tommyyyyyyyy!” Boohoo screamed, as I spotted the moving dot that had to be Tommy’s red-winged, white bellied plane. I squinted, my insides jumping every bit as frantically as Boohoo’s and Winnalee’s outsides were, but out of fear, not excitement.

  Boohoo and Winnalee kept clutching each other as they laughed and shouted, Winnalee completely forgetting that minutes ago, Boohoo was her mortal enemy.

  The Piper made a wide arc then headed toward us.

  “What’s that lunatic doing?” I screamed, as Tommy’s plane skimmed above the treetops, so close Tommy could have probably reached out and grabbed a pinecone. When the plane got close, the nose dipped as if it was sniffing us out. “Here he comes!” Boohoo shouted.

  Winnalee’s head fell back, her hair wavering, as the Piper’s shadow spilled into the yard. “What does his plane say? What does it say? Lady Godiva? Coooooooool! Hi, Tommy!”

  I clamped my eyes shut, and crouched down, my arms instinctively wrapping around my head as Tommy’s plane buzzed over the house, whirring like a table saw.

  When the pitch of the plane’s engine rose, I peeked up with only my eyes to see if the plane was lifting. It was. But it was also circling. I pressed my knuckles against my mouth, silently pleading with Tommy not to dive at the house again.

  But he did. Twice more. I cursed him under my breath and promised myself I’d punch him when I saw him again.

  “I want a ride, Tommy!” Boohoo shouted as the Lady Godiva headed toward home, “Take me! Take me!” When the Piper was nothing but a faint buzz and a speck, Winnalee, breathless from shouting the same, turned to me and said, “Oh my God, Button, were you ducking?”

  CHAPTER

  14

  BRIGHT IDEA #16: If your babysitter tells you that the best place to hide things is right out in the open, don’t believe her.

  The whole ordeal of Winnalee’s marijuana plants might have been over for me and Winnalee, but it wasn’t over for Aunt Verdella. “I’m worried about that girl,” she told me a couple of nights later, when, restless while Winnalee was at work, and still obsessing because Jesse’s last letter ended with Okay, gotta go. I got a letter from Amy—sort of an apology—and I suppose I should answer it before it’s lights out, I hiked over with a basket of dirty laundry.

  I startled Aunt Verdella when I came through the door. She dropped the paper she had in her hand into the opened kitchen drawer and shoved it shut, leaving a fringe of envelopes peeking out. “Sorry,” I told her. “I didn’t want to wake Uncle Rudy or Boohoo by knocking.”

  “Button, since when does family need to knock?” she said. “Come on in. I dozed off late this afternoon and now I’m wide awake, so I was just catching up on your dad’s laundry.”

  I looked down at the basket I’d just brought in and cringed. “I wasn’t going to bring ours over, but …”

  “It’s okay, honey,” she said. “Running downstairs is good exercise for me.” She grabbed the basket and made an exaggerated phew face. “With as much beer as our little Winnalee spills on her clothes, the customers must go home stone sober. I’ll just presoak these in the washer tonight and get them whirling in the morning.

  “Oh,” she told me, stopping halfway across the dining room. “I called over to the Bishops this evening and talked to Marls herself. She’s got placenta previa and that’s why she was spotting.” I must have looked confused, because she explained how that means the placenta was down by the cervix, instead of above it, and the pressure of the baby caused some tearing. If the truth be known, pregnancy scared me, and I was creeped out by all those parts inside, which seemed as foreign to me as Japan, so I just nodded like I was listening and understood.

  “Is she going to be okay?” I asked.

  “Well, the doctors think her placenta will move, but she’s got to take it easy for a while.”

  “I’m glad the baby’s okay,” I said.

  Aunt Verdella’s eyes, like her bladder, weren’t what they used to be, so when she worked in the evenings she kept the room well lit. I examined her freshly cut and colored hair in the stark light as she prattled more about Marls’s pregnancy. The old growth was a medium auburn, but the inches of roots were more of a Pepto Bismol pink. Aunt Verdella noticed me staring. “Does it look all right?” she asked, patting the side of her head. “Fanny said it’s two-toned.”

  I told her it looked real pretty and she said, “Maybe it was just the lighting at The Corner Store. I told Fanny; Claire knows what she’s doing.”

  Aunt Verdella headed my basket downstairs—still talking, though I couldn’t hear what she was saying—while I stared at Dad’s clothes—pants as worn and limp as him, shirts with arms too lifeless to pick up a six-year-old boy. Brody would be a dad just like him, and it made me sad for the baby Marls was carrying.

  Aunt Verdella’s voice stopped, the house going dead silent, but for the soft hum of a fan upstairs. I cocked my head and listened harder, then went to the basement door, fear gripping me. “Aunt Verdella?” I called. “You okay?”

  “Oh my goodness, my goodness,” she uttered.

  “You okay?” I asked again.

&nb
sp; Aunt Verdella started up the stairs. Her arm was stretched in front of her, something dangling from her hand. I couldn’t see what in the dim light, but I was prepared to wince, sure it was a dead mouse.

  I moved back to let her step into the kitchen, and glanced even if I didn’t want to. Then I all-out stared with disbelief and horror when I saw that it was something worse than a dead mouse. It was a used rubber, pinched and half crumpled.

  “It, it was wrapped up in the sheets,” she told me, heading to the trash can, where she stopped to grab a paper towel to wrap it in first.

  “It wasn’t mine,” I said quickly.

  Aunt Verdella waved off my declaration. “Oh, I know that, honey.”

  She turned to me, her face sagging with disappointment. “You know,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about Winnalee, as it is. This whole dope thing … and now this.” She took a gulp of air, held it a second, then blurted out, “Button, you’re not on dope now, too, are you?”

  Her worry was so absurd that I couldn’t help laughing. “Aunt Verdella, you know that if I was even tempted—which I’m not—Ma would reach down and whack me in the head. Besides, life itself should be enough of a high, shouldn’t it?” And for me, it was. At least on days when I heard from Jesse (and he didn’t talk about old girlfriends). He was writing once or twice a week now, and I was writing him every day—except for the day neither Winnalee or I could scrounge up a lousy six cents to leave in the mailbox for a stamp. Jesse noticed I hadn’t written that day, too. “It just didn’t seem right when roll call came and your letter wasn’t there.” He signed that letter, Love, Jesse.

  “Maybe we should take her to a doctor,” Aunt Verdella said, her voice chasing off my daydreams. “Ellie Connor’s boy was addicted to drugs and that’s what they had to do with him. The doctor put him in the hospital and gave him medicine until he was done with the shakes and vomiting.”

  “Marijuana isn’t like that, Aunt Verdella.”

  “And that strange man she had over to the house …” Chet Bouman. A creep according to Tommy. A cool cat who was into Transcendental Meditation and played the bongo drums, according to Winnalee. Aunt Verdella’s sentence stopped mid-stitch, and I didn’t encourage her to continue.

  Aunt Verdella sprayed another pair of Dad’s work pants with water, then rolled them. “I’m worried about her, Button. And I feel responsible, since Freeda isn’t here to look out for her.”

  Aunt Verdella smacked her tongue against her gums. “I love that girl, you know I do, but she’s like a grown-up Boohoo. So lovable, yet so prone to trouble. I sure do wish Freeda was here. She had a way of snapping people back in line.”

  “Winnalee isn’t doing anything that Freeda herself didn’t do,” I reminded her, then corrected myself. “Okay, except smoke pot, but she stopped doing that now.” I didn’t add the “in the house” part.

  Aunt Verdella went to the ironing board. She licked her finger and tapped it to the bottom of the iron, then unrolled a damp shirt and stretched out the collar. “Button, you notice how whenever we bring up Freeda, Winnalee changes the subject?”

  “I know.”

  Aunt Verdella’s iron, when pressed against line-dried cotton, emitted a warm smell that reminded me of sunny Saturday afternoons. Ma’s laundry day.

  Aunt Verdella shook her head. “Freeda was only sixteen when she had Winnalee. Just a baby …” I’d known this fact as a child, but sixteen sounded pretty old then. Now the thought of someone being a mother at that age was almost enough to make me hyperventilate. Marls was twenty-one, and she looked like a scared kid when I drove her to the hospital. “She had reasons for leaving Winnalee as she did, just as she had reasons for taking her from Hannah. I wish Winnalee could see this,” Aunt Verdella added.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Aunt Verdella sighed. “I was thinking, the other day, how it don’t seem to matter how someone’s parent turned out in the end. What has the most impact, seems to me, is how that parent was when that child was little.” Aunt Verdella glanced at my arms, as if every scratch I’d ever cut into them was still showing. “Our Jewel changed over time, yet you seem more influenced by her mommying when you were little, than by her mommying after you were more grown.” She smoothed a sleeve over the ironing board and pressed the iron to the cuff. “I guess the same is true for Winnalee.”

  Aunt Verdella looked up and the harsh light magnified her weariness. “Oh, I’m just being a worrywart about most everything these days. I went over to your dad’s earlier tonight, and that stew I made him was still in the fridge, dried, and fuzzy with mold—your dad loves beef stew. He had a stick of summer sausage in there, tooth marks on the end like he just picks it out and takes a chomp when he’s hungry. That’s no way to eat.”

  It was always the same when the topic of Dad came up. Aunt Verdella fretted, and the whole time she did, pity and scorn wrestled inside me. “Dad will be okay,” I said without conviction.

  Aunt Verdella hung dad’s shirt and reached for another. She worked quietly for a minute, then said, “I don’t know if we should say anything to Winnalee about what we found.”

  I looked down, my cheeks burning.

  “Oh, honey, don’t you be ashamed.”

  I fidgeted. “I was hoping you wouldn’t know what it was.”

  Aunt Verdella chuckled a bit. “Oh, Button, those things have been around since Adam and Eve. Well, not that long ago, or none of us would be here”—she paused to giggle—“but practically since they invented latex. Course, in my day, they were mostly used by married couples … or cheating men. You remember that couple that lived above the drugstore? The Johnsons, Beulah and George?”

  I shook my head.

  “I don’t suppose you would. That was a long time ago. Anyway, Beulah always feared George was cheatin’ on her. She was sterile, so they had no reason to use, you know … but Fanny Tilman put a bug in Beulah’s ear that she’d seen George in the pharmacy when she went there for Epsom salt, and that she was sure he was buying some. Beulah asked the pharmacist if he had, and he told her that he couldn’t discuss what his patrons bought, even to a spouse, and she figured he was covering for George.

  “Beulah had this dog named Willa, so bony, that I swear, she clinked when she ran like a set of keys. Anyway, don’t know how she did it but she trained that little thing to sniff out the scent of a woman—and”—Aunt Verdella paused and lowered her voice, as if to make it too small to climb the stairs where Boohoo slept—“the smell of latex.”

  I couldn’t help but giggle. Half because of the story, and half because Aunt Verdella was telling it so earnestly. That’s when Winnalee came in, giggling, too, because apparently she’d caught at least the last part of the story. Winnalee passed out quick hugs, kicked off her sandals and sat down, drawing up her knees and planting her heels on the seat. “Oh my God. Latex? As in rubbers?” Winnalee asked, oblivious, of course, to what led to the story in the first place.

  Aunt Verdella dipped her head, and her chin bubbled under her pinkened face.

  “We know what rubbers are, Aunt Verdella,” Winnalee said, rolling her eyes as she squeezed a “geez” out of her giggles.

  “Yes, I know you know what they are.

  “Anyway, that part of the story about Willa is true, because Beulah ordered an afghan from me once, and when I delivered it, that little dog wouldn’t stop sniffing my legs and yapping, hopping in circles. That’s what she’d do if she smelled a woman. Hop in circles, going clockwise. But if she smelled latex, then she’d hop counterclockwise.” Winnalee and I were in stitches by then, Winnalee was in such hysterics she was snorting.

  But Aunt Verdella wasn’t even cracking a smile.

  She made the shush sign, while glancing toward the ceiling, and we clamped our hands over our mouths so we wouldn’t wake Uncle Rudy and Boohoo.

  My breath was hot against my hand, my cheeks billowed, as Aunt Verdella continued her story.

  “George was taking out the trash one day, Willa at
his heels, and he ended up across the alley, at this young widow’s place, helping her change the inner tube on her boy’s bike tire. Course, Willa went nuts, and when Beulah heard her and rushed to the window to see her standing outside the garage hopping counterclockwise, she ran for George’s twenty-two. Good thing she didn’t know how to load a gun—she was trying to put the shells down the barrel!—or George and the widow would have been deader than doornails.”

  Winnalee and I wiped our tears after the story was over, but kept bursting into fresh giggles every time we looked at each other. “Poor woman,” Aunt Verdella said. “To be that scared of losing her man.”

  “Poor woman?” Winnalee said. “Poor man, is more like it. With a wife like that he’d be stupid not to cheat. I mean seriously, to be that jealous? How dumb. Why would anyone be jealous because her man slept with another woman, anyway?” she asked.

  “You serious?” I asked.

  “Of course I am. Nobody owns someone else’s body. We should all be free to share them with whoever we want. Besides, just because two people sleep together, it doesn’t mean they love each other. It’s just sex.”

  Aunt Verdella startled. “Oh, Winnalee, I hope you don’t mean that, honey.”

  “Times have changed, Aunt Verdella. At least for women. Men, they’ve been doing that shit for centuries, but with the Pill especially, now women have the same perks as guys. It’s no big deal.”

  “But it is a big deal, Winnalee. And times might have changed, with all this women’s liberation stuff, and the Pill and all, but I’ll tell you one thing that will never change—men. No matter what they say, or how sweet they talk to get what they want, in the end, they aren’t gonna want a woman who’s been with every Tom, Dick, and Harry.”

  Oh boy!

  “Well, women might end up with Tom, or Dick,” Winnalee said, “but I think Beulah will see to it that they can’t be with George.” Winnalee laughed at her joke, but Aunt Verdella and I didn’t.

  “Why does everything have to be about right or wrong, anyway?” Winnalee huffed when she got done laughing.