The Book of Bright Ideas Read online

  I suppose Daddy was just as curious about what Ma was doing as I was, because he turned his head stiffly and glanced at her when she circled his chair to stand right behind him, and said, “Maybe this will help.”

  Daddy’s red eyes got round as rubber balls when Ma set her hands stiffly on his shoulders. It got so quiet suddenly that even the sound of the wrapper coming off the butter sounded loud.

  Ma’s mouth looked twitchy at first—just like it had looked after she showed me her dress and didn’t know what else to say—then her hands started working good, like they were just kneading bread dough. Daddy’s whole body seemed to melt then, like the old butter I’d just scraped out of the dish, and his head dropped down to the side. “Ahhh,” he said. I thought he’d fall asleep right where he was sitting, but when Ma stopped rubbing him to grab the plate out of the oven, he woke up enough to eat.

  Just a couple days later, while we were punching out paper dolls, Winnalee said, “Your ma ain’t so gray anymore.”

  “Am I still so gray?” I asked. Winnalee tilted her head and looked at me. “No,” she said, and I smiled. “You’re my best friend forever,” I said when the thought popped up from my heart at just that moment. Winnalee smiled then and said, “You’re my best friend forever too.”

  So I had a best friend forever, and I figured my ma did too. And that best friend for my ma was Freeda Malone.

  On Saturdays now, while me and Winnalee went with Aunt Verdella to the community sale to sell a few pot holders and the stuff Aunt Verdella made or scrounged up around the house, Ma and Freeda went shopping over in Porter, where they had better stores. And once they even went to see a matinee, Splendor in the Grass. They were usually still gone when we got back from the sale, and when they came back, they’d bring back the yarn and sewing stuff Aunt Verdella asked them to pick up. I could tell that sometimes when Ma and Freeda giggled about something that happened while they were out, Aunt Verdella felt left out, but like she said to me, making good money at the community sale so we’d have enough money for Winnalee and Freeda’s surprise was more important than anything else in the world right now, so she didn’t mind working while Ma and Freeda were off having fun.

  Aunt Verdella wasn’t upset about Ma and Freeda becoming best friends, but Daddy was. He didn’t like it the day he came home from that auction and saw Ma wearing makeup. “What in the hell do you have on your face?” he asked. He looked so shocked that all I could think about was how he probably would have keeled over dead if he’d seen her face right after Freeda had painted it. As it was, though, all Ma had on was a bit of eye shadow and mascara, and some pinky-red lipstick.

  Ma cringed a little when Dad asked her about her face, then she straightened up tall and turned back to the stove. “You like makeup just fine on Freeda,” she said.

  Daddy stared at her back for a bit, shook his head, then opened the fridge and took the orange juice out. “Freeda’s not my wife,” Daddy said. “And she’s getting quite a reputation around here. I’m not sure I like you running around with her.”

  Ma gritted her teeth. She stopped stirring the pot of stew she was cooking and banged the spoon against the rim. She turned. “Owen’s got quite a reputation. Everybody knows he chases anything in skirts. I don’t see you leery of being seen with him.”

  “That’s different!” Daddy said.

  The screen door opened just then, and Freeda flashed into the room. “Speak of the devil…” Daddy said.

  “Hi, Jewel. Reece, Button.”

  “Jesus, Freeda. Can’t you knock?” Daddy said.

  “Why? You afraid I’m gonna catch you butt-naked and find out that you’re not quite as big of a man as you’d like me to believe?” Ma turned back to her pot, a grin on her face. I think she was trying hard not to laugh out loud. Freeda didn’t stop herself though.

  While she was still giggling, Freeda patted my head, then tugged gently at a few of my loosening knots. “I do believe your hair’s growing, Button,” she said. “You massaging it every day, like I showed you?” I nodded. “Good girl.” She gave my head a final pat, then went over to Ma. “Your zipper got left in my bag, so I figured I’d drop it off here on my way out, in case you were planning to put it in tonight.”

  Freeda peered at the baking stuff on the counter and the recipe card next to it. “Homemade German chocolate cake?” she said, her eyebrows lifting. She turned to Daddy, while Ma turned on the faucet. “What do you think of your new wife? You got a pretty hot babe on your hands now, don’t ya?” Ma glanced at Daddy as she poured flour-and-water paste into her stew.

  Daddy looked crabby. “Jewel was fine just how she was. She didn’t need new hair, or clothes, or goddamn clown makeup.”

  Freeda got up on her bare toes to reach Daddy’s cheek with a quick kiss. “Oh, Reece. Don’t go taking that rod Jewel just pulled out of her ass and shoving it up your own now.” She shook her head. “You men are all alike, you know that? You like it on other women, but not your wife. Hmm, I wonder why that is? Could it be that you don’t want other men looking at your women? Too much competition for ya? Well, you keep the little wifey satisfied and you don’t need to worry about her wandering off.” Daddy flinched when Freeda reached out and gave him one pat on the butt.

  “I just don’t know why Jewel would want other men looking at her,” Daddy grumbled.

  “Here’s a news flash for ya, Reece Peters. Maybe she didn’t exactly do it for other men, or even for you, for that matter. Maybe she did it so that when she looks at herself, she likes what she sees. You ever think of that?” Freeda looked at Ma and rolled her eyes. “Men can be such a pain in the ass, can’t they?” This time Ma did giggle.

  Freeda sure was right about that. Especially fourteen-year-old ones with ugly mold-colored hair and vampire teeth.

  Me and Winnalee were in our magic tree the next morning when Tommy came out of the house carrying a jug, spotted us, and came across the yard. “What you kiddies doin’?” he asked.

  “None of your beeswax,” Winnalee said. She opened the grape Kool-Aid package she was holding a little wider, then dipped her purpled, pointy finger inside. She held the package out to me and I did the same. Our mouths puckered as we sucked the sour powder off our fingers, then dipped them again.

  Tommy looked at the ground where Winnalee’s ma was sitting, and he moved to stand in a different spot. “You go looking for fairies over on Fossard’s property yet?”

  “No! It takes a long time to plan an adventure like that, stupid.”

  Tommy laughed. “You’re just making excuses, you scaredy-cats.”

  “Go away, Tommy,” I said. “Aunt Verdella said you were supposed to leave us alone.”

  Tommy glanced over at the house, then shrugged. “What? I’m not doing nothin’. Rudy and I are haying and he sent me back to refill the water jug. Haying’s hard work, you know, and you have to drink a lot of water. Not that you two kiddies would know anythin’ about working hard. All you gotta do all day is play stupid baby games and think about dumb fairies.” Tommy reached down to pluck a weed. “What’s this?” he asked as he stuck the root part of the weed between his ugly teeth. He took two quick steps with his skinny legs, then reached down, snatching up our bag.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re doing?” Winnalee yelled.

  “What is it?”

  “Put that down, you asshole!” Winnalee scrambled to get out of the tree.

  “You kiddies joining the army?”

  Winnalee dropped from the branch and landed on all fours, and I followed her down. She grabbed for the bag, but Tommy held it above his head. “Give it back, you son of a bitch!”

  “You sure do cuss a lot for a little kid,” Tommy said.

  Winnalee screamed, “Give us our bag back, you creep!”

  “Oh, must be something good in here, if you want it back so bad.” Tommy opened the flap to dig inside, and turned his back to us. “Hmmm,” he said. “A flashlight, papers, a watch—”

  “It’s no
t a watch, stupid! It’s a compass.” Winnalee rolled up her fist and slugged him in the back. “Now give it to me!” Winnalee punched him between the shoulder blades again, but Tommy didn’t even seem to feel it.

  Tommy turned back to face us and stepped back. He lifted the bag out of Winnalee’s reach again. “A compass, you say. Dummies! You wouldn’t need a compass if you took the road.”

  “What road?” Winnalee asked, her fists stopping. “You said the beck was due west, through the woods.”

  “It is. But you can get there by road too.”

  I knew by one glance at Winnalee’s narrowed eyes that she was plotting how to get Tommy to tell us the directions by road. “You lie! There aren’t no roads to take to get there.”

  “What, you think that nut ball cut through the woods on foot every time he had to go to town? I just told you how to get there through the woods because, obviously, if you go by road you’re gonna get caught runnin’ off before you even get ten feet down the road.”

  “I don’t believe you. Liar!” Winnalee said.

  “I ain’t lying. You just head down Peters Road here till you come to Marsh Road. Then ya hang a left. It’s down the first road you come to on the left. The road with the dead-end sign.”

  “I’m gonna go tell Aunt Verdella if you don’t give us our bag and get out of here,” I said.

  I didn’t have to take more than one step before Tommy threw the bag at Winnalee’s feet. “Here’s your dumb bag,” he said. “And don’t think I don’t know what it’s for either. It’s stuff you’re takin’ along when you sneak off to look for stupid fairies. Well, hope you got some holy water in that bag too to protect you from evil ghosts, because you kiddies are gonna need it.” He grinned then, his ugly lips pulling back, the weed bobbing from between his pointy teeth. He turned while shaking his head. “You girls are so stupid,” he said as he picked up the water jug and started walking away.

  “Oh, yeah?” Winnalee yelled after him. “At least we knew what a beck is. And at least we aren’t mean. We don’t go around trying to scare people, and we don’t go around spilling people’s mas!” She stuck her purple tongue out at Tommy.

  Winnalee put the Kool-Aid package between her teeth, then hoisted herself up onto the branch, our adventure bag swinging from her shoulder, and scooted herself back up onto the flat part. “Come on up, Button.”

  I climbed back up our tree and looked out at the hay field, where Tommy was heading. Uncle Rudy was riding the tractor, swiping long patches of hay down, making it keel over to lie flat against the ground. It would stay lying down until Uncle Rudy fluffed it up and made what I used to call “windows” until Uncle Rudy told me they were called “windrows.”

  I liked the different shades of green that the hay made and the way it was sprinkled with other colors here and there. Especially at the edges, where the clover and a few daisies dotted the green waves with pink and purple and white flowers. When I was real little, Uncle Rudy had taken me out there and showed me what some of those grasses were. I thought it was fun grabbing the thread-skinny stalks of timothy and racing my hand to the top where the clump of seeds were, then tugging quick so that the little hard seeds pulled off in my hand.

  “You listening to me, Button?”

  I looked at Winnalee. “Yeah,” I said, even though I wasn’t.

  “I don’t like the fact that Tommy saw our adventure bag,” Winnalee said. “He could rat on us.” She dipped her finger back in the Kool-Aid package and sucked on it, while she looked off at nothing, with skinnied eyes. “I think we’d better go see the fairies just as soon as we can, because if Tommy opens his big yap, then Aunt Verdella’ll keep her eyes on us even more than she already does. Besides, if we don’t do it, the next thing we know, summer will be over, and the fairies with it. I think they fly to find a warmer place when fall comes, just like the birds do, don’t you? They aren’t dressed very warm.”

  Sometimes, when Winnalee talked like that, it was like the notion that fairies really do exist seemed stupid, and for a little bit I’d have to struggle to get back to believing in them all over again.

  Winnalee held out the Kool-Aid package and I took another dip. “I think we need to just pick a date and sneak off then, no matter what is happening. We’ll just say we’re going outside to play, then we’ll take off,” Winnalee said. “Today’s Friday, so let’s just plan on going Monday, or Tuesday.”

  “Winnalee, we can’t go then!”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Because Tuesday is the Fourth of July. Marty Graw! ”

  “It’s the Fourth of July on Tuesday? And what’s a Marty Graw?”

  “It’s what Aunt Verdella calls our Fourth of July celebration, even though Ma says it’s not a Marty Graw at all.”

  “You got fireworks?”

  “Yeah, and that’s not all we got! We got a carnival too, and two parades!”

  “Do we get to go to Marty Graw?” she asked.

  “Course we do! Ma and Aunt Verdella were talking about it just this morning. We always spend the day in town on Marty Graw, and we have a picnic at the park. That’s what they were talking about. What food to bring. After the fireworks, there’s a dance at the park too, but we never get to stay for that.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Then we’ll go see the fairies on Monday! Then we’ll have two magical days in a row!”

  “We can’t go on Monday, Winnalee. Because if we get caught, I’m gonna be in a heap of trouble, and Ma probably wouldn’t let me go to Marty Graw then.”

  “Okay, the day after Marty Graw, then,” she said doggedly.

  “Button?” Aunt Verdella’s voice boomed out of the window. “Your ma should be here to pick you up any minute. You girls come in and clean up now, okay?”

  “Okay,” I yelled back. We leapt down from the tree, and Winnalee got on her knees to put our bag back into the hollow of the tree.

  “I don’t know if it’s a good idea, leaving our bag in the tree. Tommy might come back and steal it.”

  “Nah,” Winnalee said. “I don’t think he even saw the hole. And even if he did, it’s not like he’d have a reason to go digging in there. You can’t see the bag when we shove it far back. Anyway, Tommy’s too dumb to figure out that we’d leave it here.”

  As we headed toward the house, Winnalee told me what she was going to write, soon as she got home: Bright Idea #93: If you and your best friend have an adventure bag, and some dumb boy tries to steal it, or dig in it, or make fun of you for having it, just punch him in the back.

  16

  It seemed that every day since Freeda and Ma became friends, Ma became a little bit more happy. Every work morning she’d wake up and put on the makeup Freeda helped her pick out, then she’d take out the rollers that she’d slept on, and she’d make the top of her head all poufy by holding up a clump of hair and running her comb backward in it to make snarls. Then she’d comb the top layer over that knot so you couldn’t see the snarls, just like Freeda showed her how to do. Ma made herself prettier dresses now too. Dresses that weren’t all saggy, and she’d make them out of material the colors of summer, instead of what Freeda called drab colors. Ma laughed more now too, and she didn’t get such a worried look on her face when Daddy asked her where something was. A couple times, I even heard her tell him he’d just have to wait till she got done doing what she was doing before she helped him look. And she didn’t spend time on the phone with Bernice like she used to either, griping about Aunt Verdella or complaining about this or that. In fact, I don’t think her and Bernice were even friends anymore, because one day I heard Ma tell Freeda, “Carol, the hygienist, said that Bernice told her that I’m fixing up like a floozy because Reece is having a fling with the tramp who moved into his mother’s place. She used those words too! She also said that I must be nuts, thinking that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and that I can get even, fixing up like a tramp myself.” They laughed something silly over that. “Carol was upset, because she thin
ks I look gorgeous. She said Bernice is probably just jealous of you and me because we look so good.” Then Ma had told Freeda how Daddy stopped alongside the road on his way home from work and picked her some tiger lilies, because he knew how much she liked them and we didn’t have any growing in our yard.

  “Wow!” Freeda had said. “Didn’t I tell you things would perk up once you got brave enough to tell Reece to slow his ass down? Literally.” Then they roared some more, though Ma’s laugh was more like those embarrassed giggles.

  When they were done laughing though, Ma got serious and said, “Sometimes I’m gloriously happy because I feel freer, but other times I can still hear those old voices in my head, telling me that I’m not good enough or that I’m not being good enough. It’s hard, you know? Going against all those things you heard growing up.”

  And Freeda told her, “Tell me about it. Some of my old messages I got licked. But others, they’re still running my life. I say, though, that when those voices come, just tell them to shut the hell up and carry on.”

  The morning of my second favorite holiday, I woke up early. Ma didn’t have to work during Marty Graw, because nobody wanted to get their mouth hurt on that day.

  “Good morning, Button,” Ma called from the kitchen, her words sounding more like she was singing them than saying them.

  After I brushed my teeth, I leaned over toward the mirror and turned my head to one side, then the other. My ears definitely looked smaller, so I tried to figure out if I was growing into them, as Aunt Verdella said I was, or if it was just the fluffy hair behind my ears, filling in the gap between them and my head, that made my ears not look so pokey-outy. I tugged at the frizz right above my ear, to see if my hair had grown while I slept. The tip reached down to the bottom of my ear when I pulled on it, so I thought maybe it had. A little anyways.