A Life of Bright Ideas Page 18

  Freeda hugged me hard, then backed away. She jabbered about my long hair, my flat ears—she insisted they needed to be pierced—and my big “knockers,” while my face heated. “Where’s Winnalee?” she asked when she was done marveling at me.

  “Home. She’s exhausted.”

  “I suppose she is,” Freeda said. “With the life she’s been living since she pulled into Dauber.”

  Aunt Verdella’s head dipped sheepishly. “Button, you understand why I had to find Freeda, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  Aunt Verdella tilted her head. “I knew she’d be worried. And I was worried, too.”

  “Good thing you found me, too,” Freeda said, “since Reece doesn’t pick up his goddamn phone. I finally got smart and asked for Rudy’s number—Rudolf, who knew—but when I called here all I kept getting was a little boy calling me Crackpot and hanging up.”

  “That was you?” I said, and we all laughed.

  Freeda leaned her butt against the counter and propped her hands behind her, her eyes softening and saddening at the same time. “Button, I’m so sorry about your ma. I couldn’t believe it when Verdella told me. Jewel was too young to die, and you kids were too young to lose her.”

  Freeda shook her head slowly, her green eyes dampening. “Jewel was the first female friend I ever had. I could kick my own ass for not lookin’ back after I left here, but hell, all I knew how to do back then was run without looking over my shoulder. Especially from anything that looked like love. I just didn’t trust it. And with Hannah on my trail, well … It’s just the best I could do at the time. But oh, I missed you guys.”

  Freeda looked up, her milky neck swan-pretty. “It’s going to take me a while to realize Jewel’s gone.”

  “I still forget sometimes,” Aunt Verdella confessed. She started crying then, and as always, her tears broke my heart.

  “Evalee is so cute,” I said, to steer her—to steer us all—to something joyful. “I’ll bet Winnalee looked just like that when she was a baby.” I cringed after I’d said it. Freeda left Winnalee when she was a newborn. How would she know?

  Freeda turned back to the sink and started filling the bottles. “I love that little baby in there with everything I’ve got,” she said. “And I love Winnalee. That’s why I don’t want her making the same mistake I made. She takes Evalee back now, and that little one never needs to know her mommy left her in the first place. She doesn’t, and Evalee will never forgive her, just as Winnalee will never forgive me. I don’t want that for Winnalee. It’s hell.”

  Aunt Verdella’s head snapped up. “Oh, Freeda. Winnalee will forgive you in time. You’re her mama. And she’s got a kind heart. You watch. In no time, she’ll be calling you ‘Ma.’ ”

  I guess Aunt Verdella didn’t see the absurdity in that comment. Winnalee had refused to call Freeda “Ma” for all the nine years since she learned that’s who she was. It was doubtful that she’d start calling her it now.

  Thinking the word call startled me into remembering that I was supposed to make one. Aunt Verdella helped me dig through cluttered drawers for the phone book. I had to shout so the bartender on the other end could hear me over the jukebox. “At least she’s working,” Freeda said after I hung up. “Though I can’t imagine her waiting tables—hand her a plate or a cup and she’s as klutzy as a fawn on roller skates.”

  “Well, she does seem to come home wearing more beer than she probably serves,” Aunt Verdella said. They laughed, and I cringed. I busied myself carrying the filled bottles to the refrigerator, grateful that neither of them knew that on weekends, Winnalee set down her order pad and climbed into a cage to dance for dollar bills.

  Aunt Verdella poured three cups of coffee, and we sat down at the table. “Verdella told me about your dad,” Freeda said, as she tucked the short side of her hair behind her ear. “How he’s checked out of life. Out of you kids’ lives.”

  “Well, I didn’t exactly say it like that,” Aunt Verdella said.

  Of course she didn’t. Aunt Verdella always used her love for Dad to smooth over the sharp edge of the truth.

  Boohoo came barreling down the stairs then, marching into the kitchen proudly. “I found his slippers,” he said. “And I tied them right to the bed legs so Chameleon can’t run off with them again.”

  “Oh dear. Freeda, remind me to take my sewing shears upstairs when I turn in.” She looked at Boohoo. “Honey, didn’t Auntie tell you to get your jammies on and get to bed?”

  “I’m hungry,” Boohoo said.

  Freeda looked at him. “For a kid with an imagination like yours, I would have thought you could come up with a more original excuse than that?”

  Aunt Verdella hurried to dab a baking powder biscuit with jelly. “Oh, he’s a bottomless pit, this one,” she said, while Boohoo studied Freeda under tucked brows.

  Freeda watched him, too. “He sure looks like Reece.”

  Boohoo took two bites of his biscuit, then tossed it on the rug for Knucklehead. Freeda looked at the poor dog and shook her head. “And that old thing looks ready to kick the bucket.”

  Aunt Verdella stiffened, the same as I did. Knucklehead had slept with Boohoo up until climbing the stairs became too much for him, yet feeble as he was, when Uncle Rudy and Boohoo settled down to watch TV at night, Knucklehead always stretched out on the floor alongside Boohoo. Aunt Verdella and I often shared a secret smile when Boohoo unconsciously rubbed the dog’s floppy ear against his cheek as if it was the silky edge of a blanket. Whether Boohoo found Knucklehead dead, or we did, we both dreaded the day we had to explain to him why Knucklehead wasn’t getting up.

  Boohoo looked at Freeda, and crinkled his nose. “Buckets? You and Winnalee sure do talk funny.”

  “Boohoo, you’d better brush your teeth and get upstairs. Go on now,” Aunt Verdella said.

  Boohoo headed for Freeda’s chair, probably to grab a stray ball of yarn from underneath it. But Freeda stopped his head with her hand. “Didn’t your auntie tell you it was bedtime? Go on now. Mind.”

  Boohoo looked up, his chin jutting out. “You ain’t the boss of me.”

  “He’s got his daddy’s bullheadedness, too, I see.” Freeda peered down at Boohoo. “You got a lot of gall, talking to me like that, kid.”

  “Oh yeah?” Boohoo said (though I doubt he knew what gall even meant). “Well you got big knockers!”

  Aunt Verdella gasped. “Boohoo!”

  Freeda laughed, and tugged Boohoo into her arms. She kissed him hard enough to flatten his cheek, even as he wriggled to get free.

  “I don’t think I like you,” Boohoo said after he broke loose.

  Aunt Verdella and I scolded him in unison, but Freeda only laughed and swatted him playfully on the behind. “I’ll grow on you. Now get to bed.”

  After Boohoo went upstairs, Freeda looked at Aunt Verdella with intense eyes. “We’ve got a few family messes on our hands, don’t we?” She shook her head. “It’s goddamn crazy, what’s happening in both of our families. We all oughta know better.”

  Aunt Verdella touched the side of her face and nodded. I looked down. “But I’m back now,” Freeda said. “So is my attitude. And shit’s gonna hit the fan in Dauber now. You can count on it.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  BRIGHT IDEA #64: Sometimes your eyes tell the truth even when your mouth doesn’t.

  I wrote to Jesse after I got home that night. A long letter about all that had transpired. Guilt kept my pen scrawling, because even if Jesse and I weren’t officially a couple yet, I felt bad about that drunken moment when Tommy carried me to the car and I had wondered how his skin would taste.

  I fell asleep late, and slept until a knock at the door woke me the next day.

  I didn’t bother tossing a bra under my T-shirt, because I was sure it was Freeda (though I would have guessed her to just barge in). Instead, it was Marls Bishop.

  “Marls,” I said. Oh please, I begged in silence. Please, be here only because Aunt Verdella
told you to stop in to visit anytime!

  “Can I come in?” she asked. Even through the rusty haze of screen, I could see the anguish in her eyes.

  I looked over my shoulder. Winnalee had been sleeping like dead weight when I’d left the bedroom, but there was no guarantee she’d stay that way. “Or we can just talk out here,” she said, as if she understood.

  “Can I get you anything first?” I asked, still through the screen.

  She shook her head, so I stepped out onto the porch and closed the door behind me.

  Three of Uncle Rudy’s old lawn chairs were on the porch, and a small table that Aunt Verdella had picked up at the Community Sale. Winnalee had plucked yellow daffodils from the flower bed and propped them in a jelly jar. Marls waddled to the lawn chairs and sat down. I joined her.

  “You look good,” I told her, even if it wasn’t true. Her face was even blotchier than it had been at the shower, and her navel strained against her shirt like a giant nipple. I wondered if she was scared, thinking about how that baby had to come out.

  “When’s the baby due again? I know I should remember, but …”

  “August twelfth,” she said.

  “Oh. Nice. Is your … has your medical problem corrected itself?” I couldn’t get myself to say “placenta.”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  I was racking my brain, thinking of any other question someone might ask a pregnant woman they hardly knew. My left leg crossed over my right, then they switched places again, as if they were as unsure and uncomfortable as the rest of me. “Do you have names picked out?” Marls was picking at a hangnail on her pointy finger and didn’t say anything, so I quickly added, “It’s okay if you don’t want to say. I suppose—”

  “Evy?” she said abruptly, looking me right in my eye. “Is Brody having an affair with Winnalee?”

  The air in my lungs snagged in my throat, and I gripped the armrest.

  “I’d ask her, but I don’t know if she’d be honest with me.” Marls’s puffy eyes were pleading. I looked down, and brushed at a loose thread squiggled on the leg of my pajama bottoms.

  “Brody lied to me Friday night. He told me he was hanging out with Tommy, and gotten too drunk to get himself home. He claimed he crashed at the Smithys’. But that wasn’t true. I went there at three in the morning—his car was in the driveway—and Ada woke up when I knocked. She told me that Tommy was sleeping, and that Brody wasn’t there. Was he here?”

  I could feel her next to me, her muscles tense, her body heavier with dread than with baby. I didn’t know what to say. I had no desire to protect Brody. But Winnalee?

  Seconds ticked by painfully, as I bit my cheek, and begged for someone, something, to interrupt this conversation.

  Marls hoisted herself up. “It’s okay, Evy,” she said. There were tears in her voice, but they didn’t reach her eyes. “Your silence is all the answer I need.” She headed for the steps, and held on to the porch door frame as she lowered herself down.

  “I’m … I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  If Marls heard me, she didn’t react. She just lumbered to the old Chevy that Brody used before he got his Mustang, and drove off.

  I didn’t know what to do after she left. I went back inside and looked for something to clean—which wasn’t exactly like looking for Easter eggs, since Winnalee tended to drop everything right where she used it.

  I caught my reflection in the living room window, and noticed how I moved like Ma when I cleaned. Quick. No wasted movements. It made me wonder if that wasn’t why she cleaned so often and so hard; because the messes we made in our house were a lot easier to clean up than the messes we had made in our lives.

  CHAPTER

  21

  BRIGHT IDEA #66: It doesn’t matter if you stop thinking about your math assignment over the weekend because you didn’t do long division in your last school and you don’t know how to do it. That assignment is still going to be due on Monday.

  Aunt Verdella was feeding Evalee on the couch when I got inside. I leaned over and the baby looked up at me with round eyes that would probably be the same shade as Winnalee’s when they lost their newborn murkiness. Her hair was still damp from a bath, and darkened with baby oil. Someone had tried making a curl on top of her head, but it wouldn’t bend and so stood straight up like a baby porcupine’s quills.

  “Good morning, pretty baby,” I cooed. The stream of milky bubbles crawling up the glass paused as Evalee’s lips pulled away from the nipple to smile. I giggled, my distress over Marls’s visit and my hope to get Aunt Verdella alone to tell her about it shoved aside by that sweet baby’s smile.

  Freeda was in the kitchen rattling dishes and harping, “Boohoo, pour that stuff carefully. Look at the mess you’re making. You’ve got cereal bouncing all the way over to the fridge.”

  “Knucklehead will eat it,” Boohoo said.

  “By the looks of things, that dog wouldn’t be able to get on his feet if you’d dropped a steak.”

  “Yeah he could. Watch. Here, Knucklehead. Here, boy.”

  A chair scraped against the floor, and water ran in the sink, then Boohoo yelled, “Aunt Verdella, Knucklehead just peed on the floor!”

  “Oh dear,” Aunt Verdella said. “He’s been doing that.” She turned to me. “You want to give our little cupcake her bottle? I should get in there.”

  “Sure.” I reached for the baby and Aunt Verdella wriggled to her feet. “I’m coming!” she yelled.

  There was the whack of the screen door, and Freeda shouted, “You little shit! Get back here and pick up these Sugar Pops!” I looked down at Evalee, who was staring at me intently.

  Just as Aunt Verdella only went higher, not faster when she ran, when she was trying to hush her voice, it didn’t get any quieter, only deeper. “Freeda, we don’t talk about Knucklehead dying in front of Boohoo.”

  “Why not?” Evalee squirmed and I took her almost empty bottle from her mouth and lifted her to my shoulder to burp her. Fearful that the back door was open and Boohoo would hear the conversation, I headed into the kitchen.

  “We just don’t.” Aunt Verdella was pushing at the door with the toe of her canvas shoe when I got into the kitchen.

  “That’s crazy, Verdella. What in the hell you gonna tell him when the old dog croaks? That he went off to the store to buy doggie biscuits and got lost on his way home? Crissakes, Verdella.”

  My stomach tightened and I rocked Evalee side to side.

  “Well, I don’t really know what we’ll tell him. That dog’s older than he is, and Boohoo loves him so.”

  “All the more reason to prepare him a bit, don’t you think?”

  “We don’t want to upset him,” Aunt Verdella said.

  Freeda paused for a second. “Wait a second here … Boohoo couldn’t have been more than a baby when Jewel died. What have you told him about her?”

  For a second, there was silence (but for Evalee’s milk-scented belch).

  “Verdella?” Freeda said slowly, while cocking her head. “What have you told him about Jewel?”

  “Nothing,” Aunt Verdella confessed.

  “Verdella, look at me. What do you mean ‘nothing’? Are you saying you haven’t told him how she died? Or do you mean that you haven’t told him about her, period?”

  “We don’t really talk about Jewel in front of Boohoo, Freeda.”

  Knowing we did this was one thing, but hearing the admission spoken out loud made it sound crazy.

  “What the hell, Verdella. So that boy doesn’t even know he had a mother?”

  My insides clenched, and I cocked my jaw to the side to find a spot of skin that didn’t feel raw and sore.

  “Well, after Jewel died, that baby was missing her so badly that if anyone even said her name, he’d toddle to the door and cry for her. It was pitiful. Just pitiful. So we stopped saying ‘Jewel’ or ‘Ma’ in front of him. I guess it just got to be habit.”

  “Well, where in the hell does he think he came from? A cabbage pa
tch?”

  “He’s never asked, Freeda.”

  I dipped my head. No, Boohoo had never asked about his mother, or about death, period, for that matter. But then, what would have prompted him to wonder? We kept all pictures of Ma hidden away, we made an effort to scoop dead birds out of the yard before he could find them, and we’d never driven past the cemetery with Boohoo before, much less taken him with us on Memorial Day. Not once.

  “That’s not the point! He should know who his mother was.”

  Freeda must have realized how absurd that sounded, coming from someone who had kept Winnalee in the dark about who her mother was for nine years, because she—we—went silent. Aunt Verdella and I exchanged nervous glances as Freeda grabbed a coffee cup from the mug tree. “No good comes out of keeping secrets like that, Verdella. Ask me. Ask Winnalee.”

  I looked down. Evalee’s face was pressed against my heart, her closed lids so thin that the tiny veins colored them like lavender eye shadow. As I carried her carefully into the living room and lowered her into the playpen, I felt like crying, though I wasn’t sure why.

  The back door opened and Uncle Rudy’s and Boohoo’s voices filled the kitchen. Freeda wouldn’t let this topic drop for good, but she would for now.

  I reached down and pulled a summer-light blanket, busy with ducks, over Evalee’s bare legs, and paused at the sound of a vehicle. I leaned over the playpen and pulled back the sheer curtains. Winnalee’s van was peeling out of the driveway.

  Winnalee never woke before noon. Eleven, at the earliest. Fear slammed into my stomach. I should have had the foresight to know she’d bolt when Freeda showed up, just as Freeda had bolted when Hannah showed up in Dauber.

  “I’m running home for a second,” I called into the kitchen. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I hurried inside and thumped up the stairs. The bedroom looked trashed, but then it had looked that way since Winnalee’s arrival. I searched frantically for her duffel bag, knowing that while she might leave clothes behind, she would never leave that. Not with her prized possession inside.