The Book of Bright Ideas Read online

  “Well, good,” Aunt Verdella said, “because it looks like you two are gonna be neighbors!”

  As soon as Aunt Verdella went back inside, I peered back at Winnalee’s book while she munched on a cookie. She was staring at it in between bites and humming while she chewed with her mouth open. “Says here the name of this book is Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens. Why you call it your Book of Bright Ideas, then?” I asked.

  Winnalee shoved the last of her cookie into her mouth, even though it was too big of a piece, and it bulged the sides of her cheeks. She picked up her book and laid it across her legs and opened it toward the back. I blinked, because there wasn’t any writing in that book at all, only white, blank pages.

  When she talked, she was all mumbly, so I told her that maybe she should swallow first. She did, then she explained.

  “I got this book at a rich lawyer’s house, where Freeda cleaned for a time. He had a whole library of these leather-bound books, every one of them with nothin’ inside. Freeda said they were just for looks. So I took this one. I tucked it right up my shirt and walked out with it. Freeda says I stole this book and that she had every right to blister my ass for doing it. She said she was gonna march me right back there in the morning so that lawyer could blister it some more, but she didn’t do either. Not once I convinced her that it wasn’t stealing at all. This here wasn’t anything but an empty box, and nobody in their right mind would tell the folks who take the empty boxes out of the back room of the IGA that they were thieving. It’s not like that lawyer was going to read it, anyway, so I took it and started a book of my own.” She paged toward the middle of the book and, sure enough, there were words printed there in pencil.

  “You’re writing a story?”

  “No, not a story. Just things I learn. I number them, see?”

  “Why do you do that?”

  “So I can find the things I want to read again, faster.”

  “No,” I said. “Why do you write those things down?”

  The wind tossed a strand of Winnalee’s loopy hair between her lips and she took it out and flipped it. Her hair looked glossy and pretty in the sun, even with a few snarls and cookie crumbs stuck in it. “Because I’m writing clues. Ittybitty clues that you have to put together. You know, clues to the secrets of life. So you learn how it works, and you don’t keep makin’ the same mistakes over and over again. That’s what Freeda says people do. They keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over again. I don’t want to do that.”

  Now Winnalee had me all mixed up, because she was saying this stuff like I was supposed to know what she was talking about, but I didn’t.

  She paged through the book, near the beginning, then stopped and rested her finger in one spot. “See? Bright Idea #17,” she read. “If you don’t give your ma a hug before you go to school because you’re mad at her for not letting you wear your good dress, she might die while you’re at recess. Then you ain’t going to be able to give her that hug ever.”

  Winnalee looked up and bit her lip. “You know what a great expectation is?” she asked. She didn’t wait for me to answer. “Well, it’s something you really, really hope for. It’s my great expectation that when I get one hundred bright ideas written down, I’m gonna be able to fit them together like pieces of a puzzle and know all there is to know about how to live good. God knows, a kid ain’t gonna learn these things by asking her sister, because she ain’t gonna tell you shit, so I’m gonna figure it all out by myself. I figure by the time I get to one hundred, I’ll know all there is to know. You can help me find the clues, then we can jot them down. I bet by the time school starts, we might even have this whole book filled up with one hundred bright ideas.”

  I didn’t have any bright ideas, but I smiled because I was happy that Winnalee thought I might think of one. “How many you got written so far?” I asked.

  “Eighty-three,” she said. “I wrote the last one while we were driving out of Gary. See?” She held the book out and I read Bright Idea #83: If you go dancing with a meat packer when you got a biker for a boyfriend, he might get his gun and shoot you and your sister dead, so you’d better get out of town fast.

  As Winnalee shut the book and reached for her second cookie, the door opened and the wind carried the grown-ups’ voices over to where we were sitting, and I knew Winnalee had to leave then. I picked up the tray and Winnalee grabbed a glass from it and drank her lemonade as we headed toward the house. “If Freeda hadn’t packed away all my pencils, I’d jot a bright idea right now,” she said.

  “What would you write?”

  “I’d write Bright Idea #84: When you go through a new town that don’t look like much, stop anyway, because you just might find a best friend waiting there.”

  3

  Soon as everyone left, Ma made Daddy and me come in for supper. The whole house was filled with the stink of liver and onions, so I didn’t bother asking what we were having.

  “I can’t believe Verdella, bringing them here out of the blue like that,” Ma said.

  Daddy grabbed a slice of homemade bread, and as he buttered it, crumbs fell like snow onto his plate. “They need a place to stay, and she wants to help them out, that’s all. Verdella is kindhearted that way.” He didn’t look at Ma when he talked, but then, he never did.

  “Well, she could have checked with us first, before bringing them over and putting us on the spot like that.”

  I know Ma wanted to say more, but she didn’t. As soon as Daddy left, Ma clanked the dishes into the sink and sprayed a yellow line of Joy over them. That’s when the phone rang. “Oh, hello, Bernice.” Bernice was the lady who worked with Ma. She had hair like mine, and a boy in my grade who punched girls in the arm. “Fanny?…Yes, you heard right…. Uh-huh…uh-huh, she certainly did bring them here.”

  While I sat looking at my plate, trying to get myself to finish my liver so I could leave the table, Ma started talking about the Malones and about Aunt Verdella. “Well, that’s just what I was thinking, Bernice. Good Lord, she doesn’t know the first thing about these people, but she’s got eyes in her head, doesn’t she? Uh-huh…yes…and you should have seen the way that child was dressed too. Why, I don’t even know if I want Evelyn associating with her.”

  Ma said a string of “Uh-huhs,” then she gasped, “Well, I’ll tell you one thing for sure, Mae would not like this one bit! That Verdella, always sticking her nose where it doesn’t belong. Course, I couldn’t say much to Reece. You know how he is about Verdella.”

  I took my fork and jabbed at the slab of liver on my plate. The onions were cold now, coated with grease that looked like those thick gobs of spit men leave on the sidewalks. My stomach felt sick just from looking at them. And from hearing Ma talking about Aunt Verdella. I didn’t care if Aunt Verdella talked too loud, or filled up her house with mismatched junk, or even if she had an old bathtub sunk halfway into the ground in her front yard, with Jesus’ mother stuck in it, even though she wasn’t Catholic. Whenever Ma talked mean about Aunt Verdella, it made those noises happen in my throat. And that made Ma turn and give me a crabby look.

  Ma stood up her tallest. “She’s picked up the line again, Bernice, so watch what you say till she hangs up.” I knew this meant that the old lady down the road, Mildred Epson (one of four others on our party line), had picked up the phone to listen to Ma and Bernice yack. Ma tapped her foot and waited. After a bit she said, “There. I thought she’d never hang up. I swear, some people on this party line don’t do a thing all day but wait around for someone to use the phone so they can listen in and get some gossip. The next time I see that woman, I’m going to tell her what I think of her eavesdropping.” Ma said this all the time, but every time we ran into that bent-up old lady, she never did do anything but smile and shift from leg to leg, as Mrs. Epson went on and on about her hips, her elbow, her back, and every other part on her body that hurt.

  Ma sighed. “There, now, where were we, Bernice?…

  “No, no. Verdella and Rudy a
ren’t on our line. They don’t even have a phone. Verdella comes down here all the time to use ours—as if they can’t afford one of their own—yet she’s saving all that money to buy a color television set. That’s Verdella, though. Not a brain in her head.” I picked up a piece of cold liver and stuck it in my mouth. It felt like I was biting into the tongue of one of Uncle Rudy’s old work boots.

  “Oh, you know how Reece is though,” Ma said, turning her back to me again. “He won’t hear one negative thing about Verdella, even if it is the truth. He says she’s the best thing that could have happened to Rudy after Betty died and that she’s good to him. Well, maybe she is good to him in some ways, but still, from what Mae always said about Betty, you can’t even compare Verdella to her. Betty kept a good house and had a good head on her shoulders. If Betty could see that place now, she’d roll over in her grave.”

  I watched Ma out of the corner of my eye. She was pacing as far as the phone cord would stretch. She didn’t say no more about Aunt Verdella, though, because Daddy came back into the house to dig for something in the junk drawer. “Well, I’d best get back to my dishes now. I’ll see you tomorrow, Bernice.”

  The next morning, Ma woke me up as she always did when the sun was first peeking through my window, and I hopped out of bed quickly, even though my eyes still wanted to stay shut. She had my things set out on the bed like paper-doll clothes, faded pink pants on the bottom and a pink flowered blouse stretched out above it. A pair of white anklets was wadded up in a ball, sitting beside my outfit. Even when wearing old clothes to go help her aunt clean an old house, a girl should match. This much I knew.

  Once we got into the car, Ma tugged at her nylons, which wanted to bunch at her ankles. It was cold in the mornings still—it being only four days since school let out—so even wearing a sweater, my arms and legs bubbled up with goose pimples.

  “So, Evelyn,” Ma said, then paused as we crossed Highway 8 and headed down the road (named “Peters Road,” since no other family ever lived on it except ours), the tires spitting rocks up under Ma’s car with little pings. “Did Aunt Verdella tell you anything about these people?”

  I knew I should probably tell Ma what Winnalee said about some guy chasing them with a gun, but she always harped at me if I was a tattletale. Yet I knew that if I said “no,” then I’d be a liar, so I didn’t say anything at all.

  “It seems a little suspicious to me. If they arrived in town in the afternoon—their belongings just tossed in the truck—and came from Gary, that means that woman probably packed that child up in the middle of the night. Who does a thing like that, unless they had to leave in a hurry?” Ma was talking more to herself now than to me.

  Ma’s knuckles got tight on the steering wheel as we pulled into Aunt Verdella and Uncle Rudy’s driveway. She leaned over and reached across me to open my door. “Stay clean,” she said, then leaned back against the seat, as though I were already gone.

  She pulled out of the driveway before Aunt Verdella could even get to our car. “My, she sure was in a hurry this morning,” Aunt Verdella said, then she gave me my morning hug.

  Aunt Verdella was happy today because we were going to start cleaning up Grandma Mae’s house for the Malones. “I told them we can have this place ready in a couple of days. Three at the most. I don’t want to see those girls paying those high prices over at Daverson’s Motel.” She handed me a cardboard box stacked inside with smaller ones, then she grabbed some more boxes, heavy with cleaning bottles, and we headed across the yard.

  Grandma Mae’s house was big and covered with gray squares that looked like sandpaper. It had red shutters that needed paint sitting beside each window. Near the house was a big, red barn, and next to that was the field where Uncle Rudy’s cows ate. Uncle Rudy milked fifteen of them every morning and every night.

  Across the field, I could see Uncle Rudy pounding a fence post into the ground. From so far away, his maul looked like a pencil with a wad of gum stuck on the eraser part. Tommy Smithy, Ada Smithy’s fourteen-year-old boy, was out there too, putting another post in place for hammering. I had sighed when I learned that he would be helping Uncle Rudy with chores around the place, just like he did last summer. Tommy had hair the color of speckled mold in the corners of old basements, and it was in tight, knotty curls that Aunt Verdella said didn’t even come from a perm. He had pointy teeth like nails in front. He wasn’t old enough to drive yet, but his daddy let him use their old truck to come to work. I didn’t like Tommy, because he liked to scare me and tease me when he caught me alone.

  Aunt Verdella was watching across the field where Uncle Rudy was working, while we walked across Grandma Mae’s yard. She had a little smile on her face, like she always did when she looked at him.

  When we got on the porch, Aunt Verdella took the key from her pocket and unlocked the door. She shoved the door open and it scraped across the wood floor. “Oh dear, I’ll have to tell Reece to rehang this door. The house must be shifting.”

  Grandma Mae’s house smelled like old dust, and it was quiet. Real quiet.

  “Come on in, Button,” Aunt Verdella said. “We’ll start right here in the front room.”

  I didn’t remember Grandma Mae real well. Only that she was skinny and stiff like a broom handle, and that she didn’t smile or talk to me. She gave me a brush and comb set one Christmas, but Ma said it was too nice to use, so she made me put it on my vanity and leave it be. I didn’t mind not using it though. Why would I need a brush as big as a bear’s paw to brush a couple of little knots, anyway? Ma said it would be nice to have something to remember my grandma by once she was gone, but every time I looked at that comb and brush set sitting there on my vanity, all I remembered was that I had nubby knots for hair.

  It took a bit to get myself to move from the doorway. I felt like I should take off my shoes and walk like a whisper, though I wasn’t sure why. Aunt Verdella didn’t feel that way though. She had on her old canvas shoes with garden and barn crud scuffed halfway up the sides, and as she thumped hard across the floor, tiny clumps of it sprinkled over the oval rag rug sitting in the middle of the living-room floor.

  Aunt Verdella got a stack of yellowed newspapers from a basket sitting next to an old chair, and she dropped them down by the coffee table, next to the boxes. “We’ll wrap up the knickknacks and pictures first and bring them up to the attic,” she said. “I’d like to leave a little something out, you know, make it more homey for the girls, but I don’t suppose your ma would like seeing any of Mae’s things left out for strangers.”

  She showed me how to wrap the glass things by rolling them in a few sheets of newspaper, then she showed me how to tuck them in a cardboard box so we could fit lots in. I wrapped up a green candy dish, then a couple little ladies that Aunt Verdella said were from Germany, just like Grandma. I laid the wrapped ladies inside the candy dish carefully, while Aunt Verdella watched me. “You’re doing a fine job there, Button,” she said. I smiled, because I liked the way Aunt Verdella always told me that, even when I wasn’t doing a fine job.

  Aunt Verdella took the pictures off the mantel. She held up one of my ma and daddy. Ma was wearing a wedding dress and her lips were pulled shut in a smile. She looked shy, but happy. Her shoulders were dipped forward, like they were lots of times. My daddy looked real handsome, his dark hair combed neat off of his forehead. “Your ma sewed her own dress. She got a pattern, then altered it to just how she wanted it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I nodded.

  Then Aunt Verdella took down a picture of Uncle Rudy and that first lady that was his wife. She was wearing one of those wedding dresses too and a long veil that wrapped around her body, making her look all cloudy, like she was already a ghost, even though she wasn’t then. Aunt Verdella talked a bit about Ma and Aunt Betty’s wedding dresses, and what she liked on each one, then she told me that when I grew up and got ready to marry, Ma would make me the prettiest gown anyone ever saw. Prettier than a princess’s gown, she said.

  “Is ther
e a picture of you in your wedding dress too, Aunt Verdella?”

  She shook her head, and there was only a hint of a smile on her face. “Oh heavens, no. I got married at the courthouse, in a regular suit. Just me and your uncle Rudy, and Reece. That’s all.”

  “How come you didn’t have a pretty wedding dress too?”

  She started wrapping the pictures in newspaper, and she didn’t look up when she said, “I was almost forty years old, Button. Why, I’d have looked pretty silly in a white dress made for a young girl, don’t you think?”

  “Well, how come there’s no picture here of you in your suit, then?” I asked, and Aunt Verdella shrugged.

  Aunt Verdella took all the pictures off of the walls and off of the tables. And as she did, she turned each one of them for me to see. “This here is your grandma Mae when she was still young, right before your daddy was born,” she said. Grandma Mae wasn’t smiling. Her face looked like a statue’s face. She had a pointy chin and eyebrows that looked like fur cuffs. She was wearing an ugly dress that was buttoned up so tight around her neck that it looked like it might have been choking her. “She doesn’t look young to me,” I said.

  Aunt Verdella laughed. “Well, your daddy was a change-of-life baby, so I guess she wasn’t exactly a spring chicken. Still, it was taken while she still had some dark left in her hair.” She rubbed the dusty glass with her hand. “That woman sure didn’t have any time for kids. Not by the time I’d met her anyway. She just worked in her garden, or cleaned, or sewed, or canned, and she sighed every time your daddy had to ask her for anything. I don’t think I saw her give that boy a hug once. Not once.

  “When I married your uncle, Reece wasn’t more than ten years old. Cute as a bug’s ear too. One of them boys that never sits still.” Aunt Verdella’s eyes were full of laughs when she said this.

  While Aunt Verdella yammered on about my daddy in the old days, I tried to shrink him down in my mind to a little boy as cute as a bug’s ear. But no matter how hard I tried, the best I could see was a midget man, with arms like gunnysacks stuffed tight with rocks, and hair like fur crawling out of the top of his T-shirt.