The Book of Bright Ideas Read online

  It was Ma’s idea that Aunt Verdella take in a few more little kids, since she was so happy to have Bobby to look after when Ma opened her shop. “If you’re going to watch Bobby, you might as well watch a couple more and make a few extra dollars while you’re at it,” Ma said. So that’s what Aunt Verdella did, and she greets them with a morning hug, just like she still does with me, even though I’m not a little kid anymore.

  As for me, about two weeks after the Malones left, I’d found myself missing Winnalee so much that I’d gone to our magic tree. And while I stood in the flat center, the wood cool against my bare soles, and thought about the fun we’d had and about how much I missed her, I realized that I wasn’t standing in the magic tree anymore. I was standing in that place they call “bittersweet.” That place that, if you could find it on a map, would be the mountain that sits between happy and sad. And I thought about how when you stand on that mountain, you can almost feel God’s hand on your head and you just know, deep down inside, that even if you don’t understand everything that happened to cause those mixed feelings, you still know there was a good reason for them happening.

  When I was done crying, I grabbed the branch and swung down, landing on my butt, right in front of the hole at the bottom of the tree. The setting sun worked like a flashlight, lighting the inside of the tree with an orangey glow, giving me a glimpse of something inside. I reached in and felt the heavy canvas of our adventure bag.

  I held it for a long time, just remembering, then I untied the flap and took out our compass and papers, and things, and lined them up on the grass. And then, at the bottom, I saw it. Our Book of Bright Ideas wrapped in thick layers of Saran Wrap.

  I unwound the plastic wrap and ran my hand over the indented letters that spelled out the words Great Expectations.

  I fanned the pages to get to the end of the book, hoping that on that last page would be Bright Idea #100, a bright idea Winnalee had just minutes before they left. If it was there, I told myself, then both me and Winnalee would know all the secrets there are to life. But when I got to Bright Idea #99 and turned the page, what I found instead was a note Winnalee had scribbled in pink crayon. Button, It can be your turn to keep our book. Bring it when we meet, okay? Your best friend, Winnalee.

  I guess Uncle Rudy was right when he said that nobody stays stuck in a sad eddy forever. That school year, I made a new friend named Penny. She liked horses, not fairies. Penny came to my house for a sleepover and we played dress-up with some old clothes of Ma’s. Penny wanted to fix her hair like a lady’s, so she grabbed Winnalee’s brush off of my vanity. “Don’t use that one!” I yelled, and she stopped.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s not for using. It’s just for remembering.” And Penny put the brush back down and picked up the one Grandma Mae gave me. “Can I use this one?” she asked, and I told her she could.

  At quiet times, when I think of Winnalee most, I wonder what she looks like now, and if she’s happy. Mostly, though, I wonder if she ever forgave Freeda for the lie she’d told, and I wonder who, in her heart, she calls “Ma.”

  Winnalee never did tell me why she wanted to find fairies so badly. Back then, I figured it was just so that she could see them (because what little girl wouldn’t want to see magical, tiny ladies with pearly wings?), but now I’m starting to think that it might have been about more than just that. Maybe a part of Winnalee always sensed a lie hiding someplace in her life, and maybe…Well, I guess I really don’t know, but somehow it seems like her hope for finding the fairies and the lie she carried in that urn were somehow tied together.

  When Uncle Rudy told me what happens when a wildfire comes along, I asked him if the tiny seeds burned up in the flames, and I still remember his answer. “Nope,” he’d said. “The sap around those tiny seeds keep ’em safe till the danger passes.” I guess that’s my biggest hope for Winnalee. That her innocence—or maybe childhood itself—was the sap she needed to keep her safe until the heat of that lie cooled.

  As for Freeda, I think of her often too, just as I know Ma and Aunt Verdella do. I don’t understand most of what happened to Freeda, but what I hope for her is that her fiery spirit keeps shining bright, in spite of how badly her childhood burned her.

  Just last night, Aunt Verdella and I were talking about the Malones, and I brought up my plan to find Winnalee someday. Aunt Verdella’s eyes dipped down at the edges, and her smile faded. “It’s not gonna be easy to find her, Button. Not with all the movin’ they’ll have done by then.”

  I let Aunt Verdella go on for a while, then I smiled, and I reminded her of what she and Winnalee had both once told me. That you have to go on believing anything’s possible, or else, what’s the point?

  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 limbs 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, gr
abbed 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.