A Life of Bright Ideas Read online

  “Pretty goddamn pathetic, isn’t it? I mean, I’m his old man, and I haven’t looked out for him once in the last four years. Probably longer. Yet I was blaming you.”

  I glanced up. Dad’s face had stubble on it, and he was wearing those familiar smudges under his eyes that made it look like he hadn’t slept in days. I looked down at his glass and watched the gray smoke from his cigarette circle it.

  “Well, I should have been watching him, instead of horsing around,” I told him. “Boohoo’s into mischief all the time, and I knew Aunt Verdella was busy.”

  Dad shook his head. “No, you should have been horsing around. I should have been looking out for him.”

  Dad hadn’t touched his Kool-Aid, and I decided I should have made coffee instead.

  “Evy,” he said as he crushed his cigarette out. He got up and paced a little, then turned away and leaned on one leg, his fingertips tucking into the back pockets of his jeans. “I know I’ve been a shitty father. The last four years especially. But every single time I look at you kids …” He suddenly sounded like he was being strangled. He took a deep breath, looked up at the ceiling, and started again. “Every time I look at you and your brother, I’m reminded of how it’s my fault you don’t have a mother anymore.”

  For four years, I’d waited for Dad to take responsibility for Ma’s death. To blame himself, hate himself even. But now that he was, I felt no glory. Only a rising desperation to take his remorse away.

  “It’s not your fault,” I said.

  He turned and his dark brows, made heavy with guilt, sagged above his strained eyes. “But it is. I know it, and you know it. How many times did your ma ask me to level that washer and secure that goddamn sump pump anyway? The basement had flooded just two weeks before that.”

  “Guys are always letting things go,” I said. “Every time I’m around more than one or two married women, they’re always complaining or joking about their men doing everything for everybody else, but letting jobs at home go.”

  Dad ignored my attempt to pardon him. “Every day I live with knowing I robbed you kids of a mother, and your ma of what should have been a long life. All because I was too damn lazy to go downstairs and do what needed being done.”

  Dad came back to the table and braced himself on bent knuckles, his head down. “You think I don’t know that that’s why you can’t even look at me anymore, Evy? Why you turn away every time you come in the house? But who can blame you? I can’t even look at myself in the mirror to shave my goddamn face half the time.”

  “That’s not why I turn away,” I protested, my words coming out thick with anguish. I opened my mouth to remind him that for most of my life he looked through me as if I was made of fog, that for most of my life we’d been uncomfortable with each other. But I couldn’t say that. It would have only made him feel worse.

  I put my head down and wished for the awkward silence and his anguish to go away. When it didn’t, I blurted out, “It wasn’t your fault, Dad. It was mine.”

  Dad peeked at me. “Yours? Come on, Evy, what—”

  “It’s true! Ma asked me to go down there and redistribute the clothes because she was busy washing Boohoo’s hands. But I was stitching something I was making, and almost had the hem done, so I ignored her. She told me again to go, and I got huffy with her and said I was just as busy as she was.”

  “You always listened to your mother.”

  “But not that time. If I’d listened to her, she’d still be here.”

  Dad leaned across the table. “You really think your ma would have rather it had been you instead? God, Evy. She wouldn’t have been able to live with herself if she’d sent you down there.”

  “But it wouldn’t have been either of us,” I insisted. “Uncle Rudy had taught me how lightning works with metal and around water. I would have been too scared to step on that soppy floor. And by the time she went down there in my place, that strike would have come and gone.” I squinted my wet eyes shut, hiding them from Dad like a little kid who thinks she can’t be seen because her head alone is hidden.

  Dad hurried around the table, and put his arms around my shoulders. “Crissakes, Evy. You’ve been blaming yourself this whole time?” he asked. “Is this why you can’t look me in the eye anymore?”

  I sobbed as I nodded.

  Dad’s arm was around my neck, his head touching mine. And I swear, he even smelled like guilt. I nodded as hard as I could with my head held so tightly.

  “Oh, Evy. Don’t blame yourself. Blame me. Blame God. But don’t blame yourself. Please. Guilt is such a heavy burden to carry.”

  Dad hadn’t made a sound when his eyes filled at Ma’s funeral. But he cried with sobs that convulsed his stomach and sounded agonizingly painful now.

  He let go of me and stood back, as if suddenly embarrassed over his outburst—or maybe ashamed over the relief he felt when he learned that I avoided him out of guilt, not blame.

  I got up and grabbed a dish towel and wiped my face, while Dad swabbed his eyes with calloused fingers. “Let’s make a deal. I’ll stop blaming myself, if you’ll stop blaming yourself. I mean it, Dad. I’ll never be able to feel it’s okay to let go of my guilt, if you don’t think it’s okay to let go of yours.”

  “I’ll do it,” Dad said, nodding his head in determination. “I’ll find a way to let it go.”

  He cleared his throat and sat down. He lit another cigarette, and after a few moments of silence, he drank his Kool-Aid like it wasn’t too sweet, and asked me if I’d been checking my oil. I nodded.

  When Dad said he had to go, I walked him to the door. “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  He opened the door and it squealed. He swung it back and forth a couple of times. “I’ll stop by and bring some WD-40 for these hinges,” he said.

  “That would be nice,” I told him.

  He went outside and I stood on the front steps. He turned. “I’m gonna do better by Boohoo, too,” he said. He looked up at the fat-bodied moths swarming the yard light above me, like he was thinking of something else to say. Across the road, I could see two heads in the window, and I knew that Aunt Verdella and Winnalee were watching. Watching and hoping, while Freeda kept herself busy in another room, the same way I did now when the mailman came. “Dad?” I asked. “Can you not tell Aunt Verdella that I refused to go downstairs when Ma asked?”

  Dad’s face was lost in the shadows under the brim of his cap, but his gratitude for having some way to help me wasn’t. “You don’t even need to ask.”

  As soon as he pulled out of the drive, the front door opened and Winnalee and Aunt Verdella came hurrying out, both calling my name. Above them, the wispy clouds had passed across the sliver moon, and I felt as though Ma was calling to me, too. Assuring me that she knew there was a difference between a lie that hurts and a lie that heals.

  I was lying on the bed, holding the picture Uncle Rudy gave me of the tree growing on the top of a big rock jutting out of the water, no soil beneath it, when Winnalee crawled into bed. She scooted over and laid her head on my shoulder to stare up at the picture.

  “Uncle Rudy gave me this the morning after Ma died. When he found me sleeping in the magic tree.”

  “You fell asleep in our magic tree that night?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  “Aw,” she said.

  “I think he wanted me to see myself as this tree, and my love for Ma the roots, stretching across space and sky, so that I’d never forget that Ma and me will always be connected.”

  “That’s beautiful, Button.”

  I stared at the roots. “It’s weird, though, how I never noticed until a few minutes ago, that this isn’t one thick root, like I thought it was. Look. It’s made up of many roots entwined together.”

  Winnalee lifted her head and peered more closely. “Oh yeah,” she said, like she found my discovery every bit as astonishing as I did. She swiped her finger along the root, saying what I was thinking. “Like there’s one root to keep you
connected to your mom, and one to Aunt Verdella. One for Uncle Rudy, and for Boohoo, and for your dad. And one for me, too, and Freeda, and Evalee. One for everybody you love. To remind you that you’re connected to all of us, no matter where we are.”

  “But I wish I could wrap all of you around me, and keep you right next to me forever.”

  “Maybe Boohoo could help you out with that,” Winnalee said, and we both chuckled softly.

  “Button? If Freeda could have made your dad happy, would you have been okay with them being together?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about your ma? If people do look down on us from Heaven, do you think she would have been okay with it, too?”

  “Yes,” I told her. “In the same way that I think, that while she once resented my attachment to Aunt Verdella, she was happy for it after she had to leave me.”

  “I think so, too.” She sucked her tongue against her teeth, then said, “I was waiting, hoping that after your dad talked to you, he’d come over and ask to talk to Freeda alone, too. And tell her he loved her, and that he wanted her to stay.”

  I didn’t need to tell her that I had hoped for the same thing. She knew it. And our sighs rose and fell together.

  CHAPTER

  41

  BRIGHT IDEA #81: If someone asks you why you carry your ma in a jar, just tell them that sometimes it takes a long, long time to find a final resting place.

  For the next couple of days, I pretended that the Malones weren’t leaving. I went blind when I stepped around the bags and boxes lined near my front door, and when I was at Aunt Verdella’s, I pretended the box stuffed with filled bell jars on the counter were waiting to go into the basement for winter and not in Freeda’s car.

  On Tuesday, Freeda made us heaping bowls of garden salad for lunch, with homemade dressing, and we ate out on the picnic table. We laughed ourselves silly as we recounted every detail of Fanny Tilman catching us doing the “naked lady dance,” then laughed even harder during the retelling, when Aunt Verdella bunny-hopped to the house, her legs pressed together to the knees, ha-ha’ing as she pleaded with us to stop making her laugh. And the whole time while we laughed, I pretended that our recounting the funniest event of our two months together wasn’t an attempt to sear that memory in our minds forever, so we’d have something to smile over when we missed one another.

  But by Thursday morning, there could be no more pretending. Dad hadn’t come to profess his love to Freeda and beg her to stay, and the girls who wanted our dresses hadn’t come early and paid us an outrageous sum so that at least Winnalee and the baby could stay. And because those things hadn’t happened, the Malones were leaving at noon, and that heavy feeling you get in your stomach when you’re full of loss woke me before dawn.

  I picked Evalee up when she stirred, and took her downstairs to change and bathe her, because I knew that Winnalee could use the extra sleep. She had a long drive ahead of her.

  I talked to Evalee as I tended her, telling her everything I wished her to know, in case I’d never get the chance to say them. Mostly how much I loved her, and wanted her to always love herself. Sure, Winnalee would tell her the same things. So would Freeda. But I wanted her to have many roots to cling to in the event she ever found herself standing alone, feeling disconnected from life and love.

  Winnalee woke early and took her bath, and we hiked over to Aunt Verdella’s by seven-thirty. The morning was cool, and the sky so clear that it was easy to believe that all of summer’s storms were behind us.

  Freeda’s car wasn’t in the drive, nor was Uncle Rudy’s truck. Aunt Verdella was in the kitchen, though, and Boohoo was in the tub. “He wouldn’t take his bath last night. He was upset,” she said, her gaze swooping over Winnalee and Evalee to tip me off as to why, as if I didn’t know.

  Aunt Verdella’s morning hugs were a little longer, a little tighter than usual. She forced a smile when she let go of Winnalee, but her eyes didn’t crinkle. She reached for Evalee. “Awwww, come to Auntie Verdella,” she said, and she cuddled her close before passing her to me so she could turn the eggs.

  Boohoo didn’t take more than a quick splash, and when he came out, he tried giving me a comb. “I can’t make that part thing,” he said, as if he had to, when his hair never saw a part unless we were going somewhere.

  I was holding Evalee, so Winnalee grabbed the comb. Boohoo jumped and snatched it back, saying to me, “Give Winnalee her creepy baby back, so you can do it.”

  I expected Winnalee to get upset, but she didn’t. I guess she knew, as I did, that Boohoo was only trying to protect his heart from hurting after they left.

  Boohoo’s hair was only half wet, and there was a wad of fuzzy soap on the dry half, but still, I made a neat part, and tucked his striped shirt into his pants as Aunt Verdella instructed me to.

  “Where’s Uncle Rudy?” Boohoo asked, when he noticed his truck was gone.

  “He went over to your dad’s to grab some quarts of oil, so he can have the girls’ vehicles in tip-top shape for …” She stopped talking and got busy instead.

  I turned Evalee outward over my arm because she was squirming, and her legs started kicking when she saw Boohoo. “Awwwww, look how Cupcake loves you, Boohoo. She’s waiting for you to smile at her.”

  Aunt Verdella grimaced when Boohoo turned his back to the baby. “Honey, I know you’re upset, but Evalee doesn’t understand why you’re not being her fun and sweet Uncle Boohoo right now.”

  “I am not upset. I just don’t want to see that creepy, poopy little baby today, that’s all. I don’t even like her. And I don’t care if she’s moving away, either. I’m gonna look for Hoppy, ’cause I’d rather have a toad for a friend anyway.”

  Winnalee asked where Freeda was.

  Aunt Verdella gave her a just-a-minute glance, then told Boohoo to go upstairs and get a clean pair of socks, because she’d forgotten to bring some down. He went quickly—maybe to avoid Evalee.

  “She was running to The Corner Store first, then she was going to Jewel’s grave. She just left a few minutes ago.” Her face bunched first with sadness, then with worry. “Button, she wanted me—and Boohoo—to go with her. But I wanted to talk it over with you, first. Honey, I think we should go. All of us. Even Boohoo.”

  “I want to go,” Winnalee said quietly, watching for my reaction from the corner of her eye.

  I sighed and looked down at my hands. With Knucklehead doing so poorly, I knew we couldn’t avoid the topic of death forever. As Freeda pointed out, we shouldn’t be avoiding the topic at all. So I nodded. It was a day of dread, anyway.

  As Boohoo thumped down the stairs, Aunt Verdella looked at me. “I’m glad we’re doing this while the Malones are here. We could use the extra support today.”

  I nodded, then put my head down. We could use the Malones’ support every day, just as they could use ours.

  Boohoo seemed to forget his cranky mood once Aunt Verdella told him we—all of us—were going on “an outing.” He ran to find his shoes, and came back wearing them, and his towel cape. Aunt Verdella fidgeted, and I knew she was thinking it would be disrespectful to go to the cemetery in a makeshift costume. But I guess she decided it wasn’t worth the tug-of-war to get the towel off of him. Either that, or she forgot about it mid-thought, because she just remembered that she needed to slip Boohoo’s bee kit into her purse.

  “Where we going, Evy?” Boohoo asked as Aunt Verdella turned the car down Shady Road.

  “You’ll see,” I said.

  “Do they sell root beer where we’re going? Because I could use a root beer.”

  “No,” I told him, quickly, and quietly. I looked over at Winnalee, who was jiggling a bouquet of lilac-colored asters, fireweed, and goldenrod that she’d picked for Ma from the edge of the yard, to get Evalee’s attention.

  Aunt Verdella slowed down as the first rows of gravestones came into view, and Boohoo’s bony elbow cut into my thigh as he leaned over me to get a better look. “What’s this place?” he aske
d.

  “A cemetery,” Aunt Verdella told him.

  “What’s a cemetery?”

  “Auntie will explain in a minute, honey.”

  We pulled under a cast-iron archway with Shady Lawn Cemetery formed in sympathy-card-shaped letters at the top. Just inside the entrance, the smooth pavement circled a six-foot granite angel. When I was a kid, I didn’t believe the statue was an angel, like Aunt Verdella said. It wasn’t pretty like the baby angels on Valentine cards, or the beautiful, sweet-faced lady angels that we topped our Christmas trees with. It was a male angel who looked serious as a soldier. And he didn’t have delicate-looking wings like a dragonfly, or those butterfly-shaped ones made of duck feathers. Instead he had spiny wings that pointed straight up from behind his head, the tips sharp as arrows. His head was bowed, and one hand curled into a fist lifted high. The other hand was resting over his heart. With his stoic face and sharp, angular lines, he looked more like a sleepy superhero villain tangled in a bedsheet than a vision of comfort for grieving hearts. I guess Boohoo thought the same, because after climbing onto my lap to peep through the opened window, he said, “Cool. Do they have Spider-Man here, too?”

  Winnalee giggled, then gave me an apologetic look.

  Aunt Verdella veered to the right when she reached the fork in the road, and pulled the car over as far as she could without making tire tracks in the grass.

  She turned sideways on the seat, and blew out a deep breath before she began. I bit my cheek.

  “Boohoo, when people get old, or get hurt and their body breaks so bad that they can’t be fixed with a shot or an operation, they leave them. Kind of like they’re taking off a pair of pants or a shirt or something, and they go off to Heaven to live with God.”

  “You mean they go there naked? Like how I went to the hospital?” Boohoo asked.

  Winnalee lifted the flower blooms up to cover her face.

  “Well, no. They go like, well, spirits. Their spirit goes there.”

  Boohoo nodded. “Like a ghost then.” He cocked his head in thought, then nodded slowly. “Yeah, I guess that’s right, because Casper the Ghost doesn’t wear clothes.”