The Book of Bright Ideas (30 page)

Ma stopped up the sink and started running dishwater. “Linda didn't say anything about Al going away this weekend.”

“Al?” Daddy reached for his cigarettes. He stopped, one cigarette half pulled out of the box. “Oh. You thought I was talking about going with the guys?”

“Weren't you?”

“No. I was talking about you and me. I thought we could have a nice dinner at The Rusty Nail, check out the band, dance a little. Maybe spend the night in that nice place across the lake. What do you say? Can you get Friday off?” Daddy made dancing steps and hummed as he waited for her to answer.

 

That Friday, Aunt Verdella and I stood in the driveway talking with Daddy, as he put their suitcase into the trunk. “I'm so glad you're doing this, Reece. Jewel seems so lost since Freeda left.”

“I'm all set,” Ma said, coming out of the house with her purse and a small carrying case. She'd gone to the beauty salon that morning and got her hair put back into a blond bouffant, and she had her face painted up. Not like an Egypt-lady, but just enough to make her look like the color of summer.

Daddy grinned at Ma, then patted his back pockets. “I must have left my wallet on the nightstand.” He sprinted toward the house.

Aunt Verdella giggled at Ma. “You look like a new bride, going off on her honeymoon,” she said.

When Daddy came out of the house, he was carrying Ma's dress, the color of sexy. “You forgot your dancin' dress,” he said. He whistled as he opened the back door and hung it up.

Ma gave me a hug before she slipped into the car, and Aunt Verdella gave Ma and Daddy a hug. “You two have fun, now,” Aunt Verdella said, then she stood back. “Reece? Aren't you forgettin' something?”

Daddy tapped his back pocket, then pulled the car keys from his front one. “Nope, I think I've got every—” And then he stopped, his eyes on Aunt Verdella. I tilted my head back and looked at her. She had her hands folded over her fat part, and her chin tucked down. Her head was tilted over to my side. “Ohhhh,” Daddy said. He moved forward, his legs kind of stiff. “See you, Kid. You be good for your auntie, okay?” He reached out and patted me on the head, and his hand
did
make a warm feeling in my belly. I smiled and said, “Thanks, Daddy,” and that made him smile.

28

It seems to me that after someone sweeps across your life like a red-hot flame, peeling back the shutters that sat over your heart and your mind and setting free your sweetest dreams or your worst nightmares, after things cool down you've got two choices. You can either slip back into your old self, your old life, tucking those things you were too scared to look at back into hiding, or you can keep those parts of yourself out until you get so used to them that they don't scare you anymore and they just become a part of who you are.

Right after the Malones left, Ma tried tucking those parts of herself back again, but they didn't stay tucked away for long. She came back from that little trip with Daddy with a shine that stayed with her. Not just for those months until my little brother, Robert Reece Peters, was born either.

Ma quit working for Dr. Wagner so she could stay home with Bobby while he was a baby. Those were her plans anyway. But right after Linda and Al's wedding, Ma got called to make dresses for two more brides and their bridesmaids. And after those two weddings, she got more calls. With the sewing room turned into Bobby's room, soon half-made gowns were hanging all over the house, and Ma was running herself ragged trying to make sure there were no beads or stickpins left out for Bobby to swallow. What choice did she have, then, but to rent a little store two doors down from Dr. Wagner's office and set up her own bridal shop?

Women come from Porter and beyond to order their gowns now, and lots of times they take the cards left on the counter advertising Daddy's band and book them for their wedding dances. I doubt I'll ever see Ma dance half-naked in the rain again, but I see her grow brighter and warmer every day. She doesn't harp at Daddy about where he's going and when he's gonna be back anymore, but sometimes
he
harps at
her
for those things. When he does that, Ma usually just pats his cheek and says, “Keep your eye on where
you're
going, Reece Peters.”

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.