A Life of Bright Ideas (28 page)

I stood up and squeezed beside her to take a look. Boohoo was by the lean-to, crouched over Knucklehead.

“He’s probably wrapping him in yarn,” I said.

“Well, he’s up to something. That little dickens. Come on, walk me home.”

Aunt Verdella must have noticed me staring longingly at the mailbox. “You must be waiting for some mail from that boy.”

“He’s taking me to a movie when he gets home on leave,” I told her.

“Oh, boy.” She giggled a little, then said, “My little Button, getting popular with the boys. But then I’d expect that, you being such a pretty, sweet thing. Tommy’s gonna be jealous,” she said in a singsong voice. I rolled my eyes. Aunt
Verdella
would
say that—even if
I’d
been born with feet where my hands should be, and a head the size of a pea. She always assumed that everyone loved me just as much as she did.

When we reached her yard, Knucklehead was standing on spindly legs drinking from his water dish, a Pampers strapped around his hindquarter and his tail poking out of a raggedy hole. Aunt Verdella laughed so hard that she had to cross her legs and hop to the house. “Good heavens, maybe
I’d
better start wearing Pampers!”

Winnalee came barreling down the road while we were still outside, and relief dropped my shoulders. Aunt Verdella was just about to tell me “one more thing,” but a loud crash in the house interrupted her. “Oh dear, I’d better get inside and see what that boy did now.”

Before I even reached the sandbox, Winnalee was coming out of our house—her duffel bag and army purse slung over her shoulder.

Panic slammed me in the stomach and I started running, shouting, “Winnalee! Where you going?”

Winnalee didn’t look at me, she just hurried to her van all the faster. She yanked open the passenger door and tossed her bags in. “Winnalee!” I screamed. “What are you doing? Where are you going?”

She was already behind the steering wheel, and the metal door was hot to the touch when I hung my hands over the door frame.

“Crissakes, announce it to the whole world, will you?” she said. She glanced in her rearview mirror.

I was almost panting and near tears. “You’ve got your duffel bag.”

Winnalee didn’t look upset. She looked almost happy.

“I’m not leaving for good, Button,” she said. “Just for a couple of days.”

“Where are you going?”

“To Hopested, Minnesota, to see Hannah,” she said. “To ask her if she’ll raise my kid.”

I stared at Winnalee in disbelief. Was this what she’d been contemplating when she slipped away? And did she
really
believe Hannah should raise Evalee? I’d heard Freeda confront Hannah with my own ears. I wanted to shout, “Are you crazy?” but instead, I said as calmly as I could, “Winnalee, you do know what happened to Freeda when she was little, right?” Winnalee’s grip on the steering wheel whitened her knuckles. “Winnalee … look at me. You
do
know that your uncle Dewey was molesting Freeda when she was little, don’t you? And when Freeda told, Hannah slapped her and called her a liar.”

“Freeda
does
lie,” Winnalee snapped.

“About little things maybe, but not about something like
this. Are you forgetting that I was there when Hannah showed up at Aunt Verdella’s? That I saw Freeda confront her? Freeda brought up specific instances, Winnalee, and she was not lying. If you’d been there, you’d know it, too. It’s why she rushed back to Hopested to get you. She’d learned that Dewey was back living with Hannah, and she wasn’t about to let him hurt you. Yeah, maybe she was wrong in
how
she did it, but she wasn’t wrong in getting you out of there.”

“Yeah? Well, I’ll tell you this much. After I leave Evalee, I’m never, ever gonna take her back. I wouldn’t do that to her.”

She glanced in the mirror again. “I’ve gotta go,” she said.

Winnalee let the van roll backward, but I didn’t let go of the door. “Wait!” I shouted. “I’m going with you.”

“Why?” she asked, suspicion squinting her eyes.

Because I don’t want you facing Dewey, Hannah, the truth, alone
.

“Because I’m your best friend,” I said. “And I could stand to get out of Dauber and go on a little adventure.”

“Cool. Jump in,” she said.

“I have to grab my purse,” I told her. I glanced across the road. Our pens were always strung around the house, except for the one I always kept tucked in my stationery box. But it was upstairs, along with Winnalee’s sketching pencils. But if I hurried, I could scratch Aunt Verdella a—

Winnalee interrupted my thoughts as if she’d heard them. “It should take you five seconds to run inside and grab it from the hook inside the door. You aren’t back in that time, I’m pulling out without you.”

So I got my purse and hurried back to the van, feeling every bit like I did at nine, and tagging along after Winnalee searching for beings that didn’t exist.

Winnalee jutted out her chin to blow air into her face. “Roll your window down, will you?” She shook her head. “I
don’t know how you can stand wearing jeans in summer. You make me sweat just looking at you.” Winnalee flicked on the radio then, and turned it up until the dashboard pulsed. She bounced with the music, and sang with carefree abandonment, as though we were two hippies going off to Woodstock.

When we got to Hopested, Winnalee started pointing out the stores she remembered, and I had to reach over and grab the wheel a few times, or we would have rammed into the cars parallel-parked on Main Street. “Oh, oh, Ma got her prescriptions filled at that drugstore right there! I always got Pixy Stix.” And “Oh, oh, there’s the Laundromat where we used to go. I liked climbing in the dryer and pretending it was my spaceship. And that restaurant, right next to it? Right there? A lady named Doris worked there. She always gave me extra pickles.” Winnalee spotted the flag waving above the rooftops a few blocks ahead. “My school! I didn’t know it was
this
close to town!”

When the one-story brick building came into sight, Winnalee
swerved to the curb rather than pulling into the empty parking lot, and jumped out. “Oh my God, look at how small it is! Come on,” she said. She took off running.

I tagged her into the school yard, where she stopped and spun in slow, starstruck circles. “Isn’t it cool?” It looked like most every other school building to me: one story, brick, windows lined in rows like desks, with a blacktopped playground filled with the usual assortment of equipment: swings, a slide, a jungle gym, a merry-go-round.

There was something heartbreaking about watching Winnalee cupping her hands over the sides of her face to peer in the windows. “My kindergarten room!” she shouted. “They still have the little playhouse! Come see, Button. Come see!” She pointed out where they lined up to get their milk, and where the napping mats were kept. “And there’s the table I fell against when I tripped over my shoelace. I split my lip open. Ma thought it would scar, but it didn’t.”

Winnalee took off for the playground toys, giggling like she was five again, while I tried to subdue the unease I felt when I heard Winnalee call Hannah
Ma
. She insisted that I get on the merry-go-round with her, then spun us until the horizon smeared, and leapt off before the spinning stopped. “Come on!” she yelled. I dragged my foot in the dirt until the merry-go-round stopped and staggered after Winnalee.

Winnalee hiked up her long dress and tied it in a knot at her thigh, then climbed up the monkey bars. She braced her feet on the two opposing poles near the top and elevated herself up above the highest tower. She lifted her arms above her head, and shouted, “Winnalee Malone! Maker of Magic! Fairy of Fun! Princess of the Playground!” She peered down and giggled. “Debbie Rutherford used to get
so
mad at me when I’d say that. So I’d do this …” She stepped down one wrung and clutched the bars. Then, using her whole body, she jerked side to side so that the jungle gym wobbled. Winnalee stopped.
“She’d scream then, because she thought I was using magic to make the bars shake. Like I could make the whole thing crumble and crash to the blacktop and bury her alive if I wanted to.”

Winnalee didn’t climb down until her cheeks were flushed, then she stood quietly, blinking against the breeze as she looked over the playground and building. “Freeda didn’t have any right taking me away,” she said slowly. “I was happy here. I could have stayed in the same school for all my grades.”

We stopped at a gas station I was sure I remembered from my trip to Hopested with Aunt Verdella when I was nine. I used the restroom first, then Winnalee. While she was gone, I dug in my purse for change. I wasn’t sure how much a three-minute call home would cost, but certainly more than the few cents I managed to scrounge up. There were two customers waiting in line, and the old clerk was so putzy that I knew I wouldn’t have time to cash a couple of dollars before Winnalee stepped out. I dialed O for the operator and told her I wanted to make a collect call.

Boohoo answered.

“Collect call from Evelyn Peters. Will you accept the charges?” the operator asked.

“You ain’t Evy. Who is this?” Boohoo asked.

“Operator, he’s only six years old. He doesn’t understand,” I hurriedly explained.

“Collect call from Evelyn Peters. Will you accept the charges?” she repeated, as if I hadn’t spoken.

Say yes, Boohoo. Say yes!

“Boohoo? Who’s on the phone?” Aunt Verdella’s voice sounded far away, like maybe she was talking from the living room, or even out on the porch.
Give her the phone, Boohoo. Please!

“It’s Crackpot again,” Boohoo groaned, and the line went dead.

“I’m sorry, Miss. The party you dialed did not accept charges. Please try again another time.” She hung up.

The restroom door opened, just as I was hurrying to press down the receiver so I could try again. “You called them, didn’t you?” Winnalee barked from across the room. The elderly clerk leaned around a customer to gawk. Winnalee marched down an aisle lined with motor oil and antifreeze, her eyes pinched.

“I tried to,” I said when she reached me. “Aunt Verdella will be worried sick tonight when we don’t show up and she doesn’t know where we are.”

“What did you tell her? I don’t want Freeda knowing my business.”

“Nothing. I didn’t get to talk to her. I called collect and Boohoo answered.”

The clerk grabbed a pen and peered out at Winnalee’s van. When Winnalee noticed, she snapped, “Geez, we’re eighteen. Legal adults. Not a couple of stupid-assed runaway kids!”

Hannah’s house was small and dirty white. A section of the roof on the nearby barn was caved in, and broken farm equipment was scattered across the overgrown yard. A stack of windows, some broken, were leaned up against the house, and chickens were feeding near the front door.

Winnalee stopped the van and pointed. “I remember them,” she said, as if the chickens could possibly be the same birds that had been there when she was a kid.

A face appeared in a window, the head too small to belong to someone the size of Hannah. Winnalee grabbed her fatigue-green
purse off the seat and we got out. “I’m nervous,” she whispered. I took her hand.

A man opened the door before we cleared the chipped cement steps. He was short and had narrow shoulders. His eyes were bright blue, like Winnalee’s, and his boyishly round face looked at odds with the Uncle Rudy–deep wrinkles. He reached up and scratched his grizzly cheek.

“Uncle Dewey?” Winnalee asked.

“Who is it, Dew?” came a wheezy voice from inside.

Winnalee started crying then, and brushed past Dewey. He backed up and let me in, tipping an imaginary hat. I stepped over the ladies’ flats with sides stretched wide like boats and an array of work boots that cluttered the doorway, and followed Winnalee into the kitchen. Hannah—every bit as big as I remembered—was sitting at the table, a sheet of notebook paper pinned under her forearm. She had to be at least fifty—Freeda was thirty-three—but any lines that had tried crinkling her face had obviously been stretched to lie flat. She still wore a crucifix around her neck, but either a different one than the one she wore to Dauber, or the same one on a longer chain, because it was no longer embedded in the folds of her neck.

“Maaaaaaaaaaa,” Winnalee cried, as if she’d just jumped out of our magic tree and landed in yesteryear.

Hannah looked confused for a moment, then a cry escaped from a round mouth that looked as small as a Cheerio on a face that size. Her hand came up to pat over her chest, as if she was feeling for her heart. “Winnalee?” she whimpered. She didn’t get up, but swiveled herself to the side. I tried hard not to stare at her belly, which filled her lap to her knees.

Winnalee rushed forward, wrapping her arms around Hannah. “Ma, Ma,” she kept repeating, as she sobbed like a baby. Hannah was wheezing tears every bit as heartfelt as Winnalee’s, as she patted her back. I felt overwhelmed as I watched. Up until she was five, Winnalee’d believed that Hannah
was her ma. And for the next four years, she’d believed that Hannah was dead. Now here she was, crying in her arms. I dabbed at my eyes, happy for Winnalee, but wishing that it could be me hugging Ma, four years later, because her death had all been one big, fat lie.

“Dewey, Dewey,” Hannah said, her double chin smashed against Winnalee’s arm. “It’s Winnalee. Praise the Lord, it’s Winnalee.”

Dewey stood near the wall, watching them.

Winnalee sniffled hard as she sobbed and laughed at the same time. The bathroom door was open, so I slipped inside to look for Kleenex. The room was bare, but for two limp towels, and it smelled like urine. Mottled dirt huddled near the floorboards, and a gummy film edged the tub. I couldn’t find any Kleenex, so I unrolled two lengths of toilet paper and brought them into the kitchen. Winnalee and Hannah paused in their hugging to take the toilet paper wads, and I backed up, looking away to give them their privacy.