A Life of Bright Ideas (30 page)

I straightened up, still staring. At my eye level, the words
Fuck You
were carved into the thick paint in angular letters, clear down to the wood. A trail of triangles—tears? blood?—ran from the words. Drawings in faded black marker filled the bottom third of the door. It was the picture in the center, drawn with skill no greater than that of a kindergartner, that held my attention, though. A rectangle formed the body, and straight lines made the limbs. A round head floated above it, and a wide smile stretched across the circular face. Two dots formed the eyes, and from the bottom of each ran an unbroken line, all the way to her L-shaped feet. Red marker was scribbled across the floating, smiling, crying face.

My insides went cold, even as my skin was damp from the stuffy, upstairs air. The dirty sheets turned slimy in my fists and I dropped them. I stepped back.

Winnalee scooped up the bedding—she was humming “Who’ll Stop the Rain”—and kicked the door open so wide that it banged against the wall. She stopped in the hall and looked at me. “You coming?”

I started after her. “I want to go home,” I murmured.

She turned around so fast that the toes of her sandals butted up against mine. “Why?”

The skin on the inside of my elbows quivered and I clawed at them. “I just do,” I said, not wanting to lie, yet not knowing how to tell her the truth, either.

Winnalee shook her head. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. You never stayed overnight at my place when we lived in Dauber the first time. I’ll bet you never stayed at Penny’s, either, even after you were older.”

No amount of scratching was quieting my skin. “It’s not that,” I said.

“Why then? Because you don’t like Hannah? I saw the way you were staring at her, Button. Like she’s some kind of circus freak.”

“No, no.” I tried to keep my voice hushed so they wouldn’t hear us downstairs, even though I doubted they could over their playful banter. “It’s him,” I said. “He gives me the creeps.”

“Uncle Dewey?” She rolled her eyes. “Why? Because Freeda told you bad things about him?” She didn’t mention the drawings on the door. “Well, she’s a liar. I’ve told you that a hundred times already, even though I shouldn’t have to. She told me Ma was dead. Isn’t that proof enough to make you question the things she said about Uncle Dewey?”

The air felt too thick to breathe, and my legs felt weak.

Say it, don’t scratch it
.

Say it, don’t scratch it
.

“He was staring at my boobs,” I told her.

“Guys do that, Button. You know that.”

“But they don’t stare at their niece’s butt.”

Winnalee’s lips puckered. “Why are you doing this?” she asked, her words a pleading whisper.

I didn’t know what to say. What to do. So I just stood there, itching.

“Fine. I’ll take you home in the morning,” she said, spinning around to face the stairs. “When I go to pick up Evalee.”

I worked the doughnut cutter, keeping the circles close together and making neat rows, as if everything would be fine as long as I kept the cuts in a perfect line. One. Another one. Then another—putting all my energy into butting the metal doughnut cutter up against the last doughnut without cutting a tiny half-moon into its soft side.

At the counter, Hannah watched the dough sizzle. “You have to watch for the browning edges. And be sure you don’t puncture the skin when you flip them, otherwise grease pools inside. I’ll tell you when to flip them.” I looked up as Hannah was reaching for a cookie sheet lined with paper towels. “Dewey, move,” Hannah scolded. “This grease is hot.”

Dewey reached across Winnalee and grabbed a handful of doughnut holes from the platter in front of Hannah. She slapped at his hand. “Dewey, those aren’t even sugared yet!” Dewey laughed like a naughty little boy.

“Oh, turn those two right there, honey,” she told Winnalee. “That’s right. That’s right.”

I should have kept my eyes on my work, I told myself later. If I had, I wouldn’t have seen Dewey turn toward me, his cheeks bulging with doughnuts holes, two more cupped in his hands. He grinned, flashing teeth caked with mashed doughnuts,
then dropped his hand down so the doughnut holes rested at his crotch.

It was so quick that it was easy to tell myself that maybe he hadn’t meant it like
that
.

“Dewey, stop that and get out of the kitchen,” Hannah scolded. Dewey raised his eyebrow at me and popped the two holes into his mouth, just as Winnalee was fishing more doughnuts out of the grease. “Get it! Get it! Stab that doughnut right in the hole,” Dewey said, then glanced back at me and snickered.

I stared down at the dough, plump and soft and white as Evalee’s skin, and I wanted to scoop it from the table, tuck it back in the bowl, and cover it with its dish-towel blanket. There was a telephone hanging on the wall, the cord looped like Winnalee’s hair, and I longed to yank it loose and call home. Ask somebody to come get me, like I’d done the night of Penny’s slumber party when I was in fourth grade and scared of the Ouija board.

“Dewey, I mean it. You’re in the way. Go watch TV or something!”

I stared at the circles of dough, blinking hard, the taste of blood in my mouth. The table jostled, but I didn’t look up. Not until Winnalee snapped, “Did you just grab my ass?”

Winnalee was holding the long-handled fork, drops of grease dripping from the tines. She stared at Dewey, her mouth hanging open. Then she turned to Hannah. “Uncle Dewey just grabbed my ass.”

“Winnalee!” Hannah said.

“I was just pattin’ you out of the way,” Dewey said, and Hannah mimicked his words like a parrot.

“He was just pattin’ you out of the way, honey.”

“No,” Winnalee protested. “That isn’t what he did. You saw him! You were looking right over here. He patted my ass
first, then he rubbed it. Like this.” She tossed the fork onto the counter and rubbed her behind hard enough to tug her dress along with her hand.

“Oh, Winnalee. Honey, please don’t use that profane language like your mother. It lowers a girl, talking like that.”

I was on my feet in a flash, my back to the wall. My purse and Winnalee’s were lying on the heap of shoes in the doorway, and I edged over to scoop them up.

Winnalee was staring at Hannah, her eyes so big, so pretty, so hurt. “But he …”

Dewey grabbed another handful of doughnut holes and moseyed out of the room. For a moment, there was no sound but the sizzling of hot grease. Then Hannah shouted, “The doughnuts!” She reached for the long fork, and the sizzling grew fainter with each doughnut she plucked from the pan.

A TV in the next room clicked on. The local weather.
A sixty percent chance of rain tonight …

Winnalee was still staring at Hannah. “Maaa …,” she whimpered, her voice as weak as a kitten’s.

“Come on now, Winnalee. We gotta get more dough in here before this grease burns.”

“But he grabbed me,” she said to Hannah, who was busy lifting pale white circles of dough from the table and dropping them into the hot grease. “Ma?”

Hannah didn’t look up.

Winnalee turned to me. Her cheeks slack, her eyes a muddied blue.

I held out my hand and mouthed the words, “Let’s go.”

Winnalee circled the table, catching the edge with her hip as she reached for my hand. She moved like a sleepwalker as I pulled her down the stubby hall.

“Winnalee?” Hannah called.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” I kept saying, because by the time we
got down the front steps, she was bawling. I hurried us across the yard, weaving as if the metal scraps were land mines.

I helped her into the passenger side and buckled her in. I shut the door and ran around to the driver’s side.

Hannah was in the kitchen window, leaning forward, as if her arms were too weary to prop her up straight. Her hand was over her mouth.

I jerked open the driver’s door. Winnalee was staring at the house. She turned to me, her eyes screaming,
I don’t understand!

I looked back at the house. At the scraggly lawn filled with broken things that could cut the flesh of children. I could see Winnalee running with a pail of copper pipes, her long loops floating behind her like strands of Harvest Gold yarn. Her hands working hard and her spirit working even harder to bring some music, some magic to this horrible place. I peered into the van. “I’ll be right back,” I told Winnalee.

I didn’t run. I walked. In long, determined strides. I could feel someone watching me as I passed the front steps, but I didn’t look, and I didn’t speed up. I wasn’t scared that Dewey or Hannah would come outside and try to stop us, because a new awareness had come to me like a Bright Idea: I was armed with the truth, and the truth, for some, was something that could cut far deeper than scrap metal.

At the oak tree, I unwound Winnalee’s wind chime, determined not to leave even one tiny part of the little girl Winnalee once was behind. The copper pipes sang out as I carried it to the van.

Winnalee was curled up like a baby when I opened the door. Her legs were tucked under her dress, and her arms were wrapped around her head.

“Get me out of here,” she begged, and I assured her that I would. I gently set the wind chime behind my seat and
climbed in, and we drove away in rain that glossed the roads to black.

Winnalee cried herself to sleep, and didn’t wake but for the brief moment when we reached St. Croix Falls and I smoothed the tangled hair from her face and asked her if she had to pee. She shook her head no. I locked the van, went inside, and made a collect call to Aunt Verdella. I didn’t know what Winnalee would think of me telling them where we’d gone and what had happened, but now that it was over, I wasn’t feeling so brave anymore, and all I wanted was Aunt Verdella’s arms.

“Oh no,” Aunt Verdella cried after I told her where we’d gone, and what had happened. “Freeda, they’d gone to see Hannah. Dewey made a pass at Winnalee. No, no, he didn’t hurt her … Button, did he hurt her?”

I told her how he’d touched her, and Aunt Verdella started to cry. “Oh, that poor baby.” She repeated the story to Freeda, who bellowed cusswords about killing “that sick son of a bitch.”

Winnalee was awake when I got back to the van, and she talked the rest of the way home, her emotions roller-coasting with hurt, anger, confusion, and grief. “It’s like Hannah died to me twice now,” she said.

I reached over and held her hand, waiting for her to mention Freeda. She didn’t until we were passing through Dauber. “She saved me from getting hurt when I was little, didn’t she?” She sounded confused about how on earth she couldn’t have known that until now. “I feel so stupid.”

I squeezed her hand. “You just wanted to believe something good.”

It was after two in the morning when we pulled into Aunt Verdella’s driveway. The kitchen light was on, and the door
opened before we even got out of the van. Freeda came out first, Aunt Verdella on her heels, their arms opening. I grabbed on to Aunt Verdella, and over her shoulder I saw Freeda hugging Winnalee. Winnalee’s arms were straight at her sides, her head facedown against Freeda’s shoulder.

They stayed outside talking, while Aunt Verdella and I dozed on the couch, me with my head on her lap. Freeda and Winnalee didn’t come in until the sky started brightening and the birds were chirping. They dropped into Uncle Rudy’s recliner side by side and slept. Neither of them woke when Evalee and Boohoo did.

The summer after Ma died, I was standing in the middle of the living room, watching a storm rage outside the window. Uncle Rudy was lowering himself into his favorite chair with the
Dauber Daily
, and he glanced up. “In a little bit, those storm clouds will have pushed off, leaving nothing behind but blue skies,” he said. “Storms never last forever, Button.”

I thought of his promise a couple of mornings after our trip to Hopested, when we woke to skies so bright and blue that it stung your eyes when you stepped outside. Sure, questions about the future hovered in the air like rising fog. Yet no one seemed concerned—not even me—because when Freeda and Winnalee woke that morning after Hopested, they were
behaving how they had in the past, which meant that their storm had passed.

“Crissakes, Winnalee. It’s just a shit diaper. It won’t kill you,” Freeda said as she shoved a disposable diaper and a cleansing cloth into Winnalee’s hands the afternoon of our return.

Winnalee was sitting cross-legged on the floor, Evalee lying on a blanket before her. “I’ll gag,” she said as she gingerly lifted Evalee’s legs. “Maybe even throw up. Freeda, come on, you know I have a weak stomach. Especially when I’m overtired.”

“Yeah, well, time to muscle it up,” Freeda said.

“Just cross her ankles with one hand, and hold her legs up out of the way,” Aunt Verdella called from the kitchen.

“How?” Winnalee asked.

“Like this.” Freeda demonstrated, while Boohoo stood nearby reciting, “Cupcake’s a poopy pants. A poopy, puppy, poopy pants!” Freeda was crouched down beside Winnalee, giving step-by-step instructions that could hardly be heard above Boohoo’s chanting. I told him to quiet down as I checked the window for the mailman, since I thought I’d heard a car.

“Boohoo, come on, knock it off,” Winnalee said, as she struggled to undo the diaper tabs while holding Evalee’s legs high. “You’re getting her all rowdy and she keeps kicking.”

Boohoo revved up the tempo of his little song and started hopping in place.

“Boohoo, you’re going to jump on her head if you keep that up,” Freeda snapped.

He started clapping his hands. “Here, Cupcake. Here, Cupcake!” He followed this with cartoon sounds.

“Boohoo!” Aunt Verdella and I called in unison.

“Damn it, Boohoo. Knock it off right now!” Winnalee snapped.

“Winnalee. Don’t cuss at kids,” Freeda said.

Evalee wiggled a foot loose from Winnalee’s grasp. “She got her heel in it!” Winnalee moaned.

“Okay, that’s it!” Freeda said. “You’ve been acting up for days now, Boohoo. Tying Aunt Verdella up again when she dozed off after lunch … swiping more diapers to put on Knucklehead, even after we told you no more because those things cost money. Enough!”