A Life of Bright Ideas (42 page)

“Well, Verdella, if I learned anything from my past, I’ve learned that it’s our fathers who teach us what to expect from men. When I was little I used to tell myself that if my dad knew what Dewey was doing to me, he’d protect me. Comfort me, even.”

“Your dad was alive then?” Aunt Verdella asked.

“Yeah. He died when I was fifteen. It took me until therapy to admit that if I had truly believed he would’ve rescued
me, I’d have told him instead. He was sitting in the living room, not even six feet away, when I told Hannah. He had to have heard her scream at me, and no doubt heard the slap. He waited until I was done cleaning up my vomit, then came into the kitchen. He stepped over me like I was a barn cat, and went to the stove for coffee. He never did buck Hannah.”

“Oh, honey …”

“It’s all right. I’ve dealt with it. But my point is this: Dewey may have taught me that the only value I had to any guy was for sex, but my dad taught me that no guy will ever love me enough to protect me or be there for me. And I’ve taken that attitude, that lack of trust, into every relationship I’ve ever had that could have been good.”

“I’m so sorry …,” Aunt Verdella said.

“It doesn’t matter anymore, Verdella. What does matter, though, is what’s in
Evy’s
present and in her future. What
she’s
learned from
her
father. Reece ignored her when she was little, and although he may have given her some attention between the time we left and Jewel’s death, he’s been ignoring her ever since. What has she learned from him, but how to quietly hope for a man’s attention, and make a meal out of any crumb she gets? How to love a man from afar? I’ll bet any money, if Jesse came home tomorrow and professed his love for her, she’d not know how to deal with it. She’d only feel awkward, and almost wish he’d leave again so she could love him openly from a more familiar distance. Look at her with Tommy. She doesn’t know what in the hell to make of him.”

I swallowed hard in an attempt to dislodge the lump in my throat.

I could hear Aunt Verdella crying. “Rudy tries to give her what she needs.”

“I know. And what he gives her is priceless. But she needs the same from her father. Verdella, think back. Wasn’t your dad the very first man you fell in love with?”

“Well, I guess so. Ma said when I was three, I told her I was gonna marry him when I got big.”

“And I guess you could say that’s exactly what you did. I’ll bet your dad was every bit as loving to you as Rudy. And that’s my point.”

I assumed Aunt Verdella nodded.

“Just listen to me,” Freeda said with a humorless laugh, “sounding like a know-it-all. No wonder Reece won’t hear me out. My kid doesn’t even have a father. Neither does my grandkid. And I cut out on Winnalee, and she tried doing the same. Who in the hell am I to talk about the damage we do to our kids when it’s taken me this long to deal with my own shit?”

“You’re a kind heart, and a wise soul. That’s who you are, Freeda Malone,” Aunt Verdella said. “You’re somebody who suffered over her mistakes and the mistakes of others, and you don’t want to see anyone else suffer.”

I heard the soft murmur of sniffles, and I turned and headed for home before they heard mine.

“What’s the matter, Button?” Winnalee asked when I got in the door.

I turned to her, my voice hoarse from the words that were still stinging me. “When were you planning on telling me you’re leaving, Winnalee? Or were you just going to slip out in the night without saying goodbye, like you did last time?”

Winnalee sighed herself to the couch, a spit-up baby T-shirt bunched in her hand. “I was holding out hope that I wouldn’t have to tell you, period. That we’d make a mint off our dresses and I wouldn’t have to go—I didn’t know they’d take so long. But Freeda’s right. Finding old clothes and making them over might bring in a few bucks, but not enough for me to raise a kid on.”

“Well, what will be different in Michigan?”

“Freeda will work days, and I’ll clean the salon after hours.”

“I could have done the same for you if you found a night job here. And there
are
night jobs.”

“But you’ll need a job now, too, Button. Who’s to say we’d find jobs fast, much less in opposite shifts like we’d need to?”

“Did everybody but me know Linda is closing Ma’s shop and that you guys are leaving?”

“Button, I don’t even have money for Cupcake’s next case of formula. That shit’s expensive, and I’ve got five dollars and fifty-three cents left to my name. That’s it. Going with Freeda is the only option I can think of.” Winnalee tossed the dirty T-shirt into the laundry basket waiting by the door. “But I’m coming back. I promise you I am. This is the only place left that really feels like home. You guys are my family, and I want my daughter to grow up here. Where she can play in the magic tree, and have people make her bunny pancakes, and look out for her and love her just like I do.”

“Then stay,” I begged. “I told you I’d help. So will Aunt Verdella. I don’t pay rent here, so all I’ve got are my utility bills and what little food I buy. I’ve got enough to buy her formula. Diapers, too. We could figure it out.”

Even as I spoke, I knew I was wasting my breath, because money and a job
wasn’t
the sole reason she was leaving. “You just don’t want to be apart from Freeda right now,” I said. I sounded accusatory, even though I didn’t mean to. “No, don’t deny it, Winnalee. I don’t blame you. I’d be with my mother, too, if that was possible.”

“But still, it will only be for a while,” she said. “You know, until I get the hang of being a mom. I’m coming back, though. I promise you, I am. I came back once, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, nine years later.”

“Well what was I supposed to do? Use my step stool to get in Freeda’s truck and drive myself back here?”

“You could have at least written, after you got older.”

“Yeah … but it’s weird. You don’t really know if someone you knew when you were nine would even remember you.”

She sighed, then gave me a smile I knew she hoped would be contagious. “Hey, I
have
to come back. We haven’t written our one hundredth idea yet.”

I bit at my cheek and flinched at the pain. Her smile faded. “Don’t you believe me?” she asked.

I got up and removed my box of stationery from the end table, closing the lid and slipping it into the drawer underneath. “Right now,” I said, “I’m having a hard time believing in anything. Except that people you love leave.”

It was easier if you stayed busy. I suggested we sort through Winnalee’s things. Pack what she wouldn’t need before Thursday, and get the dirty laundry gathered to wash in the morning.

“No, leave those,” Winnalee said, when I grabbed her buckskin dress with fringes and a couple of her granny dresses from the closet. “If I take everything, then that’s just all the more I’ll have to lug back here.” I rehung the dresses, knowing full well that Winnalee believed with all her heart that she’d be back, whether it was true or not.

Evalee reached out to grab a fistful of my hair, but I tugged it gently out of her grasp before she could get it to her mouth. I lifted her up to my shoulder and pressed my cheek to her downy head.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you, Button. Yesterday Freeda took a phone call from one of those girls I pitched our dresses to at the picnic. She wants to know if she can come over with some of her friends and look at them on Sunday. I’ll be gone by then, but I’m gonna price them today. Don’t you cave when they try to talk you into taking less, either. Those dresses are one of a kind and supercool. They want them, they can pay for them.”

I nodded, not caring.

The flies were particularly heavy, as they always were in late summer, so we were keeping the front door closed most of the day now so they couldn’t shimmy in through the gap between the screen door and the door frame.

I didn’t hear anybody knock. I was upstairs in the sewing room, pairing Winnalee’s albums with their covers, and Winnalee was downstairs washing bottles. “Coming!” she shouted from the kitchen, then: “Uncle Reece!”

I slipped into the upstairs hallway to listen, trying to figure out why Dad was downstairs.

“Hi, kiddo,” he said.

“Did you come to say goodbye to me and Cupcake?”

“Goodbye?”

“Yeah. We’re pulling out on Thursday. We’re heading back to Northville. But I’m coming back. By Christmas, I decided. Man, and we didn’t have you over for supper. Not even once.”

I heard Winnalee close the entrance door, and some quieter talk, then I thought I heard Dad say, “I came to talk to Evy, actually.”

But that couldn’t be right.

I waited, wondering if I’d heard wrong.

“Button!” Winnalee bellowed.

“Coming,” I called back, hoping the weakness of my voice
would be interpreted as not wanting to wake Evalee. I smoothed my hair, then went down the stairs, trying my best to act like it was natural for Dad to be here, asking to see me.

He was standing by the door. “Hi, Dad,” I said awkwardly. I was ashamed that the house was such a mess, the couch scattered with stiff, line-dried clothes, and folded jeans and shirts heaped in lopsided stacks on the back and arms of the chair. Paper plates with bread and potato chip crumbs were still on the coffee table, along with empty glasses and a baby bottle. I couldn’t help but wonder if he was seeing
his
mother’s judgmental face looking down at the mess.

Winnalee looked at me, then at Dad. And when nobody said anything, she asked me to keep an ear out for Evalee so she could run the last batch of dirty laundry to Aunt Verdella’s. I nodded.

I didn’t want Winnalee to go, but I couldn’t say so with Dad standing right there.

I went to move Winnalee’s clothes from the chair, but I didn’t know where to set them, so I just put them back down. “You want some Kool-Aid or something? Well, I guess not ‘or something,’ because that’s all we have, besides water. Oh, and coffee. I could make some of that.”

“Sure,” Dad said, though I didn’t know which he was saying sure to, the Kool-Aid, the water, or the coffee.

Dad followed me into the kitchen—I was glad that I’d at least put away the bologna, stuffed the chip bag back in the box, and that Evalee’s bottles were tipped upside down in the dish drainer. Dad sat down and lit a cigarette. I didn’t have an ashtray, so I brought him a glass candy dish.

I had one hand on the handle of the cupboard, and one hand on the fridge. I turned. “Which drink do you want?” I asked nervously.

“Anything’s fine,” he said. I never saw Dad drink water unless he was overheated, and coffee would take awkward
minutes to brew, so I pulled out the Kool-Aid and filled two glasses with ice. “It’s grape,” I said as I poured. “Boohoo’s favorite.” I scratched my hairline at the top of my neck, though I wasn’t sure I’d felt an itch.

“I guess I should know that, shouldn’t I?”

Dad asked me to sit. I took a sip from my glass; it tasted too sweet. But that’s how Winnalee and Boohoo liked it. I hoped Dad did, too.

“Evy, I want to apologize for snapping at you like I did on the way to the hospital. I guess I’m so used to you looking out for your brother, that you were the first one I thought to blame.”

“That’s okay,” I said, because that’s what you say when somebody apologizes, whether it’s okay or not.

“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.