Free The Luck of the Buttons by Anne Ylvisaker Page B

arriving uninvited, except to show off her new hair. She imagined them giggling over their matching haircuts. She could take a picture of all of them. Except that she left her Brownie at home. Maybe the Marys would let Tugs be an honorary Mary. And Aggie, too. The Five Marys. She would suggest it. Mary Louise, Mary Helen, Mary Alice, and . . . Tugs. Mary Tugs?
    And with that thought, her avalanche of dissatisfaction welled. Mary Tugs sounded terrible. She said it out loud. Mary Tugs. Ridiculous. Aggie, Louise, Helen, and Alice, now, those were girl names.
    If she could change her name it would be . . . it would be . . . well, something lovely. Penelope? No. Catherine? No. Priscilla. Mary Priscilla. Perfect.
    Tugs’s actual name was a mistake to begin with. Her mother had been out at the Goodhue cemetery, which was a beautiful place, especially the part where the soldiers were buried. Their plots had little gold stars on gold sticks stuck in the ground next to the stones. The grass grew high there, and wildflowers bloomed whenever and wherever they wanted. There were wide shady trees and breezes on top of the hill.
    It was one of Tugs’s favorite places to roam, so it wasn’t hard to imagine her own mother wandering there some hot summer day, trying to catch a breeze on her bare neck.
    The way her mother told it, she was strolling the cemetery the week Tugs was born, when an early heat spell swept across the plains. She was so round and unwieldy she couldn’t make it to the top of the hill, much as she craved that breeze. So she’d plopped her big self down to rest her back against a cool stone. After she’d sat there awhile, the cool of that stone had sunk into her back and she felt refreshed and hopeful that this baby would be her first living baby. Two had died before Tugs, but that was just the way of it. So Mother Button had turned around to read that headstone and give a little thank-you to the soldier who had cooled her off and given her hope. The stone had grown mossy since the boy’s death in 1864.
    She read the name out loud.
Tugs Button,
she read. Well! A Button! What were the chances of that? Far as she knew, none of her husband’s family had fought in the Civil War. Granddaddy Ike’s drummer-boy days were a wee exaggerated, as the conflict ended before his drumming fingers had even gotten blistered. Far as she knew, there were no heroes among the Buttons.
    She rose to her feet and lumbered back along the road as fast as she could, the baby kicking in her stomach to beat the band, and the heat not bothering her at all. She couldn’t wait to tell Father Button.
    He was incredulous. “Maybe he’s from another branch of Buttons,” he said. “Doesn’t sound like our people.”
    “I know,” said Mother Button. “But I saw it with my own eyes, and that is going to be the name of our baby.” After all the babies they’d christened and buried, after all the tears he’d seen his wife shed, he was not going to say a word about what they’d name this one, though he hoped this baby would stick around awhile. But what if . . . ?
    “What if it’s a girl?” he asked.
    “Pshaw,” said Mother Button. “We haven’t had a girl yet, not much chance of us starting now.”
    And Tugs was born that night and she was a girl. She was a wailer right away. They named her Tugs Esther, after the soldier and Mother Button’s favorite Bible woman. “It’s grown on me already,” she said of the name when people inquired about the odd moniker. “It’ll grow on everyone else, too.”
    She told the story of the cool comfort of the brave soldier’s tombstone every time she told anyone her baby’s name, but no one else visiting the cemetery could ever find that stone. Granddaddy Ike had gone so far as to read back issues of the
Goodhue Gazette,
which, until its demise, he’d collected on his back porch. But he found no news of any other branch of Buttons, not even of Granddaddy Ike’s own Civil War