Dirty Little Secrets

“Well, this little kid is really good at the piano,” he said, pointing to a photo of a small girl seated on a piano bench, her shiny patent leather shoes dangling above the floor. “Is that your grandma?”

“Let me see.” I took the paper and looked more closely. The caption under the photo read: “Local piano prodigy little Joanna Coles can barely reach the keys, but she performed like a professional at the Central Conservatory of Music Piano Competition, where she beat out all comers to win first prize.”

“Huh. It’s my mom.” I looked at the date on the paper. “She would have been about nine years old.”

TJ hoisted a big black leather book onto his lap. The pages creaked and the plastic sleeves stuck together as he opened it. “Looks like she won a lot of stuff.”

We quietly flipped through the pages that showed Mom’s progress from a cute little girl whose feet didn’t touch the floor to a beautiful teenager seated elegantly in front of a white baby grand piano in a sleeveless ball gown. Her neck was long, and she gazed straight into the camera, as though daring anyone to doubt her talent.

The newspaper clippings showed win after win at local and even national piano competitions—photos of Mom accepting medals and trophies of all sizes. The book was only half full, and the clippings stopped abruptly in 1970. The rest of the shiny, black pages were blank. Mom would have been about seventeen.

TJ shut the book. “Did she quit?”

I felt like I had been looking at pictures of someone I’d never met. Why hadn’t she ever shown me any of this before? Why did she stop playing? She never let me dig in the trunk, and now I knew why. I realized with a jolt that I’d never get these answers. “I don’t know,” I finally said to TJ.

“You should ask her.” He stood up and looked around the room.

I put the book on top of the baby clothes and carefully shut the trunk. “Yeah, I should.” There were so many things I’d never know the answers to now. “Enough of this. You go finish up over by that wall, and I’ll take care of these things.” I needed something to distract me. Something that would take my mind off the photos and the clippings and the trophies that had never made it into this part of Mom’s life. I wondered what had happened to that girl who looked like she could win anything, to turn her into someone who wouldn’t even answer the front door.

chapter 12

6:00 p.m.

“Oh yuck!”

“What?” I prayed there weren’t any maggots, because I wasn’t sure how I would explain those away. High school science experiment? Suburban 4-H?

“This box is all soggy and gross,” TJ said. He had the flaps open and was picking out mildewed bits of paper that disintegrated and fell heavily back into the box as he held them up.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Just shove everything into this garbage bag.”

“Hey, Lucy, this looks good,” he said. “Can I keep it?”

I looked over to see him holding up a plastic bag containing Teddy B., the brown gingham teddy bear I’d made by hand in third grade. I walked over to take a better look at the box.

“Did your mom make it?” TJ asked.

“No,” I said. “I did. It was a Girl Scout project—I even got my sewing badge for doing it. My mom used to make quilts a long time ago—she was a really good sewer, and she showed me what to do.”

I squeezed the bear’s tummy and looked at the small brown stitches that ran the length of his side, thinking about the nights Mom and I had sat with our heads bent over the effort of making the stitches that held him together as tiny and uniform as possible.

“Here,” Mom had said softly, taking the floppy, unstuffed bear from my lap. “Just put the needle in a little ways, like this.” I could feel the warmth of her body straight from the shower, and her wet hair tickled my chin as she bent over our work. We sat in a cleared space on the living room couch, piles of newspapers and scraps of quilting fabric surrounding the small, folding TV tray that held our supplies. “You want to try?”

She handed the brown fabric back to me, the needle sticking up at an angle. “Just put your finger behind the fabric where you want the stitch to go,” Mom said, watching my fingers as I worked. Beside her tight, tiny stitches, mine looked like something that would have held Frankenstein’s monster together. “That’s good. Just try to get them a little bit closer together.”

I tried to concentrate even harder, wanting my stitches to match hers so she’d be proud of me. “You mean like th—? Ow!” I cried, the sharp end of the needle making a searing stab at my finger.

“Oh, let me see,” Mom said, pulling my finger into her lap. She dabbed at it with the edge of her shirt. “I think you’ll live.” Mom smiled at me. “Congratulations. You are now an official member of the top secret quilting society.”

I dabbed at the mark in the middle of my finger. “What’s that?” I was mad that I’d done something so stupid and wrecked what we were doing.