C. Omololu - Dirty Little Secrets

“Okay, okay,” I said. I clapped my hands. “Come help me drag this bin over to those. This one is heavy, so be careful.”

He grabbed the front handle and I grabbed the back, and together we picked the bin up just a few inches off the floor and crabwalked it over to the others. “What’s in here?” TJ asked, and before I could stop him, he pulled the lid off. “Oh, cool!”

I peeked over the edge and was relieved to see it was just a pile of old books she must have had a greater plan for.

TJ picked one up and looked at the spine. “What are they? They all look the same.”

I grabbed one and recognized it right away because we had another set buried in a bookcase in the living room. “They’re encyclopedias.”

He looked at me blankly.

“You know, books people used to use if they needed to find out about something. Kind of like Google, only in real life.” I showed him the side of the book I was holding. “See, this one has everything that starts with V . I used to read these when I was little, like they were regular books.”

He picked up another volume and flipped through it. “Can I keep them?” He shuffled through the books in the box and pulled out two. “I’ll take T and J .” He stuck his hand back in and pulled out another one. “And L too. L for Lucy.”

“Okay, but that’s it,” I said. “We’ll ask your mom about the rest later.”

As I lifted a small mountain of shoeboxes and started to step on them so they would fit into the bag better, I spotted the heavy brass corners and battered black leather of the trunk that I hadn’t seen for years. Grandma had died before I was born, and Mom kept Grandma’s special stuff in this trunk. If Mom and I were alone at night, she would sometimes let me sit with her and look at the yellowing bonnets and tiny lace shoes Grandma had saved from when Mom was a baby. I’d always wanted to put the clothes on my dolls, but Mom said they were too old to play with. The trunk opened with a loud creak that got TJ’s attention across the room.

“What is it?” He came and knelt down by the trunk.

“Some of my grandma’s stuff,” I said. The bonnets and booties were still carefully folded on top.

“Are you going to keep it?”

I nodded. “I think I should.”

Stacked in the corner was a set of gold-rimmed plates with pink flowers on them. Mom always said we would use these plates sometime when the occasion was special enough. As far as I knew, there had never been an occasion special enough. I took one finger and ran it through the thick coat of dust that had formed on the small top plate. In three short moves I made two eyes and a frowning mouth. Poor, lonely plates. Once this stuff was cleaned up, maybe I’d keep the plates. Except that when I was in charge, we’d use them every day.

TJ stuck his head in the trunk. “It smells like old people in here,” he said. He reached in and pulled out something from the bottom. “Was your grandma in the Olympics or something?”

I squinted at what he had in his hand. “Not that I know of.”

“Well, here’s a gold medal from somewhere.” He handed me a heavy medal that hung on a faded red, white, and blue ribbon.

I turned it over. On the back was engraved: First Place, Central Conservatory Piano Competition . I shrugged. “I never met my grandma. She must have been a good piano player.”

TJ was digging in the trunk again, and I was afraid he was going to wreck something. I wanted to put the whole thing aside until I had time to go through it piece by piece. Mom never talked very much about growing up—her stories never started with “When I was a kid” like a lot of other parents.

“Let’s leave this alone,” I said. “I’ll go through it later.” I reached for the baby clothes to put them back in the top of the trunk.

“What’s a ‘prodigy’?” TJ asked.

I looked over his shoulder at the yellowed newspaper he was reading. “It’s a little kid who is really smart or really good at something.”

“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?”