“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:
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?”
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.
“Hold on a minute,” Mom said, and jumped up to rummage in the big tote bag she kept next to the recliner. “I know it’s in here somewhere.” She pawed through material and thread, and dug way down to the bottom. “Aha! I knew I’d seen it,” she said, and held out something small and round.
I took it and held it up to the dim light. It was like a tiny metal hat with dents all over the top and a pretty painted blue picture of windmills all around the base. “What is it?”
“Lucy Tompkins! Are you telling me that you don’t know a thimble when you see one?”
I shrugged, trying to keep her in a good mood. I held it back out to her. “It’s pretty.”
Mom laughed. “It is pretty,” she said, and took it back to look it over more carefully. “It was my mother’s, and she gave it to me when she taught me to sew. You put it on your finger like this.” She popped it on the end of her pointer finger. “And then the needles won’t stick you.”
I gave her a small smile. “Cool.”
She held up my injured finger and set the little thimble on the end. “Now it’s yours,” she said.
It took a little while to get used to wearing it, but I didn’t poke myself again.
I hadn’t thought of that thimble in years. Somewhere, in some box or bag or green bin, was an antique thimble that I’d probably never see again.
TJ held out his hand for the bear. “So, do I get to keep him?”
I held Teddy B. a little tighter. He was physical proof that things hadn’t always been this bad. “You know what, T? Let’s find something else for you to keep. I think I’m going to hang on to this for a while.”
“Fine,” he said, and started grabbing things out of the box again.
I tucked Teddy B. into the front of my jacket and bent down to see what else was in the box. On one side my name was written in black marker that flowed with my mother’s handwriting.
Taking a handful of soggy papers out of the box, I could see they were a mix of kindergarten drawings, report cards, and those meaningless paper certificates you get for completing a reading program or passing Tadpole swim lessons at the Y. Mom must have put everything in here to save for when I got older. And now everything was destroyed. She had fifty plastic bins in this house full of pristine crap—why couldn’t she actually put something
