Chapter 13: What Bea Knew

I did not remember driving to Newton.

I remembered my mother's porch light, and the blue folder on the passenger seat, and that I had not opened it again after the coat room.

Bea was at the kitchen table in her robe, doing the crossword.

She looked at my dress and my face and put the pen down.

"Sit," she said.

"I can't."

I laid the folder on the table, open to the title page, and turned it so she could read it.

She took her glasses off the cord and put them on.

I watched her read the words Participant D.

I watched her read Subject enrolled at age six.

She did not say what is this, or what does it mean.

Her hand went flat over her mouth.

"Mom."

"I should have known," Bea said, through her fingers.

"Known what?"

She got up and dragged a chair to the pantry, and she climbed on it in her slippers.

From the top shelf, behind the Thanksgiving platter, she took down a shoebox.

She set it in front of me and took off the lid.

It was full of check stubs and envelopes, rubber-banded by year.

Every envelope had the same return address, in the same blue ink.

The Frane Foundation, Neighborhood Playgroup Scholarship.

"Four hundred dollars a month," Bea said. "Since the summer you turned six."

I counted the bands.

There were twenty-one.

"For what?" I said.

"For you to play with Lydia. That's what they said."

"A scholarship to play."

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