Queen Bee Goes Home Again by Haywood Smith

Author:Haywood Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781466864535
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Thirty-two

I walked into my mother’s kitchen and gained five pounds just from the heavenly aromas.

“How did it go?” Miss Mamie asked with obvious anticipation as I washed up to join them.

“Great. I scored really well.” I sat down and covered my lap with my napkin, then accepted the meat loaf Tommy passed me.

“So what’s ‘really well’?” she prodded.

“I’ll probably be able to CLEP out of a lot of required classes. But I’ll still have to buy the prep quizzes and study. That comes to about a hundred fifteen a course, including the test fees.” Thank goodness for that sales commission. “A lot cheaper than taking the actual courses.”

Disappointment congealed Miss Mamie’s expression. “And that’s it?”

“Yep.” I couldn’t discuss the IQ thing in front of Tommy. And who knows? Maybe the test was wrong this time. “That’s all.”

Still, you could feel the unspoken thick in the air between us, opaque as a dawn fog in a mountain hollow.

“Oh,” my mother said, clearly rebuffed.

In a gesture of conciliation, I added a glop of mashed potatoes to my plate. As long as I was climbing all those stairs and working in the attic, I could afford to comfort myself with mashed potatoes every once in a while.

“Well, there you go. Finally eating like a normal human, at last.” Miss Mamie beamed with pride. “I told you, you’re getting too thin.”

Then she totally mixed her signals by handing me the low-carb catsup for my meat loaf. “Here.”

Tommy had been observing us warily since I’d come in, but wisely remained silent.

I noticed he had on a new suit. And cologne.

Whoever she was, things must be heating up.

After dinner when he left for his meeting, I joined Miss Mamie at the sink to wash up. She washed and rinsed, and I dried.

Now it was safe to ask, “Mama, did I ever have an IQ test in school?” Not that she would necessarily remember.

“Yes. They gave them to all the children.” She handed me a clean plate to dry.

I wiped it. “Do you remember what I made?”

“Yes.” Nothing more.

She wasn’t going to make this easy, but I was compelled to ask, “What was it, please?”

She forgot to rinse the next plate, handing it to me with suds dripping. “Why in the world would you want to know something like that at this late date in your life?”

I rinsed the plate under the tap, then started drying it. “I’m going back to school. I need to know.”

She frowned as if I’d asked her when she lost her virginity. “Well, if you insist; it was a hundred forty.”

Whoa. So the test was right.

And my mother hadn’t told me. Ever. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

She stopped washing and turned to face me. “Your daddy and I talked it over for a long time. We didn’t tell you because we’d seen what happened to children who had that ‘genius’ label put on them. They never had a real childhood. Shipped off to little think tanks. Skipped grades. They were outcasts with the regular kids.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.