I did not answer any of the forty four missed calls. I sat in the parked car outside the community college with my mother, who was holding her new student ID in both hands like a ticket to somewhere far away, and I read the last two messages again. Did Megan ever find out who paid her tuition? And below it, from my daughter, three words. Grandma, was it you? I turned to my mother. She was gazing through the windshield at the lit windows of the library, with the faint pink look of a girl caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “Mother,” I said, because I only call her that when I am cross. “What did you do?”
“Nothing you would not have done yourself,” said my mother, who is eighty one years old and has never answered a straight question with a straight answer. She had her purse in her lap, the one with the brass clasp, and she snapped it open and shut as she talked. “Four years ago, Janet, you sat at my kitchen table with the letter from the university. You thought I was asleep in the next room. You cried over the number at the bottom of the page, and you did it so quietly. Do you remember?” I remembered. It was the worst night of that whole year, and I had told nobody.
I had been a widow for two winters by then, with a part time job at the front desk of a dental office and a daughter who had just been accepted to her first choice school. Fifty one thousand dollars a year, with the room and board. I had been prepared to take out loans in my own name, as many as the bank would allow, and work until I was seventy. I had cried in the kitchen of my mother, in the dark, still in my coat, and I had believed that no one saw me. “I saw you,” said my mother, in the shadows of the car. “I see a good deal more than you give me credit for.”
A secret scholarship paid by a grandmother came to light the night she walked into a classroom of her own.
She had gone to the bank the very next morning. She sold the lake lot that my father had left her, forty acres of pine and sand she had refused to part with for thirty years, and she paid the whole first year to the university in a cashier check, in the name of a scholarship she invented on the spot. “The Whitaker Fund,” she said, with a trace of pride. “My maiden name. I thought it sounded respectable.” I stared at her. For four years I had written thank you letters, in my best handwriting, to a foundation with a post office box in Cleveland. And my sister Paula had mailed every one of them straight to my mother.
“Paula knew?” I said. “Paula drove me to the bank,” said my mother. “She has the key to my house, and she keeps the books for half the county, and she is very good at keeping a secret.” She patted my hand. “Do not be cross with her. I made her swear on the photograph of your father.” I laughed then, though I could feel the tears starting, because my mother has sworn on that photograph for sixty years and has never once broken the oath. I put my arms around her, in the dark, student ID and all, and she smelled of lavender and peppermints.
Megan found us at the house at midnight. She had driven two hours from the apartment she shared with three roommates, still in her graduation dress, with her shoes in her hand. She stopped in the doorway of the kitchen and looked at her grandmother and did not say a word. My mother was drinking tea. She looked back over the rim of the cup, with perfect calm. “Sit down, sweetheart,” she said. “You will catch cold.” And Megan, twenty two years old, with a diploma in her purse, crossed the linoleum and knelt on the floor and put her head down in the lap of her grandmother.
“At the party,” Megan said, muffled, into the wool of the skirt, “I told you that you did not belong. In front of everybody. I said the parents of my friends went to college.” She was crying hard now. “And you are the reason I went. You are the whole reason. Grandma, I have been so busy being ashamed of everyone, and I never once looked at what any of you gave up.” My mother stroked her hair with one dry, spotted hand. “Child, you were twenty two and showing off,” she said. “I wore a borrowed fur coat to a wake at that age, and my own mother never forgave me.”
My mother was not finished. She reached into her purse and drew out a small bundle of receipts, tied with a rubber band, every one of them stamped with the seal of the university. Four years of payments, in her cramped schoolteacher handwriting, with the date and the amount at the top of each page. “In case anyone ever asked me to account for myself,” she said. Megan took the bundle in both hands and held it against her chest, the way you hold something that is still warm.
We sat up until nearly three, the four of us, because Paula arrived in her robe and slippers, having been telephoned by somebody. Megan said she wanted to do something, and she would not be talked out of it. She had been offered a job in the city, and she meant to take it, and the first thing she would do with her paycheck was reopen the Whitaker Fund. Not to pay anyone back. To hand it on. “One student a year from the high school here,” she said. “And Grandma gets to pick.” My mother considered this gravely. “I shall want to interview them,” she said.
She enrolled in Literature, History and Painting, as she had always wished, and she was the oldest student on campus by thirty years. Megan drove out every Thursday to carry her books. The young people called her Miss Dot. In the spring she earned an A minus for a watercolor of the old lake lot, and she hung it over the television and said it was the proudest thing she had ever made. Two years later, in a cap and gown, with Megan and Paula and me in the front row, my mother walked across the stage and shook the hand of the dean. And I clapped until my palms burned.
