“I could tell you shit about your mama and your daddy that would bust your head,” she said. Lennie asked, “Ain’t you my mama?” Bea replied, “I didn’t even want you. Your daddy wanted you. If I had my pick, I would have got me a boy. But they wouldn’t let me take just the boy, because he was a twin, so I had to get you.” That’s how Lennie learned, at seven years old, that she was adopted. Not just unwanted by her birth mother, she thought, but by her adopted mother, who settled for her because she couldn’t take on twin boys.
