A Woman Like That
Twenty-three. He was sixteen. She knew what that made her, and she answered his letters anyway. Nineteen years on, Kate Gibbons was still paying — in unpaid bills, in a back that wouldn't straighten, in a son raised on the gentlest version of a lie. She told herself she had been a good mother. She told herself the lie was a kindness. She almost made it true. Then her son asked for his birth certificate, and Kate Gibbons went looking for the one man she had spent nineteen years not looking for.
She was the clever one, once. The girl with the library books and the storytelling prizes. Then her father's back went, and at fifteen Kate Gibbons walked out of Ogilvie High and into a Target uniform. The cleverness went into novels read after midnight, when no one was watching.
She kept reading. She kept paying. Retail, admin, whatever. The power bill or school shoes, never both in the same week — and Joel never knew. That was the rule.
The other thing he never knew was his father's name. She gave him a dead man instead. Kinder, she thought, than a teenage boy on the mainland who'd written sweet letters and gone home. Twenty-three and sixteen. She never said the number out loud.
Her back hurt. Her chest did too, but the chest could wait; the chest had been waiting years. There was always something more urgent. There was always Joel.
She told herself she had been a good mother. She told herself the lie was a kindness, that the silence was love, that she had done what any mother would have done. She told herself this for nineteen years, and she almost made it true.
In the end, she gave her son a dead parent after all. It just wasn't the one she'd lied about.
