ANOTHER PROVINCE
Felix looked so much like his father, so much like the way Kathy remembered his father and all the things that happened when they first met. He hadn’t been a nice man, but they had got along for a while before she realised he was an alcoholic and she realised her mistake. Anyway, he’d only smacked her a few times before she got away and that leaving was the right thing to do. It was a happy ending. Now Kathy was trying to figure out how to talk to her son Felix about booze. All through high school he’d been so good, so cautious, so responsible. Maybe now the other shoe was going to drop. She was worried about him going wild once he left the house, like she did when she was 17, a million years ago. He was headed off to university in just a few months and what was she going to do if he got drunk in another province and she couldn’t go pick him up if he needed her? Kathy’s heart flooded with shame when she remembered about the truck she stole when she was twenty-five years old. How she never got caught and how that was something that Felix did not know and would never know about her. She reminded herself that children did not need to know everything about their parents. That was what her therapist had told her, anyway. Those days. Those days crowded up inside her sometimes like the newspapers and glass jars she hoarded. Luckily for Kathy Felix wasn’t interested in booze. He knew that booze made you fat and he wasn’t planning on packing it on in his freshman year like most kids. Felix was interested in men. He really was. And that was why he was so quiet and good around his mother. That was why he got all his homework done and never had to ask for an “extension”. That was why Kathy had nothing at all to be worried about and more to look forward to than she could ever possibly imagine. In the coming years she and Felix would grow closer. Kathy’s anxiety would level off. Her preoccupation with the past would lessen. She would finally come to know the truth about her son and the love between them would flourish.
Photo credit: Sadie Glenn Derry