mother. It didn’t matter that I had run out of new stories years before, he wanted to hear them again. He needed to know where he had come from, because he did not want to be his father’s son. Yet, he knew, if he wanted a father, he must become that man. We would pray together. As he grew into the magnificent person I had always known he would be, he would still come to me and ask to seek God. A link to his mother? Perhaps. Even when he went away to university, nearly destroying me, he continued to pray. I was not asked to leave. I had no other life. Kay was my life. I kept the house prepared for both of them, for the times they would come home. I would barely know when the father was here. When Kay came home it was as if the sun had come up again. He was my family. My father was missing. My brother disappeared. My mother had died. Kay was everything. I was his safe place. He was mine. He presented the university medal to his father. His father gave him a new car. Kay had simply hoped for a hug. He went to work in the family business. Everything grew. He was even better than his father. People liked him and trusted him. His father watched. Silent. Almost satisfied. Not quite. His father went on another trip and died in a country I had hardly heard of. When his body was repatriated, most of the people at the funeral were Kay’s friends and colleagues. After the funeral, Kay stayed and prayed until midnight. The next day, he got back to work. He would not let his father down, not even now, when he could never hope to please him. We went on. Girlfriends came and went, frustrated by the veneer they could not pierce. Kay still gloried in the light on the river water at dawn, stones skipping across the mirror of glass, but he did not know how to share it. Except with me. He would look at me with his mother’s eyes and I could see that he needed to be set free in some way, but I did not know how. I was not her, whatever I might have wished. 46
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