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“Cool,” Noah says before going back to eating his eggs. When he’s finished, he digs into his backpack and hands me a folded piece of paper. It looks slightly mangled, like someone crumpled it and had it in their mouth at some point.

“I need this signed. It’s for the heritage project in social studies. We’re supposed to do a family tree.”

I take the paper and read it over, dreading the part where we have to talk about his father. It’s a cheerful handout with a family tree sketched on it. The handout asks students to interview family members and collect stories about both past and present family members. He’s to give an oral report to the class in six days.

“Okay,” I say, signing it. This isn’t really optional since it’s part of the classroom curriculum. “We can work on it over the weekend. You’ve got me, and you’ve got Aunt Carol, and I can tell you about your great-grandma Hale, who once chased a dog away who was barfing on her welcome mat.”

“Why didn’t she take him to the vet?”

“I’m not sure, bug. I’ll concentrate on remembering a better story.”

Noah grins mischievously. “I like the dog barfing story. It’ll gross the girls out.”

He tucks it into the folder with his good papers, and we hit the road. I love driving him to school. I don’t start my shift at the restaurant until eleven, and it gives me a chance to spend time with my son, and he hates taking the school bus, so it’s a win-win, I suppose.

***

I spend the day at work preoccupied with how I’m going to answer when he asks about his dad again, and I know he will because he’s working on this project. One of the reasons I decided to move to Las Salinas and leave the restaurant in LA was Noah. Being a head chef in a fine dining establishment meant working long hours. I often wouldn’t be home until after midnight, and he spent more time with his babysitter than with me. The Gilded Fig is different, it might be Las Salinas’ fanciest place, but service ends at eight, meaning I’m usually home in time for Noah’s supper and we can talk about his day.

“So, was my dad like me? Did he like airplanes and history and war stuff?” he asks as he eats his cereal.

The food in my mouth turns into a burden to chew and swallow. Noah’s asked about his dad before. He brings it up every year. The questions come in spurts and are always related to something he’s reading, watching, or thinking about. And every year I answer it the same careful way, trying not to disappoint him.

“I’m not sure, bug,” I say. “We were very young when we first got together. And we probably didn’t know each other as well as we should have.”

“But you married him, right? So, you must know something about him.”

“We weren’t actually married. We were just dating. We broke up before you were born and I came here to live with Aunt Carol.”

“Is that why I don’t have his last name?”

“Say what now?”

“My friend, Tyler, says kids are supposed to get their dad’s last name. The mom’s too.”

“Well, that isn’t always true. Some women don’t change their last names and others hyphenate it. But you have my name because I’m your only legal parent. I raised you. Hale is a good name. Your great grandma from the dog barf story was a Hale.”

Noah looks worried. He stares down at his plate and asks, “Was he bad? Is that the reason he’s not here with us?”

I know I have to tell him eventually. My son deserves to know what happened. I decide to give him the kid-friendly version of the truth. So, I leave out the part where his father held his mother by the throat in a parking lot, shaking her and screaming at her that she belonged to him. A stranger called the police on my behalf.

“To be honest, your father made some bad choices. Choices that mean he can’t be in our lives,” I explain. “He wasn’t safe to be around us. So, I did what I had to do in order to keep us safe.”

He accepts my explanation at face value, the way he does everything. In his world, there is no reason for his mother to lie to him. He doesn’t yet understand the difference between lying and withholding information for his own good. I worry about what will happen the day he makes that discovery.

Aunt Carol stands silently in the doorway until we hear his door shut upstairs. She walks into the kitchen and pours herself a cup of coffee. Leaning against the sink, she looks at me with a critical eye.

“You might as well say what’s on your mind,” I tell her.

“You are going to have to give that boy a fuller understanding of what went on with his father. You know that, right?”

“He’s too young,” I say, shaking my head.

“He’s nine. That’s old enough to begin to understand,” she shoots back.

“I don’t know. My gut feeling tells me to wait.”

“Kids fill in the information that is missing. Right now, he is filling it with military heroes, which his father is not.”