Arkwright by Allen Steele

to see her in a different way yet having trouble doing so. She’d never known her grandmother—or rather the woman she’d grown up believing to be her grandmother—but nonetheless, it was difficult to accept the new truth with which she’d been confronted: her grandmother was alive, and sitting across the table from her.
    â€œSo what am I supposed to call you?” she asked. “Grandma?”
    â€œIf you’d like, but I think we’re past that now. Maggie is fine.” A sad smile. “To tell the truth, though, there were times when I wished you knew me and could call me that name. But that’s the choice I made, and I had to live with it.”
    â€œWhy did you do it?”
    Maggie let out her breath as a quiet sigh. “Please understand, when I discovered that I was pregnant from my affair with Nathan, I was in my early twenties and working as an assistant editor at Street & Smith. I had my eye on a publishing career, perhaps even starting my own literary agency. Even while I was having a relationship with your grandfather, I was coming to realize that getting married and having a child was the last thing I wanted to do, and in fact, I never did. But having an abortion was…” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “Well, it wasn’t a pleasant prospect. They were far more dangerous back then than they are today. So I was between a rock and a hard place.”
    She absently ran a fingertip around the rim of her water glass. “Fortunately, Nat took responsibility for what had happened. We’d just broken up when the doctor told me the news. It really was just a fling, although for a little while, I’d thought it was serious enough that I made the mistake of writing a letter to Harry, but Nat accepted the fact that the child was his, and it was up to him to do something about it. He and Judith had met by then, and their relationship was serious enough that engagement was inevitable, but she’d already accepted me as an old girlfriend who was still one of her beau’s best friends.”
    â€œThat was rather forgiving of her,” Kate said.
    â€œJudie was a saint. I was at the party where she and Nat met, and … look, it’s a long story, but what it boils down to is that I was trying to figure out how to break up with him without hurting him too badly when they met. Nat liked me well enough, but with her, it was love at first sight. All I had to do was step aside and let nature take its course.”
    â€œSo the three of you stayed friends.”
    â€œThat’s right. And that made it easy for the three of us to sit down and work things out.”
    â€œSo my grandparents—Grandpapa and Judith, I mean—”
    Maggie smiled. “If you still want to call Judie your grandmother, you can. I understand.”
    â€œSo they decided to adopt my mother once she was born.”
    â€œThat’s correct.” Resting her elbows on the table, Maggie clasped her hands together. “I took a leave of absence from Street & Smith—I hadn’t yet begun to show, so they accepted my story that I was having a ‘case of nerves’ and needed a sabbatical—and moved up to New Hampshire, where my family had a summer cottage on Lake Winnipesaukee. My parents were sympathetic to my situation, and my mother came up to take care of me. In the meantime, Nat and Judie tied the knot and then moved up to Boston where Nat had a teaching position waiting for him at Boston College. Judie bought some maternity clothes and started wearing pillows beneath them, and because she wouldn’t let anyone touch her belly and stayed home as often as she could, everyone accepted their story that she was pregnant. When the time came, they took a weekend trip up to New Hampshire, where she allegedly gave birth to her child.”
    â€œIn a vacation cabin on the lake, with a country midwife who happened to live nearby doing the