Title: Confession
Rating: PG
Summary: Lip service is what her mother was paying to the church. She would sit in the pews with her child, her husband, while waiting to meet the man she was allowing to destroy their family.
Disclaimer: I do not own Lost. At all. I wish but alas...
Author's Note: Used for philosophy_20, prompt #16: god.



"Confession is good for the soul."
– 17th Century English Proverb

Kate remembers being very little and sitting in between her mother and father in one of the back pews of the small church in her home town. At one point in time, the three of them had gone to church every Sunday that her father was home. She had met Tom outside after and gone to play at his house until coming home at dinner time.

Her dad was usually gone by then, and her Mom seemed out of breath, hurrying to catch up with making dinner. In her late teens Kate would come to learn that her father would, more often than not, leave just after church, and those times when she was gone at Tom’s would be the times that Wayne was in the house with her mother.

Lip service is what her mother was paying to the church. She would sit in the pews with her child, her husband, while waiting to meet the man she was allowing to destroy their family.

It was at about age fifteen, when her mother had made it clear that Wayne was in their lives to stay, that Kate began calling her, “Diane.” At first, she only said it to Tom (“Diane’s dragging me to church with her, I’ll meet you after.”) and, if she was angry enough, to her face. Her face was like stone the first time Kate said it, then preceded to stay out all night without calling.

She had referred to it as an “attitude problem” when explaining Kate’s new motorcycle to people. Tom just shook his head without saying anything, left Kate to do what she was going to do until he no longer recognized her and began pulling away.

Wayne had changed her mother – from someone she loved and respected to someone who cared about nothing except the love of a man who abused her. Wayne had changed her – into an angry young girl who couldn’t keep her life together, couldn’t stop people from leaving her. Wayne had changed everything.

Kate thinks about her mother, her father, Wayne, and that church every time she’s in one of these places, sitting in a pew, staring at an alter and a cross. This was the beginning, she knows now. Where she had once sat, innocently, with her family. Where she had later slumped, bitter, next to a mother she could only look at as a contemptible hypocrite.

It’s a Catholic church this time, and she’s watched three women come and go from confession, laying their sins at the foot of a priest and walking away, leaving them behind and taking instead the promise of God’s forgiveness. Kate wishes that it were they easy, that she could lay Wayne at someone’s feet, and have his memory taken away forever.

But she can’t, won’t, do that. She won’t disgrace everything that this place is supposed to stand for by lying – to a priest, to God, to herself. She’s not sorry for what she did to Wayne. She never will be. And she’ll carry him with her, everywhere she goes, because of that.

And even that is preferable to being a liar. To being a hypocrite. To being Diane.