The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

That would have been nothing, if it had been once.

At Easter, with a ham on the table and my mother’s good plates out, he looked down the length of it at my son in his high chair and said, “Sure doesn’t look like a Brandt, does he?”

My mother said, “Frank.”

He said, “What? I’m only saying.”

At the Fourth of July he said it to my uncle Gil across the tailgate of a pickup, with a paper plate in his hand, and he laughed when he said it. Gil is his older brother. Gil did not laugh. Gil looked at his plate for a while and then went to see about the sweet corn.

I had not stood there and taken it, in case you are wondering where I was. I called my father the Monday after Easter and told him to knock it off. He said he was only teasing and I had gotten thin skinned since I married. I called him again after the Fourth and said it plainer. He said, “It’s a joke, Nathan. If she can’t take a joke, that’s not on me.”

So I knew what a third phone call was worth.

You need to understand something about my father. He is not a stupid man and he is not a mean one. He worked forty years at the mill and never missed a shift he was not in the hospital for. He plowed my driveway every snow of my married life before I was out of bed. When Jenna was seven months along he spent six weeks of evenings in his shop building a high chair out of red oak, pegged, not screwed, because he said a child ought to eat his first meal in something that would outlast him.

He built that chair before he ever saw the hair.

But he is a man who cannot hear a thing unless it costs him something. Tell him he is wrong and he will nod and go on being wrong. Show him the bill and he will pay it to the penny.

That Thursday night Jenna went in to put Wyatt down and did not come out.

I stood in the hall. The door was open a few inches. She was in the rocker in the dark with him against her shoulder, and I could hear the runners on the floor.

“You look exactly like who you are,” she was telling him. “You hear me? Exactly.”

I went out to the garage and sat on an upturned bucket for the better part of an hour.

When I came back in she was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea she was not drinking.

“I’m going to answer him,” I said.

“Not at the party.”

“No.”

“And not mean, Nate. I mean it. I don’t want it mean. I have to sit across a table from that man for the next thirty years.”

“Not mean,” I said. “Fair.”

She looked at the kit on the counter. “What does fair look like?”

I told her.

“Why Gil?” she said.

“Because if it’s just Dad, he’ll say the lab made a mistake. He says the bank makes a mistake when the statement doesn’t suit him. Two Brandts on file and he can’t argue with it. They’ll match each other, and that will be the end of it.” I rubbed my face. “I don’t want to shame him, Jen. I want him to stop. If blood is going to be tested in this family, it starts with the man who asked. That’s all I mean to say.”