The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

Jenna was quiet for a bit.

“There’s one more thing,” she said. “And I need you not to get your back up.”

“All right.”

“I want a real one done. Not that thing. A cheek swab, you and Wyatt, the kind the drugstore sells, sent to a real lab. With a paper copy mailed here.”

I did get my back up. “You don’t owe him that. You don’t owe anybody that.”

“It’s not for him.” Her eyes were wet now, finally. “It’s for me. I want to know there’s a piece of paper in this house. I don’t want to need it. I just want to know it’s in the drawer.”

I did not understand right away. It took me until about two in the morning, lying there looking at the ceiling fan, to work out that for a year she had been the only person in my family who had to prove something every time she walked in a room.

“I’ll swab,” I told her at breakfast. “But I’m not reading it. I don’t need a lab to introduce me to my own son.”

“You don’t have to read it,” she said. “You just have to put it in the drawer.”

Friday on my lunch break I bought two more kits. Seventy-nine dollars apiece.

Saturday morning we were up at six. There were going to be about thirty people in a house built for five. By eight the birthday banner was up on the kitchen wall, blue letters with a little paper tractor on each end, and Wyatt was crawling through the whole business with a balloon ribbon in his fist.

I got a shipping box from the garage and set it on the counter.

I put in the kit my father had sent. I had not opened it. I put in the two I had bought. On one I wrote my father’s name on a piece of masking tape. On the other I wrote Gil’s.

Then I took his index card, turned it over, and wrote on the back.

“Dad, if blood is going to be tested in this family, it starts with the man who asked. One is yours. One is Gil’s. Nate and Jenna.”

I took no pleasure in writing it. He is my father. I would rather have been writing him a thank-you for the high chair.

I had written a longer, hotter one the night before. Jenna had read it, handed it back, and said, “That one’s for you. Write the one that’s for him.”

She stood beside me now with the birthday boy on her hip, watching me run the tape gun down the seam. She did not say a word. She put her free hand flat between my shoulder blades and left it there.

I carried the box out and set it on the passenger seat of my truck.

My folks pulled in at ten to two.

I will give my father this. He walked into that house like a man who had not mailed anything to anybody. He carried in a card table. He stood at the grill with me and told me my burgers were too thick, which they were.

And when the cake came out, he was the one Wyatt reached for.

That is the thing I could not get past, then or now. My boy loved him. Held his arms out to him across a room full of people. Dad took him and stood there by the window with him, this big, heavy, white-headed man with a dark little head tucked under his chin, and I watched him lay his hand over the back of that head the way you would cover something from the wind.