The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

He did not mention the box. Neither did I.

My mother found me in the hall by the bathroom about three o’clock.

“He mailed it, didn’t he,” she said.

“Thursday.”

She closed her eyes. “I told him if he sent that, he could sleep in the shop. I took it off the table and put it in the hall closet. He went and got it out.” She opened them. “I’m sorry, honey. I’m sorry to Jenna. I’ll tell her myself.”

“I’m sending it back, Mom.”

“Good.”

“With one for him and one for Gil.”

She looked at me a long moment. Something crossed her face that I could not read then. I can now.

“Well,” she said. “He did ask.”

Monday at noon I stood in line at the post office and mailed a box eleven miles. It cost me nine dollars and some change.

I figured he would pitch it in the burn barrel behind his shop. I had made my point, and the point was the box.

He called Wednesday night. Ten after seven. I took it out on the back step.

“You think this is funny,” he said.

“No sir.”

“Your mother’s read it. She thinks it’s about the funniest thing she ever saw.”

“I don’t think it’s funny, Dad. I think it’s fair.”

I could hear him breathing.

“I never said she stepped out on you.”

“You mailed my wife a paternity test for my son’s birthday.”

“It’s an ancestry thing. They’re on the television.”

“With a note.”

He did not have anything for that.

“I asked you twice to quit,” I told him. “You told me it was a joke. I’m not joking and I’m not trying to get even. If blood is going to be tested in this family, it starts with the man who asked. That’s you. Gil’s there so you can’t call it a mistake.”

“And if I do it?”

“Then it’s done, and I’d be glad to never speak of it again.”

“And the boy’s?”

“The boy’s a year old. He can’t spit in a tube. It says so on the side of the box, if you’d read it.”

“Fine,” my father said, and hung up.

My mother told me the rest. He stood at the kitchen sink the next morning with his coffee sitting untouched, because the instructions say nothing to eat or drink for thirty minutes, and he watched the clock on the stove the entire half hour like a man waiting out a penalty. Then he spit in that tube until it reached the line. Pure pride.

Then he put the other kit on the seat of his pickup and drove out to the home place.

Gil still farms it. Four hundred and some acres north of town toward Pierce, the house our grandfather built, the same barn. It was the second week of October and he was cutting beans. Dad parked at the end of the field and waited for the combine to come around.

Gil called me from the cab that night. I could hear the machine idling under him.

“Your dad was out here,” he said. “He wants me to spit in a bottle.”

“That was my doing, Gil. I’m sorry to drag you in. You don’t have to.”

There was a long pause. Gil is seventy-one and has never been in a hurry to finish a sentence.

“Nate. Are you sure you want this opened up?”

I took it wrong. I thought he meant Wyatt. I felt my neck get hot.