The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

“There’s nothing to open up,” I said. “That boy is mine and there’s not a soul in this family with any cause to think different.”

“I know that,” Gil said. “Lord, I know that. That’s not what I’m asking.”

“Then what are you asking?”

“Nothing,” he said finally. “I asked your dad twice if he was sure. He said spit. So I spit. Had to set my thermos down for half an hour, longest I’ve gone without coffee since Carter.” He tried to laugh. It did not come out right. “You tell Jenna that boy has good hair. You tell her I said so.”

He hung up before I could answer.

I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand, and for the first time I had the feeling you get when you have pulled on a wire in an old house without knowing where it goes.

Jenna and I did the cheek swabs that Sunday night at the bathroom sink. Swabs for me, swabs for Wyatt, who thought it was a game and bit his. She sealed the envelopes, filled out the form, and paid for the paper copy. About a hundred and seventy dollars, all told.

The paper came the last week of October in a plain white business envelope with a return address in Ohio.

Jenna set it on the counter. I looked at it.

“You want me to?” she said.

“No. Do you need to?”

She thought about it. She really did. Then she shook her head.

“I thought I would,” she said. “I just needed it to come.”

I put it in the junk drawer under the phone book and the takeout menus, and that is where it stayed.

The corn came out. Gil finished the last of it the first week of November.

Then, on a Tuesday in November, my phone rang at twenty to ten at night.

My father does not call after the news. In thirty-four years I could count the late calls on one hand, and two of them were deaths.

He did not say hello.

“It came back,” he said.

His voice was doing something I had never heard it do. It was not anger. I know every grade of my father’s anger. This was thin, like a wire stretched too far.

“Nate, it’s not about the boy.”

I heard my mother in the background say his name, soft.

“It’s about me and Gil. Can you come out here?”

“I’m coming.”

Jenna was already holding my coat.

It is eleven miles and I do not remember them. I remember the yard light, and Gil’s pickup already parked crooked by the shop with frost on the windshield, so he had been there a while.

They were at the kitchen table. All three of them. My mother’s tablet was propped against the napkin holder.

Dad did not get up. He turned the tablet toward me with one finger.

My mother had set up the accounts, because he will not touch a computer. There was a page with a list of names on it, relatives, people who had taken the same test. At the very top was one name.

Gilbert Brandt. Half brother. Shared DNA: 25%.

“They got it wrong,” I said.

“That’s what I said.” Dad’s hands were flat on the table. “I said it’s a seventy-nine dollar spit test and they’ve mixed up the tubes.”

“Then how did it know he’s your brother at all, Frank?” my mother said quietly. “If they mixed up the tubes, how did it find Gil?”