The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

He looked at the chair he had built. He looked at the boy in it. And then my father, who has two knees ruined by forty years on a concrete mill floor, who gets up out of his recliner in stages, took hold of the edge of the table and lowered himself down onto my kitchen linoleum.

One knee, and then the other. It took him a while. I started forward and Jenna shook her head at me, just barely.

On his knees he was eye level with Wyatt, who studied him gravely and offered him a noodle.

Dad took it.

“I built this chair,” he said, “before I ever laid eyes on him. I built it for my grandson. Then he came, and I spent a year looking at him sideways. Looking at you sideways. In your own house, at your own table. At the hospital, with you not an hour out of labor.”

Jenna’s eyes were filling. She did not look away from him.

“I told myself it was a joke. It wasn’t a joke. Something’s been wrong in me since I was eleven years old and I never knew what, and I took it out on a girl who never did one thing but love my son and give me that boy.” He swallowed. “You know what came back on that test.”

“Nate told me.”

“Then you know I’ve got less claim to the name Brandt than he does.” He nodded at Wyatt. “By blood, I’ve got none. All I’ve got is that a good man decided I was his and never took it back. That’s every bit of it. And I had that example in front of me my entire life, and when my turn came, I mailed you a box.”

His voice went.

“I am sorry, Jenna. I’ve got no right to ask you for anything. I’m asking anyway.”

My wife did not rush to him. I want that understood. She is kind, but she is not soft, and she had a year of Sundays to account for.

“You hurt me, Frank,” she said. “Not once. Every time. I’d get in the truck after dinner at your house and cry so Nate couldn’t see, and then I quit crying, and that was worse. I started dreading my own son’s birthday because you’d be at it.”

He took it. He did not duck his head.

“I know it,” he said.

“You don’t say it again. Not teasing. Not ever. Not about him and not about any child that comes after him.”

“You have my word.”

“And when he’s old enough to ask where he got his hair, you’re the one who tells him. You tell him it’s Novak hair and you tell him it’s the best hair in the family.”

Something broke loose in my father’s face that was almost a laugh.

“It is,” he said. “I’ll tell him.”

Jenna wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. Then she reached down and put her hand on his shoulder.

“He needs a grandpa a whole lot more than I need to stay mad,” she said. “Now get up off my floor before you can’t.”

It took the two of us to get him up. Wyatt thought it was the finest thing he had ever seen and banged the tray with both hands.

When Dad was on his feet and in a chair with a cup of coffee, Jenna went to the junk drawer. She moved the phone book. She took out the white envelope and laid it on the table in front of him.