The Two More Kits We Mailed Back

The box came on a Thursday, two days before the party, with my father’s handwriting on the label.

I knew that printing anywhere. Square capitals, pressed hard, the way a man writes when he has spent forty years filling out shift tags at a steel mill.

My father lives eleven miles from my front door. He could have set that box on my porch on his way to the lumberyard. He mailed it.

I was not home when it came. Jenna was. She told me later she had Wyatt on her hip and a butter knife in her other hand, and she slit the tape thinking it was a birthday present from Grandpa. She was pleased about it. She said, out loud, to a baby, “Look what Grandpa Frank sent you.”

Inside was a white box about the size of a paperback book. One of those ancestry kits you see advertised every Christmas. Spit in the tube, mail it in, find out where your people came from.

On top of it was an index card.

“Just to be sure. Dad.”

When I came in from work at a quarter to six, the kit was sitting in the middle of the kitchen counter with the card laid square on top of it, and my wife was cutting a banana into coins for our son’s supper.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Read the card.”

I read the card twice.

“He doesn’t mean,” I started.

“Yes he does, Nate.” She did not look up from the banana. “He means exactly that.”

She was not crying. That was the part that got me. If she had cried I would have known what to do. I would have held her and said he was an old fool and it would have blown over like every other time.

She just set the knife down, slid the banana onto the tray of the high chair, and said, “He can’t even use it. Wyatt’s one. He can’t spit in a tube. Your dad didn’t read the box.”

Then she picked up a dish towel and wiped a counter that was already clean.

I ought to tell you what the year had been, or none of this will make sense.

I am a Brandt. In Madison and Pierce County that means something, though not much. It means corn and beans and a few cows, a pew at the Lutheran church, and hair the color of straw. My great-grandfather came over from Germany a towhead, and every Brandt since has been one. My father was so blond as a boy that his school pictures look overexposed. So was I.

Wyatt was born the first week of October with a full head of dark hair.

Not dark blond. Dark. He looked like he was wearing a little cap.

There is no mystery in it. Jenna is a Novak. Her mother’s people are Czech, from over by Clarkson, and every one of them is dark. Her grandpa had hair like a crow’s wing until he was eighty years old. Jenna’s is so brown it is nearly black. I married her partly on account of it.

My father knew every bit of that. He said it anyway.

The first time was in the hospital, an hour after Wyatt was born. Dad stood at the foot of the bed in his good jacket with his cap in his hands, looked at the baby, and said, “Well. Where’d he get that?”

Jenna had been in labor nineteen hours. She smiled and said, “From me, Frank.”

“I guess so,” he said.