Chapter 13 — THE BLOOD TEST

I want to explain why I waited nineteen days, because I have been asked.

It was not denial.

I knew.

I had known since the moment Nadine Okoro read it off her notepad, and I had probably known before that in the way you know things you have decided not to have language for.

Theo does not look like me.

Josie looks like me — she has the Whitaker jaw and my mother's coloring and a cowlick I have been fighting on my own head for thirty-six years.

Theo has dark hair that came in fast and thick, and he is long, and at six months he was in the ninety-fifth percentile for length and my whole family tops out at five nine.

I had noticed.

I had noticed and I had done what I imagine most people do, which is to think about my grandfather's side and my wife's cousin who is tall and about how babies change.

The reason I waited nineteen days is that as long as the box was on the refrigerator, I was a man who was probably his father.

I opened it on a Thursday night after both kids were down.

It is two cheek swabs and a form.

Theo was asleep and I swabbed the inside of his cheek with a thing that looks like a mascara wand and he made a face and turned his head and went back to sleep, and I sat on the floor of his room for a while with the swab in my hand.

Then I mailed it.

The results came back in eleven days, by email, at 9:40 on a Monday morning while I was on a call about a fire panel in a Cracker Barrel.

Probability of paternity: 0%.

There is a line at the bottom of the report that says the tested man is excluded as the biological father.

Excluded.

I finished the call about the fire panel.

I want that in the record because it is the single most accurate thing I can tell you about that morning. I finished the call. I told a district manager that his fire panel needed a new NAC circuit and that we could get a tech out Thursday, and he said Thursday's no good, and I said Friday then, and he said fine.

Then I went out to the parking lot and sat in the Ranger for fifty minutes.

Here is what I thought about, in order.

First I thought about Corinne, and it was the shallowest of the three and it lasted the shortest amount of time. It was not even really pain by then. February had used most of that up.

Second I thought about Grant Mercer standing in the gravel at the storage facility saying ask her why she couldn't hold the baby, and I understood that he had told me, in October, on purpose, and that he had enjoyed it.

And third — for the other forty-five minutes — I thought about a boy who was eight and a half months old and who had, that morning, before I left, held onto the coffee table with both hands and stood up for four seconds and looked at me to make sure I saw it.

He looked at me.

There is no version of what happened next in which I am the wronged party in a story about a baby.

He did not do anything.

He was in the house that night too. He was the one who was hungry.

I drove home and I did not tell anybody for six days.

Not Alma. Not my mother.

On the seventh day I called Alma, and she was quiet for a moment and then she said, "Okay," and then she said something I have repeated to men in parking lots twice since.

"Legally, this is not the problem you think it is."

"He's not mine."

"In North Carolina, a child born during a marriage is presumed to be the husband's. That presumption is rebuttable, but somebody has to rebut it, and the only people with standing to try are you, your wife, and a putative father who acts within a very specific window." She paused. "You have a test in your hand that nobody else has seen. Nobody has filed anything. You have a choice."

"What's the choice?"

"You can use it, and be free of a support obligation for a child who is not biologically yours."

"Or?"

"Or you can put it in a drawer and be his father."

I asked her what she'd advise.

She said, "I've been practicing family law for twenty-three years and that is the one question I have never once answered."