Chapter 3: The Second Page
I knew she had, because she made a sound. A small catch in her throat, the sound you make when you step down onto a stair that isn’t there.
“Lauren,” she said. “Give me that paper.”
“What’s on it?” Ryan leaned over my shoulder. I felt him stop breathing.
Half the guests had already turned back to their drinks, satisfied. The other half were watching Diane, and the ones watching Diane didn’t stop.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “It’s those apps. They match you with total strangers. Everybody knows they’re wrong half the time.”
“They’re not wrong,” said Aunt Carol.
Frank’s older sister sat at the far end of the table, a slice of watermelon forgotten on her plate. Carol is sixty-three, retired from the post office, and the keeper of the Whitfield family tree. She’d mailed her own tube to the same company three years ago and printed the results for every relative at Christmas.
“I’m on that app,” she said slowly. “Same company. If Ryan’s in there, I should be at the top of his list. I’m his aunt.”
She looked at me. “Am I there, honey?”
I looked down the list. A third cousin. A fourth cousin. A Morrison. A Kowalski.
“No,” I said. “There’s no Whitfield on it. Not one.”
Carol put her fork down.
Now here’s the part people argue about. My friends, my own mother, half the strangers I’ve told since.
I could have folded the page. I could have said, “Just a bunch of cousins,” handed it back, let Diane slide it into her purse, lit the candle and sung.
Frank was right there. Frank, with the stent, and the little bottle of nitroglycerin in his cardigan pocket. Frank, who had just watched his wife accuse me of cheating in front of the whole neighborhood and had asked her twice to stop.
I thought about him. I swear I did.
Then Diane said, to the table, “She’s making a scene. This is what she does.”
And something in me went flat and quiet.
“You wanted it read out loud,” I said. “In front of everyone. So nobody could say it was twisted.”
“Lauren,” Ryan said. It wasn’t a warning. I think he wanted to know too.
So I read it. Every word, the way she’d asked me to.
“Close family. Predicted relationship: half brother. Daniel Duvall. Shared DNA: twenty-four percent. No matches found on the Whitfield family line.”
Then I slid the page across the tablecloth to her, past the cake.
“You wanted everyone to hear it, Diane.”
Nobody moved. Somewhere a neighbor’s kid was still running through a sprinkler, shrieking, and it sounded like it was coming from another planet.
“Mom,” Ryan said.
Diane didn’t look at him. She looked at Frank.
And Frank, very slowly, took off his wire-rimmed glasses and folded them.
“Duvall,” he said.
“Frank, don’t.”
“Gary Duvall.” His voice was so calm it frightened me. “The dentist. You worked his front desk the year before Ryan was born. Then you quit all of a sudden. You told me he was a difficult boss.”
“Frank, please. Your heart.”
“Don’t.” He stood up. “Don’t you use my heart. Not today.”
Ryan had gone white. He looked at the paper, then at his father, then at the paper again, as if one of them might change.
“Dad,” he said. “Dad, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t—”
Frank opened his mouth to answer him.
Then his hand went flat against his chest, over the cardigan pocket, and he sat back down so hard the chair scraped across the patio stones.
“Frank?” Carol was already on her feet.
His face had gone gray. His fingers fumbled at the pocket and couldn’t find the opening.
“Pills,” he said. “Ryan. My pills.”
