Keziah didn’t speak to me the next morning. She shuffled through the kitchen, preparing breakfast for herself (she literally made enough for one person), completely ignoring me. This hurt at first, given that I was in desperate need for someone to talk to, to make sure that what happened last night wasn’t a hallucination, but it was to my benefit. The fact that she was giving me the silent treatment made it okay for me to leave the house without telling her where I was off to. I hadn’t thought up a lie in case she asked where I would be. She didn’t.
I called the cab, the same driver from before (who I was thinking to hire as a back-up chauffeur to William), and he took me to Amanda’s house. He agreed to wait for me again, giving me a wave and a wink as I knocked on her door. She opened up almost immediately. Her hair was freshly twisted and she was dressed in a sundress and sandals, a pleasant contrast to her previous choice of wardrobe. She frowned when she saw me.
“You look so tired,” She said.
“If you only knew,” I sighed.
“Makonnen isn’t ready yet. I’m getting him dressed right now, so you can wait on the couch.” Amanda walked me into the house and left me in the living room. It looked different from last time. Better. She really did clean up once she knew I was coming.
“That’s fine,” I called to her. “Can I make something to eat while I wait?”
“Sure, everything’s in the fridge or the cupboards.” She said.
I opened the fridge, which seemed to be mostly filled with treats for her son, and took out ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There was a birthday cake on the lower level, but I willed myself not to touch it.
After I finished my sandwich and was washing up the plates, Amanda and Makonnen emerged from the back. He ran up to me with a grin.
“Hey, M-Dog,” I picked him up and tickled his stomach, something that I thought all babies enjoyed. He seemed to especially fancy it.
“Who’s birthday cake is in the fridge?” I asked Amanda.
“Oh, that’s mine.” She laughed. “My birthday’s next week but a friend of mine thought it was yesterday, so she bought me a cake. Isn’t that funny?”
I laughed, but it wasn’t. If the results of this test didn’t go in her favor, it’d probably make her birthday less enjoyable. I tried not to address the place we were going, though. I only had to talk about it when Makonnen asked me. I told him we were going for to the doctor’s office for me to get a check-up, and he was completely unsuspecting. He wouldn’t even know what a DNA test was if I told him, anyway.
The driver took us to the clinic Amanda picked out, and wished me good luck when I was getting out of the car. I didn’t know what his luck would help me with, which result would necessarily be better than the other, but I thanked him.
The clinic was filled with clones of us, couples with a child. The children were all much younger than Makonnen, though. Some of them even looked like newborns. Clearly, we were a group who’d waited much too long for this. Amanda seemed embarrassed to even be here, so I flipped through a magazine with her while Makonnen played with another little boy around his age.
We waited for an hour, watching the couples go in, come out, and then go in again. That’s how it worked here; we’d give our DNA samples, wait for the results, and then leave. I tried to look at the expressions on their faces when they left, but they were all the same as they’d been before they got their results, the same as ours now. I realized that most of them didn’t look at the results inside the clinic. I wouldn’t be one of those to let the anticipation build. I’d waited long enough.
The doctor finally called us in at eleven in the morning, two hours after we got there.
“Hello, Dr. Phite,” Amanda greeted him. She gave me Makonnen to hold and sat down on one of the doctor’s couches, resting her purse on her lap. I hadn’t been to a doctor’s office in a while (and the sign on the wall reminding patients that we had to get a check-up every six months didn’t make me feel any less guilty), but this one seemed to be exactly like the ones I remembered. The bed with the noisy sheet on top of it, diagrams of the body, the doctor’s desk and tools toward the back, and a computer to the side. There was even the same grumbling feeling in my stomach, but its cause was much larger than my resentment for needles. Makonnen leaned his head against my neck and closed his eyes.
“This is the little one you told me about over the phone,” Dr. Phite asked, smiling at the dosing little boy on my lap.
“Yes, that’s him,” Amanda chuckled. “We made sure to get here early enough for the results.”
“You want the same-day package?”
“Knowing the truth is kind of urgent for us.”
The doctor scratched his chin, screwing his face up into a disappointed frown. “That package costs a fortune. Do you have insurance?”
It was Amanda’s turn to frown now, looking away from me and the doctor to shake her head.
“Well I’m sorry that you don’t, but to be honest I wouldn’t use the same-day route if I was you.” Phite sat down on the examination bed. “I understand that getting some answers is important to you and your partner, but seeing that you don’t have insurance, the smartest choice would be to wait. There is a much cheaper four-day option available, and I believe it will be more appropriate for you.”
“We want the same-day option.” I don’t know why I said this or why everything I did was always so spontaneous, but it was already in the air. They already heard it.
“We don’t have the money, Aubrey.” Amanda looked at me. I was going to agree with her at first, to say that the doctor was right and the four days would go by in no time, but the utter humiliation and dissatisfaction in her eyes would kill me if I didn’t do something.
“You don’t.” I said. I should take it back.
Her eyes widened. “You’d really do that for me? You’d really pay for it?”
“Of course,” I grinned. Shut up. Stop talking. “Why wouldn’t I do it? It’s for us.”
Amanda, whose smile expanded from one ear to another, hugged me tightly. “You’re the best, Aubrey.”
Yeah, I was. I always was. I couldn’t not be, apparently.
“Alright, then let’s get going!” Dr. Phite shook my hand. “It’s a paternity test you’re interested in, correct?”
“Yes.” We said.
“Good. Miss Amanda, you may step out now. I’ll get the samples from Mr. —” He asked me for my full name, “—Graham and your son, and then all of you can sit in the waiting room until you’re called back in. It may take up to closing time, but the results are accurate and it’s worth the wait.”
“Thank you so much, Dr. Phite,” Amanda stood from her seat and hugged him. She turned to me, kissed her son’s cheek, and then scurried out of the room. Dr. Phite looked at me with a grin on his face, like he knew I wasn’t with Amanda and that I wasn’t excited about this, like he wanted to just ask me “You ready to see if she has you on lock?”. But instead, he asked:
“Are you ready to get these results?”
I shrugged. “I guess so.”
So the testing proceeded.
---
The doctor took various forms of DNA from both Makonnen and I: our hair, cheek swabs, saliva, and blood. Makonnen thought it was some kind of contest and the doctor was the judge; we played along as much as we could. It was over sooner than I thought, and he told us to join Amanda in the waiting room, that we could leave and come back at around seven o’clock for our results.
She looked happy when I walked out of the office, probably the exact opposite of how I felt. I regretted this deeply. I regretted ever coming to Amanda’s house and having the urge to patch up this unfinished business in my life. I wanted to erase all my interactions with her for the past few weeks and focus on the drama that I already had. This was too much for me. Being around Amanda was like pretending to have normal people’s problems when really, my problems with much bigger. I had some that I couldn’t even understand, according to Belphoebe.
“We can go and get some ice cream,” She suggested.
“Yeah!” Makonnen’s face lit up.
“That’s a good idea,” I told them. “You guys should go to the one on 3rd street.”
Amanda eyed me. “You’re not coming with us?”
“I don’t think so,” I stretched my arms and yawned dramatically. “I might just take a nap here until you come back. You don’t have to get me anything.”
The two of them pouted at me. Alone I could resist them, but both of them combined was too much to handle. I gave in.
“Fine, but I’m not paying.”
“You’ve already agreed to pay for something else. Fair enough.”
We got our ice cream on 3rd street, ate it by a nearby park, and went back to get Makonnen some more because his top scoop fell on the ground. Then we went back to Amanda’s house to get him some toys to bring back to the waiting room so he’d keep occupied. The new driver, whose name was Chicago, called me to ask if he should come back now. I told him to be available around seven. The three of us walked back to the doctor’s office, sat for an hour, and then left again to get something to drink. That’s how things went for the majority of our wait: we left, came back, and left again, for the most trivial reasons possible. None of us grew tired of it, because anything would be better than sitting in the waiting room with the other anxiety-ridden couples and fathers. At four o’clock we went to Amanda’s house, and agreed to stay there until it was time to go back. She left me with Makonnen to go and do laundry, so I took this liberty to make a phone call to Keziah.
“Hello?”
Long, deliberate pause. “Hi, Aubrey.”
“How are things going?”
“Where are you, Aubrey?”
I sighed. “I’m taking care of some business with my lawyer Money talk, you wouldn’t understand. I’ll be home around eight, okay?”
Keziah paused again; this time I could hear her breathing heavily. She was upset. “If you’re not home by then, we’re going to have a problem, Aubrey. Do you understand?”
We already did have a problem, clearly, by the tone in her voice, and no matter what time I got home, she’d be sitting on the couch ready to start up an argument with me. I understood this completely. “Yeah.”
“Bye.”
She hung up.
Thirty minutes later Amanda returned, and I helped her fold the laundry while watching old episodes of “Good Times” and laughing with her about our childhood memories. This time spent didn’t bother me; it didn’t make me feel like I was pretending to be a normal person having a normal conversation, because in that instant I was a normal person having a normal conversation. It felt good. I could relax, let my shoulders fall. I could smile at her and make jokes and think about things like my appearance and the last time I went shopping or saw a good movie in the theater. I told her something I’d never told anyone, something I hadn’t entirely admitted to myself but had been feeling for at least a year now: I wanted to do another movie. Not for the money, since I was still making that from my last series, but for the experience. It was something I enjoyed, a hobby. I didn’t expect her to be so genuine about it, to say that she approved and that I should pursue it as soon as possible. As if it were that easy.
It was a miracle to look at the clock and see that it was seven o’clock already, when it felt like we’d only been there for an hour. We put a blazer on Makonnen, since it was probably chilly by now, and rushed back to the clinic.
Chicago was outside already, smoking a spliff in his car and listening to an eighties’ rap mixtape. I told him that we’d only be about thirty minutes, though I wasn’t really sure. Dr. Phite could still be getting our results together for all I knew. We walked in and gave the clerk our names. She said that the dcotor was ready for us thirty minutes ago.
My stomach was flipping, folding itself into halves, quarters, eighths, and then stretching out again. It couldn’t be long before I threw up. I was now one of them, one of those maybe-fathers-maybe-nots who was walking into the office, preparing myself for the big news. I looked down at Makonnen and winked at him. He smiled back and gave me a thumbs-up. He thought we were about tos ee who won the contest; that’s why he was excited. It went no further in his mind.
“Happy to have you back,” Dr. Phite said once he saw us.
“Sorry we were late.” I sat down in the same chair from before.
“It’s fine. I told you seven, so you’re on time.”
“I haven’t seen the results yet, but I always recommend that my patients sit down before I give them out.”
Amanda sat down beside me, lifting Makonnen onto her lap. Her son. Maybe mine.
Dr. Phite excused himself to go and get our information from the back room. Amanda didn’t look at me. I didn’t want her to. We stayed quiet, waiting and praying and asking questions in our minds. In under three minutes, the doctor was back with a large envelope in his hand.
“The nurses accidentally prepared it for mailing, because they didn’t know you were coming to pick it up.” He laughed. “Would you like to open it?”
“You do the honors, please.” I said. Amanda looked at me, but she didn’t protest.
The doctor picked up an envelope opener, sliced the thing open, and pulled out our results. He scanned them for a while, reading line-by-line of whatever information he’d found, and then looked up at us. His expression was the same as it always was - professional and polite. I couldn’t read him.
“Mr. Aubrey Graham,” He said, straightening out the paper in his hand. “Your DNA did not match Makonnen Tyler’s. You are not the father.”