He looked at her. “For which part?” She had no answer that could fit. Tyler walked into the dining room and picked up the DNA report again. He studied the percentages, though he no longer needed them.
“So this thing didn’t just tell me Dad isn’t my dad,” he said. “It told me my uncle is probably my dad.” “Biologically,” Mark said immediately. Tyler looked at him. Mark’s voice shook.
“Biologically. I’m still your father.” Laura broke into louder sobs. Tyler stared at Mark so long that Mark wondered if he had said the wrong thing. “I know,” Tyler said finally.
Then he turned to his mother. “You’re the one I don’t know right now.” Laura pressed both hands against her stomach as if suddenly nauseated. Tyler walked past her into the kitchen, grabbed his jacket from the mudroom, and reached for his keys. “Where are you going?”
Mark asked. “I don’t know.” “You shouldn’t drive like this.” “I’m not staying here.” “Then I’ll drive you.”
“No.” Mark hesitated. Tyler was legally an adult by five months, old enough to make a decision and young enough to terrify his parents with one. “At least text me when you stop somewhere.” Tyler’s hand froze on the doorknob.
He looked back at Mark. “I will.” Then he left. The mudroom door closed with far less violence than his bedroom door had. Somehow that felt worse.
Mark did not speak to Laura for several minutes. He moved mechanically around the dining room, blowing out candles because the flames suddenly seemed dangerous, though nothing else in the room had changed. He carried the gravy into the kitchen. Put foil over the turkey. Set the serving spoon inside the sink.
Small tasks kept his hands from shaking visibly. Laura sat at the table crying. At last Mark said, without turning around, “Tell me everything.” She nodded. “No editing.
No protecting Andrew. No protecting yourself. If I find out later you held anything back, there will be nothing left to discuss.” Laura wiped her face with both hands. “It happened the summer before we got married,” she began.
Mark stopped moving. They had been engaged then. That mattered to him immediately and painfully. He had imagined, in the frantic minutes since the truth cracked open, some drunken mistake during a rough patch early in the marriage. The actual timeline felt crueler because he remembered that summer clearly.
They were planning a September wedding. Mark was working long hours at the family insurance agency. Laura was teaching kindergarten. Andrew had recently separated from his first wife, Rebecca, and was staying temporarily in Indianapolis while consulting at a hospital there. “He came over one night when you were in Chicago for that conference,” Laura said.