It wasn’t for him.
It was for her.
I sat in the rocking chair one afternoon, watching Evelyn sleep in the bassinet with her arms thrown up over her head like she’d just won a race, and I thought about her at sixteen. At twenty-five. I thought about her one day finding out, from some cousin or some aunt or some overheard conversation, that her own father had once looked at her in a hospital room and said she wasn’t his.
I wanted a piece of paper that said, in black and white, that he was wrong. That she had always belonged exactly where she was. That nobody, ever, would be able to question who she was or where she came from.So I swabbed the inside of her tiny cheek while she squirmed and complained. I mailed one envelope to Ben with a short note that said, Swab and send it in. Not for you. For her. He sent it back the very next day. He didn’t write anything else. He just did it.
