I should have asked questions. I know that now.

Then Bridget’s 9th grade biology teacher assigned a genetics project. Family heritage. Ancestry mapping. I ordered a 23andMe kit because Bridget said everyone in her class was doing it and I thought it’d be fun.

I swabbed her cheek on a Tuesday night while she was eating Totino’s pizza rolls, the pepperoni kind, and I sealed it up and mailed it and didn’t think about it again.

43 days later. Saturday morning. Dale was at Home Depot getting caulk for the bathroom. Gerald was God knows where. I opened the app on my laptop at the kitchen table. There was a pot of Folgers already on the warmer and the dog, this ridiculous beagle we have named Captain, was whining to go outside. And I was just sitting there.

The match list loaded.

I saw Gerald’s name.

Not as grandfather.

As father.

I don’t know what I felt. Angry? Sick? Blank? I think blank. Like my brain hit a wall and just stopped. The coffee went cold. Captain started scratching at the back door. I could hear the neighbors’ kid bouncing a basketball in their driveway. And I was just staring at this screen with my reading glasses sliding down my nose.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I just sat there and thought about the pizza rolls. She was eating pizza rolls when I swabbed her cheek. Pepperoni. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and I told her to use a napkin. That’s what I was thinking about. The napkin.

I know that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is obvious. But the pizza rolls and the napkin and the way she just opened her mouth for the swab like it was nothing. That’s what I keep coming back to.

I called my sister Deborah. She drove over in fourteen minutes. I showed her the screen. She sat right in Gerald’s chair and said, “Gerald?”

Just that. One word.

We sat on the porch for a while. She smoked three Newports back to back. She quit four years ago. I didn’t have anything to say and she didn’t push it. That’s the thing about Deborah. She knows when to just be there.