When he answered, his voice was calm. “Well,” he said, “blood or no blood, that boy is ours now. Bring him home.”
And so, after months of paperwork, Joey came to live with them. He turned out to be a cheerful, affectionate kid who wanted badly to belong and did his best to help with everything. On weekends he went fishing with Mike, loved Eleanor’s pancakes and apple pie, and learned quickly where the extra blankets were kept and which cabinet held the cereal he liked.
One month after they finally returned home with him, Eleanor was in the kitchen making lunch when Mike came in from outside carrying a large official envelope from the state health department. He handed it to her without a word.
Together they opened it and found a formal letter of apology. A lab technician, it said, had mishandled the samples. The DNA test results had been mixed up with another case. The employees responsible had been disciplined, and a repeat analysis had been completed.
Eleanor’s eyes raced over the final lines. “We hereby confirm,” the letter read, “that repeat testing shows a 99.6% probability of biological relationship. Kinship is established.”
Mike laughed and cried at the same time as he pulled Eleanor into his arms, along with Joey, who had just run in from outside with dirt on his sneakers and wind in his hair. The three of them stood there in the kitchen holding on to one another, knowing that after years of grief, mistakes, and silence, they had finally been given their family back.
