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on my arms showed just how unsure I was.
    â€œThe thing is,” he began, but got stopped immediately by the ring of his iPhone. I looked over to see if Tiffanie’s photo had surfaced, but he’d turned away to scan the screen. “Gotta take this.”
    Instead of his usual casual greeting, I heard a serious, “Yes,” before he swung around to take the deck steps double time. Obviously a private call. I could only watch, wonder, and worry as he trotted down the path to the beach.

    Throughout Jack’s childhood, I’d played a game with him. With myself, really, because he didn’t even know about it. What if my sweet child wasn’t the biological offspring of donor #1659? What if, this one time, against all odds, the passionate coupling of Henry London Farrell and Nora Quinn Farrell had produced a pregnancy? Jack hadn’t been test-tube generated, after all. My gynecologist had used a modern variation of the old turkey baster to introduce donor sperm to egg, so it was on the outer edge of possibility that Lon’s feeble swimmers had suddenly and unaccountably turned into Olympic champions, beating out #1659 for the gold.
    Could be, I’d told myself. Lon and I certainly had sex around the time I conceived. And anything could have happened within the deep, dark recesses of my inner passages and chambers. Who was to say we hadn’t hit the lottery that one time? Maybe a miracle occurred, part of a divine plan to lure me back into the folds of the Mother Church. Stranger things had happened. People prayed to grilled cheese sandwiches embossed with the image of the Virgin Mary before selling them on eBay. Maybe, just maybe, Jack was
Lon’s
genetic offspring.
    For a long time—because it didn’t seem fair that a love as potent asLon’s and mine wouldn’t create a fusion of the two of us—I wanted that to be true. Also, as the daughter of a biology teacher, I gave nature more power over nurture than it probably deserved.
    So all through Jack’s early childhood years, I looked for evidence of a genetic link between my husband and my son. And found none. Lon was black Irish: hair the color of coal, eyes green, complexion fair. Jack had been born bald, and when his hair finally arrived around his first birthday, it came in corn-silk blond. By adolescence, his hair and skin color almost matched, in summer a tawny gold. Jack didn’t have Lon’s dimpled hands or his square jaw, his big feet, or the cleft in his chin. Nothing. But I continued to hope.
    Jack was six the first time we took him to the circus, and in the lobby we ran into a high school friend of mine. She backed off from our reunion hug, scanned the three of us, and said, “Oh my gosh, Nora, the child is your clone. Except for the hair, he’s your total clone, down to the crazy arch of your eyebrows.” She glanced at Lon, back at Jack, and laughed. “I mean, you’re sure he’s not the Immaculate Conception?”
    That night, after Jack was tucked in bed with his new stuffed elephant, Lon took a slug of Jameson and asked, “Your friend’s comment today, that bothered you, didn’t it?”
    â€œNo,” I lied.
    â€œPlease,” he said. “I saw your face.”
    â€œOkay, but only because I didn’t want you to be hurt.”
    He slammed down his glass. “Now, you listen to me, Nora. I don’t give a crap about his genes, designer or otherwise. In every way that counts, that boy is mine. If I weren’t shooting blanks, if that DNA had been Farrell—handed down through a long line of drunks, mogs, chancers, wastrels, and highway robbers, by the way—I couldn’t have made a better son or one I love more. In a couple of years, we’re going to let Jack know how he was conceived. And you better get good with that before we tell him, because I’ll be damned if I’ll have him thinking he doesn’t measure up for