Man of the Year (Drake Story)

Chapter Enogtyve

Keziah didn’t speak to me the next morning. She shuffled through the kitchen, preparing breakfast for herself (she literally made enough for one person), completely ignoring me. This hurt at first, given that I was in desperate need for someone to talk to, to make sure that what happened last night wasn’t a hallucination, but it was to my benefit. The fact that she was giving me the silent treatment made it okay for me to leave the house without telling her where I was off to. I hadn’t thought up a lie in case she asked where I would be. She didn’t.

I called the cab, the same driver from before (who I was thinking to hire as a back-up chauffeur to William), and he took me to Amanda’s house. He agreed to wait for me again, giving me a wave and a wink as I knocked on her door. She opened up almost immediately. Her hair was freshly twisted and she was dressed in a sundress and sandals, a pleasant contrast to her previous choice of wardrobe. She frowned when she saw me.

“You look so tired,” She said.

“If you only knew,” I sighed.

“Makonnen isn’t ready yet. I’m getting him dressed right now, so you can wait on the couch.” Amanda walked me into the house and left me in the living room. It looked different from last time. Better. She really did clean up once she knew I was coming.

“That’s fine,” I called to her. “Can I make something to eat while I wait?”

“Sure, everything’s in the fridge or the cupboards.” She said.

I opened the fridge, which seemed to be mostly filled with treats for her son, and took out ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There was a birthday cake on the lower level, but I willed myself not to touch it.

After I finished my sandwich and was washing up the plates, Amanda and Makonnen emerged from the back. He ran up to me with a grin.

“Hey, M-Dog,” I picked him up and tickled his stomach, something that I thought all babies enjoyed. He seemed to especially fancy it.

“Who’s birthday cake is in the fridge?” I asked Amanda.

“Oh, that’s mine.” She laughed. “My birthday’s next week but a friend of mine thought it was yesterday, so she bought me a cake. Isn’t that funny?”

I laughed, but it wasn’t. If the results of this test didn’t go in her favor, it’d probably make her birthday less enjoyable. I tried not to address the place we were going, though. I only had to talk about it when Makonnen asked me. I told him we were going for to the doctor’s office for me to get a check-up, and he was completely unsuspecting. He wouldn’t even know what a DNA test was if I told him, anyway.

The driver took us to the clinic Amanda picked out, and wished me good luck when I was getting out of the car. I didn’t know what his luck would help me with, which result would necessarily be better than the other, but I thanked him.

The clinic was filled with clones of us, couples with a child. The children were all much younger than Makonnen, though. Some of them even looked like newborns. Clearly, we were a group who’d waited much too long for this. Amanda seemed embarrassed to even be here, so I flipped through a magazine with her while Makonnen played with another little boy around his age.

We waited for an hour, watching the couples go in, come out, and then go in again. That’s how it worked here; we’d give our DNA samples, wait for the results, and then leave. I tried to look at the expressions on their faces when they left, but they were all the same as they’d been before they got their results, the same as ours now. I realized that most of them didn’t look at the results inside the clinic. I wouldn’t be one of those to let the anticipation build. I’d waited long enough.