“Why the hell not?” he said to himself.

Aidan was supposed to be looking for a job. After all, he was $55,000 in debt for that goddamn MBA. He needed a job, like yesterday. But he couldn’t look at one more posting on Indeed or Glassdoor. He needed a break.

He was scrolling through Facebook when he glanced at a posting by a friend.

I’ve got Neanderthal DNA! No wonder I love caveman movies!

I hate cilantro and, guess what, it’s genetic!

Mosquitos love me, and guess what, it’s genetic!

No sign of late-onset Alzheimer’s!

I love-love-love 23andMe!!

Aidan had heard of the genetic testing company. He found it easily online, it wasn’t even expensive. Five minutes later, his purchase was complete and the DNA kit was on its way.

He knew what it was going to find. He was 50% Irish on his mother’s side (McNeely, Murphy, O’Connor) and 50% Italian on his father’s side (Cancio, Baldoni, Romano).

But it was his father’s Italian heritage that had dominated the family. He had heard the immigration story a hundred times. Nonna related the family journey from Southern Italy in the early 1900s to New York to their rightful place in East Hanover, New Jersey. The pocket grocery store in the poor part of town that grew into eight grocery stores dotting the state. The first Cadillac. The pride in educating their children and grandchildren.

But every good family story has drama. The Big Drama erupted twenty-five years ago when his father wanted to marry his mother. True, she was Catholic but she wasn’t the right kind of Catholic. The letters flew back and forth between the camps and many a family dinner was ruined by thrown napkins, tears, and ultimatums. But marry her he did and Aidan’s mother compromised by suppressing her McNeely-ness and jumping into the Italian culture with both feet. That meant giant weekly Sunday dinners with pasta courses, church every Sunday, rooting for the Italian soccer team, driving only cars manufactured in the home country, and buying tires from Uncle Lorenzo’s Best Tire Store.

“When are you going to settle down with a nice Italian girl already?” was a question asked often of Aidan these days. He knew he would probably marry a nice girl from church. After all, he was Italian through-and-through.

Until he wasn’t.

The bomb was sent to his inbox. Who knew incendiary devices could look so innocent? So commonplace. So banal?

“Finally!” Aidan eagerly opened the email from 23andMe.

It took him a minute to orient himself. Health reports. Share and Compare. Research. He clicked on Ancestry. A moment later, a beautiful colored circle fanned open on his screen. The summary was at the bottom. It was cruel in its brevity.

52% British & Irish

46% Broadly South American

2% Broadly European

Aidan’s smile faded. The British & Irish were clearly his mother’s genetic contribution. But where was the Italian? He was reading it wrong. There must be a mistake. Maybe they tested the wrong sample. Maybe his saliva got lost and they substituted it with someone else’s DNA.

To prove it to himself, he clicked the DNA Relatives link. There would be a gallery of strangers, unknowns. The close relatives of someone who was half South American.

Until there wasn’t.

The first face he recognized was Natalie. She was identified (correctly) as his first cousin with a shared DNA of 8%. Her picture was there too, in a tiny circle, but unmistakable. It was Nat all right. That was weird.

Right above her was a familiar face. A man. Aidan squinted close to the computer screen. His name was Oscar and he was the manager of their favorite family restaurant. What was he doing there? A man about his parents’ age. A man with wavy dark hair, dark eyes, and light brown skin. A man identified as Aidan’s father.

What the holy fuck?

46% shared DNA.

Father. Father. Father. Father. Father.

Aidan tried to think through the haze and shock.

Oscar and his mother? Had a relationship? His mother still saw this… this Oscar… at least once a month if not more. Oscar’s restaurant catered every one of their big family parties. Were they stealing away from his family and… and… doing it… in the basement? He felt sick to his stomach. What did his father know? What would Nonna say? Were his younger brother and sister really his brother and sister or just half-sibs like in some sick reality TV show?

It was all too terrible to contemplate.

Aidan’s heart squeezed with a random and dark thought.

Now that he wasn’t Italian, did this mean he had to sell his precious Alfa Romeo?

Much later, Oscar would reflect on how that big day started like every other day. He got up at seven o’clock. He did his usual twenty minutes of yoga on downwarddog.com. He sipped his espresso and read the New York Times headlines. He took his dog for a stroll around the block and breathed in the sweet jasmine smell that infused the neighborhood. He kissed his spouse good morning.

Life is good, he remembered thinking.

By nine o’clock, Oscar went downstairs and unlocked the front door of his restaurant. After turning off the alarm, he walked through the expansive dining room, flipping on lights as he went. He unlocked the rear kitchen door and found his two cooks and three kitchen helpers, leaning against the wall, smoking and laughing as they waited.

They had an hour before the rest of the lunch staff would arrive and two hours before Bruno Ristorante opened for what was always a brisk lunch crowd, fed like tributaries by three adjacent office buildings filled with attorneys, accountants, therapists, and investment bankers. Oscar smiled when he heard the rhythmic metallic clicking of the knives jumping into the lunch prep, always starting with the onions and green peppers.

It all started right in the middle of the lunch rush.

It was 12:30 pm. Conversation and laughter crested like waves from the 50 or so diners. Oscar had just served hot sandwiches to a table of three giggling middle-aged women when the front door opened with such force that it hit the wall with a loud thwack. Heads turned in the direction of the noise. Oscar could see, backlit by the midday sun, young Aidan, in the open doorway with clenched fists on his hips.

“What the fuck, Oscar!” Aidan’s voice was unnaturally loud and high. “I need to talk to you!”

Fifty pairs of eyes swiveled in Oscar’s direction. The tension dissipated in the room. Who knew that their lunch would come with a show today?

Oscar was shocked. Aidan was the son of his close friends, people he considered family. Aidan had always been a shy child, hiding behind his mother’s knees, now a quiet young man. He had never heard Aidan swear and had certainly done nothing to upset him.

He gestured to the back of the room. “Aidan, why don’t we…”

“You! You!” Aidan spluttered. He took two strides into the room, picked up a plate from a nearby white cloth-covered table and threw it in Oscar’s direction. Oscar ducked but when his head came up, spaghetti draped over his hair and a large meatball clung to his collar.

Aidan’s chest heaved with emotion, and he pointed a finger in Oscar’s direction.

“You’re my fucking father, did you know that?”

The movement of 50 mouths falling open simultaneously changed the air current in the room, which could have been measured by an anemometer (which measures wind speed and direction) if one had been available.

A waiter named Henry, who was quite old and a little deaf, toddled out from the kitchen galley and into the center of the room. He carried an ice-cream cannoli on a small white plate. He placed the desert on a table, and with the obliviousness of the hard-of-hearing, slowly took two candles and a matchbook from his pocket. After carefully inserting the candles into the ice-cream, he lit them with a dramatic hand movement.

“Shall we sing Happy Birthday?”

When no one at the birthday table spoke or moved, Henry looked up and took in the frozen tableau around him. The open-mouthed silent guests. The spaghetti and meatballs at Oscar’s feet. The fury on Aidan’s face. The crack in the glass front door. Henry shuffled backwards.

The words between Oscar and Aidan’s flew like bullets.

“I know you’re my father.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Aidan.”

“I did genetic testing and you showed up as my father. My father.”

“I don’t have any children.”

“Yes you do, you asshole. Look at your 23andMe account. I’m listed as your son.”

There was a low gasp from the lunching audience. Oscar put his hand to his forehead. Could it be possible? Could Aidan actually be his son? How old was the boy? Twenty-three or twenty-four? Oscar met the family soon after being hired at the restaurant. He was a boy himself then, mid-twenties, broke and confused. He had run away from a bad situation in Texas and he needed a new start. He was hired as a bartender, then a waiter, and finally a manager fifteen years earlier.

Aidan’s parents were his first friends in New Jersey.

Newly married then, they invited Oscar to a beach party along the shoreline. There was drinking. Drugs. Someone gave him a pill that dissolved on his tongue, a pill that made the sky black like tar and the sand hot like fire. He wasn’t sure where his body ended and someone else’s began. He remembered looking down and seeing four legs instead of his usual two. Three torsos. Four heads. Ten sets of fingers. Five heads. Oscar had wondered: what dimension am I in?

A week after the party, Aidan’s mother gestured for Oscar to come to her table at Bruno Ristorante. Her new husband was in the restroom and the early dinner crowd was light.

She stood up, leaned towards Oscar, and whispered, “Look, things happened. Let’s forget it, keep it between us. Is that a deal?”

“I’m sorry?” Oscar held his order pad in one hand. “What happened?”

“Really, am I that forgettable?” She laughed. “Just forget it, OK?”

“No problem.” Was this about the pills?

Now decades later, facing Aidan, Oscar finally understood. Apparently, something quite important had happened that summer night on the sand.

“Aidan…something happened a long time ago. I didn’t even know that it resulted in…in…” Oscar waved his hands futilely in the air “… in you.”

The lunch crowd shifted in their seats. At that very moment, a pair of prospective diners entered the front door and stood on the threshold. The young couple took in the wide-eyed diners who sat in silence around the two men in the middle of the large dining room. Without a word or a gesture or a sign to the other, they backed out of the restaurant in perfect synchronicity.

“So how long have you and my mother…”

Oscar held up one hand. “No! Aidan, no! Something happened one time a long time ago. Once.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Aidan, it’s true. You don’t know something about me.”

“I don’t want to know anything about you.”

“Wait, Aidan. You need to know this.”

There was a pause between the father and son. Oscar’s next words were spoken so softly, the witnesses needed to lean forward over their tables to hear.

“Aidan, I’m gay.”

There was a collective gasp from the crowd. They didn’t see that coming. Apparently, neither did Aidan who, despite his strong build and healthy skin color, looked like he might fall down, collapse, right there on the lightly patterned carpet.

“Aidan, I’ve been married to Jimmy for many years.”

The regulars shifted their gaze to the waiter Jimmy, who was leaning against a wall. The tall man with the full head of glossy black hair gave a low wave and a thin smile. A dozen diners returned his wave.

Oscar moved towards Aidan. “We’re happy in our lives together.” As gently as touching a baby, Oscar put one hand on his son’s arm. “If I had known that I was your father, you would have been part of it.”

“So what now?” Aidan whispered.

“We catch up.”

“Where do we start?”

Where to start? Oscar caught Jimmy’s eyes. Where it all began, of course.

“Texas. We’ll start in Texas.”