Julia Watts - Wedding Bell Blues

...” The judge looked at the brown-skinned young man seated in the courtroom. Doctor or not, he couldn’t have been much over thirty. “You’re gonna have to help me again with that name, buddy.”

The young doctor smiled patiently. “Anuj Mahatjan,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s it. The doctor here has the results of Benny Jack McGilly’s DNA tests in a sealed envelope.” Judge Sanders savored the phrase “sealed envelope.” Clearly, this revelation was high drama compared to the humdrum cases that were usually heard in the Faulkner County Courthouse. “Doctor, you may take the stand, if you like, and open the envelope there.”

Dr. Mahatjan carried a manila envelope to the stand. Lily had never looked upon an inanimate object with the amount of fear she felt for that envelope. Dr. Mahatjan opened the envelope with painstaking slowness. He removed some papers from it and looked them over for a few excruciating moments before he spoke. “The test indicates that Mr. Benny Jack McGilly and Mimi Maycomb do share the same genetic material. Mr. McGilly is Mimi Maycomb’s father.”

“I’ll be goddamned!” Mike Maycomb blasphemed, at the same time Lily had been thinking the exact same thing.

“Thank you, Doctor,” Judge Sanders said. “I’ll retire to my chambers to do the paperwork.

Custody of Mimi Maycomb will be awarded jointly to Mr. and Mrs. Benny Jack McGilly.”

Lily was being hugged by Jeanie and Big Ben before she could even process the information she had been given. “Congratulations, honey!” Jeanie squealed. “I told you everything was gonna be fine.”

Big Ben chucked his stunned son on the shoulder. “I knew it, boy! I knew it!” Big Ben whooped.

“A McGilly man don’t have to do nothin’ but look at a woman to get her pregnant.”

“Apparently not,” Ben mumbled.

“Come on,” Jeanie said, taking Lily by the hand, “let’s be good sports.”

Jeanie led Lily to the table where the Maycombs were arguing bitterly with Stephen Hamilton.

“Frankly,” Lily heard Ida say to her husband, “I’d be a whole lot more sure of this if they’d let a white man do the DNA tests.”

“Excuse us,” Jeanie said. Charles, Ida, and Maycomb turned to face her, looking shocked. “I just wanted to let y’all know that you can visit Mimi whenever you want to.” Jeanie’s smile was sweet and welcoming. “But if I ever hear you say one hateful word about my son or my daughter-in-law, you’ll never see hide nor hair of your granddaughter again.” Her smile was just as bright when she led Lily away from Charlotte’s slack jawed family.

Soon Lily and Ben were in the car, on their way to pick up Mimi — Mimi who was theirs officially, who could not be taken away from them. Lily’s happiness was overshadowed by only one minor factor: She was completely baffled. “So,” she said to Ben, “how did you rig it?”

Ben looked as if someone had just shaved forty points off his IQ. “Rig ... what?”

“Rig the DNA test! Mimi has the DNA of two dead people. So how did you fake it?”

“I honestly don’t know what happened. I mean, Dez was the sperm donor for you and Charlotte, right? The ‘designated wanker,’ he used to call himself.” Ben laughed. “I remember once he said to me —

you know how Dez talked — he said, ‘Benjamin, my dear boy, when I was sixteen, I never thought I’d get tired of wanking off, but dear god, this sperm donor thing is putting welts on my weenie. Now I know why Portnoy complained.’”

Ben laughed, and Lily joined him. It felt so good to laugh now ... now that she knew that Charlotte and Dez’s biological child would be raised in a way that would have made them happy.

Ben interrupted his own laughter with a sudden, “Hmm.”

“Hmm, what?” Lily said.

“I was just thinking about how exhausted Dez got with the whole sperm donor thing ... God, that seems like so long ago, doesn’t it, when you and Charlotte were trying to get pregnant?”

“It was a while ago, I guess...almost three years.”

“Yeah. You know, I hate to admit it, but after y’all pulled Dez’s name out of the hat, I didn’t pay too much attention to all the baby-making attempts. That was back when I was so in love with Chris, even though our personalities totally clashed. I was so obsessed with him, though ... oh...my...god!” Ben lost control of the car, swerved, then finally regained control, and pulled over to the side of the road.

“What?” Lily gasped. “Are you trying to get us killed now that this thing’s finally over?”

“No. It’s just ... oh my god.”

“Talk, boy. Talk.”

“I just thought of something. There was this one week when Charlotte was just sure she was ovulating, and you were getting two sperm donations a day from Dez, one in the morning and one at night. The poor guy was just whipped — he said it was apparently no myth about women being sexually demanding. Anyway, I remember one night I had been out with Chris, and we had had a big fight at the restaurant. I was so mad I stopped at Blake’s on the way home and had a couple of drinks, just to calm down. And of course, you know my alcohol tolerance. I was bombed by the time I got home.

“I found Dez upstairs in bed, glumly examining this empty artichoke jar he was supposed to ejaculate into. He had all these boy mags spread around him on the bed, but his face just looked desolate.

‘Benjamin, my boy,’ he said to me. ‘I just can’t do it. I’ve come inside this jar so many times, I feel like I ought to marry it.’ Like I said, I was drunk, and he was exhausted, so I just grabbed the jar from him and said, ‘Oh, hell, let me do it.’”

“So the jar of semen Dez brought over that night was —”

“Mine. I don’t believe it, though. I just did it that one time, and Dez did it dozens and dozens —”

“It just takes one sperm, honey.” Lily laughed and threw her arms around Ben, who, for the first time, hugged her back with equal force.

As Lily walked up the path to Granny McGilly’s house, the old woman opened the screen door.

Mimi stood in the doorway, wearing a sunshine-yellow gingham sundress, and her face lit up like sunshine as soon as she saw Lily. “Mama!” she squealed and ran barefoot down the path into Lily’s open arms.

Big Ben and Jeanie had told Lily and Ben they could invite anybody they wanted to the big celebration barbecue, and they had taken the elder McGillys at their word. Ken was there, and he and Ben were pushing Mimi around the pool on the inflatable raft while she lounged like a tiny bikinied goddess.

Jack was helping Ben’s brother Wayne tend the grill, while Honey was helping Jeanie set out the potato salad and baked beans.

“There’s no telling when we’ll see our better halves again,” Jeanie laughed, in reference to the fact that Big Ben had just taken Mick into the house to show her his hunting trophies.

At the redwood picnic table, Granny McGilly sat with Dale and Sue, drinking beer and laughing about times no one else at the party was old enough to remember.