I Have Five Kick-Ass Brothers novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: The Door at One A.M.
Five huge men open a farmhouse door to a stranger in a ball gown, and their mother finds the birthmark.
The address was nine miles away, and I walked three of them in borrowed shoes before a delivery driver took pity on me.
He dropped me at the end of a gravel road a little before one in the morning.
At the end of the road stood a big white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, and beside it a truck yard lit by floodlights.
Eleven pickups and four semi cabs sat in the yard, every one of them clean.
There was a light on in the kitchen.
I stood on the porch in a silver dress and bare feet, because my shoes had given out at the gate.
I knocked before I could talk myself out of it.
Nothing happened for a long moment.
Then the door opened, and I looked up.
And kept looking up.
The man in the doorway was six foot four, with an auburn beard and a flannel shirt open over a T-shirt that said KINSELLA FREIGHT.
Behind him, the hallway filled up.
A second man came down the stairs in boxers and a bathrobe, rubbing his face.
A third came out of the kitchen with a spatula.
A fourth stood on the landing with a fire department sweatshirt pulled halfway on.
A fifth, who looked about my age, leaned over the banister and said, "Is that a bride?"
"It's a birthday dress," the one with the spatula said.
"Are you sure?"
"It has sequins."
"Ma'am," the huge man in the doorway said, very gently.
"Are you lost?"
"Are you Dean Kinsella?" I asked.
His face changed.
"Who's asking?"
"My name is Maggie," I said.
"Maggie Winslow."
I had barely said it before the man in the bathrobe stepped forward and put a hand flat on my shoulder, which was surprisingly kind.
"Dean," he said quietly.
"Winslow. The hospital foundation. The lawsuit."
"I know," Dean said.
His voice had gone flat and hard.
"If Janet Winslow sent you with another letter, you can tell her we'll see her in court."
"She didn't send me," I said.
"She just threw me out of my own birthday party."
The one at the banister laughed out loud.
Dean did not.
"Why are you here?"
I held up the crumpled page with shaking fingers.
"Because this says you're my brother."
Nobody spoke.
The spatula clattered onto the hallway floor.
Dean took the paper from me and read it under the porch light.
I watched his eyes move down the page and stop.
"I did the kit three years ago," he said slowly.
"My brother here bought it for my birthday as a joke. I didn't think anything would come of it."
"I thought it was a hoax," the one in the bathrobe said, "and then you got a full-sibling flag."
"I wrote to the lab for weeks," Dean said.
"They said it was a data error. I only ever had one sister, and she..."
He stopped.
"Dean," a woman's voice said from the top of the stairs.
"Who is at the door?"
We all looked up.
She came down slowly with one hand on the rail, in a quilted robe, with grey streaks in her auburn hair.
She was somewhere in her fifties.
She stopped three steps from the bottom, and I saw her see me.
She went completely white.
Her mouth opened and made no sound.
I stood there in the doorway with five tall men staring at me, and I realized that I had her chin.
Not something like it.
Her chin.
Her grey-green eyes looked back at me out of my own face, only older.
"Turn around," she whispered.
"I'm sorry?"
"Please, honey. Turn around."
I turned.
The back of my dress was cut low across the shoulders.
She made a sound I have never heard anyone make.
"Frank," she said, to nobody.
She came down the last three steps without holding on to anything.
Her hand lifted, shaking, and stopped an inch from my left shoulder blade, where I have a small pale mark shaped like a crescent moon.
"She has it," she said.
"She has it, she has the mark, I have it, Dean has it."
She caught her breath.
"Her name was Alexis."
I turned back around and she took my face in both her hands.
She was crying and she did not seem to know it.
"I'm Hannah Kinsella," she said.
"I held my daughter for eleven months, and I buried her at Brookfield Memorial when she was still in her crib clothes."
The hallway had gone absolutely still.
"I've gone to that grave every week for twenty-three years," Hannah said.
"Who in the world are you?"
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