I Have Five Kick-Ass Brothers novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Necklace on the Floor
At her birthday party Kaitlyn reads out a DNA result that says Lexi is no Winslow, and Lexi sets the pearls in the champagne tower and walks out, until the same page names a brother.
My mother gave me a pearl necklace for my twenty-fourth birthday, and my sister read my DNA results out loud over it.
The party was in the ballroom at the Brookfield Lake Club, with two hundred guests and a champagne tower taller than I was.
I had been standing next to it for an hour, smiling.
I smiled a lot at my own family's parties.
It was the only way to get through them.
At eight o'clock Kaitlyn took the microphone from the string quartet.
She was twenty-one, golden and glossy, and she had never once been told no.
"Before the cake," she said, "I have a little birthday surprise for Maggie."
Everyone turned to look at me.
My mother, Janet Winslow, sat at the head table with her hand around a wine glass and said nothing.
That should have warned me.
Janet always said something.
Kaitlyn held up a printed sheet.
"I ordered Maggie a genealogy kit as a joke," she said, "and I used her hairbrush for the sample."
A few people laughed, because they thought a joke was coming.
"The results came back last night."
She turned the page toward the crowd.
"Maggie has no Winslow DNA at all. None. She isn't related to Mom, to Dad, or to me."
The ballroom went so quiet I heard the ice shift in the champagne bucket.
I looked at my father.
Mr. Winslow stared at the tablecloth.
I looked at Janet.
She lifted her chin and met my eyes across the whole room.
"Take it off, Margaret," she said.
Her voice was calm and pleasant, the one she used to fire housekeepers.
I touched the pearls at my throat.
"Mom, there has to be a mistake."
"There is no mistake," Janet said.
"There is a girl in my house who was never mine, and I have fed her for twenty-four years."
A woman near the front gasped.
Somebody lifted a phone.
I understood then that nobody was going to stop this, because nobody in that room had ever stopped anything Janet started.
For twenty-four years I had been the Winslow who looked wrong.
My hair was auburn in a family of blondes.
My shoulders were broad in a family of narrow ones.
I laughed too loudly, ate too much, and asked questions at dinner.
Janet called me "our little cuckoo" in front of her friends, and everyone laughed, and I laughed too.
I was done laughing.
I reached behind my neck and undid the clasp.
The pearls were cool and heavy in my hand.
"You want them back?" I said.
"I'd like them back," Janet said, "and I'd like your key, and I'd like the car."
I nodded.
I walked straight to the champagne tower.
Kaitlyn gave a little squeak of alarm.
I dropped the pearls into the top glass, where they sank through the champagne and settled against the stem.
Then I took the car key out of my clutch and set it on the next tier.
"Thank you for the party," I said to the room.
Nobody breathed.
"I've spent my whole life trying to be what you wanted," I said to Janet.
"I'm going to stop now."
My voice shook only a little.
Janet's mouth went thin.
"You'll be back by morning," she said.
"You have no money, no name and nowhere to go."
"I know," I said.
It was strange how true it felt, and how light.
I turned around and walked toward the doors in my silver birthday dress and borrowed shoes, past the cake with my name piped on it.
Two hundred faces tracked me.
All but one looked at me.
He stood alone by the bar, a tall man in a dark suit with a drink he hadn't touched.
He did not look at me with pity or with hunger for gossip.
He looked at me the way you look at someone who has just made a very good move.
Then he lowered his glass an inch.
I did not know his name.
I pushed through the double doors into the cold April night and kept walking until I reached the edge of the lot.
My hands began to shake.
I realized I was still holding something.
Kaitlyn had dropped the printout beside the cake knife, and I had picked up the second page without noticing.
I stood under a parking light and smoothed it flat.
Below the line that said NO WINSLOW MATCH there was a second heading in smaller type.
CLOSE FAMILY MATCH FOUND.
My heart stopped.
DEAN KINSELLA, BROOKFIELD, WI.
FULL SIBLING. PROBABILITY 99.9 PERCENT.
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