One Night Stand novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Dinosaur

Mateo meets Otto in Dottie's kitchen and the toy dinosaur breaks something open; the lab says 99.9 percent. A long-lens photo of Otto at the window runs online.

He came at seven, on foot, with no driver and no suit jacket.

I watched him from the upstairs window as he stood on the pavement in front of Dottie's rowhouse and looked up at the numbers on the door.

A black car idled at the end of the block with two men in it.

He rolled his sleeves to the elbow, which I noticed, and then I made myself stop noticing.

Dottie got to the door before I did.

"You're taller on television," she said.

"I'm told it's the stage."

"I'm Dottie. I own this house. I fed that boy his first solid food and I've got a rolling pin in the kitchen drawer, so choose your words."

Mateo held out a paper bag. "I brought bread."

She looked in the bag.

"Hm," she said. "Good bread. Come in."

Otto was on the kitchen floor with his dinosaurs in a line, sorting them by who ate whom.

He looked up at the tall man in the doorway.

Mateo stopped walking.

I had thought about this moment for three years, in a dozen different shapes, and in none of them had he stood this still.

"Otto," I said, "this is Mateo."

"Hi," Otto said. He did not get up.

"Hello," Mateo said.

His voice was a little rough, and he cleared it.

"What are you playing?"

"That one eats that one." Otto pointed. "But that one eats everyone. That's Rex."

"Can I see Rex?"

Otto considered him with his head on one side and the left eyebrow slowly rising.

Mateo's own eyebrow went up before he could stop it.

Dottie put down a pot lid with a clang.

Otto took the largest dinosaur, the green one with the chewed tail, and held it out in both hands.

"You can hold him," he said. "But he bites."

Mateo crouched, and took the dinosaur very carefully, and held it flat on his palm.

"He's very big," he said.

"He's the biggest one."

"I can see that."

I turned around and ran the tap, because I could not stand there.

Behind me, Mateo asked if Rex ate bread.

Otto said no, Rex ate trees.

Dottie said, "Sit down and eat before it gets cold," and the three of them sat at my kitchen table and had spaghetti.

I did not sit.

I stood at the sink with my back to them and listened to him ask my son what his favorite color was.

At nine, Dottie took Otto up to bed.

Mateo and I were alone in the kitchen with the dishes.

"He's very polite," Mateo said.

"Dottie raised him."

"He looks at things the way I do."

"I noticed."

He leaned back against the counter and pressed his palm into one eye.

"I thought you were selling a story," he said. "For four years, every time my phone rang, I thought, this is the photographs."

"I never sold any photographs."

"You had a camera."

"I always have a camera."

He dropped his hand and looked at me, and for a moment he was only a man in a kitchen.

"I'd have liked to know," he said. "Before the steps."

"I tried to tell you before the steps."

"Yes," he said. "I know."

He rinsed the last plate and set it in the rack, and neither of us said anything else.

The result came on Friday at six in the morning, by email, to both of us at once.

I read it standing in the hallway in my socks.

Probability of paternity: 99.99 percent.

I sat down on the stairs.

My phone rang almost at once.

"I've read it," Mateo said. His voice was very low. "I'm in my car. I'm outside."

"At six in the morning?"

"I've been here since four." A pause. "I didn't want to knock."

I went down and opened the door.

He was on the step in yesterday's shirt with his phone in his fist, and he did not say anything at all.

He just looked past me into the hallway, at the little rain boots lined up by the door.

"Come in," I said. "Dottie's making eggs."

I put the kettle on.

Mateo had Otto on his knee by seven, and Otto was showing him how Rex could open his mouth.

At seven-fifteen my phone buzzed.

It was Dottie's nephew, who works nights at a newspaper and who is never wrong about anything.

"Callie," he wrote. "Look at the Inquirer site. Don't let Otto see."

I opened it.

It was a photograph of my kitchen window.

My son was in it with his dinosaur against the glass, shot from across the street with a very long lens.

The headline said: KINCAID'S SECRET SON.

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