Zach had a great time at the game with Dad. The team won again, so the mood in the dugout was ecstatic for a few minutes at the end. Zach didn't venture out of the dugout much except to get a drink from the water fountain once; he knew it was silly, but he didn't want to risk not being allowed back inside. This was all a wonderful dream, and he didn't want to wake up.
After the game they returned home, Dad explaining the finer points of baseball on the way. Zach loved it, even if he only retained half of what Dad told him. He savored the attention. He liked being a family, liked the feeling of it. He hadn't felt that in a long time.
Mom had obituaries and photographs ready for them to search through on the computer when they came inside, and he helped her look through them for an hour before she announced that it was time to give up and "hit the sack," which, she explained, meant going to bed. He brushed his teeth, but thankfully he didn't have to take a bath, not tonight. The amazing, huge bed was as soft and warm as ever, and he fell right to sleep.
School was good the next day, but he noticed that he didn't crave it like usual. He had other things to look forward to now, like Dad telling him that since Mom had to work late, he would take a break from his own work and pick Zach up from school, and then Zach could come work with him and Derek. Dad even said he would pay Zach for his work, like an employee. Zach had never had money before. If this was a dream, it was a magnificent dream. He wanted to sleep forever.
They zipped along the freeway for a few minutes in Dad's pickup, then exited a couple of blocks from their destination, a preschool. Derek's truck was backed up to the playground, its bed loaded with a mound of woodchips. Derek himself, tall, strong, and dark-skinned, dressed in dirty jeans and a sweaty T-shirt, was standing atop the mound, pulling and shoving woodchips onto the ground with his rake.
"And there's the new employee!" he called heartily as Zach emerged from the cab.
"Hi," Zach responded with a wave.
Dad picked up two more rakes that had been set aside and handed one to Zach. "Mr. Fleming, welcome to your first day on the job. Follow me." With Zach behind him, he strode to the growing woodchip pile and began raking chips away from it and across a broad sheet of black plastic stretched atop bare ground. "Our job is to rake these chips out all the way across this plastic," he said, indicating the space around the playground equipment. "This morning, all of this was covered with grass. We dug it out so we could lay this weed barrier and these woodchips down. Are you ready?"
"Definitely!" Zach replied, and he began to rake enthusiastically. It was fun. He was getting paid for this? What was more, Dad got paid to do this everyday? Well, he did different things, too, of course…like planting trees and wrestling in the mud. Zach grinned at the thought of getting paid to wrestle in the mud.
Derek propped his rake on one end and rested for a moment, watching them. "You know, Craig," he said, "I was thinking about what you said about Zach, how he's got to be your cousin's son… You ought to do one of those DNA tests."
Dad glanced up at Derek as he continued raking woodchips out of the other man's pile. "You mean a paternity test? I already thought about that. But there's no way I'm his—"
"They can check for cousins, too," Derek interrupted. "My mother has a friend who is adopted, and she did one of those tests and found a brother and two cousins from her birth family."
At this, Dad stopped raking and gazed up at Derek in thought. "They can check for cousins?"
Derek nodded.
"How about cousins once removed?"
"I don't know," Derek answered. "Maybe they could make a good guess, anyway."
"That could help a lot. I wonder if we might be able to find some DNA from Elliott?" Dad turned to look at Zach. "What do you think, Zach? It might give us some real answers."
Zach didn't really understand, but he nodded anyway. "Yeah, Dad. We should do it."
Dad gave him a confident smile, shot a thumbs-up to Derek, and set back to work. Derek pushed more woodchips onto his pile, and Zach thrust his rake into them again, pulling them loose and spreading them, like his dad.
*****
The Boy Who Appeared from the Rain Page 31