The tiny bracelet in the palm of my hand was cracked and yellowed, with its little white beads strung on a thread of plastic, and the letters on the beads said GUIDRY. I read it three times in the hush of the funeral home. Rene was leaning over my shoulder, and I felt him go still. The name on the bracelet of the baby my mother had taken home from the hospital, the baby we had called Rene Doucet, was not the name of our family at all. It was the name of the woman standing in front of us.
Nobody said a word. Odile Guidry, with her cane and her good black coat, looked at my brother with eyes as wet as mine. “I did not want to tell you here,” she said. “I did not want to tell you at all. But I am eighty one years old, and I have kept this bracelet for sixty years.” Rene put out his hand and touched the beads with one finger, the way a person touches a stove to see whether it is hot. “Mrs. Guidry,” he said, in a small voice, “are you saying I am your son?”
She did not answer directly. She turned her head, and a man was standing at the door of the chapel, a tall gray man in a Navy windbreaker with his cap in his hands. He had the shoulders of Rene and the stubborn jaw of our father, and I knew him at once, though I had never seen him before.
Lucien Guidry walked down the aisle slowly, like a man crossing a bridge he was not sure would hold. He stopped before my brother, and the two of them looked at each other as if each were seeing a stranger in a mirror.
A mother can love one child with her arms and the other with a present in the attic, and neither love is smaller for being a secret.
We did not rush. The people of Lafayette do not rush a thing that matters. We buried my mother in the morning, and the whole family went to the house afterward for gumbo, as always. Odile sat at the head of the table beside Rene, and Lucien sat beside me. After the meal, we did what I had been afraid to suggest. A cousin who works at the hospital arranged for two simple tests, and we sent our cheeks to a laboratory in Houston, all four of us, and then waited.
Eleven days later the envelope arrived. The paper said what the bracelet had said, in quieter language. Rene was the son of Odile. Lucien was the son of my mother, Yvette, and therefore my own full brother. I read the page out loud at the kitchen table, and when I finished, nobody spoke. Then Rene laughed, a short disbelieving laugh, and said, “Well, I always did like rice and gravy more than gumbo.” That broke us. We laughed until we cried, all of us together, for a good ten minutes.
I do not know how to describe what happened next without making it sound simpler than it was. There were hard moments. Rene grieved the mother he had lost, though she was dead, and Lucien grieved the childhood he had spent in a house that was not his. But Odile took one of them by each hand and said that she was too old to waste a minute. She said God had finally given her both of her boys back, one at a time, and she meant to enjoy them.
On Christmas Eve, the four of us drove to the old house and climbed the pull down ladder into the attic. The forty one presents sat against the chimney, gray with dust, each with its small tag. Lucien knelt beside them. I handed him a small package marked 1964, and he turned it over and over in his big hands, and then he opened it. Inside, wrapped in tissue, was a wooden fire engine, painted red, a little chipped, the kind of thing a mother buys in a hurry.
He opened all forty one. It took three hours. A truck, a ball glove, a cap gun, a Walkman, a game for the television. The Walkman still had a tape in it, a cassette of Cajun waltzes, and he put the headphones on and listened, and I watched his whole face change. When he finished, he took the headphones off and said, hoarsely, that he had been given more presents in one night than in his whole childhood. Then he asked whether he might take the fire engine home.
It sits on the mantel of his house in Pensacola now, beside a photograph of two old women, my mother and Odile, taken at the church picnic of 1965, when they stood with their babies in their arms and did not know. Every Christmas Eve we gather in Lafayette, all of us, the four and the grandchildren, and after Mass I wrap one present, a small one, and carry it up the ladder. It is for the baby Jesus, I tell the children. It is also for everyone who waited.