Usually, when the boy got home from grocery shopping, he helped his mother unpack the bags in the kitchen, mainly by reveling in how rich their family seemed to be for this one moment each week and wondering which item he would honor by opening it first. But this time, the boy ran right to his room with the cereal box so that he could keep his word to hide it from his father, who found both the boy and the box only minutes later, drawn by the sobs to his bedroom, where the boy was discovered crying over a torn-apart box of Frosted Flakes.
“I thought we didn’t buy this kind of cereal,” said the boy’s father, crouching down to look directly at Tony the Tiger, eyeing him as one would an enemy and an equal.
“If you have the right secret code in the box in the treasure chest,” explained the boy, swallowing mucus, “you win a hundred thousand dollars. We’d be rich.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” said the boy’s father.
The boy’s father stood up and pulled a hardcover dictionary from the shelf above the boy’s bed, the frayed sweater he always wore on non-teaching days riding up as he reached.
“If you can guess the word I’m thinking of on this page, I will give you a hundred thousand dollars.”
The boy stopped crying and guessed.
He guessed wrong.
This time the boy was too confused by this whole whatever-it-was to cry.
“What would you have done if I got it right?”
“I have no idea,” said his father, with a smile-like expression the boy had never seen before. “But you didn’t.”
The boy didn’t quite understand how this lesson had worked—he didn’t have the words for this yet, either. There was something odd and cool about his father’s introduction of this consolation contest, something that he would later be able to describe as something like wryness; some offbeat calm about this presentation of a paradoxical idea, the promise of a possibility that couldn’t possibly be kept. For now, while the boy didn’t yet have the words to explain the feeling, he could feel it, and he liked it, and he wanted to be a part of it. So he accepted this as the conclusion of the story of the cereal-box contest.
But not for long.
The next day the boy ran to the supermarket with all the money he had the second the school bell rang; bought five boxes of Frosted Flakes and another three of Corn Flakes with the same prize offer on the box; and ran back to school in time to catch his bus.
He felt especially grown-up to be riding the bus with grocery bags and desperately hoped that someone would ask him why.
“Why are you carrying grocery bags?” one girl finally asked.
“None of your business.”
The boy got home and started ripping up the boxes, starting with Corn Flakes, so that the Frosted Flakes, which he actually liked, would stay fresher a few seconds longer.
On the first box of Corn Flakes, he lost. On the second box of Corn Flakes, he won the $100,000 prize.
The boy checked the other boxes just in case he won anything else. He didn’t. That was fine. One $100,000 prize was still a good day’s work.
The boy called a family meeting, his first.
“First, I have a confession to make,” said the boy. “I know we don’t buy sugar cereals or brand-name cereals. But I went to the grocery store by myself today, and I bought more boxes of Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes so I could enter that contest again. So I broke two rules. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you,” said the boy’s mother.
“We understand,” said the boy’s father, with something calm and ironic in his tone again. What was that? Wryness, again? “Thank you for your honesty.”
“Okay, good,” said the boy. “Now the good news: I won the contest. We’re rich!”
This story is about to take a more personal turn, and I am starting to feel less comfortable that I am telling it the way that I am. So let me come clean on a couple of things: I am the boy in the story, and this is the story of how I found out my father was not my father.
“Let me see the box,” he said quietly.
I handed it to him. He looked at it.
“Now let me see another box,” he said. “A losing box.”
“Which losing box?”
“Any of them.”
“There are seven—”
“Any fucking box,” he said quietly. “Any box. All of them, just one—any of them.”
I walked over with all the boxes. He looked at two and then put the rest back down.