Soon Lily and Ben were in the car, on their way to pick up Mimi — Mimi who was theirs officially, who could not be taken away from them. Lily’s happiness was overshadowed by only one minor factor: She was completely baffled. “So,” she said to Ben, “how did you rig it?”
Ben looked as if someone had just shaved forty points off his IQ. “Rig ... what?”
“Rig the DNA test! Mimi has the DNA of two dead people. So how did you fake it?”
“I honestly don’t know what happened. I mean, Dez was the sperm donor for you and Charlotte, right? The ‘designated wanker,’ he used to call himself.” Ben laughed. “I remember once he said to me —
you know how Dez talked — he said, ‘Benjamin, my dear boy, when I was sixteen, I never thought I’d get tired of wanking off, but dear god, this sperm donor thing is putting welts on my weenie. Now I know why Portnoy complained.’”
Ben laughed, and Lily joined him. It felt so good to laugh now ... now that she knew that Charlotte and Dez’s biological child would be raised in a way that would have made them happy.
Ben interrupted his own laughter with a sudden, “Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?” Lily said.
“I was just thinking about how exhausted Dez got with the whole sperm donor thing ... God, that seems like so long ago, doesn’t it, when you and Charlotte were trying to get pregnant?”
“It was a while ago, I guess...almost three years.”
“Yeah. You know, I hate to admit it, but after y’all pulled Dez’s name out of the hat, I didn’t pay too much attention to all the baby-making attempts. That was back when I was so in love with Chris, even though our personalities totally clashed. I was so obsessed with him, though ... oh...my...god!” Ben lost control of the car, swerved, then finally regained control, and pulled over to the side of the road.
“What?” Lily gasped. “Are you trying to get us killed now that this thing’s finally over?”
“No. It’s just ... oh my god.”
“Talk, boy. Talk.”
“I just thought of something. There was this one week when Charlotte was just sure she was ovulating, and you were getting two sperm donations a day from Dez, one in the morning and one at night. The poor guy was just whipped — he said it was apparently no myth about women being sexually demanding. Anyway, I remember one night I had been out with Chris, and we had had a big fight at the restaurant. I was so mad I stopped at Blake’s on the way home and had a couple of drinks, just to calm down. And of course, you know my alcohol tolerance. I was bombed by the time I got home.
“I found Dez upstairs in bed, glumly examining this empty artichoke jar he was supposed to ejaculate into. He had all these boy mags spread around him on the bed, but his face just looked desolate.
‘Benjamin, my boy,’ he said to me. ‘I just can’t do it. I’ve come inside this jar so many times, I feel like I ought to marry it.’ Like I said, I was drunk, and he was exhausted, so I just grabbed the jar from him and said, ‘Oh, hell, let me do it.’”
“So the jar of semen Dez brought over that night was —”
“Mine. I don’t believe it, though. I just did it that one time, and Dez did it dozens and dozens —”
