Fitz Read online

  “ ‘Semi-serious,’ I said. ‘Just a little serious.’

  “ ‘What does she do?’ my mother asked.

  “What you did—your job, your income and status, your prospects—to my parents, that was who you were.” He glances at Fitz. Maybe he’s wondering if Fitz knows people like that. Maybe he wants Fitz to believe that he is not a person like that.

  “What Annie did was make me happy,” his father says. “I could have told her that. Instead, I lied. I said that she was a law student, too, third-year, and when I hung up, I felt sick.”

  So you chickened out, Fitz doesn’t say. That was your dare-to-be-great moment, your chance to declare your independence. But you didn’t do it. You took a pass.

  “When I was offered the position in St. Louis,” his father says, “I was thrilled. A clerkship with a federal district judge was something special. It was my dream job.

  “But now we had to figure some things out—we couldn’t go on like this. For months we’d been speaking only in the present. But now I had a job out of state. At first Annie said that she was happy for me. She didn’t want to hold me back. She never demanded anything from me. But now things were going to change. We had to make some decisions.

  “It all came to a head one Saturday night. I was leaving on Monday for St. Louis. We’d been talking all day, going around and around. We’d been talking for days, really. You were in a little baby seat. It had a handle and a little canopy. I had brought a pizza over, and it sat on the coffee table in front of us, untouched, just looking nasty. It seemed like some kind of accusation, even—who thought this was a good idea?”

  Fitz understands. What kind of person brings cheese-and-pepperoni to this?

  “We got into it again, really arguing this time. It was confusing, all my coming and going, that’s what she was saying. It was making things worse. It wasn’t right.”

  His father says he was ready to respond. There were some points he wanted to make. He wanted to take exception to some of the things Annie had said. Maybe he got a little bit, well, lawyerly.

  “Annie cut me off. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘Cut the crap. You can’t have it both ways.’ She said something about stepping up, being a man.”

  Yes, Fitz thinks. Yes! It’s about time. Step the hell up.

  “I guess I raised my voice then,” his father says. “I just wanted to defend myself. Annie was being unfair. I can’t even remember what it was I said. I was upset. Doesn’t matter. It was loud, it was angry. The pizza box got knocked on the floor. The baby was still in his seat, right there on the couch between us. He startled. He started crying.”

  “That was me,” Fitz says. “The crying baby.” He feels like he needs to remind his father. This story—it’s not all about him.

  “You,” his father says. “You started crying.”

  And Fitz isn’t stupid. The pizza box didn’t knock itself on the floor. Who’s he trying to kid?

  “Annie snatched you up in a flash. Held you close and just like that, you stopped crying. But your face was still beet red. You gave me a look. As if to say, what are you doing here? As if to say, get lost. That’s just what you seemed to be saying. You are not needed here. I belong to her, not you. You’re the problem. You’re unnecessary.”

  Of course, Fitz feels like saying. Who needs a father?

  “Annie told me that it would be best if I would leave. Best for her. Best for you. Best for everyone.”

  “So that’s when you walked out.”

  “Stepped back,” his father says. “That’s what I thought I was doing. Just for the moment, like a time-out. A cooling-off period.”

  “Stepped back?” Fitz says. Can he hear himself?

  “Annie told me that it would be better for all of us,” his father says.

  “Better for you,” Fitz says quietly.

  “I know how it must sound,” his father says. “But it was temporary, that’s what I thought at the time. That’s what I told myself.”

  The rest of the story is pretty much what Mr. Massey calls denouement, falling action. After Curtis left town, Annie moved back in with Grandpa John and Uncle Dunc. Fitz knows things had been testy at home during her teenage years—back then his mom had a wild side—which is one reason she moved out in the first place. But now, they must have come together, because that’s what you do, that’s how family works.

  As soon as he got to St. Louis, his father sent a check.

  “I had no intention of being a deadbeat,” he says.

  Annie mailed him back a polite thank-you note. After that, he sent money every month, an amount that struck him as generous and gradually increased over the years. More at Christmas and around his birthday and at the beginning of each school year.

  “While you were gone,” Fitz asks, “did you think about us? Did you think about me?”

  “Of course,” he says. “Of course I did.” Those first years, he says, he was working long hours, twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day, living like a monk in a tiny apartment, but still, he would remember that baby smell, the way the baby threw his arms over his head after a feeding, milk-drunk. He hoped he was sleeping better.

  “I called a few times,” he says. It was awkward. Formal and polite. Annie thanked him for the checks, and he told her she was welcome, it was nothing. He asked how the baby was doing, and she said fine. She said everything was fine, and it was better this way. He agreed, and she agreed with his agreement. It was easier to believe her. Easier just to write a check, to believe he was doing the right thing.

  When he came back to town once, he stopped by the house. He brought some flowers and a teddy bear. Her father was home, and he did not invite him in. “He’d had a few drinks,” his father said. “He said that Annie wasn’t home. He said that I wasn’t welcome there. Told me what I could do with the flowers. I chose not to get into it with him. I called and left messages, but Annie didn’t call back.”

  One day followed the next. It’s just the way it is. His clerkship ended, and he took a job with one of the largest firms in St. Louis.

  “Weeks passed,” he say. “Months, years. I made partner. I thought about reconnecting, getting acquainted. I thought about it a lot.”

  “But you didn’t do it,” Fitz says.

  “No,” his father says. “I didn’t do it.”

  They’re both silent for a moment. For now, Fitz can’t think of anything else to say.

  “Every day you don’t do something,” his father says, “it’s easier not to do it the next.”

  28

  “You have a kid there?” Fitz asks. They’ve been driving around more or less aimlessly while his father talks. They’ve been out as far as the airport and the megamall, and are in Highland Park now. Edgcumbe Road. They’ve just passed the golf course and the theater where Fitz and his mom sometimes go to see second-run movies.

  Fitz is trying now to keep the story going, trying to keep poking and prodding, trying to keep the ball in the air. But he’s running out of gas. His father’s story is slowly working its way through his insides, making him feel something. It’s like a spiked drink, he’s afraid, it’s starting to make him woozy. Or maybe it’s more like he just swallowed some broken glass—any minute, his insides are gonna start bleeding. Later, there’ll be time to sort it out. Like one of the poems they read in Mr. Massey’s class, he can chop it up, weigh and measure every little bit, analyze and interpret it, but for now he just wants more: more details, more words, more anything. “You got a kid in St. Louis, too?”

  “No,” his father says. He looks surprised. “No kid in St. Louis. No kid anywhere else.”

  “And you’ve really never been married?”

  “Never.”

  They’re at a four-way stop, and he motions for a momish woman in a minivan to go first. He may be a terrible father, but he’s a courteous driver—Fitz has to give him that much. Go figure.

  “I think maybe some people are just not cut out for that,” his father says.
r />   “For what?”

  “You know—for that life. I think I’m one of them. I guess I’ve learned that much about myself.”

  Fitz wonders if it can really be that simple. Some people have a marriage allergy? Maybe. What about his mom? She went out on dates, more it seemed when Fitz was little. He can remember her primping, he can remember shaking hands with a few guys, playing the little gentleman, being interested in their cars, them being nice and kindly in an exaggerated way, trying to show his mom what good guys they were. There was Philip, who lasted longer than any of the others, who became a kind of regular around the house with his pressed jeans and full packs of sugarless gum. He was a computer expert, with a monster laptop Fitz played games on. Fitz liked him, but he stopped coming around eventually—not so much a breakup as a fade-out. His mom seemed kind of relieved. Recently Fitz even had some hopes that his mom and Mr. Boudreau, his French teacher, might hit it off on parent-teacher night. But she’s never seemed especially eager to hook up with someone. She sure isn’t one of those desperate middle-aged singles. Maybe she’s got the allergy, too? Fitz wonders if you can inherit something like that. He wonders if he is doomed to be a serial loner, too.

  29

  They’re still driving, on Snelling again now, passing a string of funeral homes, where they were about ten minutes ago—it’s like they’re in a holding pattern, waiting for permission to land somewhere. Fitz has a kind of movie in his head taking shape from his father’s story. The scene of his father walking out, leaving him and his mom behind—Fitz knows already it’s the one that’s going to stick with him, it’s the one he’s going to come back to and watch again and again. He can almost hear the door slam.

  In a Hollywood movie, Curtis would leave, but it wouldn’t end there. There’d be another act. Later, he’d come back, and there’d be a tearful reunion. They’d both realize how stupid they’d been. But in real life—his real life—it never happened. It’s not like his father was Bogey in Casablanca either, saying goodbye for some honorable motive. It was selfish, he basically said so himself. As if copping to that wipes the slate clean. It reminds Fitz of some politician’s feeble blanket apology: sorry if I offended anyone, now let’s turn the page, let’s put this behind us. Meanwhile, whoever it is he’s cheated is like, wait a minute, not so fast.

  What really bothers Fitz is how easily his father seemed to step aside. He and his mom exchanged words, okay, they got worked up and said some things, he can understand that. She tells him, get out and stay out, etc. He goes to St. Louis, cools off a little, and then comes around with what, some flowers? It seems so lame. Why didn’t he put up more of a fight?

  “So tell me again,” Fitz says. “Why you didn’t come around. Why you didn’t, you know, like, visit.”

  “She didn’t want me to,” his father says. “She said it was best for you.”

  “And you believed her.”

  His father doesn’t say anything. Maybe he can’t think of a plausible evasion. Maybe for once he’s at a loss for words. He puts on his blinker, checks his blind spot, and changes lanes.

  “You didn’t make much of an effort,” Fitz says.

  “That so?” his father says. His voice is almost too calm, a kind of warning, a snake’s rattle, which Fitz ignores. He hates his father’s composure, that layer of lawyer cool.

  “Come on,” Fitz says. “Tell the truth. You didn’t even try. You were so over us. Why don’t you just admit it?”

  “Look, my friend,” his father says. Anybody who calls you “my friend” is not your friend—Fitz knows that much.

  “Maybe you should have a talk with your mother,” his father says. “Ask her who told me to stay away. Who told me that again and again and again. Who didn’t return my calls. Whose father threatened me. Who refused me, who wouldn’t let me in. Maybe you should take out your little piece and ask her some questions.”

  Fitz is startled by his father’s tone, by his—what’s the word for it?—his vehemence. He did it fifteen years ago, and now he’s done it again. This is the guy in the story. He’s looking at him right now. Fitz can totally see it. The man can be nice when he’s in control. In his office, surrounded by his people, he’s Mr. Magnanimous. But push him a little, get up in his grill, he’s a different person altogether.

  Fitz flips up his hood. He’s got nothing more to say. He’s out of questions. He can’t even remember why it seemed so important to get his father to talk, to tell him a story. A story! A bunch of words. That’s all it is. It doesn’t do anything. What’s the point? Whatever his father tells him, that’s not going to change anything. Those years, growing up without a dad, feeling jealous and unlovable and odd. It is what it is. Fitz usually hates people who say that. It seems so mindless, so all-purpose: you can say it about anything. But now it makes some kind of sense to him.

  He looks out the window of the car and studies the nice houses they’re passing. Brick and stone, some with winding driveways, all with beautiful green lawns and neatly trimmed bushes. Probably this is the kind of neighborhood where his father grew up. A suburb of Chicago—that’s what he said. Maybe he was spoiled. Maybe he was one of those kids who never owned up, who broke something and just asked his parents for a new one, who messed up and walked away.

  Fitz needs some music. Not his own—right now he’s tired of his own sound, and he’s not sure his father even deserves to hear any more from him and Caleb. He flips through the sleeve of discs and pulls out the Beatles’ Revolver. He knows the album so well that when one track ends, he somehow feels the beginning of the next one even before it starts to play: “Eleanor Rigby” after “Taxman,” “Good Day Sunshine” after “She Said She Said,” the album unfolding song by song as inevitably as the alphabet. “Yellow Submarine” is one of the first songs Uncle Dunc taught him to play on the guitar—G, C, D, and A minor—and he can still remember the pride and pleasure he felt strumming while his mom and his uncle sang along. In seventh grade, when his Beatles obsession was in full force, Fitz wore a Sgt. Pepper T-shirt just about every day, and his mom even baked a birthday cake for George on February twenty-fifth.

  Fitz is listening to George’s famous backward guitar solo on “I’m Only Sleeping” when suddenly the volume cuts out. He looks over at his father and sees him holding down a button on the steering wheel—he’s got built-in controls.

  “I’m sorry,” his father says. He says it softly, but even hooded, Fitz hears him perfectly. “I didn’t mean to be short with you.”

  Fitz doesn’t respond. All he can think is what a strange expression: short with you. “It was wrong to speak to you that way. I was wrong. I guess you hit a little close to home. I’m sorry.”

  Fitz imagines that it can’t be very easy for his father to admit he’s wrong. To apologize to a kid. I’m sorry—that can’t be something he says very often. “It’s okay,” Fitz tells him. “Don’t worry about it.” Why not? Apology accepted. Forgiveness is free. And it’s not as if he’s been a model of good manners himself. Really, he’s in no position to judge.

  Whenever he’s inclined to judge someone, his mom will usually call him out. She’ll stick up for any underdog, criminals even. You don’t know what they’ve been through, she’ll say, you don’t know what they’ve suffered, you have no idea what you would do if you were in their position.

  If he were in his father’s shoes fifteen years ago, what would Fitz have done? He’s heard crying babies before, and they jangle his nerves. An angry woman showing him the door, giving him permission to leave, telling him, ordering him, really, to walk. Maybe he’d ease out the door, too.

  One of Caleb’s favorite all-purpose phrases is can’t imagine. He says it when someone tells him about something foreign to him, outside his somewhat limited range of experience. Somebody’s girlfriend woes, maybe, some kind of love triangle situation, say. Caleb takes it all in—he’s a great listener—but that’s about all he says. Can’t imagine. It might seem unsympathetic. Most people want you to say just
the opposite, that you get it, you understand—you can relate. But Fitz has come to appreciate his friend’s honesty. He likes that he doesn’t pretend to understand what he really knows nothing about. So what was it like to be his father back then? Fitz can’t imagine. He really can’t.

  Fitz likes to think that he himself would have acted honorably. Manned up. Not taken the easy way out. He’d like to think that. But really, he doesn’t know. He does know that he’s taken the easy way himself plenty of times. It’s easy to be brave in theory.

  Fitz comes out of his hood and looks around. They’re passing a school now. There’s a line of buses idling outside. A woman in a reflective vest and a handheld stop sign makes them wait while a woman with a stroller crosses in front of them. School is about to let out.

  It feels like the longest day of his life. It also feels like the shortest. They crammed a lot into a few hours together. They made some memories. You can say that much.

  Here’s the problem. As good as this day has been, it’s been forced. Not freely given. They’ve fed sea lions, he’s had a second piece of pie, he’s heard about the exploding television, he’s made his dad laugh. He’s visited a law office and shared one of his songs. He’s heard his father apologize. But it doesn’t count, not really. What you get at gunpoint, that’s not love. That’s something else altogether. You can take a guy’s car, but you can’t jack someone’s heart. It doesn’t work that way.

  Fitz can remember when he realized that Bethany, the teenage girl who lived across the street, was getting paid to play with him when his mom was out. He thought she liked playing with him, building with Lego toys, coloring, lying on the floor with all the figures from his Star Wars bucket around, arranging battle scenes. Then he saw money change hands, the smile on Bethany’s face. To her it was a job. When he figured that out, he felt stupid and ashamed.

  They have no future. This is a one-off. Fitz and his father, they’re going to be known as one-hit wonders. Tomorrow, probably, he’s going to get a restraining order, and it will be illegal for Fitz to go within a hundred yards of him. It was fun while it lasted.