Fitz is thinking about what his father told him. So far, the dots are still not connecting. The story is not quite tracking. This is what he knows: They met at a diner. She made awesome sandwiches. They talked. He picked her up for a date. Her television blew up. He met her father and they did not hit it off. Fitz was born, and his father held him long enough for a picture to be taken. He went to St. Louis. Fifteen and a half years passed, and here they are. You could say there are a few holes in the story.
“So why’d you come back?” Fitz asks. This is what lawyers do, they ask questions. They interrogate, they cross-examine. The good ones are relentless. They scare people. You see it in all the courtroom dramas. They go after lies, contradictions, weakness, soft spots. Maybe, Fitz thinks, he can give his father a dose of his own medicine.
“Come back?”
“To St. Paul. Why?” Fitz knows that Gatsby did not end up across the bay from Daisy by accident. It was part of a plan.
“It was a good job.”
“You had a good job, right? There are good jobs all over the country.”
“This was a perfect fit.”
“It just happened to be here. Is that what you’re saying? It’s a coincidence. Same job, in Omaha? You take it?”
“Nothing wrong with Omaha,” his father says.
Fitz so wants to believe that his father came back to St. Paul to be near him. He wants to hear him say it. He’s tried—what do they call it?—leading the witness, but it’s no good. He’s going to have to try another line of questioning.
There’s a lot more that he’s curious about. Like, how did his mom even get pregnant? Didn’t they have sex education back then? Nobody took Health? He’s too embarrassed to ask. He doesn’t want to go there. But you’d think they would have known better.
They slow down on a curve and Fitz gets a good view of a happy little family on the walking path: Mom pushing a stroller, Dad with a yellow lab on a leash. It’s a weekday afternoon, but there they are, strolling in the sunshine. They could be in a public service announcement for family togetherness.
“So what happened?” Fitz says. “What went wrong?”
“What do you mean?” his father asks.
“Something went wrong. You broke up with Mom,” Fitz says. “You broke up with me.”
Of course, that’s the issue. Not that his parents aren’t together. In his catalog of fathers, there are plenty of divorced dads, several varieties, Caleb’s, for instance. He’s got a stepdad now—that’s a whole separate species—but his dad-dad, he checks in at Christmas and birthdays with gifts for Caleb and his sister. He takes them up north for a week in the summer. When Caleb screws up, gets a bad grade, his dad calls and gives him a talking-to. It’s not perfect—Caleb rolls his eyes about his father’s terrible taste in music, he’s not fond of his new girlfriend—but the man is on the job, he’s in the mix.
“It wasn’t about you,” his father says. “It was never about you.”
Fitz feels another quick, hot surge of anger. Your father bails on you, takes a fifteen-year hike, and then says it’s not about you. It’s a good thing probably that the gun is zipped into his backpack. In movies, when someone says something so stupid to a real tough guy, he gets pistol-whipped. Fitz totally understands the temptation.
They’re on a bridge now, crossing over from Minneapolis back into St. Paul. Below, the Mississippi is shimmering in the afternoon sun.
“What was it about, then?” Fitz says. He’s looking out the window, staring down at the river. There’s something almost hypnotic about it, it’s calming him down to watch it. “Tell me that.”
“We were so different,” his father says. “From different worlds, that’s what she used to say.”
That sounds like another soap opera to Fitz, maybe a romance novel. Now Fitz is feeling not so much angry as exhausted. Maybe it’s his belly full of burger and apple pie. Maybe his father’s line of bull is making him sleepy. He feels almost too tired to call him out.
They’re exiting the bridge now, and Fitz turns to get a last look at the river. He remembers seeing the source, on vacation in northern Minnesota with his mom, and there, at the headwaters, in Itasca Park, he and his mom waded across in a few quick steps. It made an impression. Something so modest, a shallow trickle, could become swift and powerful, dangerous even, a force to be reckoned with.
It’s the same river that flows through St. Louis, where Chuck Berry grew up, where his father lived, all the way down to the Delta, home to the bluesmen that Caleb so reveres and refers to sometimes by first name, as if they are still alive, as if he knows them, as if they are kids from school. “This is how Robert would play it,” Caleb might say, and Fitz knows he’s talking about Robert Johnson, who died in something like 1930. On the other end of this same river is New Orleans, Fats Domino, the Ninth Ward, all those people stranded on roofs and stuck in the Superdome. His mom watched them on television, tears streaming down her face. Somehow they are all connected by it, this river, Fitz and his father and his mom and the folks down there. Fitz wishes he could find a way to write a song about that.
22
Fitz flips up the hood of his sweatshirt. It is a kind of private signal with his mom, half joke and half not, his own personal do-not-disturb sign. It’s what he does when he doesn’t feel like talking, when he needs a little Fitz time. It’s how he retracts into his shell when he feels vulnerable. He’s read somewhere that some rock star, Dylan probably, somebody legendary, communicates this way with his people—when the hood is up, it means I don’t wanna talk. It means leave me alone. Fitz loves the wordless efficiency of the gesture—no need to explain, which is exactly the point—and he sometimes likes the sensation of being insulated from the world. It’s a way for him to step back. It’s not as if all his clothing is hooded—though a surprisingly large percentage of his wardrobe does indeed consist of hoodies—and it’s not all that often, really, that he feels the need. But sometimes he does. Especially in the car, he’s glad to have a no-chat option with his mom, who may smile a little when he flips up but always respects his preference. It works for him, with his mom at least.
His father obviously doesn’t know the code, doesn’t speak the language. Right now he seems to be in his own world, too. He might as well be hooded. He’s off in his own place, wherever that it is.
Fitz unzips the front pocket of his backpack and takes out a CD. It’s got a handful of songs they recorded the week before, just Fitz and Caleb and a drum machine, a few covers and one original. It isn’t a demo or anything, just something to show for all their time in Caleb’s basement. Fitz isn’t sure why he packed it this morning. He wasn’t really planning on playing it. But right now it feels like the right thing to do. They’re in the middle of something, going from one thing to the next, scenery whizzing by them—it’s the perfect time for, what do they call it? A musical interlude.
The first song on it is them doing a number by Jimmy Reed, one of Caleb’s heroes. He wasn’t blind, but he did have epilepsy and was an alcoholic, too, of course. A couple of weeks before, Caleb gave Fitz a CD of his songs. Told Fitz he should try to write something like it, but there was no way. If you copied out the lyrics to one of his songs, they didn’t look like much.
Ain’t that lovin’ you, baby?
Ain’t that lovin’ you, baby?
Ain’t that lovin’ you, baby?
But you don’t even know my name.
They didn’t always even seem to make a lot of sense. It was like the song might have been made out of phrases written on scraps of paper and pulled out of a hat or something. But somehow still, the songs got under Fitz’s skin.
Probably it was Jimmy’s vocals, the knowing, lazy way he sang, that made Fitz feel something that wasn’t on the page. It was all about wanting, wanting something you didn’t have, wanting it with every ounce of your being. It was like Jimmy knew all about having a hole at the center of yourself. The songs had some kind of New Orleans beat—it was happy music, i
t made you want to move your feet—but underneath it all, there was something else, something desperate and incurable.
Fitz slips in the disc and hits play. The song they cover is “I Wanna Be Loved.” Strumming his guitar’s bottom strings with a thumb pick, Caleb sounds a little like Jimmy. He has recently acquired a harmonica rack, which he is awfully proud of, and manages to play some decent harp fills. Fitz is playing a boogie-woogie shuffle on the bass. Caleb’s singing is passable. He sounds a little less weary than Jimmy, he sounds more urgent, he’s got a little punk edge, but it works all right.
I wanna be loved but by only you
Because I know, I know your love is true.
Fitz turns it up a little, adjusts the balance. They sound pretty good on his father’s fancy sound system, just not enough bass, which Fitz corrects. He wishes Caleb could hear for himself.
His father cocks his head to show that he’s listening. Fitz wants him to like it. To be impressed even. Wowed. And he hates himself for caring. Why should it even matter what this guy thinks of him? What does he know about music? Fitz shouldn’t give a damn one way or another. He shouldn’t crave his approval. But he does.
“That’s you, right?” his father says. “Your band?”
“Yeah,” Fitz says.
His father listens some more. “I like your sound,” he says. “You have a nice groove going. I don’t think many kids your age understand the blues. But you guys got it, you really got it.”
He is saying all the right things. But Fitz doesn’t trust it. He doesn’t trust him. Everything he says could mean just what it says. Or it could mean something else entirely. “I like your sound” could mean “I like your sound.” Or it could mean “Maybe you ought to consider taking some lessons.” It could mean “All right, I listened, you satisfied?” Or it could even mean “Please don’t shoot me.”
Fitz could try to figure it out. He could try to turn himself into a human lie detector. Study his father’s breathing and gestures, try to tune in to his micro-expressions, practice the same kind of close reading Mr. Massey makes them perform on poems—weigh every syllable, measure connotation, tone, implication, understatement. But it’s exhausting. Plus he’s not very good at it. He’s had so little practice. When Caleb says something like “Dude, there’s something wrong with your hair, it looks frightened,” there’s not much doubt about what he’s getting at. When his mom looks at his report card, even the less-than-stellar marks in French, and tells him, “I’m proud of you,” it never occurs to Fitz that she might mean something other than just that.
Fitz hears himself stumble just a second on the song’s last turnaround and peeks at his dad to gauge his reaction. He feels a warm flush of shame. He leans forward and hits the stop button.
23
They’re on Summit Avenue now. It’s St. Paul’s postcard street: lined with trees, a grassy median down the middle, wide sidewalks, and on both sides churches and mansions, mansions and churches. It’s like they’re inside a coffee table book. Fitz thinks these streets, these cities, must have some kind of hold on his father. They must exert some gravitational pull on him. He went to law school here, but then he moved to St. Louis. That’s where the checks came from. He must have had a nice place to live, he must have had friends there, some places there where he played tennis and bought fancy coffee and shopped for produce. But he came back. Fitz doesn’t quite buy the good-job line. And now, just driving around, this is where he directs the car.
Somewhere on this street is where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when he was a kid. His namesake. His mom’s favorite.
Fitz wonders what she’s doing now. She’s had her lunch already and has been outside on the playground with the little kids, pushing them on the swings. No idea that he’s rolling around town with his father. Probably she’s working with Wesley, a new boy with such a terrible history she’s only hinted at it.
All the kids at her school have issues, problems, every one of them a bundle of deficits and special needs. That’s what the school is all about. But her favorite kids, her special projects, the ones she talks about at dinner, are always the most damaged and beaten up, the toughest cases, the ones who’ve lost the most. Kids like Wesley.
Even though they’ve never met, Fitz feels like he knows Wesley. His mom talks about him all the time. He’s like a character in a book they’re reading together, day by day, chapter by chapter. “Wesley Makes Friends with Snickers the Hamster.” “Wesley and the 500-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle.”
But he’s real, Fitz knows that, with real problems. Wesley is just a little younger than Fitz, thirteen maybe, but has been in foster care since his father sold him for drug money, his mom told Fitz that much. Now he rarely speaks, never makes eye contact, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, flies off into a rage.
His mom said she thought Wesley liked Star Wars, so Fitz gave her some of his old action figures—Chewbacca, Luke, Boba Fett, a couple of droids—to bring in for him. She said he liked them. So he imagines his mom playing Star Wars with this boy, Wesley, the same way she played with him when he was little, moving them across a tabletop, making up a story together.
“You grow up here?” Fitz asks. “In St. Paul?”
“Here?” his father says. “No.”
“Where?”
“Chicago,” he says, but then corrects himself. “A suburb.” Fitz can imagine it. A rich kid. There was a big green lawn, tennis lessons. It makes perfect sense.
“Your dad was a lawyer, too, right?”
His father looks surprised. “How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess.” It isn’t rocket science. The guy hated law school. So why would you even go in the first place? “Your parents,” Fitz says. “My grandparents?”
His father’s face changes. It gets stony. “What about them?”
“Where are they?”
“My dad passed away. My mom lives in Florida.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“One sister. A neurologist. In Boston. Married to another neurologist.”
“And how about you? You ever married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Sure,” Fitz says. He looks out the window. Everything’s complicated. How do you sell a kid? That’s gotta be complicated, too. Why did he think this guy would give him a straight answer? He’s a lawyer. He’s all about complication.
They’re stopped at a red light.
“We thought about it,” his father says. “Your mom and me.”
Fitz tries to imagine the two of them getting married, coming down the steps of one of these Summit Avenue churches, people throwing rice, or birdseed, or whatever it is that people throw. Curtis in a tuxedo, Fitz can totally see that, rocking a black tie and cummerbund. Tails probably. He’d cut a dashing figure. His mom in a wedding dress, all frilled and lacy, not so much. Not at all, really.
“But you didn’t,” Fitz says.
“No,” his father says. “But I wanted to.”
“Just because,” Fitz says.
“Not just because. Because I thought she was the one. Even before you, I thought that.”
So what happened? Fitz wonders. This is what he needs to know. This is why he bought a gun. If he has to wave it in his face some more to get him to answer, so be it.
What happened? He’s in the delivery room. He’s giving her books. He’s thinking she’s the one. And then he’s gone. Out of the picture. Mailing it in from Missouri. Something happened.
24
“I have to ask you a favor,” his father says.
The possibility that he might be able to do something for his father, to give him something—that interests Fitz. It makes him feel important. “Really,” he says. Whatever it is, he’s inclined to say yes. He can show his father that he’s not only funny and a decent bass player but that he’s generous, too.
His father explains that he needs to go into his office and sign something—a motion. I
f it’s not filed with the clerk by five o’clock, he’s in trouble. Fitz feels a kind of embarrassed sinking. He’s been hoping for something personal, some kind of intimacy. Tell me, something along those lines. Forgive me. Some special favor only he can confer. Instead, his father is asking for what—work release?
“How much trouble?” Fitz wants to know.
“Big trouble,” his father says. “A boatload. If I miss this deadline, we go to trial unprepared. I could get sued. Slapped with malpractice.”
“Could you get fired?” Fitz asks.
“Maybe.”
It’s an appealing thought. Imagining his father being brought down. Fitz feels a certain pleasure in contemplating that. Some big boss man chewing him out. Telling him to clear out, clean out his desk.
But really, Fitz wonders, how could that be? It doesn’t sound right. So much riding on one guy’s signature. Who’s that important?
They’re coming into downtown St. Paul now, the capitol dome behind them, passing the science museum he used to visit with his mom, aiming straight for his father’s building. Fitz realizes that they’ve been headed to his office all along, even before he asked. It bothers Fitz that even today, his father can’t put away his work. That he has to share him. “They can’t get along without you? For one lousy day?”
“It’ll only take five minutes,” his father says. “I give it a quick read-through and sign my name.”
“What if you were sick?” Fitz asks. “I mean, really sick?”
“I’d come in, sign, and go back to bed.”
“What if you were in the hospital? What if you were hooked up to an IV? What if you were on life support? What if you slipped into a coma? What then? You’re telling me one of your lawyer buddies couldn’t sign?”
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