Fitz (12 page)

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.

Fitz thinks of those Make-A-Wish stories he sees on television from time to time. Some doomed, bald little kid spending the day with his sports hero, playing catch, getting autographs, going home with a big pile of gear. It’s supposed to be heartwarming. But
what about the next day? Fitz always wonders about that. And the day after that? It just makes Fitz sad.

“So now what?” his father says. They’re stopped at the light on West Seventh. Fort Snelling is one way, downtown the other, the river is in front of them. “Where to?”

For a moment Fitz thinks his father is giving him a song. He tries—he likes songs with questions in them. “Now what?” That could be the title of something. He could see his father’s questions becoming the chorus in some sort of existential anthem. But his heart’s not in it. It seems like a lot of work. And for what? Scribble some words in a notebook—what would be the point of that? “Take me home,” Fitz says.

Back on the west side
,
Fitz feels more like himself. On Summit Avenue, or in a downtown office building surrounded by suits and briefcases, he’s an outsider, an alien, a spy. Here, he’s just Fitz, a kid in his neighborhood.

They pass the gas station where he fills the tires of his bike, the pizza place where he and Caleb get slices and Dr Pepper with free refills, the hardware store where his mom gets little screws and such for her projects and is always smothered with attention by the old-guy clerks.

A few blocks away is the playground and park where Uncle Dunc used to push him on the swings, where he and his mom would spread a blanket and watch the Fourth of July fireworks from Harriet Island, where he still goes sledding with his friends in winter. Also, where he bought his gun.

Fitz looks at his father. Does it look like a slum to him? Compared to what he’s used to, maybe it does. Does he see only chipped paint and crabgrass? Does it make him fear for his hubcaps and want to lock his doors?

Fitz doesn’t care. He wouldn’t mind if his father felt a little bit guilty: look at this miserable life I’ve inflicted on my poor son! He would like his father to think that he’s grown up as a tough guy on the mean streets of West St. Paul, but it’s not like that, not at all.

“Here,” Fitz says when they come to his street, but he already has his turn signal on. On this block, Fitz knows the names of every family, present and past, he knows the names of their dogs, living and dead, he knows who gives out amazing treats on Halloween (Julia, the elderly piano teacher on the corner), who gives out sketchy-looking off-brand candy (the couple that listens to opera really loud on Saturday afternoons), who sits in the dark and pretends not to be home (Mr. Muscarella).

What does his father do on Halloween? Fitz wonders. There’s no way any kids get into that building of his to trick-or-treat. For years he’s probably been living in the same kind of place, some compound full of starched professionals, people just like himself. Does he even know what he’s missing? He probably sits inside drinking fancy French wine and trading stocks online or something. Fitz almost feels sorry for him. Now Fitz hands out candy on Halloween: he and his mom pretend not to recognize Evelyn and Vivian, the little princesses from next door; she takes pictures, and Fitz gives them huge handfuls of fun-size candy bars, the good ones, Snickers and Milky Way. Fitz has learned that being with kids on Halloween is just about as good as being a kid on Halloween. What has his father learned?

Now Fitz feels like he is stalking himself
.
They’re parked across the street from his own house. Fitz can see his bedroom window on the second floor. There’s an empty can of Dr Pepper on the sill.

Fitz half expects to see himself coming up the walk from his bus stop, backpack slung over his shoulder. It’s just about that time. He’d take the mail from the box, fish inside his pocket for his house key, and push open the door. He’d text his mom, tell her he’s home. And she’d send back one of her perfectly punctuated messages telling him what he already knows: that there’s food in the fridge, that he ought to get started on his homework, that she loves him.

They sit there, Fitz and his father, looking at the house. His mom spent the weekend working on her flower boxes and hanging baskets, white and red and purple. He doesn’t know the names of the flowers, but they look good. Their house has a kind of old-fashioned vibe he likes—the flowers, a flag and wind chimes, the
open porch, the wrought-iron rail, the gray clapboard and green shutters.

Fitz feels as if he ought to say something, but he’s not sure what. He feels a stupid urge to apologize, for what exactly, he doesn’t know. He knows that he says “sorry” a lot. Caleb called him out on it once after he excused himself for bumping into a chair—“Dude, relax,” he said. “It’s
inanimate
, it’s not offended.”

“You get paid by the hour?” Fitz says.

“My firm does,” his father says. “Our clients pay for the time we work on their case.”

“Plenty, right? They pay a lot.”

“It’s not cheap.”

“So, like an hour with you, if I was your client, would cost me what, a hundred bucks?”

“More than that, actually.”

“Two hundred, three hundred?”

“Something like that.”

“So I’m costing you big-time. Wasting your time. I’m money down the drain.”

His father starts to say something but then just raises his hand, palm out, fingers extended, like a stop sign, maybe, or a blessing.

At some point, Fitz needs to get out of the car. He needs to do what one of Caleb’s favorite classic blues tunes says:
step it up and go
. Then it will be over. Their not-so-excellent adventure. Soon, but not yet.

He knows there’s nothing he can say or do at this point that’s going to make any kind of difference. Earlier in the day, he had some clear goals. Revenge—that was part of the plan, to make his
father suffer for being a jerk. Payback, too, that was a piece of it, getting some of the time and attention he’d missed out on over the years. He wanted some information, too, he wanted to fill in some blanks. It’s three o’clock now. Fitz is pretty sure that he’s scared his father, at least a little, and he’s heard some stories, and they’ve spent the day together. So what? Tomorrow he’s gonna be his same old drifting self, asking Google what’s the matter with him.

If Fitz is going to resume his regular life, he needs to get out of the car, go into the house, and text his mom. He should figure out the homework that’s due tomorrow and get to work. Maybe he needs to lose his angst and stop whining and become an achiever. He should, unasked, do some household chore—start dinner, say, something to surprise his mom.

Still, there’s a part of Fitz that doesn’t want this to end. When he was a little kid, he never wanted to go to bed on his birthday. It was something special and rare, and he wanted to make it last. The day after his birthday, just another ordinary day, with no balloons and no cake—it always seemed a little sad to him.

“Okay,” Fitz says.

“Okay,” his father says.

Fitz isn’t sure how he feels about him. Maybe he really does feel a little sorry for him. He’s got a nice car, sure, and he’s a legal-eagle big shot, but there’s something sort of deficient about him, something lacking, something hollow. Fitz wouldn’t trade places with him. But he doesn’t think he really hates him. There’s certain things about him that he could see himself liking if he got to know him properly. Fitz liked him feeding sea lions, he liked him at the
diner, he liked him eating pie. At the office, not so much. It all depends. Fitz knows that he has not been all that likeable today himself, waving his piece and talking tough. Under different circumstances, it would be different. Under different circumstances, Fitz can be likeable, he can be fun to be around. He wishes his father knew that. He wishes he’d made a better impression today.