Fitz (8 page)

There are two sides to every story, Fitz’s grandpa used to tell him. And then there’s the truth.

“I help them tell their story,” his father says. “It’s how the system operates. Somebody’s got to do it.”

Fitz gets that. He’s not naive. He understands the system. But still. It’s disappointing. There’s a lot of stuff that’s got to be done. But you don’t have to be the one who does it. Fitz thinks of one of his mom’s favorite expressions, what she tells him when he tries to get away with something—using SparkNotes, say—because other kids do it.
You’re better than that
. That’s what she tells him.

“He
is
a jerk,” his father says. “You got that right.”

Fitz looks over his shoulder and sees the back of the Chipster’s bullet head a few tables away, talking in the direction of a couple of guys who already look bored and tired of him.

“Maybe, if we’re lucky,” Fitz says, “he’ll stay away. Maybe we won’t have any more issues on that front.” He raps the tabletop with his right hand, and for the second time his father laughs.

They both order
apple pie for dessert. Maddie brings it to them warm, with ice cream. The pieces are huge, tall slices of apple layered in some geologic way, crumbly stuff on top. Cinnamon, apples, brown sugar, vanilla—it may be Fitz’s favorite smell in the world. He leans over it and inhales. If this were a drug, he’d be a junkie.

His mom bakes pies just for special occasions—Thanksgiving, Uncle Dunc’s birthday—sometimes blueberry, but usually apple, always with little pictures or messages etched into the top crust: a turkey, a heart, a smiley face.

Fitz thanks Maddie, picks up his fork, and digs in. He finishes his pie in less than a minute. When he’s done, he feels a little out of breath. But he can’t help himself. It is awesome apple pie.

When Maddie swings by their table to see how they’re doing, how they’re liking it, Fitz is embarrassed. His mom is always on him to slow down. He knows it’s rude to bolt down your food.

She looks at the apple and ice cream smear on his plate. “You know what you need?” she asks.

Fitz is afraid that she’s going to say something like “better manners.” It will kill him if she shames him.

Maddie puts a hand on her hip and turns toward his father. His piece of pie is still more or less intact, just a couple of neat forkfuls removed from the edges. “You know what he needs, don’t you?”

“I know.”

She points at Fitz, a kind of Uncle Sam gesture, only infinitely cuter. “You need another piece of pie.” She consults his father again. “Am I right?” she asks. “Or am I right?”

“You are so right,” his father says. “Right as rain.”

“Because he’s a growing boy,” she says. “And he’s starving.”

“We need to do something,” his father says.

“More pie,” Maddie says. “That’s what the boy needs.”

All of a sudden, they’re double-teaming him. They’ve formed some kind of alliance, reached an understanding, and the basis of it, the core principle, is that he, Fitz, needs more of what he loves. He feels himself blushing. He’s not really used to being the center of attention, not like this.

A second piece of pie, in a restaurant—it just never even occurred to Fitz as a possibility. It violates some iron law, some rule so fundamental and obvious and universally accepted that it never needs to be spelled out:
each diner may order one, and only one, dessert
. But today that rule doesn’t apply. Today, all bets are off.

In just a couple of minutes, Maddie is back with another piece of pie, more ice cream. “Okay, champ,” she says. “Dig in.”

Fitz looks at his father. “You heard her,” his father says.

It seems to Fitz now, at this moment, with his father and a pretty girl smiling at him, a gorgeous piece of apple pie in front of him, that no matter what happens to him afterward, even if he is arrested, cuffed, expelled, no matter what punishment he suffers for his crazy stunt today, no matter what, it will have been worth it.

His father has his fork in hand. He’s doing some excavating and rearranging on his plate, but mainly he’s watching Fitz. It looks like he’s enjoying Fitz’s enjoyment, feeling his pie pleasure once removed.

Before he starts in on his pie, he wants to tell his father something. “Fitz,” he says. “That’s what they call me.”

Fitz reaches across the table
and picks up the check that Maddie left in front of his father. He calculates what would be a generous tip and pulls his father’s wallet from his hip pocket.

He almost feels as if he should keep it hidden from his father. It’s wrong that he has it. Fitz knows that. It’s a reminder, pie or no pie, of how things stand between them.

A wallet is personal, intimate even, and Fitz tries to respect that. There’s some credit cards in there, maybe some photographs, who knows what else, but he doesn’t look. He extracts a few bills as dispassionately as he can. For his part, his father doesn’t betray any emotion. He doesn’t look pained or outraged or violated in any way. His expression is completely neutral. Fitz wonders how you do that, imagines it must be a lawyer thing.

Fitz drops the bills on the table. It feels good. To have the dough. To know there’s more where that came from. It’s not like when he and Caleb go out for French fries and Dr Peppers with their pockets full of change, worrying that the sales tax is going to bust them.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be Dad. The man with the wallet. At the same time, he’s worrying about where he’s taking this show next. He’s feeling the weight of being in charge. Maybe that’s part of the dad equation, too. He’s picking up the tabs and calling the shots. He’s the man. He can see how you might love it, and also how you might get tired of it.

He thinks about asking his father,
is that what it feels like?
But really, how would he know? He’s the wrong guy to ask.

Fitz excuses himself
and hits the restroom. The men’s is down a long hallway in the far back of the restaurant, marked by a Ken doll stuck on the door, which Fitz thinks is a nice touch. Ken is shirtless, displaying impressive plastic pecs, sporting plaid shorts and sandals.

While he’s washing his hands, Fitz imagines that they might become regulars here, he and his father. Maddie would remember him, the apple pie boy. They might strike up a little friendship. Why not? He looks in the mirror and fluffs his hair a little. Anything is possible.

When Fitz comes back out, their booth is empty. There’s a guy in an apron loading their dishes into a big plastic tub. He can see the ravaged, smashed remnants of his father’s pie. His father is nowhere to be seen.

Fitz feels a flutter of panic in his gut. All his stuff is in the car. The gun is in the car. He has his father’s wallet and phone but he let him keep his car keys. How could he be so stupid?

He scans the place—people are eating, studying their menus,
Chip is gesturing at someone in a semi-threatening way with a fork. Fitz moves quickly between the booths, stifling his urge to run, keeping himself in check. His father’s not at the front of the restaurant near the register. He’s not in the foyer.

Fitz steps outside and looks up and down the block. The kid with his backpack is still standing there at the bus stop. He gives Fitz a look:
Do I know you? Am I supposed to know you?

Fitz goes back inside. He returns to their booth, which is clean and set up now, shiny and empty, as if they’ve never been there, as if the lunch never happened. He feels like the sole victim in some scam or prank everyone else is in on. He feels like he’s wandered into
The Twilight Zone
.

Just then Maddie the waitress comes by with a tray full of water glasses. She smiles, looking genuinely happy to see him, which is a little gift he’s too upset to appreciate right now. Then she seems to take in his distress. Her face gets serious. “You forget something?”

“I’m looking,” he says. “I’m looking for
him
. Did you see him leave?”

“Your dad,” she says, and he doesn’t contradict her. She makes a kind of thinking face. Then she brightens. “He’s on the phone,” she says. “Thataway.”

“Thanks,” Fitz says. “Thanks a lot.”

“Just doin’ my job,” he hears her say as he turns in the direction of the back of the restaurant.

Sure enough. He’s standing there, hunched, turned away, a telephone receiver held tight to his ear. Fitz must have walked
right by him on his way out of the men’s room. The last pay phone in America, and he’s found it.

His father sees Fitz then. He holds the receiver away from his ear and rolls his eyes a little. He doesn’t look especially busted, not at all apologetic.

“I thought we had a deal,” Fitz says. He hears his voice catch a little. He’s in the throes of some weird new emotion, some blend of betrayal and relief. It must be how a parent feels when a lost child has been found. You wanna hug ’em, and you wanna smack ’em.

“Just checking my messages,” he says.

“Right,” Fitz says. Now he’s feeling it again, something simpler, what he felt back at the park, the slow boil. “And now you’re done checking your messages. It’s time to go.”

“Just drive,”
Fitz told his father when they got in the car outside the diner, and that’s what he’s doing. They’re on the River Road now, the Minneapolis side, following the curves of the Mississippi, seeing the joggers and walkers and bikers on the path.

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.