Fitz (7 page)

Besides, Fitz knows he’s got only so much time. The clock is ticking. It’s already late in the morning. His mom gets home from work at four o’clock. He needs to be home before then, delete the
message from the attendance office and answer his mom’s after-school text.

He needs to make a decision, announce a plan. Kneel down and draw a play in the dirt. It’s up to him.

“I think we should get something to eat,” Fitz says. “I’m hungry.”

“Good idea,” his father says.

“I wanna go to that diner,” Fitz says. It’s where they met. That much he knows. It’s like the scene of the crime.

“Okay,” his father says. It bothers Fitz a little that his father is agreeing to the plan, as if he’s got a say. Fitz is afraid he’s losing control.

“We can do that,” his father says. “But you gotta do one thing for me. When we get there, you gotta leave the gun in the car. Promise me that. I’m not gonna flee.”

“How do I know?”

“Trust me.”

“Trust you.”

“You’ve got my wallet and my phone,” his father says. “You’ve got my car keys. What am I gonna do? Walk away? Don’t you see? I’m all in. I’m in it for the duration. I’m not going anywhere.”

Fitz isn’t sure what to say.

“If I run away,” his father says, “you can come back tomorrow and shoot me. You know where I live. You can come back and shoot me every day for the rest of my life.”

He smiles, just a little bit. But Fitz doesn’t feel as if he’s being laughed at. It’s as if his father is amused at himself, or maybe by the two of them, this pickle they’re in, together.

It’s a little before noon
,
and there’s a mix of people in the place. Some well-dressed business types, coming in for lunch. Some younger people in T-shirts and jeans, college age, lingering over egg-stained plates. A bearded, professor-looking guy is reading a book at the counter. In a back room, there’s a round table ringed with mostly older women who seem like members of some kind of club or fellowship.

Fitz has eaten in a diner-style restaurant at the mall. It was like a diner theme park. You could get fried bologna, which was one of his mom’s specialties, one of Fitz’s favorite sandwiches since he was a little kid. But at the mall restaurant you weren’t supposed to take it seriously. It was a joke. It was ironic bologna. You were supposed to laugh at it, laugh at yourself eating it, with the same attitude you might wear white socks and slick back your hair for a fifties sock hop.

This place isn’t like that, not at all. No retro cutesy stuff on the walls. No obnoxious oldies Muzak. There’s a glass case full of pies. There’s a Polaroid of a cat taped to the register. Fitz can see
a couple of wiry cooks in the back dressed in white T-shirts and grubby aprons, one of them, the guy scraping the grill, with forearms full of old-fashioned tattoos—anchors and eagles and such. Nothing ironic about him.

A sign tells them to seat themselves, and they slip into a booth near the windows. Fitz can see a boy about his own age on the street outside, waiting for a bus. He keeps leaning into the street to see what’s coming. He has the same backpack as Fitz. Fitz wonders what this kid’s backstory is, why he’s not in school. A dropout? Skipping? Going to seek out
his
dad, wherever he is? Not likely. But who knows? The world is full of mysteries, everybody’s got a story.

“So here we are,” his father says. He cranes his neck and looks around. Takes two menus from behind a napkin holder and slides one over to Fitz.

“Seems like an okay place,” Fitz says.

“You’ve never been here?” His father seems surprised. “Annie loved this place. It’s like she owned it. She
was
this place.”

A waitress brings them water. She’s young and pretty. She’s got rust-colored hair and cool glasses, big hoopy earrings and a tiny diamond in her nose. She’s light on her feet, bopping to some private rhythm.

“How are you today, gentlemen?” she asks.

Fitz totally understands how you could fall in love with someone like her. She seems so happy to see them. It’s like she’s been waiting for them.

She doesn’t look a thing like his mom, but still, Fitz guesses that he and his father are probably both thinking the same thing.
It’s like they’ve traveled back in time. It’s like this girl—Maddie, her name tag says—is playing the role of his mom in some back-to-the-future movie.

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” she says, and leaves them to look over their menus.

“We used to come here just about every night,” his father says. “Rory and I. At, like, ten, eleven o’clock at night, talking all about contracts and torts. We were regulars.” He looks out the window. There’s a bus at the stop now, but the boy with Fitz’s backpack isn’t climbing aboard.

“Of course, that was a long time ago,” his father says.

“Like fifteen years?”

“Something like that,” his father says. They’re talking about something and not talking about it, all at the same time. This is where they met, Annie and Curtis, his mom and dad. This is where it all started. This is where he started.

“So,” Fitz says. “Did you have some kind of super-slick pickup line?”

His father looks offended. “Annie? You think she’d fall for a line? You think she’d go for slick?”

Fitz almost says something but stops himself. This morning, Fitz was certain that his father was slick, or at the very least, slick in a past life, a guy formerly known as slick. Now he’s not so sure. On the question of his father’s slickness, he’s currently agnostic. He decides to keep his mouth shut.

“Sometimes,” his father says, “when it was slow, she’d go back into the kitchen and fix our food herself. She’d make us these grilled sandwiches that weren’t even on the menu.

“Then we’d talk,” his father says. “She’d finish her side work and pull up a chair. The place was dead. That’s how we got to know each other. The old-fashioned way. Nothing slick about it. What you guys do online, we did in person. Very old-school.”

“About what?” Fitz asks. He doesn’t want to hear about you-kids-and-your-technology. “What did you talk about?”

“Movies,” his father says. “Books. Anything and everything. The meaning of life. How much I hated law school. We talked about that a lot.”

Now Maddie the waitress comes back to their booth. “What can I get you guys?” she asks.

There’s a lot of stuff on the menu—melts and combinations, specials like walleye and bratwurst—but Fitz has zeroed in on something. He says he’ll have a deluxe burger, medium—bacon, American cheese, mayo, and sautéed onions.

“Oh yeah,” Maddie says. She nods and smiles, as if to say, of course, what else would a cool person order? It’s stupid, but Fitz is grateful for her approval.

His father closes his menu with a kind of emphatic slap. “The same,” he says.

“All right,” Maddie says, “you got it,” and off she goes.

“She was a wonder,” his father says. “Never wrote anything down either. She remembered how you liked your eggs, what kind of toast, wheat or rye, dark or light, the whole bit, what you wanted on the side. She cut tremendous pieces of pie, gave you epic scoops of ice cream. It made her happy to feed people.”

Once again, Fitz feels sort of unsettled and impressed. His father knows his mom, that’s for sure.

She is always happy as can be in the kitchen, making a big weekend breakfast, just like a short-order cook. Frying a pan of bacon and putting it aside. Then making eggs, scrambled for Fitz, over easy for his grandpa when he was alive, with onions and green peppers for Uncle Dunc. French toast for Caleb, whose mom doesn’t cook, who barely microwaves. Omelets, pancakes, hash browns, whatever you want, she puts it together, talking the whole time, working two or three burners, a total pro.

Fitz has always loved the cheerful, professional way his mom puts a plate of food in front of him, with a kind of stylish pride.

“So has it changed?” Fitz asks. “Since then?”

His father looks around. “Not much. Same menu, same booths. Really, not a bit. Just me.

“I feel like what’s-his-name,” his father says. “In
A Christmas Carol
. Visiting scenes of his happy youth.”

“Scrooge,” Fitz says. “Ebenezer Scrooge. That’s his name.” It sounds like an accusation. Which it is.

“Right,” his father says. He says it softly, reluctantly even. “Scrooge.” When he says it, it sounds like a confession.

Fitz knows the story. He’s seen all the different movie versions. His mom’s favorite, naturally, is the old black-and-white one, Alastair Somebody-or-Other shivering in his nightshirt. If it’s on, she’s got to watch it. Fitz likes Bill Murray. That’s his favorite Scrooge.

“Then who am I?” Fitz asks. “If you’re Scrooge? Tiny Tim?”

“Oh no,” his father says. “Not Tiny Tim. No way.”

He takes a sip of water. “You’re the ghost,” his father says. “My ghost. That’s who you are. That’s exactly who you are.”

Fitz and his father
both have their mouths full of deluxe burger when all of a sudden there’s a man at their booth, a guy looming over them in a black suit.

“Curtis?” the man says. “Curtis Powell?”

Dude looks like serious law enforcement—white shirt, close-cropped hair, a gizmo in his ear—FBI or Homeland Security or something. In an instant, Fitz can envision a chain of shame and humiliation—handcuffs, mug shots, a holding cell, a call to his mom. So this is how it ends.

But first his father needs to finish chewing and swallow. They’ve both just taken huge juicy bites. His father raises his hand, like he’s asking for time. Fitz sees a grease spot on his tie the size of a dime.

It occurs to Fitz that if this guy hauls him away, he’s never going to finish his lunch. Somehow, this seems worse than any dire legal consequences. Him downtown, and his burger, more than half of it, pretty much the best burger he’s ever had, and his fries, sitting on a plate in an empty booth, getting cold, getting taken
away by Maddie and then tossed. It feels tragic. To go through life with this burger unfinished. How could you not feel off balance and incomplete forever afterward?

Finally, his father swallows. “Chip,” he says. He wipes his hand quickly on a paper napkin and extends it to the man.

“Curtis,” the man says. “I knew it was you. You still downtown? Still with Daugherty?”

This guy is no cop. A Bluetooth, that’s what he’s got in his ear. Just a telephone.

“Still with Daugherty,” his father says.

“Working downtown but coming here to the diner for lunch,” this Chip says. “Classic. That’s what it is. I love it.” He glances at Fitz.

“Let me introduce you,” his father says. “Chip Slocum, this is Fitzgerald.”

Fitz has wiped his chin and his hands. He’s ready. “Pleased to meet you.” He thinks he likes it that his father has gone with just the one name, like Madonna and Prince, Bono and Flea—Fitzgerald, the one and only. It makes him feels like somebody.

He feels at a disadvantage, though, sitting down, talking up, but there’s no way to squeeze out. Turns out it doesn’t really matter. Chip is not especially interested in him. Fitz thinks he might wonder what occasion would bring two such unlikely companions together—Take an Urchin to Work Day?—but the man seems to show no curiosity whatsoever.

“And you?” his father asks. “Still at Cooke?”

“Yup, yup,” Chip says.

“Business good?” his father asks. “Life good?”

“All good,” Chip says. “No call for your expertise. Thank goodness. No offense.”

“None taken. I’m happy to hear it.”

“No more issues on that front,” Chip says. “Knock on wood.” He makes a show of rapping on the wood-looking edge of their table.

His father touches his own fist to the laminate in solidarity. “That’s great,” he says.

Fitz notices that his father’s demeanor is different now from what it’s been with him. He seems stiffer somehow, more brittle, but also less substantial, less present. It’s like he can see him fading around the edges. Like a hologram. He doesn’t like it.

“Well, listen,” Chip says. “I’ll let you get back to your lunch. Say hello for me to your colleague. The tall fellow. And your nice assistant.”

“Jerry,” his father says. “And Sheila. Will do. Absolutely.”

Chip departs then, strolling toward the back of the restaurant, his head swiveling, looking to see who else he might know.

“You his lawyer?” Fitz asks. He picks up his burger and takes a bite, a modest one.

“I did some work for him,” his father says. “We represent his company.”

“What did he do?” Somehow Fitz can easily imagine this guy needing to get all lawyered up, guilty of something somehow, doing a perp walk for some corporate crime. “What was the issue?”

“Wrongful termination,” his father says.

“He killed somebody?”

His father laughs, emits a series of soft little syllables of amusement, for the first time today. It makes Fitz feel good, proud even, that he can make him laugh. He’s funny, he wants his father to know that about him. It’s one of his best qualities. He cracks up his mom a couple of times a day.

“Fired somebody,” he says. “That’s what he did.”

“You get him off?” Fitz asks.

“It’s not like that,” his father says. “It’s civil, not criminal. And it wasn’t him personally who got sued, it was his company. The corporation.”

“So did you get them off, the corporation?”

“We settled.”

“Paid ’em off.”

“Something like that.”

“He seems like a jerk,” Fitz says. There was something about the guy that just wasn’t trustworthy. For one thing, Chip doesn’t seem like a serious name for an adult. Plus, Fitz hates middle-aged guys with earpieces. Plus, the idea of a settlement burns him. It’s a little too close to home.

You can treat someone badly, then give them money, how is that okay?

“What if they’re guilty?” Fitz asks. “The corporations you represent? What if they’re evil? What if they’re, like, terrible polluters? What if the company is spewing poison into the air, cutting down the rain forests? Or what if they discriminate? What if they treat their workers like crap? What then?”

“If you get sued, you have the right to tell your side of the story. There are two sides to every story. You know that.”