animals, and sometimes his mom makes them talk back. She’s got a whole repertoire of cartoonish voices: squeaky and manic for the monkeys, deep and ponderous for the elephants.
Fitz almost talks back to his father in his mom’s gruff and gargoylish sea lion voice—“Thank you, friend, much obliged”—but catches himself just in time.
Did they ever go to the zoo together? Fitz wonders. Young Annie McGrath and Curtis Powell? He can’t quite picture it. His mom and this guy, the two of them a happy couple, smiling, holding hands maybe. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. No matter what, it pleases Fitz that his father is talking to the sea lions. Maybe it’s a good sign.
His father is leaning on the wall of the enclosure, resting on his elbows. “Where to begin,” his father says. He is looking down at the sea lions, but now he is talking to Fitz.
Fitz doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. Begin at the beginning—that sounds stupid.
“I don’t know how much you know,” his father says. “I don’t know how much she’s told you.”
“She?”
“Your mother,” his father says. “Annie.”
“What’s to tell?” Fitz says. “You knocked her up. You couldn’t be bothered. A kid wasn’t on the agenda. You had other plans. So you were, like, goodbye, good luck, check’s in the mail.”
“That’s what she told you?”
Actually, it isn’t. Not at all. It’s more like the story he’s been telling himself lately. At least it is a story. Maybe it’s miserable, but at least it makes some sense. It’s something solid, something you could hold on to. What his mom gave him wasn’t even a story. It was something else. A puzzle, a mystery, a crime scene.
From his mom he never got a straight story. Over the years, he’s tried, really tried, to get some answers. His dad’s last name—he learned that from the return address on an envelope when he was maybe eight years old. There was something about it that made him think it was special. The way his mom took it out of the mailbox and quickly slipped it into her purse, where he found it and studied it when she was out of the room. It came from Missouri. The printing on the envelope was precise. “Who’s Powell?” he asked her that night at dinner. “It’s my dad, right?” Somehow he just knew. She wouldn’t tell him much else. Why was he writing? Business. Was it about him? No. Was he coming to visit? No. He found another letter in the mailbox a couple of years later and held it up to the light. It was a check. By then he understood about child support. What he didn’t understand was why his dad would pay for him but not visit him.
What happened? Who was his father, really? How did she feel about him? How did he land outside his dad’s reach?
He could never get his mom to budge beyond her standard spiel. Once, when Fitz was pestering her about the possibility that his dad might be famous—a rock star, say, or a professional athlete—she admitted that he was a lawyer. But mostly, it was dial-a-cliché. They were just kids back then, she told him once, young and foolish, babies, how could it last, it wasn’t meant to be, his father was a good man who always wanted what was best for Fitz.
When Fitz tried to follow up—when he asked why, for example, if his father was such a good man, he didn’t come around—she’d smile, a little sadly, and stonewall, patient as an all-day rain, shut the door with some evasion or non sequitur. “He’s in St. Louis,” she said once, as if that explained everything. St. Louis, where good men are kept from their kids. Or she’d give him some pseudo-profound, fortune-cookie philosophy: “Love is a crooked road.” Finally, as a last resort, when all else failed, she’d flip into monster-mom mode, start grooming him, straightening his collar, spit on her finger and mess with his hair, and tell him what a fine young man he was, how proud she was of him.
So he was left with only hints, echoes and glimpses, scraps and shards.
Her books, for example. She was just now about to graduate from college, cramming four years of higher education into twelve, she liked to joke, taking a night class for as long as Fitz could remember, lugging one fat textbook or another around with her yellow highlighter. But beyond that, besides her studying, she was always