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