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.”
21
“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