the car.
Somewhere on this street is where F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when he was a kid. His namesake. His mom’s favorite.
Fitz wonders what she’s doing now. She’s had her lunch already and has been outside on the playground with the little kids, pushing them on the swings. No idea that he’s rolling around town with his father. Probably she’s working with Wesley, a new boy with such a terrible history she’s only hinted at it.
All the kids at her school have issues, problems, every one of them a bundle of deficits and special needs. That’s what the school is all about. But her favorite kids, her special projects, the ones she talks about at dinner, are always the most damaged and beaten up, the toughest cases, the ones who’ve lost the most. Kids like Wesley.
Even though they’ve never met, Fitz feels like he knows Wesley. His mom talks about him all the time. He’s like a character in a book they’re reading together, day by day, chapter by chapter. “Wesley Makes Friends with Snickers the Hamster.” “Wesley and the 500-Piece Jigsaw Puzzle.”
But he’s real, Fitz knows that, with real problems. Wesley is just a little younger than Fitz, thirteen maybe, but has been in foster care since his father sold him for drug money, his mom told Fitz that much. Now he rarely speaks, never makes eye contact, and sometimes, for no apparent reason, flies off into a rage.
His mom said she thought Wesley liked Star Wars, so Fitz gave her some of his old action figures—Chewbacca, Luke, Boba Fett, a couple of droids—to bring in for him. She said he liked them. So he imagines his mom playing Star Wars with this boy, Wesley, the same way she played with him when he was little, moving them across a tabletop, making up a story together.
“You grow up here?” Fitz asks. “In St. Paul?”
“Here?” his father says. “No.”
“Where?”
“Chicago,” he says, but then corrects himself. “A suburb.” Fitz can imagine it. A rich kid. There was a big green lawn, tennis lessons. It makes perfect sense.
“Your dad was a lawyer, too, right?”
His father looks surprised. “How’d you know?”
“Lucky guess.” It isn’t rocket science. The guy hated law school. So why would you even go in the first place? “Your parents,” Fitz says. “My grandparents?”
His father’s face changes. It gets stony. “What about them?”
“Where are they?”
“My dad passed away. My mom lives in Florida.”
“Brothers and sisters?”
“One sister. A neurologist. In Boston. Married to another neurologist.”
“And how about you? You ever married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Sure,” Fitz says. He looks out the window. Everything’s complicated. How do you sell a kid? That’s gotta be complicated, too. Why did he think this guy would give him a straight answer? He’s a lawyer. He’s all about complication.
They’re stopped at a red light.
“We thought about it,” his father says. “Your mom and me.”
Fitz tries to imagine the two of them getting married, coming down the steps of one of these Summit Avenue churches, people throwing rice, or birdseed, or whatever it is that people throw. Curtis in a tuxedo, Fitz can totally see that, rocking a black tie and cummerbund. Tails probably. He’d cut a dashing figure. His mom in a wedding dress, all frilled and lacy, not so much. Not at all, really.
“But you didn’t,” Fitz says.
“No,” his father says. “But I wanted to.”
“Just because,” Fitz says.
“Not just because. Because I thought she was the one. Even before you, I thought that.”
So what happened? Fitz wonders. This is what he needs to know. This is why he bought a gun. If he has to wave it in his face some more to get him to answer, so be it.
What happened? He’s in the delivery room. He’s giving her books. He’s thinking she’s the one. And then he’s gone. Out of the picture. Mailing it in from Missouri. Something happened.
24
“I have to ask you a favor,” his father says.
The possibility that he might be able to do something for his father, to give him something—that interests Fitz. It makes him feel important. “Really,” he says. Whatever it is, he’s inclined to say yes. He can show his father that he’s not only funny and a decent bass player but that he’s generous, too.
His father explains that he needs to go into his office and sign something—a motion. If it’s not filed with the clerk by five o’clock, he’s in trouble. Fitz feels a kind of embarrassed sinking. He’s been hoping for something personal, some kind of intimacy. Tell