lights would be blazing, there’d be music playing, and he would be wide awake, wanting to play. In the middle of the day, the place would be dark, the blinds drawn, Annie sleeping in a chair, the baby on her chest. The sink was full of dishes. She ate mostly peanut butter sandwiches, one slice of bread, folded over, food you make with one hand and eat standing up.
“I tried, I really tried,” his father says. “I brought over Chinese takeout and some chocolates and once, a couple of books about babies. Dr. Spock, stuff like that. How-to books. I figured they might contain some helpful hints, maybe some advice about the night-and-day business.
“But Annie looked at me as if I were out of my mind. ‘You think I have time to read?’ she asked. ‘Do I look like someone with time for leisure reading?’ She didn’t. Honestly, she looked a little crazed. More than a little crazed. Her hair was wild, and there were circles under her eyes. Makeup was a thing of the past. Mostly she wore the same plaid nightgown and a pair of woolly socks. Day and night. I started to wonder, do I even know this person? Who is she?”
Fitz feels defensive of his mom. He’s not sure he likes hearing her being talked about this way. “What about your parents?” Fitz asks. “Did they know?”
“I meant to tell them,” his father says. “I really did. I called one Sunday with just that intention. Annie was big as a house, and I felt ready to share the news. We’d found a crib at an estate sale and set it up in Annie’s apartment. I was feeling optimistic, exhilarated even. For the first time in my life, maybe, I was doing something daring.
“Still, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to tell my parents something they didn’t want to hear. So I prepared and rehearsed—same as I would for an oral argument. I made notes. But when my mother answered, when I heard her voice, all that went out the window. I got as far as saying that there was a girl—kicking myself for calling her that—and that we were getting serious.
“ ‘How serious?’ my mother asked. She didn’t ask the girl’s name.
“ ‘Semi-serious,’ I said. ‘Just a little serious.’
“ ‘What does she do?’ my mother asked.
“What you did—your job, your income and status, your prospects—to my parents, that was who you were.” He glances at Fitz. Maybe he’s wondering if Fitz knows people like that. Maybe he wants Fitz to believe that he is not a person like that.
“What Annie did was make me happy,” his father says. “I could have told her that. Instead, I lied. I said that she was a law student, too, third-year, and when I hung up, I felt sick.”
So you chickened out, Fitz doesn’t say. That was your dare-to-be-great moment, your chance to declare your independence. But you didn’t do it. You took a pass.
“When I was offered the position in St. Louis,” his father says, “I was thrilled. A clerkship with a federal district judge was something special. It was my dream job.
“But now we had to figure some things out—we couldn’t go on like this. For months we’d been speaking only in the present. But now I had a job out of state. At first Annie said that she was happy for me. She didn’t want to hold me back. She never demanded anything from me. But now things were going to change. We had to make some decisions.
“It all came to a head one Saturday night. I was leaving on Monday for St. Louis. We’d been talking all day, going around and around. We’d been talking for days, really. You were in a little baby seat. It had a handle and a little canopy. I had brought a pizza over, and it sat on the coffee table in front of us, untouched, just looking nasty. It seemed like some kind of accusation, even—who thought this was a good idea?”
Fitz understands. What kind of person brings cheese-and-pepperoni to this?
“We got into it again, really arguing this time. It was confusing, all my coming and going, that’s what she was saying. It was making things worse. It wasn’t right.”
His father says he was ready to respond. There were some points he wanted to make. He wanted to take exception to some of the things Annie had said. Maybe he got a little bit, well, lawyerly.
“Annie cut me off. ‘Oh,