father is standing there, smiling pleasantly. He’s taken off his tie and rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think he was All-American Dad, home from work early.
“Hello?” Caleb says.
“Hello,” he says, and extends his hand.
Caleb gives Fitz a quick glance and then takes it. He gives it a shake. “I’m Caleb,” he says. “Pleased to meet you … Mr. Fitz’s dad.”
“Call me Curtis.”
“Okay,” Caleb says, but he doesn’t.
“You’re in the band,” Fitz’s father says.
“Well, yes,” Caleb says. “Actually, right now Fitz and I are the band.”
“I like your sound,” Fitz’s father says, and Caleb gives Fitz a triumphant look, as if to say, told you so, and Fitz suspects that now he will never be able to convince him that his father is not really a record executive.
“We need a drummer,” Caleb says. “But it’s not easy to find one.”
“Drummers are famously problematic, aren’t they?”
Caleb gives Fitz another look. What planet is this guy from? “Oh yes,” he says. “Famously.”
In fact, drummers have been, what he said, problematic. Fitz wonders how his father knows. He can’t imagine that he’s ever been in a band. In the past year they’ve played with only two human drummers: one was a kid with a fancy kit but absolutely no sense of rhythm, the other a kid they recruited from jazz band, who was always so busy with extracurricular activities and lessons—student council, Model UN, you name it—he was never available to hang out, much less practice.
“This is a big day for the band,” Caleb says. “Today we’re going to audition a vocalist. And I am pretty sure she’s going to take us to the next level.”
“Really,” Fitz’s father says. “That’s exciting.”
“I don’t know about this,” Fitz says. “I don’t think this is such a good time.”
“What do you mean?” Caleb says.
“I mean,” Fitz says, “there’s a lot going on. Couldn’t we do this some other day?”
“Let me give you a hand,” Fitz’s father says, and picks up Caleb’s amp. Caleb can be touchy about people handling his stuff, but this he doesn’t seem to mind. “Thank you,” he says, and leads the way, guitar in hand, up the walk to the front porch.
They’ve played out here before, Fitz and Caleb, sitting in a couple of lawn chairs. Maybe if Fitz’s basement weren’t a dank dungeon, they’d rehearse down there. Maybe not—Caleb loves playing outside. He thinks fresh air is good for musical instruments. And he doesn’t mind a little ambient noise mixing with the music—likes it, really. If there were a train rumbling by, he’d be ecstatic. That would be pure Clarksdale. But even the ordinary clatter and hum of Fitz’s neighborhood, he welcomes it into the sonic stew—a car horn, the sound of an airplane overhead, the click-clack of somebody trimming a hedge.
The problem with jamming out here is the electronics—how to plug in. There’s no outlets on the porch. When Fitz’s mom hangs Christmas lights, she does it with a complicated jerry-rigged network of extension cords that doesn’t strike Fitz as entirely safe. Not that he’d ever tell her that.
Caleb tried once to run his amp’s power cord into the house through the mailbox slot, but then was stuck in the corner of the porch, away from the chairs. Which is the point of Caleb’s new heavy-duty, extra-long cord.
Caleb looks up at Fitz. “Don’t just stand there, dude,” he says. “Go inside and plug me in. And bring out your acoustic.”
34
Fitz turns the key and pushes the front door open. Nothing has moved since this morning, of course, nothing has changed, but things feel different somehow.
It feels like a snapshot of a life—his life—that has been interrupted. On a bench in the front hall, there is a stack of his textbooks and notebooks, a folder containing the geometry proofs he dutifully completed last night, his thoughtful-sounding responses to Mr. Massey’s questions about a poem by John Donne. Fitz was planning to skip, but he did his homework anyway. What did that say about him? It’s hard now to imagine himself taking such pains again, working his way through another problem set tonight, adding and subtracting angles, trying to describe the speaker’s tone, all that work, for what? Points?
He does a quick walk-through of the downstairs. In the kitchen, Fitz feels the weird vibe of Pompeii, the Roman city they studied in Global, buried by a volcanic eruption so quickly that everything was perfectly preserved, daily life flash-frozen, an archaeologist’s dream come true.