Free Fitz by Mick Cochrane Page A

stupid?
    He scans the place—people are eating, studying their menus,Chip is gesturing at someone in a semi-threatening way with a fork. Fitz moves quickly between the booths, stifling his urge to run, keeping himself in check. His father’s not at the front of the restaurant near the register. He’s not in the foyer.
    Fitz steps outside and looks up and down the block. The kid with his backpack is still standing there at the bus stop. He gives Fitz a look:
Do I know you? Am I supposed to know you?
    Fitz goes back inside. He returns to their booth, which is clean and set up now, shiny and empty, as if they’ve never been there, as if the lunch never happened. He feels like the sole victim in some scam or prank everyone else is in on. He feels like he’s wandered into
The Twilight Zone
.
    Just then Maddie the waitress comes by with a tray full of water glasses. She smiles, looking genuinely happy to see him, which is a little gift he’s too upset to appreciate right now. Then she seems to take in his distress. Her face gets serious. “You forget something?”
    “I’m looking,” he says. “I’m looking for
him
. Did you see him leave?”
    “Your dad,” she says, and he doesn’t contradict her. She makes a kind of thinking face. Then she brightens. “He’s on the phone,” she says. “Thataway.”
    “Thanks,” Fitz says. “Thanks a lot.”
    “Just doin’ my job,” he hears her say as he turns in the direction of the back of the restaurant.
    Sure enough. He’s standing there, hunched, turned away, a telephone receiver held tight to his ear. Fitz must have walkedright by him on his way out of the men’s room. 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