Fitz by Mick Cochrane Page A

felt so awkward,” his father says. “Totally inept. I had no real experience with babies.”
    Fitz imagines he’d never been really bad at anything before. He probably never received a failing grade in his life.
Welcome to the human race
—that’s something his mom likes to say.
    “I’d fumble with something, forget to support the head, and then Annie would step in. ‘Here,’ she’d say, ‘let me take him,’ and I’d hand you off.
    “Back at school, in my study carrel,” his father says, “things made sense. There were precedents, rules of evidence. There was a sense of order.” He didn’t love it, but he could do it. He could read through a case and identify the issues. More and more, he liked to argue, he enjoyed the back and forth, the give and take. Because he’d confided the fact of his fatherhood to only a single classmate, his study partner, Rory, he was able to keep it walled off, hidden away in a kind of bottom drawer of his life. In the middle of his familiar school routine, he could almost forget about it.
    Fitz is trying his best to lean into his father’s story, to meet him halfway. The bottom drawer—maybe that’s where he’s been keeping his dad these last few weeks.
    “Kind of like a double life?” Fitz asks. “Like being undercover?”
    “Yeah,” his father says. “Something like that.”
    In Annie’s apartment, his father says, nothing made sense. For one thing, Fitz had somehow mixed up days and nights. At three in the morning, the 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 Iwould 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