“Then let us walk you to the nurse,” Maisie insisted. “She’ll take your temperature and let you lie down.”
Of course that was the sensible thing to do. But Felix could not walk another step toward school. Without saying anything more, he turned around and began to run in the opposite direction. He wondered if that letter was already in some post office in Cleveland. Once, when he was in first grade, they’d gone on a field trip to the main post office on Eighth Avenue, and they’d seen all the thousands of letters in a giant bag, waiting to get sorted and delivered. Was his letter to Lily Goldberg already waiting in Cleveland? Maybe he could call the main post office there and have someone find it and rip it up. He knew that was preposterous, but the idea made him feel a little better.
Felix kept running.
But he didn’t run home.
Instead he ran to the Hotel Viking, where his father was in Room 208, probably still asleep.
“Hey, buddy,” his father said as he wiped the sleep from his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”
“I guess so,” Felix said.
His father opened the door of Room 208 wider so that Felix could come inside. How could he describe how good it felt to see his father standing there in his long gray gym shorts with the faded letters RISD practically completely gone and a T-shirt, also faded, with Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of a man on the front. RISD stood for Rhode Island School of Design, which was the art college his father went to a million years ago. And that T-shirt was from the semester he spent in Florence. Those things, plus his father’s particular smell of turpentine and maybe sweat and something limy, were all so familiar and comforting that Felix, as upset as he felt, broke into a grin.
“We used to call that bunking school,” his father said.
He sat on the bed and picked up the phone beside it.
“Could you send up a pot of coffee, some chocolate milk, an eggs Benedict, bacon, and some pancakes, please?” he said to room service. He glanced at Felix. “Blueberry?”
Felix nodded, grinning even more.
His father hung up and ran his hands through his curly hair. Like Maisie’s, his hair had a mind of its own.
“So you’re not in school because . . . ,” his father prompted.
“Dad,” Felix said, sitting beside him on the bed, “is there any way to retrieve a letter from the main post office in Cleveland, Ohio?”
“No,” his father said. “Once a letter is mailed, it’s gone.”
Felix groaned. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“Why are you sending letters to Cleveland, Ohio, anyway?”
Felix flopped back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling.
His father waited.
“Lily Goldberg,” he said finally.
His father waited some more.
“She’s a girl,” Felix added.
“Most people named Lily are girls,” his father agreed.
“She moved to Cleveland and promised to stay in touch and, okay, I wasn’t a very good friend, but she was in Newport this weekend and didn’t even call me or anything,” Felix said, his words spilling out in a rush. “And,” he continued, “I wrote her a letter before I knew that.”
“Ah!” his father said. “Of course, it’s possible that she was only here for a day, or her parents kept her too busy—”
“Who’s side are you on, anyway?” Felix asked rhetorically.
Room service knocked on the door, and his father let the guy in. He was rolling a big cart with white linen and lots of plates covered with silver lids and a white vase with a pink carnation in the middle. Felix watched his father sign for the food and then start lifting the lids, the smell of warm pancakes and bacon filling the room.
His father plucked a piece of bacon from the plate and popped the whole thing in his mouth.
“I say just wait and see what she does when she gets the letter,” he said while he chewed.
Felix sniffed the little silver pitcher of maple syrup to determine if it was real or the fake stuff. He hated the fake stuff. But this smelled rich and maple-y, so he poured it over his pancakes and then carefully cut them into small even pieces. Felix didn’t like large chunks of pancake.
“I say . . . ,” his father said as he cut into his eggs Benedict and watched the yolk run all over the hollandaise sauce, which Felix found disgusting. “I say females are a curious species.”
Felix nodded. He took a bite of his pancakes, liking the way the blueberries and maple syrup tasted together.
“Leonardo da Vinci,” he said after he swallowed. “He wasn’t from the Renaissance, was he?”
His father laughed. “Where did that come from?”
Felix pointed to his father’s shirt.
“Ah! The Vitruvian Man.”
“The what man?” Felix asked even as he took another bit of pancake.
“Vitruvian. My shirt is too faded for you to see very clearly, but basically it’s based on the work of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. Da Vinci made a pen-and-ink drawing of a man in two superimposed images surrounded by both a circle and a square.”