I am not proud to admit that I took some small pleasure in seeing his reaction. His face drew into itself, and he dropped his head slightly. I noticed a smudge of dirt on his forehead, just above his left eye. He took in a breath. “Are they okay?” he asked, looking at his boots.
“Sure. Great,” I said, pacing in the narrow space. There wasn’t much room—I had to turn around after two steps. “Your sister quit Juilliard and can’t listen to classical music anymore, let alone play it. Your mom doesn’t want to stick her head in the oven anymore. Your dad lives at his goddamn company. Your uncle—well, shit, at least he’s got something going on in his life.”
“You’ve seen my uncle?” Fritz said, still looking down at the floor.
“Yeah. He’s pretty torn up about . . .” I waved a hand vaguely at the trailer, unable at the moment to conceive of an appropriate word.
Fritz stood up off the table and lifted his gaze. “Did he send you here? Does he know where I am?”
“No, he didn’t send me—”
“Please don’t lie to me, Matthias.” It was the first time he’d called me by my name.
I gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Lie to you,” I said. I wanted to shout, to rage. Anger and bitterness and sorrow flowed through me like separate dark rivers, a flood of emotion carrying me off to whatever happened next. “I’m not lying to you, Fritz,” I said. “Your family has no idea where you are. Honest to God. They think you’re dead, remember?”
Fritz picked up a straw hat and toyed with the brim, turning the hat slowly round and round in his hands. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said. “I know how upset you must be.”
I wanted to snatch his hat and throw it out of the trailer, watch it sail across the lot and fall into the mud. As if reading my mood, he laid the hat back down on the counter. “So how did you find me?” he asked.
It was startling to look at my friend after all these years, to see his old face, which had always been on the edge of a lopsided smile, half-hidden within the face in front of me now, which was weathered and keen and sad. The same, but different. I wondered how he saw me, if my face was as changed from what it had been, and for a piercing moment I had a glimpse of what it might be like to grow old. “It’s a long story,” I said. Suddenly, I was bone-tired. “Remember Kevin Kelly, from school?”
Fritz frowned, remembering. “That kid who called us Nazis?”
I nodded. “He saw you out here, last year. I figured, what the hell, it was worth a shot.”
“He told you? Are you guys friends?”
I laughed at that, an ugly sound. “He was selling drugs at school. At Blackburne. I’m teaching there—well, I was, anyway. I found out about it, the drugs, and heard he knew where you were, so I went to try to get him to tell me. Didn’t quite work out the way I had planned.”
Fritz considered this. “Is he here with you?”
“No. He’s dead. A cop shot him when he tried to stab me in his grow room. Ex-cop, actually.”
Fritz stared at me. “Oh-kay,” he said, and his guarded look of confusion actually made me smile.
“Needs some more explanation, I know,” I said.
Fritz spread his hands out. “I’m not exactly in a position to demand explanations,” he said. For the first time, a small, lopsided smile hovered on his face.
That look, that acknowledgment of debts unpaid, dislodged my anger enough to make me sit down and tell him, from start to finish, the story of the past year, from getting the job at Blackburne to confronting Kevin Kelly. I left out nothing, including what I’d learned from Trip and Diamond. He leaned against the counter, listening, his face intense and hard. Twice he raised his hand halfway to his neck and then put it down. The second time he did it, when I was explaining how Briggs had helped me realize what Kevin had meant by clown, I stopped talking and waited expectantly for him to look at me, and then I slowly drew out from my pocket the Saint Christopher medal on its chain.
“I thought you might want this,” I said.
Fritz stared at it, and for the first time since I’d begun my story, something shifted over his face, a look of longing. He reached for the medal, but I closed my hand around it.
“I’ve told you my story,” I said. “Now tell me why I should give this to you. You left it under my pillow, Fritz. Before you walked off the map. Tell me why.”
He looked at my closed hand, and then at me, but before he could speak, there were two short knocks on the trailer door, and it opened to reveal George, still wearing his greasepaint. “Show’s over, Pete,” he said, ignoring me. “You okay? Tommy’s asking for you.”
His eyes on me, Fritz said to George, “Tell Tommy I’ll be there in a minute.”
George hesitated, glancing at me. “Need me to cover for you?”
I’ll admit George and I had not gotten off on the right foot, but my patience was worn thin. I was on the verge of getting answers to a mystery that had shadowed my life, and George was acting like a jealous prom date. “Who’s Tommy?” I asked, interjecting myself into the conversation like a dog lifting a leg on a rival’s rosebush.
George’s sour look was replaced by alarm as a commotion broke out behind him. He turned toward the door. “You can’t —” he started, and then a small dark-haired boy, three or four years old, ran past him into the trailer. He was wearing jeans and a sweater. A frayed straw cowboy hat on a string around his neck bounced against his shoulders. He grinned and ran up to Fritz, ignoring both me and George.
“The show’s over,” the boy announced to Fritz.
“Yes, it is,” Fritz said. A slow smile spread across his face.
The boy turned to look at me like a curious bird. “What’s in your hand?” he asked.
I looked down at my closed hand, the Saint Christopher medal in it and a loop of the chain hanging from my fist. “Something that belongs to my friend,” I said.
The boy’s eyes widened. “Can I see it?” he asked.
Fritz stirred. “Can I see it, please,” he said. He nodded at George, who, with a final suspicious glance at me, withdrew and closed the door to the trailer behind him.
“Please,” the boy said.
I opened my hand, and the boy looked at the medal, his mouth slightly open. “Oh,” he said.
Fritz put his hand on top of the boy’s head. “This is an old friend of mine. His name’s Matthias.”
The boy tore his eyes from the medal and looked up at me, smiling. “That’s a funny name,” he said delightedly.
I smiled back. “It is.” I looked at Fritz.
“This is Tommy,” Fritz said. “My son.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The next morning, I returned to the rodeo lot with two coffees. Tommy sat at one end of Fritz’s trailer, armed with a stack of coloring books and waiting for Sesame Street to come on. I sipped my coffee gratefully, and Fritz looked tired, but he just cupped his hands around his coffee and let it slowly grow cold as he told me about Tommy’s mother, Shanna.