There were a few other things I wanted to know besides the story of Tommy’s mother—why Fritz had run away and was now a rodeo bullfighter, for instance—but it was clear that Fritz needed to tell me the story his own way. And I was here to listen.
He had met Shanna five years ago when he’d been working as a stable hand outside of Houston and a horse had reared up and clipped Fritz in the head with its hooves. “Shanna was an EMT at the hospital,” Fritz said. “I come into the ER, blood running down my face, and this little girl on the bench sees me and asks her mom in this loud whisper, ‘Is he gonna die?’ But Shanna just took me off and stitched me up. Got a great scar just above my hairline. I asked for her number, right there in the ER, and she just laughed and said that horse must’ve hit me harder than she thought. But I went back and asked her out. We dated for a while, and then she told me she was pregnant.” He turned the cup around in his hands. “Thing is, I liked the idea of having a family,” Fritz continued. “I’d been alone for a long time.” He glanced at me, but I just sipped my coffee, refusing to take the bait. “I was half in love with her, so I asked her to marry me. She said no, but she stayed with me through the pregnancy. Or might be more accurate to say she let me stay with her. Right after Tommy was born, I started working the rodeo, so we traveled a lot. Shanna thought it would be a big adventure, and they need EMTs everywhere. For a while she worked for the rodeo, too. But it was hard with a newborn baby—crying, feeding, diapers, all that and you get no sleep. Everything is twenty-four-seven about your kid. Once I held that baby, though . . .” He looked across the room at Tommy, who was talking to his coloring book as he scribbled in it. “It’s a cliché, maybe, but I didn’t know how much I could love someone else until I had him.”
When he had paused for a good while, I said, “Shanna didn’t feel the same way?”
He shook his head, glancing at Tommy, who was now playing with his stuffed animals. Fritz lowered his voice. “She liked to go out, have fun. Not a party girl, not like that, but staying at home with a baby wasn’t what she wanted out of life.”
“But she had a baby.”
Fritz sighed. “She could’ve had an abortion, but she was a little nervous about it, and I convinced her to keep him. I thought she’d change her mind once he was born. But we started fighting instead.” He glanced at Tommy again, but Tommy was engrossed with his animals—they were all apparently pirates because he was having them say things like “Argh, matey, walk the plank!” and then marching them off the edge of the television. Fritz lowered his voice even more. “When Tommy was about a year old, she talked about giving him up for adoption. I knew that was it. I kept Tommy and she left. She’s back in Houston, sends him cards, calls every few months. It’s okay.”
I watched Tommy show one of his coloring books to a teddy bear, pretending to read him a story. “No, it’s not,” I said quietly.
Fritz sagged a little in acknowledgment. “No,” he said. “Dammit.”
“Daddy,” Tommy said solemnly, not looking up from his teddy bear, “that’s a bad word.”
“Sorry, buddy,” Fritz said. He hesitated, and then said, “Tommy, I’m gonna turn on Sesame Street—”
“Yes!”
“Hold on—Mr. Matthias and I are going to step outside and leave you here to watch TV. We’ll be right outside if you need us.”
“Okay, Daddy,” Tommy said.
It was cold and clear outside, the sky an immense brilliant blue. The Tetons ranged along the horizon. I stretched, enjoying the sun on my face after being closed up in the trailer, but Fritz hunched his shoulders in his jacket. We walked slowly around in the cold mud and gravel of the lot, keeping the trailer in sight. A man in a shearling jacket and skullcap walked past and nodded a greeting, though Fritz barely noticed. He seemed to be deciding something. I held my breath, waiting and walking in silence.
“The day I left,” Fritz said. He turned to face me and stopped, and so did I. “I didn’t want you to think I was leaving because of you. I wasn’t. That was why I left that medal under your pillow. Sort of a . . . good-bye, a sign of friendship. I don’t know. Maybe I should have kept it.”
An invisible hand tightened its hold around my lungs and heart. And then slowly, slowly, it released. Just as slowly, I took my hand out of my jacket pocket and held the Saint Christopher medal out to him. Fritz looked at me, then at it, and held out his hand. I placed the medal into his palm.
“Take it back,” I said. “Just tell me why you left. Please.”
Fritz considered the medal in his hand, hefted it, and then raised his head to look across the yard at the door of his trailer, then at the single window, the blinds to which were shut. “I was . . .” He cleared his throat and then grimaced. His hand clenched around the Saint Christopher medal. “When I was eleven,” he said, talking to his clenched hand, “my father started working a lot. He’d always worked a lot, but now he was coming home at nine, ten o’clock at night, driving to work at five the next morning. Some nights he just stayed at the office, slept on the couch. I remember wondering if he was having an affair. I even said something like that to my mother. She just looked at me with a sad smile and said the only affair my father was having was with his work.”
He glanced up at me, as if to make sure I was listening. I nodded in encouragement, though I wasn’t sure where Fritz was going with this.