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a good father.
    “He wants to be too many good things,” she went on. “He wanted to be a good husband, a good American, a good weatherman. He even wanted to make perfect eggs Benedict. Do you know what that is?”
    “Yeah, Mom, it’s Da Vinci Academy for the Gifted,” I said. “Not the Drifted. It’s when they make funky eggs and put them on English muffins.”
    “Well, one time he made them and they came out really crappy, I mean
seriously
crappy, and I called them eggs Benedict Arnold and he was hurt,” she said. “He was really hurt.”
    I thought he was trying, too, but Mom was right. He did things by the book even if you weren’t on the same page. It was like Jay-Z talking about Auto-Tune. You couldscreech away and still come close to the right notes but it still didn’t make it.
    Saturday came and I walked downtown.
    “Hey, Zander! What you up to these days?” Mr. Watson, who lived on my block, was the cook at the restaurant in Harlem Hospital.
    “Nothing much,” I said. “Having lunch with my father.”
    “That’s good,” Mr. Watson said. “Especially if he’s paying. Order the steak.”
    “I don’t want the steak,” I said.
    I found a booth facing the door and parked in it. I knew my father was going to get there right on time. The dude was never late. I just hoped he didn’t bring me a stupid present that I was supposed to ooh and aah over.
    “Alexander!”
Bam!
Right on time. “You’re looking good!” My father had on his best smile as he slid into the booth. Donald Scott, weatherman, had on a brown sport jacket, blue shirt, and dark slacks. I had on my New York Knicks sweatshirt.
    “How you doing?” I asked.
    “Couldn’t be better,” he said. “You order yet?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Hey, guy, brought you something,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “It’s a rhyming dictionary.”
    I didn’t know what he expected me to do with it but I took it from him and opened it up. It was kind of embarrassing because I knew I didn’t want it but I didn’t want to tell him that.
    “ ’Case you’re thinking up a rap while you’re on the A train,” he said, “and needed some rhymes.”
    That was so lame.
    “Yeah, okay.”
    “So what’s going on?”
    “Nothing much,” I said.
    “Your mother tells me that you’re studying the Civil War,” he said, picking up the menu to figure out what salad he was going to order. “That’s good stuff, the Civil War. Important American history. Few people understand that many of the issues we face today, the balance of powers between the federal government and the states, were hammered out in that bloody conflict.”
    “If you say so.”
    We sat there for a while and he ran through his checklist of the things to say to your kid when you live on the West Coast and your kid lives on the East Coast. Howpretty the girls were on the East Coast, how boating was a favorite sport in the Seattle area, and how many more people drove sports cars in Washington.
    “More open highway,” he said. “Not in the SeaTac region itself but on the outskirts, as you head toward Mount Rainier. You got the pictures of Mount Rainier I sent you. Your mother said you liked them.”
    He even started talking about how well the Seattle SuperSonics were going to do.
    “The SuperSonics suck,” I said.
    He looked a little hurt when I said that and I felt bad, but I didn’t take it back.
    It was funny, because being around him always made me mad, but I wanted to be around him more. It made me mad because he was always trying too hard and I wished he wouldn’t. I wished he could just chill out and be whoever he was.
    “So, tell me about the Civil War,” he said, still trying.
    “It was a war, the Union won, end of story,” I said.
    “Sometimes things are more complex than that,” he said. “Even with the weather. A rainy day is good weather for an umbrella salesman but bad weather for a lifeguard. It’s a matter of perspective.”
    “Unless you’re a