Father's Day (12 page)

A
FTER THEY ATE
sandwiches on the steps at Versailles and shared a bottle of water, Harvey said they should go exploring. Above their heads, birds flew in arcs toward the palace, disappearing into tufts of nest beneath the windows.

Morning tours of the interior were concluding, and people were coming out into the gardens with paper maps and cameras. In some places it was difficult to walk a straight path without being caught in the background of someone else's memories.

When Harvey had to take a work call on her cell phone, Jason listened to his daughter speak French. In a few years, he thought, she would be thirty years old, though never completely a woman in his eyes—more a child pretending to be a woman and convincing everyone in the world except her father. With each passing year, she needed him less. And one day, probably soon, she would find some stranger to share all the feelings she had once shared with him. This eventual, unspoken loss was something Jason thought about after his best friend, Vincent, got married a few years ago.

One night they were all in front of the television. The Mets had lost and
The Simpsons
was on. Whenever Vincent found something funny and laughed, his wife laughed too, and they turned to face each other. And when Vincent's glass was empty, his wife noticed it was empty and said, “Another pop, Vince?” or “How 'bout something to eat Vin'?”

That night Jason sat on his front stoop in the darkness and thought about the woman who had once loved him, who had once tried to help him. The sound of her name in his mouth brought it all back, as though no time had passed since their separation.

When Harvey was a senior in high school, she had asked her father one night at dinner why he never dated anyone. “I want you to be happy, Dad,” she said. “I think you should find someone.”

“Think about it this way,” Jason had tried to explain. “I'm a single parent with no money, a dead-end job, a fake leg, bad teeth, and a criminal record. Plus I'm a recovering alcoholic. What loser could ever love a person like that?”

Harvey stood up so quickly her chair fell backward. Then she went outside and Jason could hear her crying on the patio. When he realized why she was so upset, it was like a flood through his body.

W
HEN
H
ARVEY HAD
finished on the phone, Jason asked if she would take a photo of him, maybe with the palace in the background.

“Oh my God, Dad—are you actually going to smile for once? Stand here,” she said, and positioned him beneath a statue. Then she took a few steps back. “C'mon, Dad,” she pleaded. “Just a little one . . .”

“I am smiling,” he said. “This is how I smile.”

“I don't have one picture of you happy—not one picture where you're smiling.”

“I smile on the inside, kiddo. You know that.”

“You're just weird, Dad. But I love you anyway.”

“I love you too, Harv.”

She remembered the first time they had said it to each other.

She was in her bedroom crying over something. He was outside her door, pacing the hall in his socks. Was it that first day of second grade? She couldn't be sure, all she knew was that it started in the afternoon, after going out to get the mail.

Jason was stuffing the soiled car seat cover into the washer. She remembers the faint aroma of vomit, and the discoloration on dark fabric as it dropped silently into the machine.

“Your favorite magazine is here.”

“Okay.”

“Don't you want it?”

“Just leave it on the couch.”

Harvey watched Jason pour detergent in, then looked at the magazine in her hand. On the cover was a tattooed woman in a bikini and cowboy boots, sitting on a motorcycle. Harvey held up the magazine. “Can I open it?”

“Just put it on the couch, like I said.”

After dinner, Harvey asked if she could sit with him and flick through the magazine
.
“I want to be a mechanic when I grow up, remember? Might help me to see engines.”

Jason was clearing the plates. “What do you want for lunch tomorrow?”

Harvey didn't know.

“Hot dogs and potato salad?”

“If you don't look at the magazine, how are you going to finish your motorcycle?”

“I ain't going to finish it,” Jason said. “That bike is a pipe dream.”

He carried the remaining dishes into the kitchen, then returned with a fresh pack of Camel cigarettes.

“What's a pipe dream?”

“Something that'll never happen.”

“Why is building your motorcycle a pipe dream?”

“Because I ain't got the money,” he said, taking a cigarette from the pack. “I'm going out to the patio.”

Then Harvey thought of something. “If you stopped smoking, you could use the money to build your motorcycle. Then it wouldn't be a pipe dream anymore!”

She considered getting down from the table and shouting
Eureka
—the way she'd seen SpongeBob do once when he had a good idea.

Jason laughed mockingly. “Good one,” he said, then opened the patio door just enough to let himself out.

When he came back in, Harvey heard him banging the ashtray against the side of the trash can. Then the faucet. Then the freezer drawer opening. She knew it was ice cream because the lid on the container made a
pluk
sound.

“I want to stay here with you tomorrow,” she said when Jason appeared with two bowls. “I can help you build your motorcycle instead of going to school.”

“Gotta go to school, kid.”

“But I don't need school. I already changed the oil. I could work at Jiffy Lube.”

“How you gonna make any friends? A little girl gotta have friends.”

“I'm not little anymore,” Harvey tried to explain, searching the room with her eyes for something to prove it. “And I don't want to go back to second grade.”

Jason opened a newspaper and flicked through the pages. “I thought you had a good time.”

“No, I didn't.”

“What about your new outfit with the pandas? And when I picked you up, you didn't want to come home, remember? You wanted Friendly's.”

Harvey looked at the rough black hair on Jason's cheeks. There was a vein in his neck that always stuck out and made him look like he was shouting, even when he was eating ice cream and reading
Newsday
.

“Where are
your
friends?” she asked him. “Where are the friends
you
made in second grade?”

“When you're done with that ice cream, go and get ready for bed. It's been a long day, and we're both tired.”

“What's on TV tonight?”

“Nothing until you've got your pajamas on.”

“What then?”

“Maybe a movie.”

Harvey mashed the rest of her ice cream into a paste. “There's always movies,” she said. “They're always on.”

“When you've finished eating, go wash up and get your pajamas on.”

Harvey stopped mashing and dropped the spoon into her dish. “But it's still light out!”

“You have school tomorrow, and if you wanna watch TV, do as I say.”

She snorted. “Then I don't wanna watch TV.”

“Go get ready for bed.”

“But I'm still eating.”

“When you've finished.”

“I'm not going to school tomorrow.”

“Yes, you are.”

“You
don't have a best friend, and I don't need one either.”

Jason closed the newspaper and snatched Harvey's dish from under her chin.

“Hey!” she cried. “I wasn't finished!”

“There's nothin' in it,” Jason said, sticking his finger into a pink pool at the center of the bowl. “It's just juice.”

“I like the juice.”

“Go clean up for bed.”

“I'm not dirty.”

Jason stopped, halfway to the kitchen, and turned to the wall. “You threw up in the car,” he said in a low voice. “You threw up all over yourself.”

Harvey just sat there with her arms folded.

“Then you can go to bed right now,” he growled, “with no fucking movie and no bedtime book. I'm going out for a smoke.”

Harvey slid off her chair and followed him to the patio door.

“Don't be in this room when I get back.”

“Mom said you were mean!”

“I don't give a shit what your mom said.”

“And my dad never cursed like you. He didn't smoke either.”

Jason took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Well, then, it's lucky I'm not your dad, ain't it?”

When he came back in, Harvey was sitting on the floor crying. He tried to speak, but she ran to her room and threw herself on the bed. It felt like she was in the air for a long time.
She wanted to do it again, then remembered she was upset and felt afraid. She wondered if Wanda would come and take her away for being naughty, and remembered her smug face at the table, talking back to Jason in a way she had impulsively thought was grown up and would impress him.

A minute later there was a knock, and she heard Jason say through the door he was sorry.

“Go away!” Harvey yelled. “I hate you.”

But he didn't go away.

“Go away,” she said again.

But he just stood there, shuffling his feet. She could hear him outside her door, shuffling his feet, unable to say the words, but she knew.

T
HERE WERE PEOPLE
out rowing on the lake, though some were just going in circles and laughing. Harvey said she wanted to be on the water too, so they handed over some identification, and an attendant walked them along a floating dock to a white boat.

“Wow, you're good at rowing, Dad,” Harvey said as Jason pulled them past the other boaters.

Jason shook his head. “Who the hell makes a boat where you can't see where you're going?”

“Uh sailors, Dad, for like, hundreds of years,” she said with a laugh. “Just look over your shoulder. It's easy when you get used to it.”

When they were in the middle of the lake, Jason brought the oars up onto the sides of the boat. Harvey reached into the bag for some lemon cake. There was a baseball hat stuffed into a side pocket, and Jason asked for it. Yellow writing on the front said
TRIUMPH
MOTORCYCLES
.

After eating the rest of their food, Harvey wanted to row. Jason hovered over her, but Harvey said she could do it by herself.

Rowing was harder than she'd thought, and one of the oars kept skimming the surface of the water. When she turned to ask her father how she was doing, she noticed he was soaking wet.

“Oh my God, I'm so sorry!”

“Keep practicing, Harvey.”

By now, many of the other boaters had gone in; it was hot and there was little shade. When Jason had the oars again, Harvey took off one shoe and let her foot trail in the water. They were at the far end of the lake, where there were no attendants to say she couldn't.

Jason stared at her from under his cap. “Want to talk about the Peter Rabbit cup you got me?”

Harvey's eyes fell to her father's hands on the oars. The wood was dark where water had soaked in, and she remembered the painting of an old man and a child in a rowboat, something she'd seen on a school trip to a museum. The girl had on a flowing, dirty dress and the man had a pipe in his mouth. In the boat was a net of fish. Harvey had wondered if any of the fish were still alive, and if the girl in the picture felt sorry for them. She wanted to know if the girl could swim, and thought how the dress would pull her down. Harvey's teacher saw her looking and came over. “He loves that little girl so much,” the teacher said. “You can just tell.”

The sun was so strong by midafternoon that Harvey felt somehow at a distance from her life. She hoped her father would drop the subject of the Peter Rabbit cup until later, when they were home in the shade with something cold to drink. But he kept asking.

“It was the only cup in the set that didn't get broken, all thanks to you,” she said weakly.

After a few more strokes, they reached a bank. Jason took a rope at the front of the boat and attached it to a ring in the grass. “Let's sit out of the heat for a while under those trees,” he said.

“Can we do that, Dad?”

“That's why they put the ring and rope there,” he said.

“But I don't think those rings have been used for a long time,” Harvey pointed out, fingering the rusty circle. “I don't know if we're supposed to tie these boats up.”

“They don't care as long as we're paying for the time.”

The grass was a hard dark green and grew unevenly around the trunk of a gnarled tree. It felt good to lay down in the shade.

“How did you know the Peter Rabbit cup came from a set?” her father wanted to know. He had taken the cup from the lunch bag and was holding it.

Without sitting up, Harvey said her first dad had told her stories about his childhood, and one of the stories was about the Peter Rabbit cup.

“It would have been better if he'd told you nothing,” Jason said.

Harvey lifted her head to look at him. “If I'd known it would upset you,” she said, “I wouldn't have put it in your Father's Day box.”

“It's just ancient history, that's all I'm saying.”

“But it's
your
ancient history, Dad. And it's my story now too.”

Jason sensed that she was trying to fit together all the different pieces of her life, and it reminded him that above all else, he was there to look after her.

“Wanda told me that you'd see things differently with each new stage of your life. She was right about that, I guess.”

A breeze rolled over the lake making ripples.

“She was right about everything,” Harvey said. “Wanda's amazing.”

“We should send her a postcard from Paris. She's retired now, you know?”

“I told Wanda everything I could about you,” Harvey admitted. “That's why she brought me to see you in the first place—because I told her you were special.”

“She called me first,” Jason said. “Then she came to visit. Then she brought you.”

“I remember,” Harvey said. “We were in the car. It was a station wagon, and there were all these paper towels on the seat next to me.”

Harvey thought of Miss Bateman. Her late-night whispering phone calls. How young she must have been then.

“It was raining, and the windows were fogged up. I was drawing a picture and it looked like a motorcycle. And then I thought of you, and I told Wanda everything my dad told me, but I also made a few things up. I knew it was dishonest, but I wanted her to feel what I felt, so I made things up. Is that okay, that I lied to Wanda?”

“What did you tell Wanda about the Peter Rabbit cup?”

“My dad said that your father came home one night, took all the birth china out of the living room cabinet, and smashed it under his boots. But then he realized there was a piece missing.”

“That's right,” Jason said softly. “Because I'd taken it the night before—just by chance.”

Harvey moved closer to her father across the grass so she could hear. In the distance, a young family was splashing about. Their laughter mixing with the sound of water.

“What else did you tell Wanda?”

“Something about how you nursed my father back to
health by making him take medicine from the Peter Rabbit cup. Is that true, Dad?”

“Yes. But it's not why the cup was missing.”

“I wanted so much for Wanda to like you, so I just made things up.”

Harvey handed her father a tissue to wipe the sweat on his face.

“But you'd never met me.”

“I just knew,” Harvey said, rearranging her skirt. “Weird, right?”

A
FTER SWEEPING OUT
all the pieces with his arm and stomping on them in his work boots, Jason's father had somehow managed to sneak Steve out of bed without his older son waking up.

But then Jason opened his eyes and saw his brother's covers pulled back.

His father had never done anything to Steve before, but he was older now, had soft hairs over his lip; and was playing baseball and traveling to games on a bus with other boys.

Jason looked through the crack in the door and saw his brother sitting on the carpet in his underwear. Steve was too young for his muscles to have any definition, and the tops of his arms and his back were covered in goose bumps.

Their father kept saying he would sit there until admitting where the missing Peter Rabbit cup was. What remained of the set lay broken on the carpet between them, like the ruins of a once great city.

When their father reached down and picked up a piece of the broken china as though he meant to throw it, Jason stepped
out from behind the door and stood beside his brother. Before his father could say anything, Jason blurted out that Steve had done nothing—that
he
had borrowed the Peter Rabbit cup because he wanted to draw it for art class at school. When Jason looked down at his brother, his thighs were wet because he'd been crying.

Their mother was awake now too, and watching from her bedroom doorway, watching everything in her robe. She had saved up two years for that christening china; had wanted something she could pass down through the family. When their father noticed his wife behind him, he gestured toward the broken pieces, as though unveiling a work of art.

“Look what they made me do,” he said. “Your best china.”

It was the middle of the night.

Then Steve just got up and ran into his room. Their father bolted after him, but Jason blocked his path.

It was like bricks being dropped on his body from a height, but not once did he cry out or make a noise. Steve was listening and would not have been able to forget.

The next morning their mother wouldn't let Jason go to school in case the teachers said something. She was mad at them for not giving their father the Peter Rabbit cup. Over breakfast, she told Steve and Jason that it was unfair to gang up against their father. When Steve started bawling into his Lucky Charms, their mother just stood there. “You can cry all you want to, Steven, but that's
his
food you're eating, and this is
his
roof we all live under. Next time think about how you behave, and things like
this won't happen.” Then she knelt so her head was level with their eyes. “He's a good man deep down,” she said. “I wish you could see that.”

T
HEY ROWED BACK
across the lake toward the palace in silence.

Harvey kicked off her shoes again and trailed both feet in the brown-tinted water. When the assistant came to moor the boat, he was in good spirits because it was almost closing. The other attendants were smoking cigarettes and gesturing to some Italian students trying to paddle back with their hands.

Everyone was moving toward the exit, and the sun cast long shadows over the statues and the fountains where people had been posing for photographs.

As they reached the edge of the gardens, near where they had entered, Harvey's eye was drawn by motion to one of the borders. A bird was mincing on the gravel, trying to take flight on a single wing. The other wing was spread out on the gravel, covered in dust. The bird's chest heaved with each effort. It knew that Harvey and her father were there but did not look at them.

“What should we do?” Harvey said. “I think its wing is broken.”

D
URING THEIR SECOND
full summer together, Harvey got addicted to a show on National Geographic Juniors. It showed kids curing animals or rescuing them or saving their lives by learning how they ate and made homes. There was a seal cub that washed up in Florida, her parents the victims of a boat propeller. No one had known what to do until the
National Geographic Juniors arrived in a Jeep with their logo on the side, and hoisted the seal into a bathtub on the back of a truck.

Jason and Harvey watched the show every week, as the seal grew up and became more accustomed to her new surroundings. The National Geographic Juniors team named the seal Salad. Eventually though, Salad would have to go back in the sea. Everyone knew that. But for now she was safe living on a bed of wet towels at the aquatic center.

After the first show, Harvey told Jason she wanted to be a National Geographic Junior.

“I thought you wanted to work at Jiffy Lube?” Jason said.

A week later, he was passing Harvey's bedroom when he heard voices.

“I'm sorry to tell you this, Gordon—but you've got fleas, and you won't be able to sleep with the others tonight . . .”

Later, instead of just brushing her teeth and going into bed, Harvey insisted on taking Jason on a tour of the hospital in her bedroom, describing each animal's condition, and explaining why he or she had been arranged in a particular box with blankets made from folded squares of toilet tissue.

“I like the camel,” Jason said, patting its head. “Hey, Gordon.”

“Please don't disturb him,” Harvey said. “Gordon is very ill.”

“I thought he had fleas . . .”

“No, he has cancer from smoking.”

W
HEN SHE GOT
into bed, Jason watched her pull the sheets up. But instead of saying good night and turning over, she just lay with her eyes open.

“You've never really tucked me in before,” she said.

“Tucked you in?”

“Mom and Dad used to tuck me in.”

“You mean tuck the sides of the sheets?”

“That's how it starts,” she said. “I'll show you . . .”

Jason found the edge of the blanket and forced it under the mattress.

“Now pat the covers down,” Harvey said. “And make sure the kid inside is sort of trapped.”

When it was done, Jason watched Harvey get comfortable under the tight sheets.

“Now,” Harvey said, “lean down and pretend to give the child a hug. That's the last bit.”

“Pretend to give you a hug?”

“Or a real one, it's up to you.”

W
HEN THEY SPOTTED
an official palace gardener digging in the soil beside a wheelbarrow, Jason went over and beckoned him to follow. When he saw Harvey and the bird on the gravel, he shook his head, and Jason could tell there was nothing to be done.

When Harvey spoke to the gardener in French, he pointed up at the small mounds of dirt beneath the window ledges. He explained the problem to Harvey, and she translated it for her father: “The nests are too high,” she said. “And even if he could reach them, the other birds would reject the injured one.”

They all looked at the bird, which was sucking up pieces of gravel and spitting them out.

“It is the nature,” the gardener said in English, smoothing the front of his apron.

Then Harvey spoke to him in French again.

“Oui, Madame,” the gardener replied, putting on his gloves.

“I asked him to move it away from the sun,” she told her father.

“Maybe give him a worm too,” Jason said. “That's what I'd want.”

The bird seemed to know it had been in an accident and was dying. It had stopped trying to move, and on the surface of its round black eye were tiny, identical versions of Harvey and her father standing side by side.

“I know it's silly,” Harvey said, “but I feel like crying. I want to cry.”