Father's Day (2 page)

O
NE
C
HRISTMAS
H
ARVEY
'
S
father gave her mother a diamond necklace. Harvey got Barbie's Dreamhouse
.

Sometime around then, she built a snowman in the yard. Her grandparents were visiting from Florida and said they didn't miss the cold. It was the last time Harvey would see them alive. They all wore heavy coats and drank hot chocolate from Christmas mugs. Harvey couldn't hold the cup with her mittens, so it fell in the snow. Harvey laughed, because what could snow do? But when she looked, the mug was cracked. At first her mother was annoyed, and Harvey was afraid she had ruined Christmas.

When she stopped crying, her father strung flashing lights along the side of the house. Harvey looked at them and imagined Santa trying to land his sleigh.

A few days before her grandparents arrived, they got the house ready. They had bought the Christmas tree at Home Depot and tied it to the top of the car. It was almost too big to go through the front door of the house. Harvey thought it was funny and wanted to draw a picture.

As they were unpacking ornaments for the tree, Harvey saw a photo album at the bottom of a box. She took it out with both hands and peeled back the cover. Some of the photos were yellow, and it was hard to see who anyone was. Some pages were stuck together and wouldn't open at all. When her father saw the book on his daughter's
lap, he shouted to his wife: “Come and see what Harvey's found!”

Harvey said her father's face was the same now as in third grade. His wife regarded the likeness. “That's right.” She laughed. “It is the same.”

Harvey's mother said she had never seen these pictures. Harvey's father remembered the name of the street he'd grown up on,
Sycamore Avenue
; the sort of car they'd had,
Buick Regal
; and even the name of a dog they'd found wandering along Queens Boulevard,
Birdie
.

“It was a young Lab,” said her father. “And it came right up to us and started licking my brother's hand.”

“You have a brother?” Harvey said.

Her mother reached over and closed the album. Her bottom lip was shaking. Then she stood suddenly and looked around. “Let's get this house decorated for Christmas!”

Harvey turned to her father. “What's his name? What's your brother's name?”

“Jason.”

“No, Steve!” Harvey's mother snapped. Then she went into the bedroom. The sound of the door slamming made Harvey jump.

Harvey's father just sat there fingering a branch of the Christmas tree, as though it were the most precious thing ever.

L
ATER ON, WHEN
Harvey's father was doing things on the roof, Harvey asked her mother if Jason would be alone for Christmas. She rubbed her hands on a paper towel and knelt down so their eyes were level. “Jason is not a part of our family anymore,” she answered softly.

Harvey looked at the paper towel in her mother's hands. It had softened and she wanted to grab it.

“He's not a nice man,” her mother said. “Very angry.”

Harvey asked if he would hurt a child.

“I don't know,” her mother said. “I hope not. But I guess he could do anything.”

Harvey said she couldn't imagine it.

“Some people are born with bad in them,” her mother explained.

“What bad things did he do?”

“Well, he almost killed someone,” she said. “Thankfully, the police got there to break it up.”

Harvey pictured Frosty in the Christmas movie, getting killed by the thermometer because it turned red and made flowers pop up. Not even his best friend had been able to stop Frosty from melting.

“He'd still be in jail,” her mother went on, “if the police hadn't come in time.”

A bird drew Harvey's eye to the window. A garden stripped of leaves by winter revealed a pink egg left over from Easter.

“Can I finger paint?” Harvey said.

Her mother busied herself at the sink. “Your father's family wasn't very happy,” she said, wringing out a cloth. “It's a wonder your dad turned out so well.”

Harvey hoped her mother wouldn't say any more, and asked if she could go outside.

“It's too cold,” her mother said.

“Can I finger paint then?”

“I'm trying to tell you something serious—so stop thinking about finger painting for a second, okay?”

Harvey made a face like she was going to cry.

“Let's just feel lucky that Daddy is not like his older brother or his father.”

Harvey shrugged. “Okay.”

“Can you believe, Harvey, that one night Steve's father tried to set their house on fire—can you believe it? While his own wife and sons were sleeping.”

Harvey felt the lick of flames.

“That's what alcohol can do to a person, Harvey.”

“If our house was on fire, would my dolls get burned?”

Her mother stopped what she was doing.

“Would my dolls be on the news, Mommy?” Harvey said, straining to lose herself in the feeling that Duncan was lost forever.

“Really, Harvey? I'm trying to be honest with you. You want me to be honest with you, right?”

Harvey nodded.

“Well, this is serious,” she said. “Nobody's house is getting burned down. But your father and his brother had a tough time when they were boys. They even spent a few months in and out of foster homes.”

“What's foster homes?”

“It's like an orphanage, Harvey.”

“What's that?”

“Remember
Annie
? That movie you saw with Grandma and Grandpa when they visited from Florida last time?”

“It was boring.”

“No, it wasn't,” her mother insisted. “You enjoyed it. It's a movie for children.”

W
HEN IT GOT
dark, they hung the rest of the ornaments and watched Christmas shows. Harvey's mother made a pot roast for dinner, and her father went out to Dairy Barn for apple cider to drink with it.

When Harvey was in bed, voices entered her room.

She sat up and looked through the darkness at her dolls lined up on the dresser. The dolls were listening too, Harvey thought, absorbing everything in their stillness.

“It's our home, Steve!” her mother screamed. “It's our home, and your daughter lives here!
Your
daughter!”

“Don't use Harvey as an excuse.”

“Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me?”

Something fell and rolled around on the floor.

“He's a
convicted felon
!” her mother screamed. “Who knows what he might say, or try and do to get what he wants?”

Then her father raised his voice. “Don't start judging! Jason is a part of our family, whether you like it or not.”

Her mother was really crying now. Harvey felt bad for her.

“Haven't we done enough for him?” she said.

“He's still family. He's still flesh and blood.”

“Please—
please
don't bring him into our lives. Just imagine what could happen.”

Harvey pulled the cord on her pink dragon and listened to a song play from its belly.

A
WEEK LATER,
at Chuck E. Cheese's, Harvey and her father were shooting ducks with plastic rifles. When a cartoon dog appeared on the screen with their scores, Harvey asked
her father what had happened to the dog he found with his brother.

“We only had him a few weeks,” he said. “Then he ran off and we never saw him again.”

On the car ride home, Harvey asked if his brother lived on Long Island, and if he was mean when they were kids. Her father put the radio on, but Harvey spoke over it. “Why won't you tell me about Jason?”

Her father caught her eyes in the rearview mirror. “I love you,” he said. “Do you know that? Do you feel that?”

They found a pizza shop in a strip mall and sat in a booth with fountain drinks, waiting for the pie to cook.

“It could get me in major trouble with your mother that we're even thinking about him.”

“I really want to know,” Harvey said. “Is he your little brother or your big brother?”

“He's my big brother.”

“Did he try and kill someone?”

“Who told you that?”

“Mom.”

“Did she also mention that he's disabled?”

“What's that?”

“He has a fake leg, but he thinks I don't know because we haven't spoken in such a long time.”

“How long?”

“Almost ten years.”

“Mom just said he was always fighting.”

“It's true he got into arguments sometimes, but the victims were not innocent.”

Harvey didn't get it.

“What I mean is, Harv, he never got into arguments with nice people or people who couldn't fight back.”

“Yeah, like kids.”

“Exactly. One time he got in a fight with a real bad man. They both got hurt, but the other man was much worse.”

“Did the other man die?”

“No,” Harvey's father said. “But he was blinded.”

W
HEN
J
ASON FINALLY
got on top of the other man, pieces of broken bottle were sticking out of his motorcycle jacket. Blood sprayed from the man's nose with each blow, and it was like hitting a bag of raw meat. Then the door swung open and cops charged in. People were screaming that the man was dead.

Officers swung at Jason with their nightsticks. They cuffed him, but he wouldn't lie still, so they dragged him out into the parking lot. People leaving the strip mall with boxes of leftovers hurried to their cars. Jason lay on his stomach in the rain, his tongue padding dumbly over the gum where a tooth had broken off. Swelling had closed one of his eyes, but the alcohol numbed him to anything but rage.

Then paramedics came and rushed to get the other man on a gurney. His face was a mask of blood. His shirt was ripped open and his shoes had come off.

The bartender tried to tell the police how it started, but the officer taking the statement kept asking if any weapons had been used. The bartender said both men were drunk and had broken bottles. Other police walked around putting things in plastic bags. The bartender kept trying to explain that it wasn't all Jason's fault.

By the time paramedics got the other man in the ambulance, he was in a coma.

The stragglers in the bar had sobered up and were giv
ing their accounts. The cops nodded and wrote everything down.

When a second team of paramedics arrived, they asked the police to uncuff the suspect. Jason remembers the sensation of being lifted up, and the kind face and voice of a woman about his age who held his hand in the ambulance and said her name was Julie.

When the police had gone and things were quiet on the street again, the bartender slid the deadbolt and turned off the neon bottles that flashed in the window.

When he called his girlfriend, she put on some clothes and drove down. She couldn't believe the mess. “Oh my God, Sam, what the hell,” she said.

The bartender threw sawdust on the floor, then swept up and put the splintered furniture in a plastic bin. His girlfriend sat on a barstool and watched him fill a bucket with hot water and disinfectant.

“You know I'll be called to testify,” he said.

“You should keep a gun under the bar.”

The bartender shook his head. “I'd sell up before I did that.”

As he was locking the register, the bartender noticed Jason's black custom motorcycle in the parking lot. He cursed out loud, then looked for something to prop open the door. When they got out there, the bike was heavy and impossible to move because the front wheel was locked. In the end, the bartender had to use a dolly he kept in the basement for shifting furniture around.

N
EITHER
J
ASON
'
S MOTHER
nor brother nor any of his friends had enough money to make his bail, even with the quick sale of his motorcycle.

Jason's attorney argued that the terminal cancer of his young client's alcoholic father, a few years before the incident, had certainly played a role in the uncontrollable emotions of an otherwise promising young man.

The trial took place a few days before Jason's nineteenth birthday. The attorney found Jason a shirt with a high collar to cover the tattoo on his neck. His sentence was mitigated by the fact that the other man did not die, and had a prior criminal record that included aggravated assault with a motor vehicle in Queens County, and a felony assault in the state of New Jersey.

The judge took into account the time Jason had served awaiting trial, and imposed a sentence more lenient than the prosecution would have liked on account of the defendant's age, and because the bartender had rallied his customers to write positive letters about Jason to the district attorney.

Harvey's father was sixteen when his older brother went to jail.

He visited once with their mother a week after sentencing. He wasn't prepared for how skeletal Jason looked, or for the heavy bruising.

“Oh Gawd, Jason,” their mother had said. “What have you done to yourself?”

That night Steve had a dream he was going to die, and wanted to visit the prison again.

But then a few days later received a letter in the mail:

                   
Don't come looking for me. No visits, no phone calls, no letters, no cards, no prayers, no nothing. I
blew it. Take over for me at home, live as best you can.

                           
Do all the things I never will.

                           
Your Brother

Steve wrote back several times, but his letters went unanswered.

While Jason was incarcerated, their mother took her own life. She had tried several times over the years, mostly with pills. Steve went to live with Mr. Rosenbaum, his high school math teacher. By the time he was ready to graduate, Jason was out on parole, but no one could find him.

Graduation day was sunny and warm for a late-spring day. Chairs had been set up on the soccer field to make sure all the parents and grandparents and friends and visitors had a place to sit and listen. The night before, the graduating seniors got together at the Pancake House, just off the Sunken Meadow Parkway. School was over and their real lives were about to begin.

When Steve's name was called over the loudspeaker the next day, he stepped up to the podium and shook hands with the principal.

Mr. and Mrs. Rosenbaum stood to applaud. Some of the other teachers stood too. As he was leaving the stage, Steve scanned the crowd one last time, but it was all strangers, people he didn't know, on an afternoon of general happiness.

H
ARVEY ASKED HER
father if he remembered any happy times when they were young. He told her about riding the Queens Q111 bus in summer for three hours to swim at Jones Beach, and sneaking out at night to the twenty-four-hour
diner—and how, when they were walking to school along Kissena Boulevard in the melting snow of late winter, Jason would take him into a washroom at the gas station and hold his socks under the dryer, then stuff paper towels in the soggy ends of his shoes.

And, of course, there was the dog they found.

“Birdie,” Harvey said.

When the dog ran away, Harvey's father remembered, it was the only time he ever saw his brother cry.

Harvey's father hadn't heard from Jason in about ten years, but five years ago he saw his address on some court records and, on the spur of the moment, signed him up for something called the Diner of the Month Club.

When last he checked, most of the year's gift certificates had been redeemed at diners all over Long Island.

“So he eats,” Harvey's father said. “At least we know that.”

Then the pizza arrived and the cheese was bubbling and they looked at it.