Father's Day

by Simon Van Booy

  Harvey’s face was red and her lip was still bleeding. “I don’t want to go to school!” she screamed, throwing her arms around as if trying to hit something. Sick flew everywhere.

  Jason shut the door and leaned against it. He could hear Harvey inside, but the sound was muted, as though she were underwater, or far away, or in a dream.

  Then he clenched his hand into a fist and drove it into his palm as hard as he could several times.

  Most of the houses on either side of them were redbrick with white garage doors. A dog barked, then a back door slammed, and the street was silent again. The ground was damp from a night of rain.

  The longer he just stood there, not doing anything, the less he felt rage pushing him to act. Then something from long ago came back to him. Sneaking away from school to fix a sandwich for his brother, with things he could steal from a nearby supermarket. An older boy had taken Steve’s lunch, and Jason had found him sitting alone at recess, licking salt packets he’d picked up off the cafeteria floor.

  After watching his brother eat the sandwich, and cleaning the blade of the flick-knife he’d used to cut the bread into pieces, Jason said he was going to find the boy responsible, then pummel him until he threw up the stolen food. But Steve didn’t want him to go and put a hand on his big brother’s shoulder, asking that he stay for the final minutes of recess.

  Most nights Jason kept himself awake until their father was in from the Lucky Clover and passed out on the couch or in his bed.

  He felt that he was awake again now. But instead of his brother slumbering in the bed next to him, it was a girl screaming in the backseat of a car, with sick on her clothes.

  She didn’t care what Jason had done—the way he punched the steering wheel and screamed at that woman in the SUV—or even that he had been a thief and spent time in prison after blinding someone in a fight.

  Of all those things, Jason felt suddenly that he had been forgiven, that Steve had forgiven him and was there now, in the trees or in the sky, watching, somewhere close, somewhere without a name.

  XXVIII

  WHEN JASON THREW open the back door, Harvey stopped crying.

  “Look at us, Harvey,” he said, trying to smile. “We’re like clowns!”

  He released her from the seat and helped get her clothes off. At first she was embarrassed, but Jason said it was the only way, and draped his motorcycle jacket over her before cleaning up the backseat. Harvey watched him load the sick-heavy clothes and the car seat into a black trash bag he found in the trunk. The bag was already heavy because it contained bits of plastic and metal that Jason had picked up when he drove out to the Northern Parkway to see the place where his brother had died.

  He wiped down the vinyl seat using water from a gallon jug, then picked soft bits out of the carpet with his hands. When it was done, Jason carried the trash bag over to a Dumpster sitting in the driveway of a house under construction. With a few swings, he managed to get the bag in. Then he noticed construction workers sitting in a truck eating breakfast. They must have seen everything. Jason took a few steps toward the vehicle and put his thumbs in the air. The driver wound down his window and said it was okay.

  As Jason was walking away, one of the men in the back of the truck leaned forward. “I think that’s my friend’s neighbor,” he said. “Really crazy guy.”

  THE CAR WAS very hot by the time Jason got back in, and there was little relief from the smell.

  “Does this mean I can sit in the front from now on?” Harvey said.

  “No,” Jason said, adjusting the seat belt on her shoulder. “This is just for today. And if you see a police car, get down.”

  Old Navy hadn’t opened yet, so they sat in the car with the AC running.

  “Did you ever throw up in a car before, Jason?” Harvey wanted to know.

  Jason nodded. “Yeah, a lot—even once while I was driving.”

  “Did it go on the windshield?”

  “No, it mostly went on the steering wheel.”

  “I think you would crash if you threw up when you were driving,” Harvey said. “Do you think my mom and dad threw up when they were going to die?”

  “I don’t think anyone really believes they’re going to die,” Jason said. “Until it’s in your face, you know?”

  Harvey tried to imagine death in her face. Felt its breath upon her. More heat than fear.

  When Jason noticed someone inside Old Navy unlocking the doors, he went around to Harvey’s side and gathered her up in his jacket. “What’s this?” she said, pointing to a dark stain on the arm where the leather was pockmarked.

  “That,” Jason said, trying to think of something, “is probably oil.”

  “Oil!” Harvey screamed. “You said oil was poisoning!”

  “That’s olive oil, Harvey, not engine oil.”

  “Why do you have olive—”

  “Let’s just go in, can we?”

  As he lifted her out, Harvey was worried that people might see she was naked under the jacket.

  “Just think about your dream outfit,” Jason told her. “Because today’s the day.”

  He carried her across the parking lot, then straight through the shop, where hundreds of pairs of blue and pink jeans were suspended on wires.

  A teenage worker came over and introduced himself as Tyrone. Jason told him that Harvey’s clothes had gotten ruined and it was the first day of school.

  “That’s too bad,” Tyrone said. He asked Harvey what school, but she didn’t know.

  After they picked out new T-shirts, pants, leggings, and socks with colored dots on them, Tyrone unlocked a fitting room. “Just holler if you need something.”

  Most everything fit, but Harvey was disappointed that she hadn’t found anything with a dog on it.

  “I don’t know about dogs,” Tyrone said when they asked him. “But we got pandas . . .”

  When the fitting room door opened, Harvey stepped out in blue sparkly trousers and a shirt with cartwheeling pandas that said PANDA MONIUM. Jason told Tyrone that Harvey was going to wear everything right away, and asked if he could rip off the labels and scan them. Tyrone looked at Harvey in her new clothes. “You Daddy’s girl now, right?”

  AT MCDONALD’S, JASON asked the woman if they had any fresh Band-Aids for his little girl, and she went to find a manager. After cleaning up Harvey’s lip in the restroom, Jason ordered two milkshakes, and carried them to the edge of an empty play area.

  “Wish I didn’t have to go to school,” Harvey said. “Wish I could just stay with you.”

  “After all this?” Jason said. “If you don’t go today, Harvey, you’ll never go.”

  When they finally got to school, Jason wanted to carry Harvey in through the main doors on his shoulders, but she was too embarrassed.

  As it turned out, the first day of school was just a morning of orientation for the second-graders, with only an hour left to go.

  A gang of parents had gathered in the lobby to wait. They watched Jason sign in. The receptionist explained where the second-grade classroom was. Jason wanted to tell the woman why they were late, but Harvey’s face begged him not to say anything.

  When they passed the other parents on their way to the classroom, Jason looked straight ahead. The school was in an affluent neighborhood outside Jason’s official district, but Wanda’s husband was a superintendent and had pulled some strings.

  The classroom assistant said she’d been expecting them and helped Harvey get settled in a chair.

  Jason watched through a small window in the door. Then he returned to the car and smoked three cigarettes, one after the other.

  A few minutes before noon, Jason went back inside the school and stood near the classroom door, but at a distance from the other mothers and fathers. When Harvey appeared, there was blue paint on her hands and on her new panda shirt.

  Some of the other children didn’t want to leave, so the parents talked about going to Friendly’s for lunch. Harvey asked if they could go too.


  When they got home, at least a hundred more flowers had been planted in the front yard. Harvey got out of the car and ran to look at them. She thought Jason had done it while she was in class. But Jason said he’d just been waiting outside.

  “Maybe fairies? Or angels?” Harvey said.

  “Or Wanda.”

  “But it could be angels, right?”

  After making peanut butter sandwiches, they sat on the front step near the flowers. Jason opened a soda to share, but Harvey said she wanted milk, so he had to go back inside.

  “Looks like a real garden now,” Harvey said when Jason returned. Then she took the glass but it slipped out of her hand. The bottom step turned white. Jason got up and went into the house. Harvey stood holding her sandwich but not eating.

  “Are you mad?” she said when he appeared with a roll of paper towels.

  “Yeah,” Jason said, looking at her. “But I’m tired of it, Harvey. I’m tired of being mad.”

  XXIX

  AFTER 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.

  WHEN HARVEY 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 i
t’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.”