Father's Day (10 page)

A
FTER SEVERAL MONTHS
of living together, it was time for Harvey to start second grade. Jason said they were going to have a celebration dinner and took some ribs out of the freezer. They were also having barbecue pizza, french fries, tater tots, and mozzarella sticks.

In the afternoon, after watching
Return of the Jedi,
Jason said he had to change the oil in the car.

Harvey wanted to help. “We can pretend it's our spaceship,” she said.

Jason didn't think it was a good idea. “If you get any oil or grease on your hands, you can't go putting your fingers in your mouth.”

Harvey glared at him. “I would never do that.”

Jason made her stay in the house as he drove the car onto the metal ramps. The afternoon was warm enough to wear shorts, and after he gave the signal, she came skipping outside.

Some of the neighbors were mowing their lawns, but when they shut the engines off, you could hear birds and locusts in the trees.

Harvey wasn't allowed underneath the car, even to look, so she sat cross-legged on the grass where she could see Jason working. When the oil came out, she lay on her stomach and watched it gloop into the pan. Jason brought the pan over to
show her. Harvey wanted to put her finger in, and it took all of her energy to keep her hand away.

“The blacker and thicker it is,” Jason explained, “the dirtier.”

Harvey asked if oil was dangerous.

“When it's hot in the engine, it's dangerous,” he said.

“Could it make a car crash?”

Jason set the oil pan on the ground and took a new filter from the box. Harvey followed him with her voice. “Maybe that's what happened to my mom and dad? Maybe the oil got so hot, it made them crash?”

Jason didn't answer until he was back under the car, looking up into the engine with a flashlight. “Doesn't work like that, Harvey.”

“Then how did they die if it wasn't oil?”

Jason shined the flashlight in her eyes.

“Hey!” she said.

He motioned for her to come under.

“Really?” she said. “I can come?”

“Be careful,” he warned her. “Crawl.”

Jason put the blue oil filter in her hands and steadied it so she could screw it on. It took some time to line up the threads, but when they finally caught, Harvey shouted, “I got it! I got it!”

When the filter was on tight, Jason told her to go on in the house and wash her hands. He would back the car off the ramps. She trotted along the path toward the front door, then turned back to see if he was watching.

“I put the blue thing on by myself, right?” she called out.

“Like a real mechanic,” Jason said.

When the screen door closed, Jason lit a cigarette and held it loosely between his oily fingers. When it was finished, he put it out with his foot and looked at the ground. Then Harvey opened the screen door a crack. Jason told her to stay inside until the car was down.

Harvey pushed a chair to the window and watched Jason strain to get his prosthetic leg in the driver's seat with the car up on ramps. Then the headlights came on, and in two jerks it was down and level with the driveway again.

Jason gave the signal and she ran out. Then he put the hood up and leaned in with a flashlight.

Harvey asked if she could hold the light, but instead of shining it into the engine, she put the flashlight on Jason. “I want to see your blood,” she said, noticing rashy scar tissue on his forearm. “Why is your skin messed up here?”

Jason pulled his arm back. “Look, Harvey—this is where the new oil goes in.” He handed her a gray funnel and showed her where to position it over the opening. Harvey said it was just like a trumpet and went to blow, but Jason slapped her hand away before it touched her mouth. She felt a tremor in her bottom lip but tried to concentrate.

“Sorry,” Jason said. “I guess it kind of does look like a trumpet.”

For a few moments, Harvey couldn't speak, or look at him.

“Oil was once trees and bushes that got pressed in the ground so long that they turned into liquid. You wanna pour it in?”

Harvey shrugged. “What if I mess up?”

Jason placed the container in her hands, then helped her tip the contents slowly. When she was halfway done, a burst
of excited laughter escaped from her mouth and oil splashed over Jason's wrist.

“Shit, Harvey, hold it steady now.”

She felt her confidence coming apart, and the container began to shake.

“Harvey!” Jason snapped, but then remembered what Wanda had said about how important it was for them to do things together for the first time. He steadied her hands until they stopped shaking. “You're doing great, Harvey—just keep pouring. Pour out all those plants from dinosaur times.”

Harvey said she couldn't believe that oil was old dinosaur food. Jason couldn't either, but had seen it on TV.

“Why are there no dinosaurs now, Jason?”

“They're extinct.”

“What's that?”

“It means they're dead and can never come back.”

“Like my mom and dad,” Harvey said. “They're
eggs tint
too.”

When the container was almost empty, Jason asked if she was ready for the next quart.

“It needs another one?”

Harvey mopped her brow with a frayed sleeve. “Did the dinosaurs know they were going to die?”

“Doubt it.”

“How come we don't know when we're going to die?”

Jason didn't answer, but as Harvey was pouring in the second quart, he said, “You just have to live each day with the best you got.”

“You've got me,” Harvey said.

“That's right.”

Then her eyes lit up. “And I've got Duncan.”

W
HEN THEY WERE
finished, Harvey wanted to wash the car. Jason said no but then went inside and came back with a bucket of warm water and soap. Harvey skipped behind, clapping her hands.

“First day of school tomorrow,” Jason said. “Excited?”

“No.”

Jason put the key in the ignition and the radio came on. When he turned the dial, there was static; then Spanish music tinkled out through the speakers.

“Can we listen to this?” Harvey said.

Jason raised the volume so they could hear it with the windows closed.

“Reminds me of my mom,” Harvey said.

“She was Italian, right, Harvey?”

“No,” Harvey said, sponging the door. “She was Spanish. Grandma and Grandpa Morgano came from Ecuador.”

Dirt ran down the side of the car in suds. When they met at the bucket to dip their sponges, Jason asked whom she'd visited in Florida with Wanda if her grandparents were dead.

“Mom's great-aunt,” Harvey said.

“What was she like?”

“Nice,” Harvey said, dipping her sponge, then slopping it against the front panel. “But Wanda said she's sick.”

Jason wiped his rag over the spokes of the front wheel. “Sick with what?”

“I don't know,” Harvey said. “I can't remember.”

Then she remembered. “Lung cancer! Lung cancer!”

Jason was wiping the tire with a circular motion. “That's pretty bad, Harvey.”

Harvey dipped her sponge. The water was a dirty gray. “Does lung cancer mean you're gonna die?”

“Depends on how bad it is,” Jason said, scrubbing the headlights. “Why are bugs so hard to get off? They're so little.”

“Let me try,” Harvey said.

When the body and all four wheels were covered in a soapy film, Jason lifted Harvey up to sponge the roof.

“Why don't we all die at the same time?” Harvey wanted to know. “How come we die apart, usually?”

“You're asking the wrong guy.”

“Why aren't you the right guy?”

“It's just an expression. It means I don't know.”

By the time they had finished wiping all over, the soap had dried in the pattern of their streaks. Jason lit a cigarette.

“It's still dirty,” Harvey said. “After all our work, we've made it dirtier.”

Jason laughed and it made him cough.

“Looks like we just spread the dirt around,” Harvey went on, throwing her sponge into the bucket. Then she sat in the driveway with her legs crossed and her bottom lip pushed out.

When Jason went to get the hose, Harvey followed. “Are
you
going to get lung cancer, Jason?”

“Not planning on it.”

“Wanda said Mom's great-aunt got it from smoking, and that a person should never try it because it's addicting.”

Harvey watched Jason's hands move quickly on the faucet. Water rushed through the rubber pipe. They could hear it rushing through the pipe to make a spray. When they got back to the car, Jason told Harvey to get the sponge. But she turned around and went into the house.

Jason waited a few minutes for her to come out, then continued on by himself. The water from the hose made his hands cold, but he was careful not to drop the sponge on the driveway, where little stones could stick to it, then scratch the paintwork. This was something he would have explained to Harvey. But she had gone into the house and he didn't know why.

On the back of the car were two fading bumper stickers. One said:

JESUS LOVES YOU!

BUT EVERYONE ELSE THINKS YOU'RE AN ASSHOLE

The other was a Nirvana sticker that showed the medical cross section of a pregnant woman's stomach.

When it was almost done, Jason gave the wheels another going-over. One of his tires was almost bald, and the rubber sidewall was cracking. Looking at the worn-out treads made Jason tired, so he sat with his back against the wheel and closed his eyes. Music was still playing from inside the car. He wondered if it might be draining too much of the battery, but he couldn't get up. It was a slow song—the sort that comes on just before a bar closes, and people look around for someone to fight or go home with.

When he opened his eyes again, he noticed gutters along the edge of his house that were sagging with dirt and stagnant water. One section had already separated and was almost completely off.

Jason bought the house after he got out of prison, using money his mother had left when she died. His brother had deposited Jason's share into a bank account and mailed a statement to the prison.

The property was cheap, because you could hear the freeway, and the neighborhood was considered a high-crime area—though more families were moving in, and you hardly saw cops anymore. The house had been empty for a long time, and was probably used as a place to take drugs. People had almost certainly died in it.

The carpet was rotten when Jason moved in, so he ripped it up and for a while just lived with the concrete slab. He found two hundred dollars stashed in a lamp, and shells from a handgun in the sink trap. He put in new pipes and drywall and spent the last of his inheritance getting central heat and air. Everything else, he fixed over time with the money saved from not drinking.

Jason hadn't noticed how bad the gutters looked until now—or that the siding was coming off on the far corner of the house. In another place, it was actually bent back, exposing the wood frame and insulation.

When a tear in the screen door caught Jason's eye, he noticed a face looking out through the mesh. It was a small face. And from a distance it could have belonged to a girl or a boy. When he raised his arm to wave, the face disappeared. Jason sat there wondering if it had been there to begin with—and if it wasn't Harvey's face, then whose? Ghosts, he realized, are not the people who've died but the people who won't.

His shirt was wet where he sat against the wheel. He felt for his cigarettes, but they weren't in his pocket.

He imagined driving Harvey to school in the morning. Her first day of second grade. She had probably wanted to wash the car so it would look nice beside all the other cars. He pictured them lined up in the school parking lot. Then, with an effort, Jason got up and stepped over to the trunk. He bent down and peeled off the
JESUS LOVES YOU
sticker. Then he sat on the rear bumper, feeling the car dip with his weight.

He tried to imagine what Harvey's classroom would look like, but saw only the classrooms from when he was a child, and heard the sound of a bell, and shoes tapping through the corridors. It had been his job to carry crates of milk from the nurse's office to each grade, because he was disruptive in class, and had to be given a physical task that would keep him busy.

His brother, Steve, was in a classroom with the youngest kids. They used to paint with their feet. Clap along to songs. Raise their hands and then forget what they wanted to say. Jason used to stand on a milk crate and watch through a window in the door.

Giving the milk out meant slipping Steve an extra carton or an extra straw. The first time Steve got embarrassed and tried to give it back, but Jason told him to shut up and hide it. If anyone suspected anything, Jason's plan was to say that one was leaking and he'd tossed it. He even kept an empty carton hidden in his bag in case anyone wanted proof. The only thing that could give him away was the date stamped on the top—it would have to match the date on the one that had gone missing.

But no one ever said anything about stolen milk, and
Jason figured out there were extras because of kids who were sick. There were so many extras during flu season that Jason started bringing them home, so his mother would always have something for her coffee and Steve didn't have to run water from the faucet on his Lucky Charms.

Jason had trouble at school because he had to stay awake at night for the same reason he couldn't run away. And he wanted to run away, to leave everyone and everything behind—the way you escape from a nightmare.

Since Harvey had moved in, there were times like that: times when he felt he couldn't go on, when he looked at the telephone, or started to dial Wanda's number, or imagined leaving the house and never coming back.