Father's Day (9 page)

“Who's that?” Jason said.

“We just say that when we expense things.”

Wanda said she liked how the spare room was shaping up. She saw the mini drum set and told Jason how important it would be to do things with Harvey for the first time.

“She's never ridden a bicycle without training wheels,” Wanda said. “So that's something else to look forward to. Make sure you take a camera.”

Wanda said the next three months were very important if he was to be appointed official guardian. “Reach out to your friends,” she advised him. “Have them write letters about the good things you've done and what a nice, pleasant person you are.”

B
UT THREE MONTHS
later, a week before the court interview, Jason confessed that the only person he knew well enough to ask for a character reference was standing in front of him.

“What about the neighbors?”

“They don't speak English.”

“Damn it, Jason—you could have said something earlier.”

“What should we do?”

“The interview with the courts is next week . . . I'll have to get my friends to do it.”

“Is that allowed?”

“If I did what the law allowed,” Wanda explained, “we wouldn't even be standing here having this conversation.”

F
OR THE FIRST
few weeks living in Jason's house, Harvey cried a lot for her parents, and kept having accidents.

One night Jason woke up and saw her shivering in his bedroom doorway. She had wet the bed a second time within a few hours and was afraid to wake him again.

Jason carried her into the bathroom and ran the hot tap. Then he washed her legs with a warm towel. “If it feels itchy, wake me up and I'll wipe you off again.”

He could see she'd been crying because her eyes were red. “It's not a big deal,” he told her. “Even tough guys with tats who ride motorcycles wet the bed, Harvey.”

“Like you?” Harvey said.

Jason nodded.

Then he took a Pull-Up from the bag and helped her step in through the holes. Finding clean pajamas was more difficult, but there was a pair with spaceships in the laundry room, and Jason warmed them up in the dryer.

Then Harvey sat cross-legged on the floor and watched Jason strip the bed and put on fresh linens. When he was done, Harvey got in and went back to sleep.

A couple of nights later it happened again. The mattress
was wet on both sides, so Jason had to put a garbage bag over the stain, then a blanket over the bag. When he was finished, Harvey wanted him to stay and hold her hand. She asked if he knew any songs, but the only one Jason knew by heart was “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath.

“Sing it,” Harvey said.

When her grip loosened, Jason knew she was asleep, and he went outside for a smoke. The night was cool and there were many stars.

T
HE COURT OFFICIALS
wanted to know how Jason made a living, intrigued by his eBay business. Jason explained it as basically an online yard sale. When they asked about his problems with the IRS, Wanda said that Social Services was working with them directly to sort it out.

“I don't really understand this Internet business,” the woman said, “but as legal guardian, it's also your job to support the child financially, and that means filing your taxes once a year.”

Jason said he had applied for a job at a hardware store near the house. He said if they hired him, he could work while Harvey was in school.

The man laughed and asked if the hardware store had a name.

“Home Depot,” Jason said ironically.

The man wrote it down and asked if Jason could give him the name of someone in human resources.

“You think I'm lying?” Jason said.

“We don't think that at all, Jason,” the woman said.

Jason ripped a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket
and threw it on the table. Nobody moved. Then the man picked it up and handed it back to Jason without unfolding it. “I just asked because I was going to call over there and put in a good word for you.”

“Oh,” Jason said. “I didn't know.”

“This interview is about how you look after Harvey,” the woman explained, “and what's best for her.”

The man nodded. “We have to be thorough because—as I'm sure you understand—we're here to act in the interests of a minor, and we answer to Judge Thomas, who quite rightly errs on the side of caution.”

“Yeah, I get it,” Jason said. “I'm sorry.”

“Remember this,” the man went on. “There is no perfect parent. We all make mistakes. You just have to do your best, keep them safe, and—you know—feed them from time to time.”

“And love them,” the woman added. “Above all else, you have to love them.”

Wanda took out the letters of reference from Shawn Mullen of Hempstead, Rhonda Jales of Hempstead, Taquisha Suarez of Farmingdale, and Reverend Desmond Cox of East Islip. Wanda also had an Excel spreadsheet showing how Jason had spent the Social Security payments on Harvey's behalf.

When it was Harvey's turn to be interviewed, they kept her in the room for only fifteen minutes.

On the way out, Wanda called her husband to tell him how it had gone. Then she said that Uncle Bill was taking them for lunch at Chuck E. Cheese's.

“I used to go there with my dad,” Harvey said.

An hour later, as Harvey was shooting plastic ducks with a
pink gun, Wanda got a call from the courts to say they were extending the trial period to six months.

Jason couldn't believe it. “We gotta go through all that shit again?”

“You think it's easy to get custody of a child?” Wanda said fiercely. “Think about it, Jason!”

Harvey's game ended and she reappeared, holding the tickets she'd won from the machine.

“Go trade them at the counter for a prize,” Wanda said.

“You guys come too.”

“We'll come in a minute, honey, you go on.”

“They could have been real hard-asses,” Wanda said as Harvey walked away. “They could have busted your ass. I've seen it happen, and it ain't pretty, let me tell you . . .”

“I was hoping today would be it,” Jason said.

“That's just not how it works in New York. But whatever anyone says, you
are
her guardian, Jason. You see anyone else lining up to take care of her?”

“What about the Morganos?”

“I can't go into that right now,” Wanda said, waving the subject off.

“But won't they want to see Harvey in the future?” Jason pressed. “Maybe we could all go visit them in Florida? Your husband can come too. When was it they were up here, again, Wanda?”

Wanda gave a quick little laugh. “I guess Harvey told you, then.”

“You're sly, Wanda,” Jason said. “But I guess you really know what you're doing with this adoption business. What else are you not telling me?”

Harvey shouted for them to come and help her choose a prize from a row of stuffed blue dogs.

“It's lucky for you the nice gentleman let that shit go,” Wanda went on, “you throwing the piece of paper that way. They most certainly could have used it as an excuse
not
to renew the trial.”

It hadn't once occurred to Jason they might take Harvey away.

“Mark my words,” Wanda said, “Harvey could have been on her way back to the Goldenbergs' right now.”

“But I'm her family,” Jason insisted. “We're flesh and blood.”

“What if he'd
really
pushed your buttons, Jason? What then?”

“How should I know?” Jason said, but in his mind was already dragging the man from the seat and driving his head backward toward the white brick wall. His body is light. His eyes are rolling. Jason has him by the neck and he can't breathe.

Everyone is screaming and he can feel Wanda pulling on his arms. Her voice echoes through him: “Thought you said you hated bullies, Jason?
Thought you said you hated bullies . . .”

Now his own words are attacking him.

Harvey is still in her seat, but pee is dripping through slats in the chair.

Jason is red in the face because the cops have to pin him down with their knees.

In the back of the cruiser, he realizes what he's done and bites down so hard that his mouth fills with blood.

What will he do with her toys? With the pillow she puts her head on? Who will check on her in the early hours? Flip the mattress when she has an accident?

There will have to be a trial, of course. He may even serve time. Then Wanda telling him that Harvey has gone to a family in Buffalo and he can never see her again. He wants to know if Harvey asked for him, but Wanda refuses to say.

Once it's all done with, when time has passed and he's back at home, he'll carry her mini drum kit through the house to the garage.

Let the spare room fill up with junk again.

Carry her dresser out to the curb, then watch from the living room window as some stranger heaves it into the back of a minivan, a surprise for his youngest daughter. Doesn't matter if a drawer is busted, he just wants to get it home. There's nothing he can't fix. Amazing what people throw away.

T
HE MORNING AFTER
her father arrived in Paris, Harvey found him standing barefoot in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water and looking at Isobel's drawings on the refrigerator.

“I still have your drawings,” he said. “When you get a house, I'll give them to you.”

Over breakfast, Harvey said it would likely rain the next few days, so they should pack a lunch and hop the train to Versailles—if only to see the gardens.

She told her father to pick out another item from the Father's Day box. Whatever he chose, she said, would give them something to talk about on the journey.

Harvey said she was going to make a French version of his favorite ham-and-mustard sandwiches. She also cut two slices of lemon cake to eat at Marie Antoinette's house.

Jason watched as she wrapped their lunch in foil. Then she told him again to pick something from the box, so she could pack it with the food.

The line of people at the ticket machine was so long that they missed the first train to the palace. The platform for electric RER trains was underground. Vending machines cast a warm orange glow over the swept gray concrete. Then the train marked
RIVE GAUCHE
arrived and they got on and found seats at the end of an upper level.

The train ran parallel to the Seine, below the main streets of Paris, which were bright and bustled with people and cars and bicycles going madly in all directions. After leaving the city behind, the train rattled past rows of crumbling houses patched with cement. When the train stopped, they noticed an old man and his wife, yards from the track, digging for carrots on a kidney-shaped plot of land.

Harvey told her father that some of the older houses had been built hundreds of years before the invention of trains, when there were only fields and sky and one muddy road that gradually widened, the closer it got to Paris.

Jason looked out at the old houses, his palms spread on the glass as though he were a boy again.

When he asked why Versailles was worth seeing, Harvey told him that in 1789 there was a revolution and the people who lived in the palace got their heads cut off because they had ignored the suffering of others.

“That's like my worst nightmare,” Harvey told her father. “To get decapitated like that.”

Jason shrugged. “Wouldn't bother me. When you're dead, you're dead.”

Harvey put her hands on her father's neck. “But it's your head
,
Dad!”

“There are worse ways to go, kid.”

“Like how?”

“Like, you could waste your life and then die without realizing it.”

“Waste your life how?”

“By not having anyone.”

Harvey laughed. “Huh?”

“Well, I mean, if you don't love nobody.”

Harvey snickered “Are you getting sentimental on me?”

“I'm serious, Harvey.”

“Okay, so you wouldn't mind having your head cut off as long as you're in love when the guillotine falls?”

Jason felt a sudden tightness in his throat but wanted to hear the words out loud. “I've loved three people,” he said. “In my life.”

Harvey looked out at the passing trees. “Is that a lot?”

“I think it's a good number,” Jason said. “It's better than two.”

“There's me and your brother,” Harvey said. “But who is the third person?”

“That's for another day, Harv.”

“Tell me now, Dad. I want to know. It was a woman, wasn't it?”

“Forget it, Harvey.”

When the final stretch took them into a tunnel, Jason saw his reflection in the blackened glass. He felt from time to time, this woman he had once loved was watching him, and remembered the color of her lips, or the way her body felt.

Harvey took a bar of chocolate from her purse, and shared the pieces. The windows on one side of the train opened a few inches, and when they were out of the tunnel, Jason stuck his hand out.

“Long ago,” Harvey said, “only kings and queens and their servants got to experience Versailles. Everyone else had to imagine it from what they could see through the railings.”

“But we get to go in, right?”

“If it's not, like, crazy busy. But why don't you unwrap the thing from your Father's Day box?”

Jason tried to feel what it was through the wrapping. “I can't even guess,” he said.

“Just open it, Dad.”

When he removed the paper, Jason saw it was a two-handled Peter Rabbit cup that he knew once belonged to his brother. “How come you have this, Harvey?”

“Don't worry, Dad—it's not the one from home. I got it online.”

The original cup had been among the things brought over by Wanda when Harvey first moved in.

The ceramic felt cool in his hands. Small painted rabbits bounced happily on the rim, while larger ones lower down wore human clothes, drank tea, and stood chatting over a garden fence.

The carriages near the front of the train must have been full of people, because when the train stopped, Harvey and her father followed a heavy stream of tourists down a long cobbled avenue with lanes of cars on either side.

As they neared the gates, men approached with Eiffel Tower models. Some of the men were insistent, but when Harvey spoke in French, they laughed and withdrew.

As they crossed the last cobblestone street before the heavy gold gates of the palace, a yellow postal van failed to stop and came within a yard of hitting them.

Jason followed the van up the street with his eyes until it stopped at a red light. He felt the impulse to get up there and pull the driver out, smash his face on the road, knock his teeth out—teach him a hard lesson . . .

But then he felt the pull of a hand and Jason realized he had stopped walking, and that his daughter was there by his side.

“You okay, Dad? You want to sit down for a while?”

“I'm fine,” he said. “It's a great day and I'm with my daughter and everything's great. We're totally fine.” He took off his motorcycle jacket and tucked it under one arm. There were visible lines of thread running up the back of the jacket, where it had been sewn up, but the cuffs had worn to strings, and the elbows and shoulders were cracked like old faces, and there were dark stains that could not be removed.

After passing through the gates, Harvey found the cobblestones hard to walk on in sandals. “People must have laid these with their bare hands,” Jason said. “They're so uneven.”

When they reached the entrance, people were lining up to go inside the palace and to board a miniature train that spared visitors the long walk to Marie Antoinette's house.

There was no wait to enter the grounds themselves, so Jason and Harvey crunched past everyone on a white gravel path that ran between neatly planted sections of flowers. Black birds circled cone-shaped trees. People were taking photographs at the top of a staircase, where Harvey and her father could look out at the gardens and to the green woods beyond.

Jason imagined peasants dressed in rags with jagged teeth, tearing up the plants and drinking wine from bottles, then pissing it into the fountain. He imagined the faces of people who would soon lose their heads. He wondered if they knew they were going to die and if the reason for their execution was obvious to them.

At the edge of the fountain was the bronze statue of a man with a beard leaning back on his elbows. He was being handed a bronze bunch of flowers by a bronze baby with heavy wings.

For a while, Harvey and Jason just stood looking around. Some of the other tourists had been there since early morning, and their feet dragged on the white stones as they returned from far corners of the estate. In the distance, a lake in the shape of a holy cross shimmered in the midday heat.

When they reached a flight of steps leading down to the Orangerie, Harvey said she wanted to go back and walk slowly with her father beside the pink and purple flowers. “Remember the flowers we used to plant?” she asked him.

Sunday was often spent in the yard with forks and spoons—and later trowels and spades, once they got the hang of it. Over time, Jason had learned what to plant and how to feed and water. Now roses climbed one side of the house, and daffodils unfolded in the front borders when spring came.

“Remember pushing my hands into the soil?” Harvey said.

Jason couldn't recall it.

“Kneel,” she told him.

“What?”

“C'mon, Dad.”

Jason looked around at all the people. “I don't want to get in trouble.”

“This is France, Dad. It's hard to get in trouble here.”

He sighed and got down on his knees. “You gonna make me a prince or something?”

Harvey told him to reach over the low green box-hedging and put his hands on the soil. “Hurry up,” she said. “Before someone comes.”

“I thought you said—”

“C'mon, Dad.”

Jason hesitated, but then reached over and lay his palms on the bare soil between two rows of plants. Harvey got down next to him. “You used to put your hands over mine like this . . .” she said, showing him. “. . . And told me you were going to grow a Harvey tree.”

It was hard to get up because of his leg, so his daughter helped him.

“You remember when we did that, Dad?”

“I don't, Harvey, I'm sorry.”

“That's funny,” she said, brushing off a few small stones. “Because I think about it all the time.”