Father's Day

by Simon Van Booy

  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.”

  III

  WHEN JASON 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 giving 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.

  NEITHER JASON’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.

  HARVEY 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.

  Twenty Years Later

  IV

  A FEW DAYS before Harvey’s father arrived in Paris, she sent an email, re
minding him to get to the airport four hours early in case there were lines. She also advised him that packing liquids in hand baggage would delay him at security.

  Sophie had given Harvey two days off from work and told her to come in for only an hour on the third day to look at proof sheets, introduce her father, and show off the projects she was working on.

  On the Métro home, Harvey watched a woman rip clumps of bread from her shopping bag. The woman got off at the same station but went in the opposite direction.

  Harvey stopped at Murat’s grocery to see if her apartment key was ready. Murat’s was open all night, and only a short walk from Harvey’s apartment on the rue Caulaincourt. On warm afternoons, elderly men and women stopped there to chat. At night, it was bright inside the shop, and there were fruits and vegetables stacked in cardboard boxes. Murat sold everything from cakes to cleaning supplies, and there were tubs of sweets, windup toys, and pocket flashlights on the counter, with prices written out on orange paper that Murat had cut into stars.

  The concierge to Harvey’s building, Monsieur Fabrice, had warned her when she moved in not to lose the key to the front door, as the lock was an obsolete make and no locksmith in Paris could copy it. But it was important to Harvey that her father have his own key when he came to stay, so she had sought Murat’s advice.

  “It will have to be cut entirely by hand,” he had said, holding it up to his eyes. “But there is someone I know who can do it.”

  He told Harvey to leave it with him one morning, and he’d try to have it ready by the time she came home.

  As promised, Murat had the original and the copy waiting for Harvey when she stopped in. “It looks different,” he said as she held them both up. “Because only that round barrel part is necessary. The rest is for show. Very French, huh?”

  Harvey paid Murat for the key and bought gnocchi, basil, olive oil, cake mix, cookies, and three bottles of alcohol-free beer. She had bought much the same only a week before. Her cupboards were full, and the refrigerator smelled like oranges and cheese.

  Harvey told Murat that her father was coming in a few days and she needed to stock up. Everything in the apartment was cleaner than it had ever been, she told him, and Murat said he now understood why Harvey had bought Old Spice shower gel. Then he held up a bottle of the alcohol-free beer from her bag of things.

  “I thought maybe you had a nice Muslim boyfriend—but am pleased to hear it’s your father. A girl only gets one father in this world.”

  V

  HARVEY COULD NOT speak French when she arrived in Paris two years before, so her company paid for lessons. Her tutor’s name was Leon. He was from South America and taught French, Spanish, and Italian from his apartment in the République section of the city, where he lived with his six-year-old daughter, Isobel.

  Isobel’s mother lived in Chartres, and Leon took his daughter there every weekend on the train from Gare du Nord.

  Sometimes Isobel sat with her father and Harvey during the lesson, scrubbing away with a crayon. Sometimes she folded paper and cut bits out to reveal an accordion of faceless bodies.

  In the last ten minutes of each lesson, Leon would give Harvey a short passage to translate by herself so he could run a bath for his daughter. Once Harvey asked if they had bubble bath in France, and Leon told her that shampoo was just as good.

  “But I want bubble bath!” Isobel said.

  HARVEY SPENT THE day before her father’s arrival on the sofa with a French paperback novel called Outre-Atlantique. The story was about an old man who didn’t know where he was born or when. Harvey lay back with a blanket pulled over her body. She closed her eyes for long periods. The writing was dense, and the rhythm of words, like a current, dragged her out to sleep.

  Everything was ready for his visit, including the gift she’d been preparing for Father’s Day. It was a box of objects from childhood, and each one stood for some vital moment of their lives.

  The most important piece was an envelope containing official documents. She would show these to her father on the last day, and free him from the secret he had been keeping for almost twenty years.

  Harvey had discovered the secret by accident. Some minor issue with her French work visa had required her to contact the office of births, marriages, and deaths back home on Long Island. If the Nassau County Clerk had sent the documents directly to her French lawyer, as requested, Harvey still wouldn’t know.

  She suspected that her father had kept the truth hidden to protect her. There was no other explanation.

  IN THE AFTERNOON, Harvey watched a black-and-white film that crackled and made the walls flicker. Women in the film went to bed with makeup on. Men wore dressing gowns with their initials under the pocket and smoked over breakfast.

  It was gray outside, and keeping the lights on made Harvey feel safe. Around six, she drew an early bath, then put on her pajamas and pushed a piece of salmon around the frying pan.

  Closing the curtains before bed, she could tell it was raining by the sound of traffic five stories below her balcony. It was a busy street—a steady climb through Montmartre that was dangerous in winter when snow dusted the roads, and people huddled in the windows of the bakery, watching for the dazzle of a bus.

  Some weekends Harvey invited people over or stayed out at cafés drinking wine. When her friends left to catch the last Métro sometime before midnight, Harvey liked to linger at the table and watch people out late in the darkness. Some strolled with a dog, or walked quickly with bags of food from Murat’s, or picked through an early Sunday newspaper, stopping to discard sections of little interest.

  Harvey had made some good friends since moving to France. Most of them worked with her in the art department of a media company, which took up three floors of a building that used to be a school. There was a cobblestone courtyard where the executives parked cars or scooters—and where people could go out to smoke or make private calls. Harvey was the only American in the department, and from mid-July to mid-August she spent most of her weekends at colleagues’ family houses in the country, returning to Paris with packages of honey or local wine or tiny strawberries that grew wild and didn’t last more than a few days.

  She often went in on Saturday morning when the office was empty, then spent the afternoon window-shopping along the rue Saint-Honoré, once the main route for prison carts taking people to the guillotines on Place de la Concorde. Harvey would picture the grim, dirt-streaked faces. The pull of the wagon. The echo of horseshoes on cobblestones. People on the street listening to the cries of those who called out for help or mercy or prayers.

  There was a café Harvey liked with seats near the window, and she often went there. The café was expensive, sandwiched between Lanvin and Hermès, but one of the few places to eat near her office. Harvey sometimes looked out past the tourists choosing cakes from a glass cabinet, and with each bite of her meal imagined the dry mouths of people who were long gone from this world, but whose innocence had somehow persevered. They were remembered now, Harvey thought, not for what they had done but for what had been done to them.

  She would tell her father about it when he arrived. Watch the expression on his face as she explained it.

  Being so far away made Harvey feel their closeness. The physical separation was harder for him because he knew she would never live at home again. But in the two years since Harvey’s departure, he had never once complained about her leaving, nor emailed asking her to come back. She used to think he was too proud, but had come to realize that it wasn’t pride at all.

  So much of her own life had resurfaced on those evenings spent hunched over a language textbook, studying French at Leon’s apartment, watching him sharpen Isobel’s crayons with a kitchen knife, or clean out her school bag, or wash some favorite item of clothing in the sink so it might dry in time for school the next day.

  Like her own father, Leon was always tired and on the verge of some small crisis that could not have been anticipated but which Isobel thought was exciti
ng.

  The toilet is leaking. Isobel: Do you want me to build a boat in my room in case there’s a flood?

  The carbon monoxide detector won’t stop beeping. Isobel: If you die in your sleep tonight, do I still have to go to school?

  The elevator randomly stops between floors. Isobel: Shall we leave cakes and yogurt in there for anyone who gets stuck?

  One evening Leon fell asleep in the middle of Harvey’s lesson, so she tiptoed Isobel into the next room and ordered pizza with her cell phone. While they were waiting, Harvey helped Isobel draw a cartoon cat on her iPad. When Leon woke up, he was angry with himself, but Harvey said Isobel was fed, in her pajamas, and had been teaching her French expressions.

  Later that night, Harvey took out a photograph of her own father from years ago. She touched his face. Could tell he was happy, despite a reluctance to smile.

  After brushing her teeth and getting into bed, Harvey opened her laptop and composed an email to her father, saying she had a free round-trip airline ticket that had to be redeemed soon. She suggested that he look online for times. Perhaps try to make it for Father’s Day in a few months?

  HE KEPT A photo of Harvey on his bedside table.

  She was on her bike at the baseball field. Moments before the picture was taken, Harvey had ridden without training wheels for the first time. She was hot and out of breath. Everything looked dusty. He’d been trying to keep up and was out of breath too.

  That bicycle still hung in the garage at home. It had stickers on the seat and a silver bell that Harvey used to ring with her thumb. Sometimes her father would set it upside down, let her spray oil on the chain. He used to carry her bike to the car with one arm. She marveled at that.

  Harvey imagined him back at home, watching television in bed to fall asleep, or drinking coffee in his socks under bright kitchen lights. She sensed the emptiness she had left behind, a future animated by past—and how the best years of her father’s life had only been the beginning of hers.