Father's Day by Simon van Booy Page A

abducted.
    â€œDon’t forget Duncan,” Wanda said, pointing. As Jason retrieved it, he noticed something drawn in Magic Marker on the doll’s neck in exactly the same place he had his tattoo.
    He stood at the door as Wanda backed out of the driveway. Harvey watched him through the car window, then held Duncan up to the glass, waving his plastic arm.
    When they had gone, Jason took some pot from the freezer and went back to the movie. Before leaving, Wanda had said that Harvey’s grandparents were about ready to pack up and go but were still waiting for a document to be approved by the courts. She told him that by Harvey’s tenth birthday, the Morganos would be in their eighties.
    Jason thought about it as he filled the glass pipe and then lit up. He had never known his own grandparents. His father had been the youngest of three boys, and the other two had been shredded in the early days of World War II on some beach in the Pacific.
    Jason took deep drags. Let smoke roll from his mouth like a gray carpet. He saw the bodies of his uncles in their navy whites, sliding up the beach on the palm of an incoming wave. Then he saw his father—not as he had known him in life but from a photograph his mother kept on the dresser after he died. It was a black-and-white picture, and he was in his uniform, fresh out of training, a young man with sandy hair and freckles—about the age Jason was when he went to jail.
    Every morning and every evening, his mother sat before it while doing her makeup.
    When his parents first met, Jason’s father used to tell her all kinds of stories. Make her laugh with all those wisecracks. She remembered those things. She remembered the way he was then, just before getting sent away. She was certain of when it was, because there was a dance at the school and they were together after.
    Most of the other boys at the dance that night came home from the war in boxes or were never found. Families cried over coffins filled with yearbooks, baseball gloves, a pair of Converse sneakers worn out with play.
    When the surrender came in 1945, people cheered and the streets were flooded and cars were honking. Jason’s father had been in a POW camp, and it was some time before he made it back.
    On their wedding night, he left the bed and went out to the fire escape, smoking cigarettes and drinking liquor from the bottle, going over in his mind all the things he had seen, all the things he had done, trying to figure it out, trying to untangle himself from it. But war only ends for those who have not been in one.

XXI
    O VER THE NEXT two weeks, Wanda and Harvey visited four more times.
    Wanda said she was balancing some serious juvenile cases and asked Jason if he minded being alone with Harvey while she ran errands.
    Harvey was talking more now, commenting on what they were watching when Jason muted the commercials.
    She kept asking to see the garage—wanted to know where each part would fit on the motorcycle and what its job was. When Jason showed her the spare room, Harvey asked to try out his drums. The room was such a mess, he had to carry her to the drum stool. Harvey touched the skins with her fingers, then tapped lightly to see what would happen. Jason found some sticks lying on the floor and told her to go crazy.
    He smoked out the window and listened to her bang around. When she got tired and her arms hung down, he told her it hadn’t sounded half bad. She’d been trying to work the foot pedal too, so Jason flicked his cigarette into the yard and sat with her. He positioned her fingers properly on the drumsticks, then showed her a few things. Since her legs weren’t long enough to reach the pedal, he told her to focus on drumming while he did the footwork.
    When Wanda came to pick Harvey up, she heard them through the door and sat down on the front step.
    When Harvey was in the car and ready to go, Wanda gave Jason a gray folder she’d brought from the office.