Father's Day Read Online Free PDF

times a week. His emails were short, but she could hear his voice speaking the words to her.
    Harvey pictured her one-bedroom apartment back in Montmartre and tried to imagine how her father would react to it. As the date of his arrival had neared, she’d found herselfadding little touches to the decor—moving vases of flowers around, trying to figure out where each one looked best.
    She would wake at unfamiliar hours. Sometimes just lying there, rolling back over her life. Other times she got up and cleaned the sink or organized bottles in the bathroom cabinet. Cleared out a drawer. Threw away old magazines. Wiped a layer of dust from the top of the refrigerator, then stood looking at the drawings Isobel had given her.
    Sometimes she lay awake until dawn, then stood at the kitchen window with something to eat, staring into her neighbors’ apartments across the courtyard. In summer, with the windows open, Harvey listened to their arguments and tried to figure out whose side she was on. If only one voice was raised, she knew it was a phone conversation.
    Sometimes, at night, she could hear people having sex, and sometimes an old woman on the first floor woke up screaming. Monsieur Fabrice said that when she was a girl during the war, her parents and older sister had been taken.
    On New Year’s Eve and Bastille Day, Harvey could always hear the thumping bass of different parties, which Monsieur Fabrice would have stopped if he hadn’t already removed his hearing aids for the night (intentionally, Harvey suspected).
    And each day, Sacré-Coeur’s ancient bells tumbled down through the streets of Montmartre. Harvey did not hear the sound so much as feel it, the way a child in the womb must feel the tolling of its mother’s heart, long before the coming separation.

VIII
    A FTER GRADUATING FROM a four-year art school, Harvey had taken a job at Dairy Barn, a drive-through convenience store on Long Island near where she grew up. People pulled up to her window and told her what they wanted (usually cigarettes or coffee or beer or milk or diapers or toilet paper). She finished around eight o’clock in the evening, then went home to draw or watch movies in her bedroom until falling asleep. Sometimes her dad took her out for Mexican food or to Jones Beach for a walk along the sand.
    In the months after Harvey’s college graduation, one of her friends from high school got married at the Excelsior on Jericho Turnpike. People read stories onstage about the bride and groom from pieces of paper with their hands shaking.
    Friends of the groom told Harvey she could get a job at the new outlet mall in Babylon. Other friends from college insisted she return to the city and look for a share in Bushwick or Greenpoint. She could work as a waitress, they said, at one of the new coffee shops on Graham or Manhattan Avenue.
    Harvey listened politely but was confident in her abilities as an animator. Her final thesis—a full-length comic about an outlaw motorcycle gang whose members all had disabilities like Asperger’s or obsessive-compulsive disorder—had won the Alumni Prize and gotten printed in the school magazine.
    Most of her wages from Dairy Barn she used to print her portfolio and send out by courier to prospective employers.
    A BOUT A YEAR after Harvey graduated, someone called from Europe—an art director for a creative media firm. During an interview through Skype, Sophie said she was crazy about Harvey’s outlaw bike gang comic strip. The firm had several clients who wanted edgy comic strips on their packaging—including one of France’s biggest yogurt manufacturers, who planned on targeting adolescent boys. Two weeks later, Harvey was working full-time as an assistant animator at the firm’s headquarters in Paris.
    Sophie had been there to meet Harvey at the airport, and found her easy to get along with. Sometimes Harvey invited Sophie back to her small apartment in