Father's Day Read Online Free

Muslim boyfriend—but am pleased to hear it’s your father. A girl only gets one father in this world.”

V
    H ARVEY 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.
    â€œBut I want bubble bath!” Isobel said.
    H ARVEY 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 writingwas 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.
    I N 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 thatwas 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