Father's Day by Simon van Booy

was kinda hoping you’d figure that out by yourself.”
    â€œFigure what out?”
    Wanda put the doll back where she had found it. “Harvey is your late brother’s daughter.”
    Jason’s mouth opened and closed.
    â€œAnd the only family you have left to my knowledge, Jason.”
    She explained that Harvey’s grandparents, the Morganos, were applying to adopt Harvey, and were on Long Island that very day doing the paperwork. They had flown up for the funeral from their gated community in Tampa, where they had lived since retiring. It was strictly sixty-five and older, but the board had agreed to make an exception in light of the tragic circumstances with their daughter and son-in-law. Wanda said they were still in shock.
    Then Harvey returned with the pieces of toilet paper.
    â€œI got them like you asked, Wanda.”
    â€œCount them out, sweetie.”
    Jason listened to the sound of the numbers, and remembered, years ago, sitting at home with his little brother watching Sesame Street .
    The child’s hair was pulled back in a braid. Her clothes were new and the dress still had a sticker on the hem that read 5X. She was wearing a green T-shirt stamped with peace signs, and her doll had fake plastic hair and a hole in its mouth for a fake bottle. It also had black eyelashes, and blinked when she moved it. On the girl’s wrist were friendship bracelets. On her finger a plastic ring that once had gum inside.
    When Jason went outside to smoke, he looked in through the sliding door at the woman from Social Services and at his brother’s child. He wondered why all this was happening. For years he had lived alone, slept alone, eaten alone, felt alone. Most of his mail went in the trash unopened. He ignored his neighbors, and they ignored him. But despite this effort to shut himself away, despite his determination to live at a distance from the world he had come to hate, Jason found himself once again in the midst of it—tangled up in lives that had simply been going on without him.

XV
    W HEN W ANDA HAD come to pick Harvey up from Miss Bateman’s apartment, she didn’t want to leave.
    Miss Bateman suggested they take a trip around the block. Walk off the tears.
    When all her clothes were folded into a plastic TJ Maxx shopping bag and they were almost ready, Harvey asked if Miss Bateman would brush her hair one last time.
    Wanda drove slowly because of the bad weather.
    â€œLook at this, look at this,” Wanda said as it just poured down. The windshield wipers rowed Harvey further and further toward sleep.
    â€œThe Goldenbergs are nice,” Wanda said. “I think you’re gonna like them.”
    â€œI like Miss Bateman.”
    Miss Bateman had told Harvey she would eventually get adopted by a great family who really wanted a daughter. “You are going to be so spoiled,” she had said.
    Harvey wanted to get excited, but it felt wrong, a betrayal of sorts.
    Wanda looked in her rearview mirror at the girl in her backseat. Over the years, she had met many children whose lives had broken into pieces that would not fit back together. Many of them had sat in that same booster seat, harnessed by the same seat belt, drawing small scenes from their lives on the window when it fogged.
    Wanda watched in the mirror as Harvey’s finger traced images in the glass. She thought about the show she’d seen on PBS of our early ancestors drawing stick figures on cave walls or printing their hands on the rock in colored paint.
    Some of the children who rode with her to foster care—Wanda knew from experience—would never recover. Some would end up in jail, or on drugs, or on the street, unable to live on their own or hold down a job. To think that only a few years before, they had been normal children, in normal houses, with school bags and bedtimes, fear of the dark, new shoes, presents under the tree at Christmas.
    Some children were quickly adopted by