Brandon wants to organize a camping trip at the reservoir. He promises to bring graham crackers, and marshmallows, says maybe he’ll find a boat, but I know he’ll really just bring a cooler with cheap beer and a tent that is too small for two. He invites half a dozen people from the warehouse, including me. I won’t go. I’m summer help, not part of the regular crew. I run the Pitney-Bowes machine and the Fed Ex and UPS terminals, toss labeled packages into metal bins for pick up. I only work the line when they’re behind on packing, my fingers raw from folding cardboard edges together whenever I do help, too used to typing on a keyboard. I will head back to college in a month, driving by the reservoir when it is low at the end of a hot summer, the edges of the receding water etched into the earth at inch-thick increments. I will be on my way to better things, and Brandon will be gone by the time I am back for winter break.
Elliott wants to drive Highway 1 all along the coast, but the Bixby Bridge is out again. I’ve lived here all my life, except for those years in Southern California for college and I’ve still never made it through Big Sur. The fires, followed by rain, followed by mudslides knocked out the narrow roadway at regular intervals. We head inland through the valley before turning toward the coast near Paso Robles. We stay in an ocean view room, with a large soaking tub, and a sliding glass door that lets the sound of the water’s movement into the bedroom. The trip is a test. To see if we can spend more than four days together. To see if he still likes me when he is sober. To see if I still like him when he is sober. We take a kayak out on the bay. The water is calm and bright blue, like his eyes, and goes on forever. My arms burn from rowing and we can’t quite get our oars in sync, but Elliott laughs and snaps a picture of us, our first vacation of many, he says.
My grandfather is six when the family leaves Sonora and heads north, across the border. He is tall for his age, or compared to the other boys in his neighborhood, with lighter skin and dark, black hair. He does not know he will never return to his hometown, that he is heading to a place where he does not know the language, that he will learn it and have granddaughters who won’t understand when he slips into his native tongue with his wife. His family will move around the valley and coastal towns, working on farms, picking apricots and walnuts and strawberries. He will join the military for his adopted country, fight in World War II, gain citizenship through suffering. He will learn to rebuild bridges and bombed buildings, carpentry will become his lifelong enterprise. He will drink too much when his children are small, but will stop before his grandchildren are born. They will remember him for the smell of soil from his garden, cheap cigars and homegrown peaches canned with cinnamon. I will never see him outside of my hometown. Someday someone will ask me if my grandparents were illegals, and I won’t honestly know because his family migrated at a time when borders didn’t mean what they mean now.
The baby is screaming in the backseat, like he often does on long trips. I am jealous that my cousins all have babies that immediately fall asleep. In car carriers, and baby bouncers, and baby Bjorn’s and cribs, or on couches with bottles propped against pillows. My baby doesn’t sleep in cars, screams the second his diaper is wet, or he has a hunger pain, or if it’s too cold or too hot, or if we try to hold him like a baby instead of upright so he can see the world. Elliott grips the steering wheel tight enough that his knuckles go white, a sign of irritation or anxiety, and I try to calm the baby from the front passenger seat. We aren’t far from the cemetery where Elliott’s uncle is being laid to rest, because he didn’t stop drinking when his grandkids came along, when doctors warned his liver was almost done. Elliott pulls over at the Dinosaur Point lookout and I climb into the backseat with our son. I lift him from the car seat and pull the cloth of my shirt up to feed him. The baby latches and calms, quickly, for once. I look out at the water, higher than it has been for years after a rainy winter. There is talk of expanding the basin to catch more runoff, for the cycles when it actually rains that seem to come less frequently than when I was a kid. The years leave behind marks along the sharp incline of the reservoir, like the stretch marks across my skin.
My son, Eli, is quiet in the back of the RV, headphones plugged into his Kindle while he watches downloaded content and simultaneously plays on his Switch. I try to call his attention to the great sand dunes in the distance, but he won’t lift his eyes to the window. Elliott slows the RV as we approach the entrance line of our sixth national park since our son turned two. Elliott said we should see the National Parks before they’re gone, because he’s hyperbolic, pessimistic. I’m not an optimist, but when you have a kid, you have to at least try to have some hope. Our son doesn’t care about the sand dunes, says he can see some 40 minutes from home, without having to drive 20 hours. I try to tell him these are different sand dunes, different grains, another world, but he is 10 and the world he cares about is the one on his game screen. My mind drifts north, to Denver. Brandon lives there. He found me on LinkedIn. Asked me to look over a resume. Asked for my number. He works as a satellite dish installer and has two daughters and an ex-wife. We talked on the phone once. Twice. He said he might visit an old friend in our hometown. Said he might find me on my morning jog. I told him I wasn’t going to cheat on my husband, even though he never quite asked the question.
There are more than 180 four-year colleges and universities in California, including my alma mater and Elliott’s alma mater. Eli could easily get into 90 percent of them, but he wants to go somewhere halfway across the country. To a flyover state. A place we’ve never been until we visit for a campus tour in early spring. It snows, and Eli looks comfortable in a parka, like he belongs in the Midwest. I shiver in my puffer jacket, as does Elliott. We cross off one more national park, the Gateway Arch. We’ve seen 25 now, but there are many more to go. Eli is young enough he could see them all. All the sand grains, the water droplets, the soil from 30 states, but Elliot and I are nearing 60 and I’m not optimistic anymore that we have that many trips left in us. I tell Eli this college shares a name with the town my grandfather was born in, the Spanish version of it. The world is not such a big place, maybe, and there is nothing wrong with staying close to home. But Eli is set on Missouri.
My great-granddaughter Margaret circles the Spirit of St. Louis Crater, drier and dustier than the reservoir where I never camped, but once fed a baby on the side of the road, drier and dustier than the valley where her grandfather once watched screens while the scenery disappeared by the windows of an RV, drier and dustier than a Mexican town where her great-great-great grandfather was born. Margaret tucks her wavy red hair behind her ears, locks that match my mother’s coloring, ears that curve the way Eli’s did as he suckled on the side of the road. She scans a keycard to enter a greenhouse. Inside, she checks the limbs of a peach tree, a variety that grows with less water than the ones back home, with juicy yellow flesh. She imagines it might taste like the ones in the old photos from her grandfather’s online accounts. She never had a peach on Earth. The stone fruits disappeared when orchards were converted to neighborhoods of two-story homes, and the last of the trees died off when the weather warmed too much to provide the chill hours needed for them to thrive each winter. Margaret left home, knowing she’d never see her hometown again, but full of hope for what might be.
Melissa Flores Anderson has published work in swamp pink, Chapter House, HAD and Best Small Fictions 2025. Her debut short story collection “All and Then None of You” is out now from Cowboy Jamboree Press. She is a reader/editor for Roi Fainéant Press and EIC of the Broken Hearts Gallery Literary.
www.melissafloresandersonwrites.com
