Once, my father drove from New Jersey to California by siphoning gas from strangers’ cars, then sent his van off the Pacific Coast Highway by laying a brick on the accelerator. His mother almost died when she heard. Her only child, devoured by an ocean she’d seen only in pictures. No one could find his body, of course, because it wasn’t there. But the authorities were sure to put his mama’s mind at rest: either the impact killed him, or the waves did after. Meanwhile, no more than fifteen miles south of there, my father was sifting salt at a seafood stand under a name he’d heard at a truck stop back in Missouri: Barton “the Lone Wolf” Pierce. He’d added the “Lone Wolf” part, plus the name of the town, thinking it sounded better than just Barton, a man who’d served him dinner in Pierce City, Missouri—a man so insignificant he could steal his name after bailing on the check and keep on driving west. So that’s who he became, ringing up orders and smiling for tips, trying to start fresh now that he was dead.
A few weeks later his mother flew out to make her peace. She’d never been on a plane before. Had hardly even left New Jersey. And as she stood on the cliffs, gazing across the Pacific, she wondered if this was her chance to start fresh. So much of her had died with her son that maybe it was time to be resurrected—not as herself but as someone better—and she decided to drive south. After she pulled over at a little seafood stand off the PCH, she perused the menu before looking up into the eyes of my father, who wished to God he’d called in sick.
They’ve told me this story so often, I think almost nothing of it. They give it to me in pieces: When the smell of seafood reminds them of the stand. Or when we pass a van that looks like the one he drove. They think the part about their paths intersecting is what makes the story great. But I’d rather hear it another way.
Tell me the one when you don’t stop, I say, and my grandma kind of looks at me funny.
When I don’t stop where?
The stand, I say, and no matter how many times I ask, she shakes her head and tells me it as it happened: gazing out at the ocean, perusing the menu, looking up into my father’s eyes. The two of them flying back home, together.
But finally one day she’s willing to tell me the other story. And that story goes like this:
A woman flew out to California, not knowing if she was looking for a sign her son was still there or a reason to move on. It was quieter than she’d expected, standing on the edge, where the land falls into the sea. She’d pictured the Pacific as violent—angry and white and choppy. But in its calmness, she felt peace. And as she got back in the car to drive off, she felt that peace fill her. She saw signs for San Diego and chose, for no other reason than having heard the name before, to go there, where she rented a one-bedroom apartment with nothing but bright sky and blue ocean outside her windows.
My grandma smiles at the thought.
And her son? I ask. Barton “the Lone Wolf” Pierce? The son thought his mother would find him someday, she tells me. He didn’t know why; he just had this feeling. Now and then he thought he saw her. He rang up orders for women who looked like her. The more he thought of his mother, the more he regretted not saying goodbye. He owed her that, he figured. So he wrote those words on a lunch receipt—Goodbye, Mom—and held it up to those California winds, so they could take his goodbye to wherever it was meant to go. And he allowed himself to move on.
My father comes in from weeding my grandma’s garden. He plants himself between us in the early-morning light. He is fifty now, his back almost broken from laboring on cars in the same shop where his father worked. He is happy, or so he says. My grandma sits beside him, in a long white nightgown she’s had at least since I was born. Outside, our neighbor’s dog barks, a chain-link fence between their yard and ours. Dust floats in the sun from the kitchen windows. My grandma looks at my father, his hair tousled by wind, his cheeks flecked with dirt. She waits for him to look back at her, this son of hers she’s seen grow old. When he does, she smiles.
