“Where did you get that big dent in your car?” If we talk about her, she might not notice I’ve been crying. Even so, I’m concerned that she has probably run her car into something. She seems accident prone these days. And that’s exactly what she’s done, she explains. She ran up a curb and hit a post office box in San Bruno.
“What were you doing in San Bruno,” I ask. She hardly ever leaves Santa Clara County anymore.
“Well, I want to tell you about that,” she says.”But let’s get a table first.”
I can smell those burgers on the broiler, so fresh they must have been cows an hour ago. At Clarkes, you smell the beef, not the grease. The meat juices baste your chin; it’s like you eat heaven on a bun with your whole face. I am going to miss this.
I munch through my burger like a ground squirrel digging to China while my mother goes on and on about the hours she is spending at the National Archives in San Bruno. Huh? I start to listen.
“So this library is where you can go to do research on your family, and there are lots of records from the central valley,” she is so electric that the hairs on my arms start to rise like little magnetized wisps of wheat in a polarized field. “And I’ve figured out that Iban was likely Alonso’s brother and that something happened that caused Alonso to disappear, but I’ve got Iban’s phone number now and I’m going to call him this weekend.
“I found an item in a Bakersfield newspaper on microfiche, about an incident that involved some sheepherders and some cattle ranchers. Iban and Alonso are mentioned, but the photograph is fuzzy and I can’t make it out, so I’m just going to call Iban and ask him. Or, maybe I will just get in the car and drive to Pine Mountain Club, that’s where he lives. But I will probably call first.”
“Whoa, whoa,” I put my hamburger down on the plate and wipe my chin with my napkin. “Who is Alonso?”
“He’s your grandfather,” she says triumphantly. “He’s my father.”
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