Rest Stop

a short story

“There goes another one!” Paul yelled from behind them.

“Which was that?” Margot asked him, her face pivoted around so she could see him from the front passenger seat.

“Ford Fairlane I think,” Peter answered. “Mid-to-late fifties.”

“How many does that make now?” Emma asked.

“At least seven,” Lizzy suggested. “Maybe eight. Weird.”

“Must be a classic car show around here,” Peter answered. “We’ve seen a ’68 Mustang, a ’70 Dodge Charger, a ’55 Thunderbird—”

“How can you possibly know all these old cars?” Margot asked her husband.

“Had a lot of Matchbox cars when I was a kid. Plus, a lot of these cars were still around on the streets in the eighties.”

“Besides … they’re classics, Mama,” Paul said.

“They’re beautiful,” Emma declared in her dreamy way. “I wish I could’ve lived in a time when they were still all over the place.”

That’s my Emma, Peter thought, a girl out of time.

Peter himself sometimes felt like he was running out of it. Emma would be going to college next year and her sister and brother not that long after. In not so many years—all of seven—he and Margot would be, God help them, empty nesters. He didn’t want to lose what they had possessed together all these years. Because he and Margot were teachers, they had been able to spend as much time as possible with their children. Even without a lot of money, they always tried to have good trips together. Yes, as a family they could and did often drive one another nuts, but neither he nor Margot would have it any other way.

He never wanted to admit it, but he felt they had done good. The kids were healthy, mostly sane and loving. That, he hoped, had to do with all the time they spent together. They had been coming on family trips to upstate New York since Paul was just a year old. Everyone enjoyed the trips to the outdoors—camping, fishing, hiking. In the quiet of his heart, Peter believed he had improved on what he had gotten in his own childhood.

“How much longer?” he asked Margot.

“Another hour, according to the phone.”

They were off to a campsite in the Adirondacks that he hadn’t been to since he was a child. The views along the roads and the contours of the mountains before him excavated pockets of his past to him. He was no longer driving his SUV but was in the back of his parents’ own Impala, his brother asleep beside him, the whisps of cigarette smoke trailing out through the cracked-open windows as his parents argued over paper maps whether or not they had taken a wrong turn.

These curving green vistas spoke to something deep in him. They were the first place he had ever loved, having grown up in the tight and built ravines of New York City.

“These roads are feeling familiar,” Peter declared. “I’ve definitely been this way.”