Robin Leach wishes us champagne wishes and caviar dreams from a television mounted behind a thick sheet of clear acrylic in a box high on the wall while our mothers sip from cans of RC Cola and Tab and ask our fathers how they are holding up before launching into detailed updates of our families’ financial problems and court cases. The vending machines sell microwavable soup cups and browning bananas and tasteless, pre-packaged sandwich triangles, so this is what we all eat for lunch. The middle school kids and teenagers hang back and get pushed by their mothers to acknowledge their fathers. The kindergartners and first graders among us exult at the sight of our fathers and burst forward to hug their huge crouching bodies. We meet my father in the cafeteria, which is slowly filling with women like my mother and children like me.
Boron FPC had been an Air Force base until a few years ago, and the large plaster-white radar dome on top of a tower in the middle of the facility makes it easy for me to pretend that we are visiting Epcot at Disney World. I don’t know why he’s here, only that he has been taken away from us and that we moved out to this sparse desert area to be closer to him. It is Father’s Day, and my mother and I are visiting my father at the minimum-security federal prison camp in Boron, California.
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