Chapter 1

Southbound Frequencies

I spent an excessive amount of time trying to figure out how to begin this story. I didn’t want it to start with him, but of course, it kind of does.

Still, because I refuse to hand him the opening scene, I’ll start with someone adjacent—someone cleaner—someone whose truth doesn’t tend to come out sideways. We’ll call him Music Boy.

Music Boy had just released a new single. I heard it on the Spectrum while driving home from work in my Jaguar F-Type convertible. Yes, convertible. As it happens, spiritual crises are often preceded by cliché midlife ones. Mine came with leather seats and satellite radio.

I fell for the song instantly. Diving into his discography felt like running home—not back to Tacoma, where I lived, but toward something older and softer: South Carolina. Maybe I’m biased, but music from the South doesn't just play—it holds you. Nowhere else wraps you in that feeling of home quite like it. And that feeling—or maybe just something in his voice, worn, hungry, and a little forgiving—struck a homesick chord in me I hadn't realized was raw.

A few months later, I found out he was playing at the Gorge. I’d never been, but I knew the mythology—the North End housewife proclaiming, “Oh, you haven’t seen Dave until you’ve seen him at the Gorge,” intoned like scripture, always with a wine stem raised just so. Curious, I looked up the tour and realized Music Boy wasn’t the headliner. He was opening—for Music Man. Well before Music Man was Music Man. Back when he was just a photo and a song that didn’t quite land.

I’d clocked that song around the same time, on the same station, for one reason only: the name. It was the kind of name a woman like me clings to instantly—the whiff of cowboy myth, the promise of a man who could ride you into the sunset while conveniently dodging his property taxes.

So I remembered it. And I looked him up. If the name didn’t get me, the photo sure did.

I can still remember the exact moment I saw it. He looked like the sexiest emotional project on earth—equal parts breathtaking and salvageable. No hat, no boots, just a melancholy city backdrop and a face angled slightly away, as if one direct glance might detonate the entire façade. A cowboy and a poet? Two fantasies housed in one man? Sold.

I tried to like the song—truly. The name demanded allegiance, and the photo all but drafted me into service. But the track itself never caught. Still, I kept it tucked away, for reasons I couldn’t articulate—just a sense in my body that the story had unfinished business.

Music Man was singing to a woman in his song—or maybe to the ghost of one. Whoever she was, the sentiment was nothing like Music Boy’s.

Music Boy’s song reached outward. Surrender. Devotion. A barstool confession polished into prayer. You could feel him bowing to the kind of love that softens a man without taking him out at the knees. His tone said thank you instead of forgive me.

Music Man’s? Different animal. His sounded like a plea in drag—a love song dressed up as rebellion. It wanted to sound tender, but something mean kept leaking through, like he couldn’t decide whether to worship the muse or put her on trial. You could hear the tug-of-war between reverence and resentment—the kind of song that throws stones at Eve, then prints her essence onto its merchandise.

A few months later, my dad died—sudden and unexpected. One season he was skimming the lake without effort; the next he was twenty pounds lighter and struggling to climb a flight of stairs. By the time we finally got the diagnosis—a rare, poorly differentiated sarcoma—he was six days away from his last breath.

I was already back in South Carolina by then. Not home exactly—home had become something I carried more in my body than in any address—but I was 145 miles from the place that came closest. Oconee County, the house my parents had drafted with their own hands. I can still trace its foundation in my mind, mapping the outline through skip-counts and bruises. It was never really my primary home, just the lake house—but somehow it felt like the truest one, the place where the air remembered who we were before everything got complicated. By then it mostly sat empty, holding more echoes than voices.

Instead, I was sitting in a hospital, sifting through rounds of tests as if the next result might free me from the quiet knowing of how fast he was fading. Even as a doctor, I kept hoping the data would lie. My siblings and I were camped out in a nearby Airbnb—a tired ranch with floral couches and a coffee pot that coughed more than it brewed.

Matt, Suzanna, and Mark—oldest to youngest, with me wedged in the middle. My dad had always wanted five boys—Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Ralph the Fourth— yes, that was the actual plan. He made it two-fifths of the way there. Growing up, I sometimes wondered if being the second girl before he got his second boy made me the biggest disappointment of all.

One night I couldn’t sleep. Around two a.m., I slipped out of the Airbnb and back into the hospital, terrified he might die alone. I stepped into his room, moving as quietly as I could, and bent to kiss his forehead. His eyes stayed closed, but a slow, deliberate smile began to curve upward at the corner of his mouth.

“Lord, girl,” he rasped, “your breath could use the spare toothbrush on the sink.”

Even on his way out, he wasn’t about to varnish the truth. In those last days, I gripped the rail of his ICU bed like it might tether him to the world. And when he finally let go, I held on to whatever I could take with me.

For reasons that made sense only to the grieving, that meant the fan. The love—or more accurately, the need—for an oscillating fan while sleeping was something we shared. Over his two-week stay, he’d been in four different rooms, and that fan followed him to each one.

When I left his room for the last time, I yanked the cord from the wall and thought, You’re coming with me. It was janky, half-broken. I didn’t care.

My husband, Brett, didn’t ask questions. He just boxed it up, took it to UPS, and shipped it back to Tacoma. He knew better than to fuck with a grieving woman.

After his death, I had a few weeks—maybe a month—of slow, private collapse. The existential questions lined up like creditors.

What exactly is this life? Who am I without the man who shaped half my gravity? And why had I invested so heavily in the theological importance of my ass in denim?

Suddenly everything looked ridiculous—laundry, coffee, conversation. It was like discovering you’d been a marionette in a play you didn’t audition for.

I’d briefly considered keeping the house in Oconee County, as if preserving it might blunt the loss. But that was nostalgia masquerading as purpose, and I was too far away to pretend otherwise. We let it go. It’s an Airbnb now—heartbreakingly poetic and, in its own way, generationally appropriate.

By the time the sale finally went through, I was already back in Tacoma, absorbed again into the machinery of routine. The show at the Gorge was cancelled. Life, predictably, rolled on.

It would take another five years for that feeling to return—not as grief this time, but as something closer to a celestial earthquake. No hospital room. No fan. Just the sense that life was about to stop whispering and start throwing furniture.

Life, of course, had been trying for years—before my dad died, before both cross-country moves—back when I was just an overworked Army doctor trying to stay awake in Beltway traffic.

Which brings us, inevitably, to the ridiculous symbolism of that red convertible—the chariot that carried me out of one kind of Eden and straight into another.