Page 27 of A Boy Called Lovesong

I pressed rewind on the cassette player, listening to the tape whizzing in reverse before stopping it at a random spot on the tape. “Music,” I told Chet. “Daddy’s music always made you feel better. Maybe this will too.”

I hit the play button, and the musical whiz-kid was playing Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” on the violin.

I smiled at Chet. “There you go, buddy. How’s that? Better?”

The pooch’s ears went back, and a frightened smile teetered on his doggy face.

I patted the passenger seat. “Come on, boy. I need you riding shotgun with me. I promise I’ll keep an eye out for big mean trucks from now on.”

Chet hesitated a moment longer, then jumped up onto the passenger seat and curled into a defensive little ball.

He let me pat him, gently.

I didn’t push it.

He didn’t wanna look at me, and I didn’t want to frighten him anymore than he already was.

I checked the road, looking back over my shoulder, into the side mirror and over my shoulder again to make sure we weren’t about to become roadkill.

Even the sound of the indicator gave Chet a scare.

“It’s okay, buddy. Just listen to the music. Lose yourself in the music.”

He did just that, and by the time we crossed the border into Kentucky, he was snoring his little head off.

“Why the fuck did you come this way?”

We’d made it to Nashville and the mechanic who owned the repair shop into which we lurched was checking something under the hood. He mentioned words like “faulty spark plugs” and “a failing alternator” and “an issue with the transmission,” but when he asked me to describe the problem all I really wanted to tell him was that poor Joan Collins had smoked one too many cigarettes and was now coughing up a lung.

He asked how far we’d come and I told him from New York.

He asked where we were headed and I told him Louisiana.

That’s when he screwed up his face and said, “Cutting down through Knoxville and Chattanooga would have been much quicker. Why the fuck did you come this way?”

I wanted to tell him it wasn’t my doing.

That’s the thing about grief, you see. The thing that nobody ever sees coming.

It’s a trickster.

It’s a game-player.

It likes to distract you, pointing you in what you think is the right direction, until suddenly… you’re lost.

You’re confused.

And you’re fucking miles from where you’re supposed to be.

But because you wake up every day asking yourself where you are and how you got there, grief gets away with its little tricks.

Every.

Fucking.

Time.

The mechanic was right. We should never have taken the road over the Appalachian Mountains. Even after the Mack truck almost ran us off the road, I still had no idea how we ended up spluttering our way into a repair shop in Nashville.

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