Page 32 of Sounds Like Love

Uncle Rick said, “You know he’s retiring? Just heard it on the radio this morning. One last world tour and then he’s hanging up his guitar. Can you believe it? Feels sorta cosmic, if you ask me. First you and Hank decide to close the Revelry, and now the guy who got famous there retires, too. The end of an era.”

Mom twirled the umbrella in her margarita thoughtfully. “Or maybe the beginning of a new one.” Then the radio shifted to the next song on the mixtape. “Oh, I love this one!” she cried, pointing up at the speakers. “Turn it up! Turn itup!”

So Uncle Rick did, and the bright acoustic of Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers” played through the stereo, and Mom bobbed her head and sang along with it.

Chapter13(I’m Not Gonna Write You a) Love Song

I SLOUCHED INTOthe farthest picnic table at Cool Beans. Vacationers had confiscated all the tables with shade, so I sat unhappily in the sun in my bathing suit and sunglasses, trying to find a smidge of inspiration. But all I had managed to do was doodle a hole into my tattered journal.

Despite my recent …issue, I’d written songs for the better half of twenty years—I’d written my first one on the back of construction paper in Ms. Gamble’s third-grade class. And now I couldn’t even scratch out a top-line melody. Or lyrics. Or instrumentals. Or verses. A bridge, a pre-chorus—

Hell, I didn’t even have a key signature.

I’d done this for years, I knew how.

And yet all I’d gotten down today were a few flowers in the margins.

The café radio drifted from Five for Fighting to top-of-the-hour hits. A familiar beat thumped over the speakers. Then Willa Grey’s crystal-bright voice sang the lyrics I’d written down on a napkin in a sangria bar,reminiscing about a time and place I still ached for.

I had always written to my emotions, putting my vivid feelings into the stanzas of a song. It was always so easy for me. It was part of how I created, how I saw the world. But how did I put feelings into words, into melodies, into songs? It felt like turning glass to gold—impossible. I couldn’t remember how I did it.

The song mocked me as I stared at my blank page.

And all I could think was—

That familiar gravelly voice said,“I’m so sick of this song.”

I glanced over my shoulder because he sounded like he wasright there, but of course there was no one. “What song areyoulistening to?”

Willa Grey’s vocals crescendoed until the song hit the bridge. It was my favorite part, once upon a time.

“It’s Roman Fell’s ‘Wherever.’ The driver’s got the radio on top hits,”he added, as if he needed to excuse why he was listening to it at all.

“Ooh, adriver. That’s fancy.”

“I don’t drive,”he replied. I wondered if he lived in Santa Ana like his area code suggested. Not exactly a walkable place—those Ubers and Lyfts added up.“What song areyoulistening to?”

I twirled my pen around on my finger. “The big Willa Grey one.”

The teens at a nearby table bent their heads together and began to whisper, cutting their eyes over at me, and I realized suddenly that it looked like I was talking to myself. I guess technically Iwas.

Well, that was embarrassing.

I closed my notebook, shoved it in my purse, and made my exit before I couldn’t show myself in Cool Beans ever again.

Besides, the wind had picked up, beginning to blow in a summer thunderstorm from the south.Large purple clouds buckled in the distance, approaching with steady determination. I followed the crowd toward the beach, then up the boardwalk to the pier. Families on bikes zoomed around me, dodging the kids who raced each other to the snow cone man, boogie boards under their arms and sand stuck to their legs. In the distance, the Marge bobbed along back to its dock, ahead of the storm.

I sat down on a bench at the edge of the pier, picking at a string on the frayed end of my shorts. “Why do you hate ‘Wherever’?”

“I don’t hate it,”he defended.“I’m just tired of it. It’s everywhere and I can’t escape it no matter what I do.”

“Oooh, did you get your heart broken to it? Was it on a mixtape an ex-girlfriend gave you? Danced to it with your date at prom? Walked down the aisle to an instrumental of it?” Really, the more I guessed, the more I wondered about him. Was he married? How old was he? Did he have a partner? Kids? A dog?

Why did I want to know, all of a sudden?

He snorted.“Nothing so dramatic, I promise.”

But he didn’t elaborate.

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