They’d driven through most of the night, taking turns at the wheel, though she was relegated to copilot, a role she didn’t mind, especially when Megan wasn’t behind the wheel. Roxy took her jobmore seriously—riding shotgun with her ears perked, snorting at every bump, and whimpering when someone dared turn on the radio too loud.
They’d stopped at a diner off Route 66 for dinner, where Eleanor insisted they all eat vegetables for once. Not just Cracker Jacks and Coca-Cola and gas station jerky. Real food. She made the drummer get the meat loaf with green beans, and Shep grudgingly ordered grilled chicken and sliced tomatoes.
Eleanor had gotten the meat loaf too—only halfway through did she remember she hated meat loaf. Always had. But Roxy didn’t, and that dog polished it off like it was prime rib.
“Mama Lightning,” Eddie, the drummer, called from the back, tapping out a new rhythm. “What do you think of this?”
Eleanor paused, listening. The beat was sharp, a little jagged. Almost like a foal that wanted to gallop but hadn’t found its footing yet.
“Maybe a little lighter on the third,” she suggested, patting her thighs in a similar pattern. “Don’t chase it so hard. Let the song come to you.”
Eddie adjusted, tapping again with a slight swing in the downbeat.
“Yes!” Eleanor clapped her hands in time as he mimicked her sound. “That’s it!”
The rest of the band let out a cheer, and even Roxy gave a bark of approval, her tail thumping against Eleanor’s foot, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth.
This—thiswas what had been missing. Not just music. Not just the road. But the sense that her voice still mattered. A purpose. That people were listening. That she wasn’t a widow with a dog and a fading memory.
Here in this van, sandwiched in the middle of where they’d been and where they were going, with a follicularly challenged dog and a band oflong-haired boys who thought she was cool as hell—she belonged.
Her eyes drifted shut, the wind funneling through the cracked window to sweep across her face. The road ahead stretched on, long and winding. Atlanta was calling. And this time, she wasn’t following someone else’s path.
She was chasing her own damn music.
Just like that, Eleanor realized she’d slipped into this band of misfits like a spoon into sugar. She stroked her hand over Roxy’s absurd little tuft of rocker hair—the only hair the dog had, perched on her head like a cotton candy bouffant. “You’re a mess,” she whispered, smiling, “but you’re my mess.”
The van was loud and smelly and held together by duct tape and divine intervention, but she felt at home. Like this was her crew. Her chosen family. The kids called her Mama Lightning now, and it stuck in a way that didn’t chafe like Mrs., Mom, or Grandma always had. Titles that belonged to thousands, when she wanted one that belonged to just her.
She had the strangest urge to introduce the band to her actual family. But the image came too quickly, too clearly. Leanne standing in the doorway with her mouth in that tight little line, arms folded like she expected bad news. And Nora, eyes half focused on the middle distance, already thinking about which boy would pick her up for a date, twirling the phone cord around her wrist like the tether holding her social life together.
Who could blame them? Nora had just turned eighteen—at the edge of becoming an adult. The world was cracking open at her feet. Eleanor remembered what that had felt like. The delicious ache of possibility.
Only it had been different for her. She was born in 1900, and when she turned eighteen, it was 1918. The Great War was just ending. The flu pandemic was just starting. Women didn’t go to Yale. In her caseher options were to chase the music and starve or marry a man who could afford meat twice a week. She’d skipped the school but found the latter. But it had required giving up her big musical dreams.
And now? Eleanor stared at the woman in the side mirror, the night wrapping around her like a shawl filled with holes. The woman who looked back wasn’t the girl she remembered but an old woman. Lines etched around her eyes where it used to be smooth and supple, making her skin resemble the Grand Canyon more than a level plain. Hair that seemed brittle, silver rather than silky and blond. Age spots on her arms and hands where skin used to freckle in the summer. And her lips, which used to be full and plump, were withered and wilted. Her cheekbones faded into a softness that betrayed the sharpness of who she’d been.
And yet, there was something fierce still burning beneath the surface.
Maybe that’s why she left home. Because when she looked at Leanne, she saw herself in the years she had lost—a life full of duty. When she looked at Nora, she saw the self she might have been if she’d chosen differently.
And the cruelest trick of all was that she knew those selves were slipping through her fingers. Her mind was starting to blur at the edges. Little memory lapses had become longer. Sometimes, she forgot where she was mid-song. Sometimes, she forgot names. Even her own. Just yesterday she couldn’t remember how to open a Coca-Cola bottle, until Shep had popped the cap off. And though she smiled through it—though she laughed and played and traveled and sang—a terror lived in her bones that left her constantly feeling unsettled.
Because what was she, really, without her memories? A puffing body without a soul.
“You okay?” Shep asked, pencil moving in quick scratches across the open page of his beat-up notebook, lyrics forming faster than the miles unspooling beneath their wheels.
The hum of the van, the lull of late-night headlights, and the faintscent of gasoline and road dust wrapped around them like a familiar old song. His tapping hand kept time against his bell-bottoms, knee bouncing to a rhythm only he seemed to hear.
Eleanor sat curled in her seat, Roxy a warm lump of loyalty on her lap, her arms loosely crossed over the dog as if doing so would keep the words on the tip of her tongue at bay.
She watched Shep. Bright-eyed. Handsome as sin and just as dangerous.
What if she told him the truth? That no, she wasn’t okay. That she was scared. That her memory was beginning to fray like the hem of an old apron. That sometimes she forgot the key of a song she’d written herself or the name of the diner they’d just left. That sometimes she said “egg” when she meant “chicken.” That cracks were forming in her mind, spreading quietly.
Then, she thought, why spoil the moment? Why anchor this golden, fleeting ride in the weight of her grief?
So, instead, she nodded toward his notebook and raised an eyebrow. “Are you about to turn me into a love song?”
