I play until I run out of songs I know all the words to, and then I make up my own words and fudge the chords. It’s my funeral for my father. It’s my funeral for all the things I’ve wanted.

I play until what Margo said finally makes sense. It wasn’t about Irene and the boy, or my mom leaving. It wasn’t about me at all. He did what was easy. He didn’t have it in him to do any better.

Just because my father was a coward doesn’t mean I have to be. I won’t leave my child. I will do what it takes to give him a real home and a real bed and a real parent. I will do what it takes to be a person Max can be proud of.

Somehow these things make sense to me as I play, and I can’t stop playing because I want to figure it all out. A song I never finished comes back to me. Where you gonna stay, where you gonna stay, whereyougonnastay, and I sing it again and again, playing with the chords until the rest of the words come out.

Where you gonna stay

When flesh turns into bone

Where you gonna stay

Now that you’re not alone

When the sun shines past the treetops

The light’s no longer dim

Where you gonna stay, stay, stay…

Stay with him.

I wake up on the bare rocks with my guitar still in my hands, not even in my makeshift tent. The fire is only embers and smoke. The sun is just breaking the horizon. My back throbs and my fingers are stiff like claws, but I don’t feel wrong. I feel like that place in me where all the wrong lived doesn’t exist anymore, like how I used to think there were monsters under my bed and there never ever were.

Before I leave, I bury my father’s cracked guitar pick under the rocks by the shore, because it feels like the best way to say goodbye to the person I wanted him to be.

It feels like the best way to start over.

I wad up my blanket. My legs are shaky and the pain in my back is getting so much worse, but I’m ready to go. To call Margo and tell her I need help. Face Little River and figure out what’s next. I might even be ready to sit down and have a talk with Irene.

I reach for my guitar case and all of a sudden there’s a flood of wet and warm and pain like I might break in half. I try to get up, to get to my car, but I trip and fall. I hear the crack of bone against rock. I taste dirt and blood.

— Chapter 69 —