We spend the next thirty minutes creating an Apple Music account on Maria’s laptop and downloading Pink and Katy Perry and, yes, Dolly Parton, to get me through the four-hour flight to Nashville. I hope it’s enough.

This time, before the flight attendant can even begin the safety talk, I put in my earbuds, hit play, turn the volume all the way up, and let the good noise outshout the bad. I keep my eyes closed the whole time. By the time we land in Nashville, it is three o’clock in the morning and my head is throbbing and I still have to meet my mysterious aunt Ginger and I am now farther away from Mom than I have ever been. But I did it. I flew across the country, and I did not fall apart. Not all the way, anyway.

5 Music City, USA

I slip the iPod in my jacket pocket and then pat it and keep patting it all the way down the long empty terminal. With no people to dodge, it feels bigger and calmer, like walking the mall after closing time. All of a sudden I kind of like airports.

Maria had requested that Aunt Ginger and her husband, Dan, wait for us in baggage claim. She stops me just before the escalator. We are standing under a big cutout of a guitar that makes me wish I had Mom’s in my hands. She kneels again in her suit, now wrinkled and grimy at the cuffs from a morning at a hospital and the rest of a day on planes. Sixty percent of her hair has escaped its bun, and she kind of looks like a mad scientist, but when she smiles, her eyes crinkle like Mrs. Claus.

“Got your iPod?”

I pat my pocket again. I’m worried now about the big meetup and also so tired I could curl up under this fake guitar and sleep for a week. Maria’s already told me this is where we part ways. She’ll be staying until tomorrow to confer with my new caseworker, whatever that means, and whoever that is, and then she’ll fly back to Tahoe. I hope she fights for Mom, too, even though she keeps saying, “You’re my first concern, Lou.” It’s a little scary that as of right now, Maria is the person who knows me the most in the whole wide world, outside of Mom. The people downstairs are strangers. I don’t want her to leave.