drove over a bigger pothole, cursing the fact that none of these roads had streetlights.
In hindsight, I should have stretched this last part of the drive over another day so that I wouldn’t end up wandering through the mountains in the dark.
Because it wasn’t just the ups and the downs of elevation that came at you. There had been deer, chipmunks, rabbits, and squirrels. I’d seen an armadillo and a skunk. All of them decided at the last minute to run across the road and scare the living shit out of me so bad I slammed on my brakes and thanked God it wasn’t winter and there weren’t many cars out on the road. All I’d wanted to do was arrive to my temporary home.
To find a person named Tobias Rhodes who was renting out his garage apartment at a very reasonable rate. I’d be the first guest. The apartment didn’t have any reviews, but it fit every other thing I wanted from a rental, so I was willing to go for it.
Plus, it wasn’t like there had been anything else to choose from other than renting a room in someone’s house or staying in a hotel.
“Your destination is approaching on the left,” the navigation app spoke up.
I squeezed the steering wheel and squinted some more, just barely catching sight of the start of a driveway. If there were more houses around, I couldn’t tell in the darkness. This really was in the middle of nowhere.
Which was just what I wanted: peace and privacy.
Turning down the supposed driveway that was only marked by a reflective stake, I told myself that everything was going to be okay.
I would find a job… doing something… and I’d go through my mom’s journal and attempt to do some of the hikes that she’d written about. At least her favorites. It was one of the biggest reasons why coming here had seemed like such a good idea.
People cried over endings, but sometimes you had to cry over new beginnings. I wouldn’t forget what I’d left. But I was going to be excited—at least as much as I could be—about this start and however it would end.
One day at a time, right?
A house loomed up ahead. From the number of windows and lights on, it seemed smallish, but it wasn’t like that mattered. Off to the side, maybe twenty, maybe fifty feet away—this night driving bullshit was crap on my astigmatism—was another structure that looked an awful lot like a separate garage. There was a single car parked in front of the main house, an old Bronco I recognized because my cousin had spent years rebuilding one just like it.
I turned the car toward the smaller and less lit-up building, spotting the big garage door. Gravel crunched under my tires, rocks pinging and hitting the undercarriage, and I reminded myself again of why I was here and that everything would be okay. Then I parked around the side. I blinked and rubbed at my eyes, then finally pulled out my phone to reread the check-in instructions I had taken a screenshot of. Maybe tomorrow I’d go and introduce myself to the homeowner. Or maybe I’d just leave them alone if they left me alone.
I got out then.
This was the rest of my life.
And I was going to try my best, just like my mom had raised me to do, like she would have expected from me.
It only took about a minute with my camera’s flashlight to find the door—I’d parked right beside it—and the lockbox hanging from the knob. The code the owner sent me worked on the first try, and one single key sat inside the tiny box. It fit and the door squeaked open into a staircase on the left with another door perpendicular to it. I flipped on a light switch and opened the door directly in front of the one I’d just come through, expecting it to be the entrance into the garage and not being disappointed.
But what did surprise me was that there wasn’t a car inside.
There were various forms of padding along the walls, some of it the kind of foam I’d seen in every recording studio I’d ever been in, and other parts of it, blue floor mats that had been nailed in. There were even a couple of old mattresses pressed against the walls. In the center, there was a big, black, four-by-four speaker with a banged-up old amp, two stools, and a stand with three guitars on