Hey Son,

The Land Rover made the sound approximately four seconds after Dixon shifted into reverse.

It was a clunk. Not a rattle, not a squeak — a clunk, deep and structural, the kind of sound that originates in a place where sounds should not originate, as if something load-bearing had just expressed an opinion about being asked to bear load. Dixon had heard this sound before many times. He had heard it driving into the parking lot of the Land Rover dealership, where a technician later had listened with a stethoscope and said “I don’t hear anything.” He had heard it at an independent mechanic’s shop, where a man with a British accent named Gerald had put it on a lift and said “yep, that’s in the rear axle mate” and then charged him four hundred dollars to not fix it. He had heard it another time alongside a different mechanic, who had looked at him with the weary compassion of a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis and tapped him on the shoulder as if to say, “sir, it’s a Land Rover.”

“What was that?” Brooklyn said from the back seat.

“That,” said Bobby from the passenger seat, where he was currently adjusting the settings on the massaging seat function with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb, “is the sound of British engineering.”

“It sounded like something fell off the car.”

“Nothing fell off the car,” Dixon said, though he was not certain of this. Things had fallen off this car before. A trim piece from the wheel well had detached at highway speed on the I-285 and he had watched it cartwheel into the median in his rearview mirror with the detached calm of a man who has moved past anger and into anthropological observation of his own vehicle’s self-destruction.

“Bobby, did you know,” Brooklyn said, leaning forward between the front seats, “that Land Rover has one of the highest failure rates of any vehicle brand? I read this. It’s like — I think it’s literally the worst. Or second worst. Behind maybe Jaguar, which is the same company, which tells you something.”

“Brooklyn, I don’t care,” Bobby said. “This seat is massaging my lower back in a way that my chiropractor has never achieved, and he charges me two hundred dollars a session. If this car catches fire, I want to burn in this seat.” He found a new setting. “Oh. Oh. Dixon, what is this one?”

“I think that’s the lumbar pulse.”

“The lumbar pulse. The lumbar pulse. Brooklyn, feel this.”

“I’m not feeling your seat, Bobby.”

“Your loss. This is the greatest piece of automotive technology ever created. I don’t care if the axle falls off. I don’t care if the doors come off. Dixon, I want to be buried in this seat.”

Dixon said nothing to this. He backed the Land Rover out of the driveway — the clunk did not repeat, which meant nothing, because the clunk operated on its own schedule — and pointed it toward brunch.

Bobby and Brooklyn were twins. Fraternal, obviously, not identical, as they often had to tell people. They shared enough facial features that strangers occasionally asked them if they were identical though, and this reminded them how unique it was to be twins. They knew that almost without exception boy-girl twin pairs were not identical. This was one of those things that they just carried around with them as part of dealing with people that don’t understand how twins are made. They were also different enough that being asked this was a bit more than slightly offensive to them. It felt a bit to them as it might if someone asked a mother and daughter if they were siblings, but maybe somewhat less creepy they supposed. They were Geminis, born under the sign of the twins, which Dixon found both cosmically appropriate and almost too on the nose, like the universe had made a joke and then explained it. He had known them for years. They were the friends who showed up, the ones who answered the phone at midnight and at noon with equal willingness and unequal advice.

Bobby was technically Robert, but had been Bobby since childhood and would be Bobby until death and possibly after, because some names are not chosen but assigned by the universe to people who will never be formal enough to deserve their given name. He was loud in the way that generous people are loud — not because he demanded attention but because he couldn’t figure out how to give less of himself. He entered rooms the way weather enters a valley. He had opinions about everything and convictions about nothing, which made him simultaneously the most entertaining and least reliable advisor Dixon had ever had.

Brooklyn was Brooklyn. Her parents had named their twins Robert and Brooklyn — Bobby and Brooklyn — which was, Brooklyn maintained, a matching-name situation that she had never consented to and that her brother perpetuated by insisting on going by Bobby instead of Robert. “If he went by Robert,” she had explained to Dixon more than once, “it wouldn’t sound like our parents named given us matching names. But he likes it. He thinks it’s cute.” Bobby did think it was cute. He also thought it annoyed his sister, which it did, and this was at least forty percent of the reason he continued to do it.

Brooklyn was precise where Bobby was expansive. For one thing, she was the type that read articles about vehicle reliability. She remembered facts. She looked at situations from the angle that would cause the most productive discomfort, and she delivered her assessments with the gentle certainty of a person who knows they are correct and has decided to be kind about it rather than victorious.

They were Geminis in the way that Dixon understood Geminis: capable of being two entirely different people from one conversation to the next. Funny and generous on a Tuesday, serious and brooding on a Wednesday, and on Thursday a combination of both that left you unsure which twin you were actually talking to. Dixon found them both essential and exhausting, which was, he suspected, the correct response to any Gemini worth knowing.

The restaurant was the kind of Atlanta brunch place that takes itself seriously enough to have a chalkboard menu and not seriously enough to spell everything correctly. They got a table on the covered patio because Bobby insisted on sitting outside, and Brooklyn insisted on sitting inside, and the covered patio was the compromise that neither of them had suggested but both accepted because Dixon had walked toward it without asking.

“So,” Bobby said, before the menus had arrived, before the water had arrived, before Dixon had even fully sat down. “When are we getting you back out there?”

“Bobby,” Brooklyn said, horrified. Dixon felt horrified, but knew that this was just Bobby.

“What? I’m asking a question. It’s been — how long has it been? A month?”

“27 days,” Dixon said, because he was counting.

Bobby looked at him, but then decided to ignore this obvious indication that it had not been enough time for anyone to heal from such an emotional blow. Yet, he decided to make the pitch that he had had on his mind since Wednesday. “Right. 27 days! That’s plenty of time. You need to get back out there. You need to meet some new people. You need to be on the apps. You need to be. . .” he trailed off and this gave Brooklyn the opening she needed to enter the conversation.

“He needs to be grieving,” Brooklyn said, “like a normal human person.”

Bobby was not deterred. “He can grieve and date. Grieving is not a full-time job. You can only grieve so much in any one day. There have been studies Brooklyn,” he looked at his sister and then soldiered on, “You can grieve in the morning and date in the evening. It’s like exercise and work, you can do both.”

“That is genuinely the worst advice I’ve ever heard you give, and I was there when you told Marcus to invest in that cryptocurrency named after a dog.”

“That coin went up three hundred percent,” Bobby protested.

“And then it went down four hundred percent, Bobby. I think you’re focusing on the wrong part of the math there.”

Dixon listened to this the way he always listened to Bobby and Brooklyn — with the patient, warm amusement of a man who knows that the advice is not the point. The point was that they were here. The point was that Bobby had texted him and said “brunch, we’re coming to get you, say yes” and Dixon had said yes, but insisted on driving, partly because saying yes was easier than explaining why he might want to say no, and partly because he needed to know the Land Rover could still get him across town without shedding any more components.

“I am seriously, 100%, absolutely, not ready to date,” Dixon said, which was very much true. He was still mostly in shock. And he had no idea how that would work anyway. He had placed the idea of dating on a shelf behind the hundreds of things in his office that he needed to figure out what to do with now.

“You’re absolutely not ready to date,” Brooklyn agreed.

“Come on. He’s a guy. He’s ready to date,” Bobby said, simultaneously. The two of them now staking out territory on opposing sides of the argument. “Look at him!” Bobby practically shouted, “He’s. . . Dixon, you look great, by the way. You’ve clearly been working out, right? And I can see you’ve dropped a few pounds. You’ve got that whole — what’s the word — that whole ‘I’ve been through something and I’m deeper now’ thing happening. Women love that. Women love a man who has suffered attractively.”

“’Suffered attractively,’” Brooklyn repeated, crossing her arms and making a face that suggested she was suddenly rethinking her relationship with her twin brother.

Bobby was all-in at this point. “What I’m saying is…” he slowed slightly, noting that he might need to bring everyone back to his side, “...We need a plan. We should go to Vegas. That’s what guys do after a break-up. In fact, we should go this weekend. We’ll get a big suite, we’ll go to. . .” he was thinking as quickly as he could, but he couldn’t remember the name of the newest spot that everyone was talking about, “... what’s that place?. . . with the big pool, where they do parties all day and everyone’s half-naked?”

“Bobby, he’s probably been to Vegas more times than any city he hasn’t actually lived in. He’s in the events business. That’s all they do there. I bet he could draw you a floor plan of every hotel on the Strip from memory.”

Bobby paused. This was most likely true and he had forgotten that Dixon has a special distaste for Vegas in his heart. “OK, you’re right. I forgot about the Vegas thing. Not Vegas. But somewhere. Somewhere with…” he made a sweeping gesture with his arms, “...with energy. Somewhere with great food and, attractive people, and loud music, and. . .”

“Bobby,” Dixon said. “I appreciate this. I really do. But I haven’t even told Cash yet.”

This produced a silence at the table that was different from the silences that had come before. Bobby, who had wound himself up with the physical intensity of a man pitching a business plan, leaned back in his chair. Brooklyn set her water glass down with the care of a person who has just heard something that requires both hands free.

“You haven’t told Cash,” Brooklyn said. Not a question. A sentence placed on the table like a document.

“I was there last week. I was going to tell him. I had it planned out — I had the whole conversation mapped out in my head, you know, the way I do, and then I saw him and I just...” He looked at the chalkboard menu that someone had misspelled “bruschetta” on. “I just. I just couldn’t, do, it.”

Playing in this sceneCarry MeThe Sit Boy Soundtrack Collection

►0:00 / 0:00

Brooklyn placed her hand on Dixon’s arm. She waited a few beats and then said softly, “He’s seventeen. He probably already knows.”

“Yeah, he knows something is wrong. He asked me if I was ‘good.’ Which is a lot coming from a teenage boy. I told him that I was ok, but that there’s just some things I need to work out.”

“And he let it go?” Bobby asked, even more quietly than Brooklyn.

“He let it go. He just kind of moved on to getting Indian and we got Tikka Masala and we talked about Roblox and whether it would ever stop raining in Portland.”

Bobby nodded. This was the Bobby that most people didn’t see — the one behind the fraternity energy and the Vegas plans, the one who had been Dixon’s friend long enough to know that Cash was the thing that mattered most. More than the house and the car and the Land Rover with its clunking axle and its massaging seats and its British engineering. More than all of it.

“So, did you tell him about Puddles?” Brooklyn asked.

Dixon looked at her.

“Puddles,” she said again, and the name hung in the air the way all ridiculous names do when they’re attached to something that matters. Puddles. A name chosen by a little boy who didn’t know that one day his father would have to call him and explain why he would never see his dog again.

“I know,” Dixon said.

“That’s going to be hard,” Bobby said, and there was nothing funny in his voice now. Bobby loved dogs the way large-hearted people love dogs: completely, without reservation, and with the understanding that the love you give a dog is the most honest thing most people ever do. “That’s going to be really hard.”

“Cash named that dog,” Dixon said. “He was, maybe eight? Nine? The dog peed on the floor the first day we brought it home and Cash thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen and that was it. The dog’s name became Puddles.”

“Huh, she took Cash’s dog?” Brooklyn questioned to nobody. She was considering this with a flatness that was not anger but was adjacent to it.

“Yeah, she took him,” Dixon said, suppressing further commentary. He had been the one fielding the questions from the neighbors about where his other dog had gone now that he was just walking Magnolia in the neighborhood. They would ask in a way that suggested delicate concern, rather than gossip, “what happened to other dog?” Dixon answered that question the same way every time, “He’s fine. He’s just moved out with his other owner” as if to say that he was physically healthy, but that was going to be it in the details department.

The menus arrived. The waiter, who was young and cheerful and had no idea that he was delivering laminated menu cards to a table where a man was quietly calculating the weight of every conversation he had not yet had with his son, rattled off the specials with the enthusiasm of a person who genuinely believed that the sweet potato hash was going to improve someone’s morning. Dixon ordered decaffeinated coffee, because Dixon didn’t drink alcohol or caffeine. These were facts about him that people found either admirable or suspicious depending on the context, and that women on dates found either refreshing or disqualifying, sometimes within the span of a single appetizer course. Bobby ordered a bloody mary without vodka, because Bobby didn’t drink either — a fact that most people found genuinely baffling given his general energy level, which suggested a man who might have consumed something — and Brooklyn ordered tea and the bruschetta, pronouncing it correctly and looking at the chalkboard as she did so.

“So what’s the plan?” Brooklyn asked, after the waiter left. “Not the dating plan. Bobby, close your mouth. The actual plan. The house, your life, where you’re going to be.”

“I really don’t know,” Dixon said.

“That’s fine. You don’t have to know yet.”

“My first thought, of course, would be Portland. I would be near Cash. But he’s finishing high school in one more year, and then he’ll go to college somewhere, and I’d be moving across the country to be near a kid who might be leaving in a year.”

“So stay in Atlanta,” Bobby said cheerfully. “We’re here!”

“I came to Atlanta because of her job. My job’s remote. I don’t really have any reason to be here. I don’t have many. . . I mean, I have you two, but…”

“Yes, well we’re portable,” Brooklyn said, even more cheerfully than Bobby. “We’ll visit you wherever you go. We’ll call. That’s not a reason to stay per se.”

Dixon thought for a moment about telling them about his company wanting him to move to Detroit. He thought this might be too much for them after the whole Puddles conversation.

“And the house,” Bobby said. “You’ve got that great house. Tons of room. That yard… I mean, that yard is…”

“A weekly punishment I’ve been volunteering for.”

“OK, but the house itself. You could enjoy it. Spread out. You could turn her office into a — I don’t know, a music room or something. You could…”

“Bobby, he doesn’t want to live in the museum to the life that he once had there,” Brooklyn said, feeling somewhat badly to verbalize that out loud.

“It’s not even that,” Dixon said, shaking his head. “Honestly, it’s the stuff. All of the stuff in the house. I opened one kitchen drawer. I looked in there at the pennies, the dead batteries, the old charging cables and I thought: this is one fucking drawer. How am I seriously going to deal with this whole house? I mean don’t even get me started talking about the garage.”

Brooklyn reached across the table and put her hand on his forearm. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. Bobby looked at his drink, which contained neither vodka nor answers.

“I hate moving,” Dixon said. “I genuinely hate it. The boxes. The decisions. And now there’s an entire house of it. And even if I did, where am I moving to?”

“You don’t have to deal with it all today,” Brooklyn said.

“I know, but it’s the weight of it. I will have to deal with it. Nobody else is going to do it. The house is like a giant trash bin filled with stuff that got left behind. . .” he stopped himself, before he said what he was feeling in the moment: that he considered himself and Magnolia items that belonged in the trash with everything else.

“You’re not alone,” Bobby said. And then, because he was Bobby, and because the moment had been genuine for approximately eight seconds and that was his maximum: “You’ve got us. And when you’re ready — and I’m not saying today, I’m not saying this week — but when you’re ready, we are going to get you out there. And you are going to meet someone incredible. Multiple someones. A whole parade of someones.”

“A parade?” Brooklyn said with disdain.

“A parade, Brooklyn. A parade of fascinating, beautiful, interesting women. . . or men maybe, who knows. . . who are going to look at this man and think: here is a person who has been through something real and has come out the other side with his heart intact and his spice rack alphabetized.”

Dixon almost laughed. Not quite. The laugh was still a few weeks away from being easy, but his jovial self was circling around close by. The muscles in his face remembered what it felt like to smile and almost did the thing.

Playing in this sceneHey Son,Somewhere West of Me

►0:00 / 0:00

This song was written later, but it relates to this portion of the story

Cash called on a Tuesday.

This was unusual. They texted mostly — the shorthand communication of a father and son who had been doing the long-distance thing for a decade and had developed an efficiency with words that would have impressed a telegraph operator. A text from Cash might say “what’s the Xbox password again” and Dixon would reply “LukeIAmYourFather69” and Cash would send a thumbs up and that was the entire exchange: information requested, information delivered, no small talk required. Phone calls meant something. Phone calls meant either very good news or the kind of news that required a voice instead of a screen.

“Hey dad.”

“Hey son.”

“So. Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or am I going to have to keep pretending I don’t know that something is going on?”

Dixon sat down on the couch. Magnolia looked up from her position on the adjacent cushion, the penny-colored fluff ball that she was, a dog with the temperament of a cat and the ambition of a throw pillow, and regarded him with mild interest before going back to sleep.

“She left,” Dixon said.

“I figured.”

“You figured?”

“Dad. You came to Portland and you were weird the whole time. You ordered Tikka Masala and you barely ate. And you asked me about Fortnite. Dad. You know how I feel about Fortnite.”

Dixon did know how Cash felt about Fortnite. Cash had once said, with the serene conviction of a young person who has found his hill and intends to die on it, that playing Fortnite would be like telling the world that he’d given up. Dixon had not entirely understood this, but he had respected it, and he had filed it in the part of his brain where he kept things his son said that he suspected were more profound than they sounded. He had apparently failed to file it deeply enough, because he had, in the fog of a Portland visit spent pretending his life hadn’t just detonated, asked his son about Fortnite. Which was, in retrospect, the emotional equivalent of a five alarm fire.

Dixon closed his eyes. His son could read a room the way Dixon could read a room. He had inherited the gift, or learned it, or both. The same intuition, the same ability to feel the distance between what someone was saying and what they meant. Dixon had spent years quietly pleased about this, watching his son navigate social situations with an ease that reminded him of looking in a mirror and seeing a reflection that was younger and a bit less tired. It had not occurred to him until this moment that the gift would eventually be pointed at him.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. You weren’t ready. I’ll be fine. I’m here if you want to talk about it.”

There was a pause. Dixon could hear Portland through the phone. He could hear the rain falling on the roof in the particular way that the roof sounds when it has dealt with rain its whole life, a place where it rains so often that the rain has become ambient rather than weather.

“There’s something else,” Dixon said. “Magnolia is here with me, but she took Puddles.”

The silence on the other end was longer this time. Not the silence of surprise, but the silence of a young person absorbing a loss that is small in the scope of the world and enormous in the scope of a young heart, even one that had a refined sense of dealing with change.

“Is he OK?” Cash asked.

“Honestly, I don’t really know. He’s with her. I’m sure he’s being taken care of.”

“OK.” Another pause. “That sucks, Dad.”

“Yeah. It does.”

“Are you OK?”

“I’m working on it.”

“What are you going to do? With the house and everything?”

“I don’t know yet. I’ve been thinking about it. Portland, maybe. Being closer to you. But you’re about to graduate and—”

“Dad.” Cash’s voice had the particular quality of a young person who is about to say something that the adult in the conversation has not figured out yet. “The house is just a place to put your stuff. That’s all it is. It’s not who you are. It’s where your stuff goes.”

Dixon opened his mouth and closed it. The sentence was so simple that it should not have been profound, and yet it landed in his chest with the quiet force of something that rearranges your entire world view.

“That’s true,” Dixon said. He knew it was true, but he didn’t feel that it was true in that moment.

“The real question is what are you going to do with your Xbox X? I will volunteer to take it off of your hands for nothing.”

This time Dixon did laugh. Actually laughed, with his whole chest, in a way that startled Magnolia out of her nap and caused her to look at him with the offended dignity of a creature whose rest had been disturbed for reasons she could not endorse.

They talked for another forty minutes: about school, about what he was reading — a book Cash described with the casual enthusiasm of a teenager who has not yet learned that most adults find philosophy exhausting — about whether Cash should maybe come to Atlanta for Thanksgiving one more time before the house was sold. That last question had a new and serious weight to it. By the end of the conversation, they both knew Dixon might not be there much longer.

“Well, if it could work out, then I could drive your car one more time too,” he said excitedly.

Ah shit, Dixon thought. He decided to save the news about the car for the next time they talked. Cash had enough to process today.

They hung up. Dixon sat on the couch with his phone in his hand and Magnolia breathing softly next to him, and he felt something shift in his chest. It was not the tremor from the astrologer’s reading, not the sick paralysis of the kitchen drawer, but something gentler. A loosening. The feeling of a knot that isn’t untied yet but has been given enough slack to know that untying is possible.

The house was just a place to put his stuff. His seventeen-year-old son had said this with the offhanded clarity of a person who had never been particularly attached to stuff in the first place, and Dixon was beginning to suspect that Cash was right.

He wasn’t going to solve anything today. But the house was starting to feel less like a trap and more like a question. And questions eventually get answered.

Bobby’s voice was in his head. Not the Vegas voice, not the “get back out there” voice, but the other Bobby: the one who had said, quietly, over a bloody mary with no vodka: you’re not alone.

And Cash’s voice was there too. The house is just a place to put your stuff.

And somewhere underneath both of those, Mama Honu’s voice, steady and unhurried and fragrant with Hawaiian green: the universe will take care of it.

Maybe he’d try dating. Not today. Not this week. But maybe soon. Bobby’s parade was out there somewhere, and Dixon was, if nothing else, curious about what a parade looked like when you were not the one standing on the sidewalk watching it go by, but were the one up on the float going down the middle of the street. That sounded like an adventure.

He had a son in Portland who already knew the answer to a question Dixon was still trying to figure out how to ask. And, he had two friends who would show up and take him to brunch and argue with each other about whether he was ready for things he wasn’t ready for, and who would put their hands on his arm when it mattered, and who would drive home with him afterward in a vehicle that was, like Dixon himself, probably more than a little bit broken under the surface, and still somehow running.

Published April 26, 2026 from somewhere on the road in Utah.