David Campbell hadn’t spoken to his father in thirty years. Now he’s driving his ’72 Chevelle across Canada to attend the old man’s funeral.
Part supernatural journey, part road trip through the dark night of the soul, FM99.3 is a story about the music that haunts us, the memories we can’t outrun, and the long road home.
Sample
Every time I picked up a guitar I ran straight into my father. But I didn’t give up on music entirely, I still listened. I can’t say as I’d ever lock on to the oldies station, as they recommended, and rip off the knob. It’s not that I’m not sentimental, I am, I still drive the Blue 72 Chevelle that I found rusting out in a farmers field when I was a kid. When I left home at seventeen it barely ran well enough to get me out of there. That day is stuck on repeat in my head. I’m looking up into the rear view mirror at my red swollen eye, watching my house receding into the distance. I swore that I’d never come back. But here I was nearly thirty years later driving the same car, looking into the same rearview mirror at another shiner and a cut above my eye. The difference is this bruise is a couple of days old, and the other difference, I’m driving home.
Peg was the only member of my family that still kept in touch.
Lately she’d call and say, “Dad’s not doing well, you should call him.”
And I would always give her some non committal response. Early Sunday morning when the phone rang I was already testing my excuse on the tip of my tongue.
“Oh hey Peg, I’m super busy, I’m gearing up for my big gallery show and I just…”
“Dad’s dead,” she interrupted, “he passed away this morning at 4:37 so you can keep your lame excuse, you might need it later for something else.”
“I’m sorry Peg I know it meant a lot to you that Dad and I reconciled.”
“It wasn’t for my sake stupid, it was for yours,” she said
Then she talked about funeral details and how Mom was. She’d been going on for several minutes when she realised that she had lost me. She stopped and made me repeat it with her. “The funeral is next Tuesday at eleven.”
“Be there,” she said and hung up.
I sighed deeply. How long had it been since my Father and I had spoken, fifteen years? No, it had been more like thirty. Time had really gotten away from me. I always thought there would be plenty of it, that eventually one of us would back down and give in. But the intervening years were like a scab over a deep wound that neither one of us had been keen to pick. Now he had slipped away, leaving me holding the bag full of guilt and regret. It was just like him.