Lloyd McNeil's Last Ride: A Novel

by Will Leitch

This is about you, losing a dad, losing someone who loves you more than he would have thought anyone could ever love anything.

My first gentle edict is a simple one: This is going to happen to everyone. It’s OK.

Does a son want to spend the last three months with his father crying and scared? Or does he want to do soccer chants and eat sushi and make armpit noises?

“You won’t care what other people think about you when you realize they don’t.”

But that was my first lesson of parenthood, one that I both accepted and tried to resist for the next thirteen years of Bishop’s life: he didn’t need me as much as I needed him to need me.

There will be a time when Bishop longs for his father, when he has a million things he wants to tell him, when he is chasing him. He will not be able to find me. I will be gone. But I am here now. He can find me right here. Right now.