Volume 6, Entry 22: Later

Lymph Nodes and Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride

I must not wash my neck well enough most days because I couldn’t answer the advice nurse’s question. I didn’t know how long it had been that way because I only discovered it that morning.

“Look, I’m calling you right away,” I said into my phone, pretending to be patient and composed. “I know these things aren’t usually good to wait on.”

“Well, it would help to know how long it’s been like that,” she replied, not snapping at me exactly but with a cadence that said she wanted to. Advice nurses always act like you’re thoroughly inspecting every crevice of your body every morning. They ask questions like you’re supposed to take your temperature every time you apply deodorant.

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” I said, more tersely than necessary, glimpsing through the window at a patiently waiting first period class pretending not to look back at me. “I found it today.”

“Okay…sir.” There’s an edge to her voice at first—she didn’t miss my frustration—but then she reconsiders mid retort. She cools to a practiced, professional concern. I think I heard her sigh—and not an assholes-making-my-job-harder sigh but a this-guy-is-justifiably-worried one.

I didn’t like that. Not one bit. But I liked it less than the reason I had called and the reason for her generous tone change.

I don’t usually think about lymph nodes. In some cases, I don’t think about lymph nodes at all. If I could go through the rest of my life without any cause for awareness of lymph nodes, be they mine, yours, or anybody else’s, I’d sign up tomorrow. Put me on that mailing list instead of all the transparent educational money grab ones pitching programs and products at my email address.

But it’s difficult to avoid thinking about lymph nodes when you’re washing your face and neck, and then suddenly you remember lymph nodes exist and that you have them because one of yours has made its presence known. There’s a small walnut, or a huge pistachio, or a medium “Why are you thinking of so many nuts?” Simple: because nuts are rigid and round.

Just like one of my lymph nodes, in a way I instantly knew it wasn’t supposed to be.

“I don’t see any appointment slots,” the advice nurse says, whipping you back to two hours later. “But I’ll get you one.”

I gulped when she said that. My doctor is fantastic, but HMOs don’t usually clear their schedules for random guys like me. They do everything in their power not to see me.

Usually.

There were so many moments that week that left me in this paralyzing state of fear. The initial discovery was one, a moment of terror so great that a hot shower suddenly felt like skinny dipping in Antarctica, and then stepping out of the shower and seeing it protruding from under my skin was another. The intentional compassion from the people at Kaiser marked another quieter moment; when my doctor’s eyebrows carried intense concern, even after his fingers left my neck, was another. It didn’t matter that the thing started to shrink a week later, that my blood tests eventually came back clean, or that my doctor’s eyebrows went slack with relief in March when he probed my neck. Amoxicillin doesn’t treat the fear that accompanies your fingers finding a comically swollen lymph node in the shower. All of those first moments left me fuzzy and cold, convinced that my body was a malfunctioning machine whose limbs might stop cooperating at any moment. But none of those was the hardest moment to breathe after.

The hardest was when I spoke with a colleague about a calendar dilemma that first morning. After going back and forth, the conversation ended in tabling the concern, which was a mercy because I couldn’t yet feel my face. It was the word she ended the discussion on.

“It’s fine,” she said amiably. “We can worry about that later.”

I turned white when she said it. I turned white because I no longer understood what later meant.

I’ve theoretically left that week in February behind. Although I have different health concerns right now, they don’t involve the lymph nodes I inherited from a grandfather who contracted lymphoma and a grandmother who died of rare bone cancer. That’s a wonderful thing.

But that word later hasn’t returned to normal. Unlike my lymph nodes, the perversion of later never responded to the antibiotics.

*****

Will Leitch

’s latest novel Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride begins¹ in a doctor’s office. The titular Lloyd, a career police officer and divorced father to a thirteen-year-old, is there because of debilitating headaches. His doctor, a degenerate gambler as trustworthy as a henhouse-visiting fox with a bib and a bottle of Tabasco, informs him that the results are in and they’re bad. In fact, the situation’s worse than bad: Lloyd’s got a glioblastoma in his brain, which is like a tumor except infinitely worse. There’s no cure. Lloyd’s going to die. Lloyd’s going to die very soon.

One of the aspects I love about Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is its urgency. A terminal disease gets diagnosed in chapter two, but from his first words, Leitch has us reading with a dying man. We learn a lot about Lloyd, about his family history and generally feckless policing career throughout the story, but the novel’s engine runs from the start.

We’re conditioned, I think, to read stories like this with a nugget of hope, that some magic turn—a faulty CT scan, a wonder drug development, an “It was all a dream” rug pull—will save our narrator by the book’s end, but that’s not on the docket. Reading Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride means growing closer to a man who will expire by the time you turn the last page.

Which sounds delightful…if you’re a masochistic monster. But that’s the magic of Leitch’s latest fiction: Lloyd’s march toward oblivion is a nourishing, heart-filling story about a loving father trying to do right by his kid and the world.

A fuller gist of the novel is this: Lloyd’s dying, but the dorky cop decides to leverage his mortality for good. According to his employment contract, dying on duty results in a lifetime’s financial windfall for his family, aka his brilliant middle schooler, Bishop. Insurance, on the other hand, would leave behind a mere pittance. Thus, Lloyd decides to commit insurance fraud, burying the results of his MRI and leaping into every dangerous situation he stumbles across, hoping one of them ends him and jumpstarts Bishop’s future financial freedom.

Plenty of films have featured police detectives with a death wish, but Lloyd’s pursuit of danger feels fresh because of his conviction: he confronts gunmen and chases down kidnappers with righteously reckless abandonment. Every action he takes protects other people as well—to an onlooker, Lloyd is a crazy man but also a heroic one—but to us, reading along with his thoughts, he’s a selfless provider, a man who loses access to the future but never wallows because he’s got someone he must serve.

Despite being central to the novel’s story, Bishop McNeil, Lloyd’s son, never comes across as a fully three-dimensional being. At all times, we see him through his dad’s eyes: as a precocious thinker with diverse talents and interests who nonetheless abhors hygiene and melts when an older girl calls him cute. At first, I worried that this distance from Bishop might inhibit my access to Lloyd’s sacrificial wavelength, but the deeper I got into the story, the more I relished the way Leitch presented Lloyd’s son. Yes, there are powerful moments between the dying man and his reason for living, but even those are tiny moments of comfort. Leitch justifies his protagonist’s mission with scenes at a soccer game, texted meme exchanges, and fought-over blankets while watching movies from the couch. The paternal love he presents is lived-in, wholesome, and grounded. That Lloyd, while dying, revels not in grandiose gestures but quiet moments, reinforces the affection that powers the touching story playing out.

Those naturalistic scenes define the father-son bonding we observe, but Leitch lends further insight into that connection by weaving ten message from Lloyd to his boy throughout the story. Framed as “ten gentle edicts” for guiding Bishop after his father’s death, these letters make explicit the unyielding affectionate concern Lloyd has for the oily, sushi-obsessed kid with half his DNA. Ranging in focus from ecological peril to driving stick, these edicts are moving documents that speak more widely than the fiction they’ve been embedded within. Still, in a brilliant touch, these rules for living resist the cloying feel I initially anticipated. These edicts sound every bit like the Lloyd McNeil telling us his story. They meander at times and belabor the point in others; the philosophies behind them are polished and profound, but they never jerked me out of the story because they don’t read as contrivances. I fully bought that they were the missives of a dying cop trying to concisely convey his brand of wisdom to his son. They absolutely added to the story.

And it’s a winning story, to be sure. I’m avoiding several memorable characters and multiple plot threads that I found satisfying, but trust me, they are central and sharp additions to this story about fathers and sons. Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride is a page-turner I eagerly devoured in a few short sessions, a book I couldn’t wait to pick up again every time I slid in my Past Lives bookmark.

Which is saying something with this novel, by the way. When I crossed into its second half, I realized that every page I flipped inched me closer to Lloyd’s death. I sought answers to myriad questions posed while reading, but I also felt myself growing closer to, and more fond of, the narrator with his tragically ticking clock. I count my ethical concerns about hastening a character’s expiration among the many incredible victories of Leitch’s novel.

This novel, about a man marked for death before you even log it into Goodreads, beautifully blends the moving with the humorous in a propulsive story centered on an inspiring character on an unforgettable, though tragedy-tinged, journey.

You should probably just buy it already.

*****

Roughly five years ago, Alyiah and I started taking regular walks. They were their idea, a chance to reconnect when so few of us had opportunities for it, and we had already established a weekly routine when we realized we had something unexpected in common.

We were both writing novels.

That winter, I read Alyiah’s first novel, Faeblood Unbroken. Actually, I read it three times between August 2020 and its release early in 2021, offering feedback each time but enjoying it in all forms. I’ve written about my walks and friendship with Alyiah before, but I’m pretty sure Faeblood Unbroken’s place on my Most Read Books list certifies how important they are to me.

Still, that trio of reads for their novel marked an achievement of sorts for me: it was my first² time reading a novel written by a friend. Their novel was my first glimpse at the fruits of a person I care about brought to life, and my first experience reading a literary work whose development I had followed closely.

When I read Faeblood Unbroken, I saw scenarios Alyiah and I had discussed. I knew the rigor with which she’d chosen characters’ drink orders. I recognized which characters represented which people in their life, and I recalled which scenes had been wholesale rewritten and why. I read their novel as a novel—I enjoyed it as one—but I also read it as a crowning achievement by a person I admire and a person whose influence drips from my authorial craft.

Which brings me back to Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

Because it read the same way as Alyiah’s book.

I stand by everything I said about Leitch’s novel in the previous section, but I confess that I can’t be unbiased about my earnest affection for it…because I read it in the same way that I read Alyiah’s debut novel. In a way, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride felt more like the project of a friend than my actual friend’s because my familiarity with Will’s writing is greater than my familiarity was then with Alyiah’s.

Because I read Will’s weekly newsletter like it’s a sermon, I couldn’t help but read Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride, at least in part, as the product of my surrogate preacher of choice. One of Lloyd’s edicts is about the environment, and I recognized a story Lloyd recounts about burning trash from one of Will’s newsletters. Another edict centers on Bishop being surprised and shaken by being sick; I recognized two newsletters there, one about that very topic and one regarding the movie Melancholia³.

There’s more: I caught countless references in the novel that otherwise represent Mad Libs-style fill-in fodder. I’m not talking about a character like Officer Anderson, an explicit connection to his previous book, 2023’s The Time Has Come; I'm talking about throwaway details. Unseen characters named Grierson and Daulerio, a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, a Mattoon sweatshirt on a student in the park, an old buddy of Lloyd’s who shares a name with a friend of Will’s central to his non-fiction book about attending a baseball game with his father while on the verge of becoming one himself. All these scraps made this brand new novel feel familiar, like it was less some fresh release than a project I’d been following for years. Which, I have…but I didn’t expect it to read like one. I didn’t anticipate feeling as close to the source material as I did.

In the same way that The Gray Valley’s early readers will read about the hobby of Nick’s dad and discover a hidden story within the story, I felt that way over and over again with Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

I bring this up not as a super fan-flex but because it renders my review above incomplete. I gush about the novel, but I’ve downplayed what the experience of reading it felt like because, well, I didn’t read it like some rando who plucked it off a tasteful Barnes & Noble display.

For the first time ever, I marked passages in a novel with miniature Post-it notes. I used two colors: the purple corresponded to passages I wanted to return to later, while I added a blue one every time I got choked up.

There are a lot of blue Post-its, folks. Some pages have two. One page even has three.

More than any novel I’ve read, Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride made me aware of the delicate dance between author and reader. Those post-it notes certify impeccable craft by Leitch—his book is every bit the profound, moving, and exhilarating read I and others have lauded—but often those tears started with his text on the page only to veer into my life and heart. By pure coincidence, I read the novel at an emotional time, and that amplified my response, but it was also a relatedly emotional time.

My father’s health isn’t the best right now, with effective Parkinson’s medication suddenly turning on other parts of his body, and that colored a novel about an ailing dad. Likewise, I’d been writing throughout release week about the flecks of fatherhood I'd discovered while teaching the Accelerated group over the past three years, and framing an appropriate goodbye to them had preoccupied me. It suffices to say that Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride nailed me at precisely the moment I read it. When Leitch announced the novel’s thrust many months ago, I anticipated that my response might be tricky, but I never could have predicted how hard my favorite author’s latest book would slam my composure. And that’s without acknowledging my health scare in February.

But I’ll address that in a moment. For now, I’m gonna explain why Leitch is my secular pastor of choice and literary role model. This section is the closest I’ll come to SPOILERS, so read with caution if you’ve already added his novel to your shopping cart or Father’s Day wish list.

More than anything, Leitch believes in goodness. In his three novels, goodness wins. That belief in the decency of humanity, in the power of people to come together and do the right thing, is incredibly persuasive in his prose. I instinctively resist that inclination, the fat kid I was too aware of civilization’s abject cruelty, but he never relents, he never relinquishes his belief, and it’s so powerful to have a voice like that in my digital ear every weekend. It’s why I read him, follow him, emulate him, and trust him, even though he’s a stranger. I have a deficit of faith in people, whereas Will Leitch sees the people and powers that corrupt or counter that goodness in the same way Lloyd’s son sees food poisoning: as a rare perversion of the natural order. I want to see the world that way, too.

Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride nudges readers in that direction. While the story of a dying father throwing himself into harrow to provide room for his kid to be himself is naturally gonna get the waterworks going, so often the moving parts that got me blue tabbing were not his narrator’s gentle edicts or Lloyd’s persistent decay but the world around him supporting him without substantive reason to do so. It was an ex-wife’s compassion, a boss’ guiding hand, a colleague picking up a cane, or a stepfather’s patience. Leitch’s novel features abusers, thieves, armed riflemen, and even a serial killer, yet it’s a novel where, down to its final pages, there’s unabiding decency and kindness. Lloyd McNeil is death-bound from the moment you crack that book open, but I ended the novel running low on blue post-its because that death never overwhelms the goodness in the novel’s and character’s heart.

Nor the author’s.

*****

Unlike Lloyd McNeil’s story, mine, thus far at least, went a different direction. I’m fortunate that the lymph node that made an HMO generous, that hushed the tones of every employee I encountered, responded to a simple treatment. I’m also fortunate that I have a doctor I trust, a doctor who treated my situation with attentive care, who helped me calibrate my concern, and who gave me a few minutes each appointment to talk about the A’s and his childhood in a country that no longer exists. Even if it had been what my grandfather had, medicine is incredible these days. Whatever it might have been, Kaiser would have taken care of me. I’d have had hope that Lloyd never could.

That doesn’t change how radically that moment affected me. The terror of watching an innocuous word like later morph into a quixotic collection of phonemes hasn’t left me. I dodged a bullet this time, but aging has this way of continuing to fire with increasing frequency. I realize a clean blood test and relief in my doctor’s eyes won’t conclude every appointment I make.

Two years ago, I wrote one of my favorite pieces ever about this topic. I was responding to the illness of a man who’s not related to me but looks like me and shares my last name, but the piece strikes me as more timeless than that. Perhaps being two years closer to my ultimate expiration stokes that, or maybe it’s some mixture of everything I’ve written about here in what is, ostensibly, a review of Leitch’s new novel.

Whatever the case, in the months that followed my fingers glancing an alien object in my neck, I’ve gotten to interrogate “endgame.dll” in silence. Other than a brief mention to Bria a month later, I, like Lloyd, chose to tell no one about what felt like my body turning on me. I didn’t write about it, I didn’t share about it; I went forward with my week like nothing was amiss. I emceed a Mathletes meet on a campus I’d never seen before. I took photos. I graded Calculus problem sets.

But I thought about it. I thought about it a lot. If you’re cynical, you could say I was preparing myself for the worst, bracing for the possibility that random chance could upend every plan we considered. That’s a fair read, I’ll say. From the outside, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking that.

Yet it wasn’t true. No, the urgency of my thoughts during that (fortunately short) window when my neck leered at me owed to optimization. With no later to count on, I needed to act immediately if I wanted to maximize my potentially truncated time. Just as I efficiently walk over 40 miles daily, teach a full course load, write thoughtful essays weekly, and coordinate multiple organizations, I found that some part of me thrives under that stress. Difficult decisions became easy. Vague plans crystallized. As I negotiated what I wanted to do if everything went to shit, I thought about people, and I thought about what I would say to them, and how I could make sure my words propped them up until their ends. It was exactly what I’d thought when “endgame.dll” exploded out of me. I felt prescient.

All that buries the lead, though. When the chips are down, I posited in September 2023, we discover what is essential. Flipping a coin to choose a college reveals our desires, in the same way that confronting mortality does. When Leitch’s Lloyd McNeil learns he has a few short weeks to live, all he thinks about is his son, Bishop, and making sure he grows up with financial freedom.

So what did I think in that window between discovering a rogue lymph node bulging from my neck and receiving a squeaky clean blood test one week later? What did the man with a fraught relationship with being alive decide while his coin rotated in the air for 140+ hours?

I’m not going to tell you, but it’s not because of some desire for privacy or anything like that. I’m not going to tell you my specific thoughts because they’re secondary to my actions. And I opened the piece with those actions.

I responded to finding a terrifying something in my neck by calling my HMO immediately. Fuzzy, white-cold me dialed Kaiser before he had underwear on. I was so desperate to stay alive that I didn’t waste one second.

I’m so, so, so happy this is how I get to end my review of Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride.

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I felt like I would add a bit more here or perhaps even record a podcast, but the exhaustion has me nodding off while I stand here hunting down links to paste in. I’ll let the piece speak for itself.

But seriously: Lloyd McNeil’s Last Ride earns my most enthusiastic endorsement.

Finally, let me give a shout out to

Evelyn Fox

, whose engaging book review inspired me to connect this piece to Leitch’s new novel. I knew I wanted to talk about the medical scare; I also knew I wanted to more visibly share about Will’s book. This was my landing spot.

School’s out for the summer!

1. Technically, it opens while Lloyd stares at a freeway interchange. His diagnosis arrives in chapter two, but it’s only a few pages later.

2. There’s a minor quibble I could make here, but the subject of that quibble sits near the top of my Future Newsletter Topics list, so I’ll only qualify that Alyiah’s was the first full-length novel I’ve read by a friend.

3. The Melancholia take is one I’ve written multiple rebuttals to in my journal. I broadly agree with his argument, but I’m protective of Justine, the obviously-ill character he cites.