Summer Stories 2025: ‘The Luckiest Wind (1978)’

Ford reaches down and turns the radio up. It’s a song about dust, about wind. His mom’s favorite. She liked to remind him that the luckiest wind delivered him to her.

Twenty-nine years ago tonight, a November gale blew through Spokane. It tore the roofs from houses, snapped the 800-foot KHQ radio tower in two. A wind so strong that she and Ford’s dad barely made it to the hospital. The next day, news of Ford’s birth ran in The Spokesman-Review along with the headline: VIOLENT WINDS CAUSE DESTRUCTION ACROSS EMPIRE. She clipped both from the newspaper and framed them, so he’d never forget his dramatic entrance into the world. “Stardom,” she liked to say of his imagined future. “What else is there for someone who arrived on that wind?” He’d lost her nine months ago. Cancer. He lights a cigarette, rolls down the window. Lets his thoughts drift.

Ford always thinks of Jane on his birthday. He met her when they were both on their lunch break from the Crescent (he from the warehouse, she from the book department) and a pelting, late fall rain pushed them both off Riverside, into the doorway of Newberry’s. “That wind!” she said. Her hair was tangled, her mascara smudged. She was delicate, pale. He reached over and plucked a leaf from her dark hair. “Thank you …” she smiled, paused. “Ford,” he said. “As in Tennessee Ernie? she asked. “As in,” he said. “I’m Jane,” she said. “Just Jane.”

Over grilled cheese sandwiches at the store’s lunch counter, she told him her mom and dad died in a car accident when she was nine, she was raised by her grandparents, she believed in fairy tales and happy endings. “How could I go on if I didn’t?” she said. He told her, when he was 11, his dad left him with his name, his lake-blue eyes and a guitar with two broken strings. At the end of their lunch hour, he invited her to come to his first show the following Sunday at a roadhouse on the Newport Highway. “What a thrill!” she said.

Ford and Jane met for every lunch hour and for dinner every night. Their relationship was a marriage of food and laughter. On weekends, they drove to Priest River to visit his mom. They’d sit by the river. He’d play his guitar, Jane would read, his mom would knit. Then Jane and his mom would make dinner. Afterwards, they’d eat lemon meringue pie, while watching Saturday night TV. This, Ford knew, is what love looked like.

Ford pulls into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn West on Sunset. For the past year, he’s been playing in the motel’s lounge. When he auditioned, the manager told him he had talent, but he wasn’t paying to hear him sing his songs, he needed to play radio songs. Top 40 hits. And so he does. He plays for local after-work drinkers and businessmen with expense accounts. He plays for women looking to land a man for a night or a lifetime. He plays for couples on their first date or their last. Two sets, five nights a week.

Before his first set, Ford eats dinner in the restaurant’s kitchen. Chef Elliot knows that when he doesn’t feed him, Ford gets by on a diet of drive-in hamburgers and cans of Chef Boyardee Ravioli or Spaghetti & Meatballs. “Bachelor food,” the chef says with a shake of his head. In his kitchen, he feeds him shrimp cocktails, crab salads and steak, steak, steak. He also insists Ford return on Sunday nights, before his gig at the roadhouse, for the restaurant’s signature Family Fried Chicken Dinner (eaten in the dining room with its table linens and candles and its sweeping view of downtown Spokane). “You can’t starve your creativity,” the man tells him. Ford rubs his burgeoning belly, “No chance of that,” he laughs, “Not the way you feed me!”

Ford thinks of Dusty as he sits in the corner of the motel’s kitchen eating dinner. Dusty who’d followed Jane. Who’d called him ‘Squatch. Short for Sasquatch. This after he took off his shirt in front of her at Liberty Lake. He laughed, until he realized it was her own cruel shorthand for hairy, for fat. He stopped laughing, felt the wasp sting of her words. One night she told him his job unloading trains on the dock of the warehouse, embarrassed her, “It’s so blue-collar. It’s so … beneath me,” she whined. “If I embarrass you, why are you with me?” he asked. “Your potential,” she said matter-of-factly and went back to polishing her nails.

He’d met Dusty at the roadhouse one Sunday. Jane stayed home, said she was feeling unwell. At the end of his set, he saw a blonde, swiveling on a barstool, drinking a bottle of Olympia. She waved, jumped off the stool, walked toward him. “You’re really something, you know?” she twirled a strand of hair around her finger. “We should play together sometime,” she giggled. “Guitar, I mean.” She was long-legged, golden-skinned. Electric. Spokane’s answer to Farrah Fawcett. He thought of Jane. “I can’t,” he said, “I’m sorry.” She took a swig of her beer. “Give me your arm,” she said, as she pulled a pen from her hair and her feathered mane tumbled down around her shoulders. His breath caught. She wrote her name and number onto his skin. Dusty, he read. “I’m Ford.” She cocked her head and looked him up and down, “I know,” she said, “like the President.” He started to correct her, but she turned and walked away. “Call me,” she hollered over her shoulder.

He called Jane the next day, told her they had to talk. Broke the news of Dusty to her over a cheeseburger and fries at the newly opened restaurant the Onion. “I met someone,” he said. “She sings,” he added. “Plays the guitar.” He did not add that she was stunning, that she sizzled, that she had sex appeal. She blinked back tears, waited for him to finish his burger, offered to pay for her half of the check, since they were no longer dating. Even in the middle of heartbreak, Jane was a class act.

Three months into their love affair, Dusty told him that his dreams weren’t big enough for her. Dusty who’d hounded him until he quit his job at the Crescent, hounded him until he got the gig singing radio songs at the Holiday Inn, hounded him until he let her sing with him. Dusty who when she found out his father had left him and his mom and gone to Nashville to make a name for himself asked, “Do you think he could help me?” Dusty who left a note under the windshield wiper of his truck that read: Off to Nashville. Wish me luck. Dusty. No, I’m sorry. No, I’ll miss you. Not even, an xoxo.

Ford finally understood what he had been feeling since he lost his mom, since he broke up with Jane, since before Dusty disappeared. He is a vinyl record mastered, stamped and pressed with loneliness.

As Ford strums the opening chords for the first song of the night, the side door gusts open. It blows dresses up, combovers back, scatters cocktail napkins. Ford keeps playing and when the astonished voices subside, says, “Guess my mom came to celebrate my birthday with me tonight.” There are hollers of “Happy Birthday.” Bottles of beer arrive on the edge of the stage, cocktails. He thanks the senders and good-naturedly takes a drink of each. “Before the wind whipped through,” Ford says, “the song I started to play was my mom’s favorite, which also happens to be about the wind.” He starts again. When he stops, the room roars with applause. A first.

After the show, as he’s putting his guitar in its case, he hears someone say his name. He knows the voice, but is scared that if he turns around, she won’t be real. He takes a breath, turns, and there she is. “Jane,” he says and lets her name float in the space between them. “Happy Birthday, Ford,” she says. He tries to apologize. She shakes her head, waves her hand in the air. “Yesterday’s news,” she says. “Still my sweet Jane,” he says, and then catches himself, his cheeks cherry. She shrugs, smiles. “I’ll always be your Jane, Ford.” He steps off the stage and wraps his arms around her. Smells Love’s Fresh Lemon Mist. Smells his past, his future. “I missed you,” he says. “Us.”

He turns and grabs his amp, she his guitar. He pushes open the door and a blast of wind pushes them sideways, tangles their hair. “That wind,” she says, laughing. “The luckiest wind,” he says. He takes her hand and together they walk into the wind, into the night.