we lucky?” Garland asked. “Just traveling souls, making traditions and cheeseburgers.”
“Lucky,” I said right back. I didn’t really know if I believed that part, but I sure could believe in the summer’s traditions.
Garland always said being a rambler of the road meant three things: food, family, and fun. Triple and I always said it meant three other things: blisters, grease splatters, and loneliness. But there we were, rambling back into Ridge Creek for another summer.
The Rambler’s windows were down, and a hot breeze gave away the hiding place of a skunk out in a roadside ditch. Garland sang at the top of his lungs, sounding like someone who should stick to doing it in the shower. And since he was driving the Rambler, he was almost in reaching distance of our shower stall, so I guess that counted. Triple played along on his banjo, which wasn’t really a banjo—it was just an empty shoebox with a paper towel tube for a neck and rubber bands for strings. Garland had gotten real mad when he found out Triple used the good scissors to cut a hole in the lid, but that shoebox was worth saving. Triple had named him Twang. I didn’t want to admit to either one of them how much I liked their broken duet.
So as we bumped along the country roads, the three of us stretched our necks around to rest our eyes on the landmarks. It was a routine that told us the rambling was about to settle down. It would slow to a complete stop for the summer, and so would we.
While Garland and I counted landmarks, Triple sang, making up new words for the stories we knew by heart. There was the old drive-in: “Roll down the windows of your car, set your eyes on a movie star!” The farm with all those calm cows that stood staring together, always in the same direction: “Bales to the east; moos to the west!” And of course, the general store that sold gigantic concrete planters that looked just like turkeys: “Mister Mayflower sticks his zinnias in his fancy turkey dinn-ias!”
Once Garland kicked in the parking brake and unhooked the Grill from the back of the Rambler, we wouldn’t see the drive-in or the cows or the turkeys. We’d stay close to the Grill all summer, because even though we were done with the driving for a while, we weren’t done with the work. But that would be okay, because we’d be right in the shadow of the best baseball stadium there ever was. We’d have traditions and time and each other. Besides, I always did prefer summer grease splatters to winter blisters, and the next few months would be full of those hot, prickly burns.
If only I could’ve counted on grease splatters to be the biggest trouble of the season.