Chapter 1 #2
“We’re lucky,” Joelle said as slid into the passenger’s seat and fastened her seatbelt. “At least pot is legal now, and we’re not headed for another Woodstock.”
“Woodstock!” Nita squealed. “Are they having another one? Can we squeeze it into the schedule?”
“No,” Joelle answered, “but if they were, we’d do our best to get y’all there.”
Ford settled in behind the wheel and started up the engine. The nightmares caused by what he’d endured in his Army Ranger days could very easily be replaced by the mental image of giant flowers painted on the VW bus that just might overpower him in his sleep.
“Okay, Joelle, start up the playlist,” Sharlene said and handed her niece her phone. “Sorry you kids can’t have good cold beers, but you’re on the clock as of right now, and you can’t drink on the job.”
“Playlist?” Ford asked as he drove down the lane lined with pecan trees, turned onto the highway, and headed through town. “And it’s only eight o’clock in the morning. Isn’t that early for beers?”
“It’s five o’clock somewhere.” Billy Joe laughed as he twisted the cap off his bottle.
***
“Hope you like music from the early sixties and seventies,” Joelle said as she started the playlist that she and her aunt had set up the night before.
When the first song began, Billy Joe said, “That’s The Association singing ‘Cherish.’ It came out the year we were all full of piss and vinegar, weren’t we?”
“Back then?” Nita asked. “Billy Joe, darlin’, we still are full of it.”
Joelle glanced up in the rearview mirror to see him flash a crooked smile toward his two best friends who were sitting across from him.
“And we’re out to prove it.” He raised his bottle of beer.
“A toast to getting to do what we always wanted to and making memories that we can talk about the rest of our lives. I just wish that Mae Ruth would have lived long enough to join us.”
Nita touched her bottle to Billy Joe’s. “To chasing our dreams. Mary Nell is watching from above, and I know that she’s real happy that you finally get to go to the dude ranch.”
“And you get to play and sing on the streets of Nashville, Nita, and Sharlene gets to lay on the beach in Florida,” Billy Joe said.
Sharlene took a drink, then clinked her bottle with the other two. “To the trip of a lifetime, and to making memories that will last forever.”
“I’m wondering if they’ve packed bikinis and if your grandpa has a Speedo in his duffel bag,” Joelle turned back toward the front and whispered.
“Now, why did you have to say that?” Ford groaned softly. “I won’t be able to get that picture out of my head for the rest of the day.”
Joelle laughed softly. “It’ll be gone by the time we reach the first campground tonight.”
She had known Ford her whole life. After all, he had grown up on his grandfather’s farm down the road from her aunt Sharlene’s place—sometimes she called it a farm, and other times she referred to it as her ranch—where Joelle spent the most part of every single summer.
Her mama and daddy were both military people, and she’d been a military brat until she graduated from high school.
But every summer she had spent several weeks on the old family farm that Sharlene still ran with a firm hand.
Nowadays Joelle taught fifth grade in Prosper, Texas, which was less than an hour from Whitewright, so she still spent most weekends at the farm.
She glanced over at Ford and remembered having a terrible crush on him when she was a teenager.
Trouble was that back then, with five years between them, she was just a child to him.
Then when she was old enough to really fall in love, she had already vowed that she would never get involved with a serviceman.
Relationships could become permanent, and early in her life she had vowed that if she ever did get married, it would be to someone who was already grounded and had roots.
Creedence Clearwater Revival’s song “Proud Mary” blasted from the phone, and all three of the passengers sang along at the top of their lungs.
Joelle turned around to see them doing a chair dance, wiggling their shoulders and bodies down to the waist, and holding their beers high as they kept time with their feet—all three in colorful flip-flops.
She smiled at their happiness and turned back around to find Ford staring at her with his brown eyes that were so dark they were almost black.
“What?” she asked.
“I was just doing the math. How are we going to spend time in each of these places and be home in two weeks?” he asked.
Sharlene shook her head slowly and raised both eyebrows. “Is that what Billy Joe told you? Two weeks?”
“I figured you wouldn’t go with us if I told you we would be out longer”—Billy Joe chuckled—“and you need a vacation to unwind before you take over Henry’s job as foreman of the ranch.
We’ll be home when we get home, but I promised Sharlene we’d be there by the middle of August so Joelle can get back to her teaching job. ”
“You can’t be serious!” Ford grumbled.
“Serious as one of them cardiac arrests my doctor keeps fussing about if I don’t stop eating bacon,” Billy Joe said. “By the time we get back home, you’ll be tired of traveling and be ready to put down some roots.”
Joelle jerked her head around to look at her aunt Sharlene.
Her aunt just smiled and closed her eyes to listen to the next song on the playlist. Did her aunt feel the same way?
Was that what she meant about the trip being what Joelle needed to realize that she should be on the ranch and not in the classroom?
“It takes a lot of greenback dollars to live at that fancy place y’all have been looking at,” Ford said. “You need to sell the land to pay for the next twenty years.”
“You think I’m going to live to be a hundred, do you?” Billy Joe laughed out loud. “Boy, I’ll do good to make it another ten years, and for your information, I’ve got enough of the greenbacks buried in quart jars out in the backyard to keep me in a fancy place until I’m a hundred and twenty.”
Joelle shivered at the thought of her aunt having money in the ground, but she wouldn’t put it past her. All these folks had lived through tough times, and not a one of them was very trusting when it came to banking and finances.
“Why would I want to tie myself down to raising cattle and cutting hay?” Ford asked.
“To help you get rid of those bad dreams,” Billy Joe answered.
“Until you put down some roots and find a good woman to keep you warm at night, those things are going to follow you around. Onliest way you’re going to outrun them is stand your ground and fight, just like you did in the army.
But enough about that. We’re on our way to the first campground.
We’ll be getting our instruments out and playing around a campfire tonight.
Got to get all polished up to do some sidewalk singin’ when we get to Nashville. We’re a bit rusty right now.”
“From the pictures Aunt Sharlene showed me, it’s more like a firepit than an open campfire,” Joelle whispered.
“That would be safer,” Ford said out the side of his mouth. “We don’t want to have to dig up the backyard for enough money to bail them out of jail for setting the west part of the state on fire.”
“Amen!” Joelle agreed.
***
In the middle of the afternoon Ford pulled into the Ole Towne Cotton Gin RV Park where Nita had made reservations. Ford parked in front of the office building, and Nita got out of the back of the bus and went inside to collect their permit.
In a few minutes Nita returned waving a brochure.
She got back in the bus and closed the door, opened up a map and started giving directions.
“Drive straight ahead, and then…” She pointed.
“Our spot is just around the next bend over there. These old oak trees will give us good shade, and we can get the barbecue grill going. Pull up right there, and we’ll help unload the tents and everything. ”
“I’m ready to cook us up some hot dogs, some beans, and fried potatoes as soon as we get the tents set up,” Billy Joe said.
“Where’s the food?” Ford asked.
“In coolers in the trailer,” Sharlene answered. “We brought enough stuff for the trip. We just have to get fresh ice every day before we start out.”
“They had ice and some supplies at the office back there,” Nita told them. “It’s just two more days to the dude ranch. I still don’t know why in the world you want to go to a ranch when you’ve lived on a ranch all your life, Billy Joe.”
“Why are we going to Nashville?” Billy Joe countered. “You’ve been singing country music all your life. Why would you want to go to Nashville?”
“Okay! Okay!” Nita snapped. “I get your point, but I think what really got your attention was the shooting contest, the mechanical bull, and the two-stepping at the honky-tonk.”
“You got it!” Billy Joe said. “I’m going to dance some leather off the bottoms of my old boots with any pretty woman who will dance with me. And I’m going to beat you and Sharlene both in the shootin’ contest.”
“Hey, now,” Sharlene scolded. “I could outshoot and outride you any day of the week.”
“We’ll see about that,” Billy Joe shot back at her.
“Day one of an eternity,” Joelle muttered.
She had been dreading sleeping in a tent, but even that sounded good after listening to their music for the past three hundred miles and now their bickering.
What she would give for some Blake Shelton, Chris Stapleton, Jason Aldean, or Luke Combs couldn’t be measured in dollars and cents.
Are you talking about the distance you have to travel or having to sit beside your old crush for two weeks? the voice in her head asked.
Both, she answered without hesitation.
“Think we’ll live through it?” Ford asked as he parked the bus.
“You know what they say: That which don’t kill us makes us stronger,” she answered.
“Then we should each be able to bench press an Angus bull when this is over,” he said, chuckling.
“We got to get these tents up before we can cook,” Sharlene said as she crawled out of the van. “And Nita gets downright bitchy when she’s hungry.”
“All I’ve had today was a beer and a little snack from the gas station back down the road, and the kids today call it ‘hangry,’” Nita told her.
“I guess that’s our cue to help with the tents,” Ford said as he got out of the bus. “I’m starving. Did someone mention fried potatoes back there?”
“Yep, we’ll cook soon as we get the two tents…” Sharlene said.
Two tents was all Joelle heard. Did that mean she would be wedged in between Nita and Sharlene?
“Me and Nita will be taking one tent.” Sharlene was removing stuff from the trailer and setting it on the picnic tables.
“Me and Ford will get the other one,” Billy Joe said as he carried one of the tents to a place under a shade tree. “Man, it feels good to stretch my legs. I’m glad we’re getting to our ranch on Saturday so I can go to the honky-tonk and dance away all my stiff muscles.”
“Hmph,” Nita snorted. “It’ll take more than one night of dancing to work the soreness out of eighty-year-old muscles. I just now heard your knees cracking, and you were trying not to groan when you got up from that position you were in for our first picture.”
“I ain’t eighty yet,” Billy Joe shot back at her as he rounded the bus to get the supplies out of the trailer, “and there’s a lot of good left in this old body.”
Sharlene patted Joelle on the shoulder as she got out of the bus. “You’ll be throwing your sleeping bag on the floor back here at night. When we get to the ranch, we’ve rented a big cabin with three bedrooms, so you can even have your own room then.”
Joelle didn’t realize she was holding her breath until it came out in a long whoosh.
She’d gladly sleep in the bus rather than crowd into a two-person tent with two old ladies—especially with her aunt who snored like a six-hundred-pound grizzly bear.
She had learned years ago to bring earplugs when she visited the farm.
She had often wondered if the neighbors—that would be Nita on the next ranch over, and Billy Joe just past that one—could hear her aunt.
But then she figured that if she stepped out onto the porch in the middle of the night, she could probably hear them making just as much noise.
“What are you thinking about?” Ford asked as he opened the driver’s side door.
“Snoring,” she answered honestly.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” he groaned. “I didn’t bring my earplugs. I may be bringing my sleeping bag and joining you on the floor of this thing.”
“Would you really sleep in a pink hippie wagon?” she asked. “Won’t that ruin your big he-man Army Ranger image?”
“To get some good sleep, I just might,” he answered. “And I finished my twenty years in the service as of two weeks ago, so the image, if I ever had one, retired with me.”
She gave him a slow once-over, from head to toe. “I don’t think the image knows that yet.”
“If it doesn’t know now, it will by the time this trip is over. Did you really not know how long this trip would last?” he asked.
“Not until this morning,” Joelle answered, “but I’d planned to spend the whole summer with Aunt Sharlene anyway.”