Dad rented a larger truck to make the delivery run. More than eight hundred miles to the coast—a sixteen-hour drive across the plains and over not just the Crazy Mountains, but the immense Rockies as well. Lying in bed the night Mom had made the sale, Nate could hear his parents arguing in the kitchen below.

“You’re crazy, Carl,” his mother said. “He can’t come with you. He just started school.”

“What could be more educational than a chance to see the world, Helen?”

In the end, she’d let Nate go with his dad.

The day before the big trip, they’d loaded the bales on the truck. Poppa was there too, lending a hand.

“Sorry excuse for hay,” Poppa said. “This crop lay out too long in the field. If it was me, I wouldn’t buy it.”

“It’ll work out, you’ll see,” Dad told Poppa.

“Twenty cents on the dollar. Not what I call working out.”

From where Nate stood on the back of the truck loading the bales, he felt a sting.

“Hit the road, Jack,” Nate told his father, trying to cheer him up after his grandfather had left.

They set out before sunrise the next morning. Junie was still asleep, but Nate’s mother was out front to wave them off. “Just get him home safe and sound,” she said. “And no dillydallying.” She gave his dad a peck on the cheek, and he put an arm around her waist.

In the cab of the truck his father put the heater on, and in a minute it was toasty. He’d brought a thermos of hot chocolate for Nate and a duffel bag he said held their trip supplies: a bag of licorice and a couple packages of beef jerky; road maps of Montana, Idaho, and Washington State; their baseball gloves; and a gazetteer of the planets. “This is what I call living,” he said as they pulled off the dirt road onto the tar. “Just me and my boy, heading out on the road like a couple of tumbling tumbleweeds.”

They stopped in town for a bag of doughnuts, still hot, and a cup of coffee for Nate’s dad. Then they were rolling. Sometimes his dad would tell an amazing story—something from the Arabian Nights, or from the adventures of an explorer named Ernest Shackleton, who took a boatload of men to Antarctica, and then his boat got trapped in a block of ice, so they had to eat their own dogs. Other times an hour would go by where he wouldn’t say a word.

“Pick a team,” Dad said somewhere outside of White Sulphur Springs. Nate chose the Brooklyn Dodgers, 1953 season.

“Who batted .336?” his father called out.

“Duke Snider.”

“How many RBIs for Campanella?”

“142.”