Retro Road Trip

by Caroline Kendall

  Retro Road Trip

  Caroline Kendall

  Copyright © 2019 by Caroline Kendall

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  "Have you bought any fleas today?" Grandy texted me the same joke he always makes when I'm stuck with my mom at the flea markets.

  "No, but I'm thinking about buying this." I texted him a picture of the quilt that one of the other antique dealers was selling.

  My grandfather never wanted to be called Grandpa because it made him feel old. It's kind of like when you hear some old guy say, "Mr. Smith was my father, but you can call me Joe."

  Actually, maybe you never hear people say that, but when you hang around as many old people as I do, it comes up more often than you'd think. My grandfather's first name is Andy, and ever since I was little I've called him Grandy.

  "Get a good price, Birdie. I'll see you soon," he said. He's been calling me Birdie lately. My name's actually Robin.

  There's not really any difference between antique fairs and flea markets. Well, I guess there is a difference in how old the stuff they're selling is, but it doesn't matter to me. I would definitely rather be home right now sleeping late, but I had to come help my mom set up the folding tables and the extension cords and all the crap for her antique booth.

  I always unload the plastic bins first and put them back in our trailer where no one can see them. She wants the customers to only see the old-fashioned wooden crates. I pulled out the old radio and set it on a wooden stool. She plugged in her speakers under the table and turned on the old-timey music. It's supposed to help the atmosphere and make people want to buy a bunch of junk they don't need.

  I guess it could be fun if you like that kind of thing. Which I don't.

  We were at the first antique fair of the summer. I only got to sleep late for two days before we had to come here. My mom works at a school library so she has the whole summer off. This time I didn't mind being there as much as usual because in a few days my cousin Lauren was going to drive me to Grandy's lake house and my mom would be going by herself to more antique fairs.

  I love going to the lake house and I get to hang out with Lauren for a month. She's in college and she is going to take three online classes this summer and she can do them from the lake house now that there's finally good Wi-Fi. I can't wait.

  The early birds had already come through this morning, and there was a break before the late sleepers got up, bought their expensive coffees and showed up looking for a rustic background for their selfies. You know, thoughtfully trying on a straw hat in front of an old door or something.

  I ran my hand over the folded quilt. A lot of these old quilts are really worn out, but this one wasn't too bad. It was the kind made from feed sacks. People used to buy flour in these big bags made of printed cotton, and then they'd make dresses and curtains and quilts out of the cloth. It's hard to find a feed sack quilt that isn't faded or torn at least a little. Cloth just doesn't last forever, the way a china teacup does, or a piece of silver.

  I put down my sunglasses and my sketchbook and I unfolded the quilt to check for old coffee stains or spills or pee spots. I know, that's totally gross.

  At least with the dishes and teacups, you can completely clean them. So it's not like you're drinking some old lady's tea from 1945 or something. Or finding an old plate and scraping off some disgusting crusty bits of meatloaf or liver or whatever they used to eat back then.

  But this quilt looked clean, and I thought about buying it. It had a nice blend of blues and greens. Maybe I would take it to the lake house and keep it up there.

  I was checking for rips and I saw some embroidered letters in the corner of the quilt. In tiny light blue script, so faded that it almost matched the fabric behind it, it said "Andrew."

  I thought I should probably buy the quilt for Grandy since that's his actual name. Maybe I could give it to him for Father's Day.

  The woman unloading her bins in the booth noticed me looking at the quilt.

  "Nice one, huh?" she said. "Can't you just see yourself stretching out on that for a nap in the sunshine?"

  It usually bugs me when vendors are pushy and try to talk me into buying something. I'd rather avoid the chitchat, but actually, as soon as she said that, I wanted to take a nap on or under that quilt ASAP, even though I just woke up two hours ago.

  "Do you know anything about this Andy guy?" I asked, touching the embroidery. Sometimes the dealers know the history of the stuff they're selling. Sometimes they just make it up.

  "No honey, I never found out any details. If you want it, I'll let you have it for only a hundred and fifty bucks. That's a log cabin pattern. It's real clean. Did you see how nice the stitching is on the edges? It's a bargain," she said.

  I knew that was a good price for a flour-sack quilt in good condition. Totally Instagrammable too. I frowned and looked at it with my best "I'm thinking about walking away" face.

  "How about eighty?" I said.

  "Oh honey, that's not enough. Absolute lowest I'll go is a hundred," she said.

  I actually had eighty dollars with me. I still had some birthday money. I folded the quilt and set it down. I knew it was worth way more than a hundred.

  "I'm pretty sure I want it," I said. "Can you let me check with my mom? She's selling over there by the swine barn. I don't have enough but I think she'll let me borrow."

  The woman nodded and picked up the quilt.

  "Okay, honey, but I'll only hold it for you for an hour. If you don't decide by then I'll have to put it back on the table," she said.

  "Deal," I said, hoping my mom would loan me an extra twenty dollars.

  I grabbed my sketchbook and turned to go find my mom. Then I heard a crunch under my foot. I had knocked my sunglasses off the table and I stepped on them. Great.

  When I bent down to get them I noticed some slightly cute guy who looked like maybe he was taking a picture of me. I pretended I didn't see him. I hoped he didn't take my picture, because I had a big scowl on my face. I picked up the cracked sunglasses and kept going.

  There’s not much for me to do when I’m stuck here. Besides the usual Netflix, texting and whatever, I like to draw and paint. I always have my sketchbook with me. I do pencil drawings and watercolors, mostly of random things that I see at the antique fairs. It's hard to do oil paintings when you're traveling because it's a huge pain to clean the brushes, but watercolors are easy.

  I have a pretty hand-painted mug with a big chip out of it that I pour water into so I can paint during the antique shows. As long as my mom doesn't accidentally take a drink out of my paint-water mug again, thinking that it’s coffee. She's still mad about the time she had purple lips for a day.

  At least when you hang around all these antiques, you never run out of things to draw or paint. The whole antique fair is one still life after another. Table after table with carefully arranged stuff that once belonged
to dead people, and it's been wrapped, packed, unpacked and unwrapped over and over when it doesn't sell, which is most of the time.

  Sometimes I just want to say, "Seriously? Salt and pepper shakers?" I don't understand how some people can get so obsessed with one random old thing and then build their whole life around it.

  My mom collects all kinds of antiques and she keeps buying more. She never gets tired of shopping. She always says, "You never know where you're going to find hidden treasure."

  Sorry, I am not into dumpster diving.

  I walked down one of the long rows of tables. Some of the dealers had their whole families with them, some seemed to have a friend with them, but most were alone. Some people pay extra to be in covered spaces. I was almost at my mom’s booth and I saw a table that had a lot of really old hardcover books that looked like they were in pretty good condition. Not like those yellowed paperbacks with limp pages that smell moldy even when they're only ten years old. My mom always wants me to look for old editions of the Alice in Wonderland books. Collectors usually grab them up in shops, so we don't see them very often at the flea markets.

  I walked up to the table and saw a small red leather book with gold lettering on the spine. I picked it up. It was a collection of poetry by Charlotte Bronte. I opened it to a random page and read the verse.

  The human heart has hidden treasures,

  In secret kept, in silence sealed;

  The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,

  Whose charms were broken if revealed.

  Chapter 2

  There's never anybody my age at these antique fairs. They're all old. At least my mom's age. If I ever do see anyone who looks like they're around my age, they at least dragged a friend with them. Sometimes girls walk around in pairs and basically laugh at the antiques. I can hear them coming toward our booth. I try not to give them a mean look, because I kind of get it.

  Maybe I'd be doing the same thing if I didn't have to be here on the other side of the table. They probably think we're pathetic or something since we're selling at flea markets. It's humiliating. I mean, I don't care what they think. It just sucks that there's nobody for me to hang out with besides my mother.

  Sometimes I used to earn a little money babysitting kids of the other dealers. I'd walk around with the younger kids and show them how to play some of the old retro games that people were selling. We played checkers even if there were missing pieces. Most of the vendors liked it if we want to play one of their games or toys for a little while, but they definitely kept their eyes on us.

  The younger kids seemed to like doing something different than video games, but then we would just end up sitting down and playing games on our phones anyway. Sometimes when we were walking around looking at all the stuff for sale, I'd tell them I'd give them a dollar if they didn't break anything. It made them a lot more careful. Then those kids got older and didn't need me watching them anymore.

  Some of the other vendors used to ask my mom if I could help them set up their tables and unload some boxes. One woman gave me ten dollars just to sit at her booth for twenty minutes while she went back to her truck. That was awesome. I just sat there hoping no one would ask me a question.

  Every sale takes forever because they never stop chatting. The customers all want to talk about how their grandmother had one of those cornbread pans and they have such great memories about cooking with her, blah, blah, blah. I've literally heard that a thousand times. It gives me a headache.

  Mostly it's long stretches of killing time being bored out of my mind. You can only walk around and look at cases of tarnished jewelry and campaign buttons for so long till the hoarding thing kind of gets to you. Sometimes I want to stand on a stack of refinished fruit boxes repurposed for holding old record albums and yell, "Can't you people just throw this crap out already?"

  I mean, God! Just because something is old doesn't mean you need to have it. Don't they ever want to just go to freaking Bed, Bath and Beyond and get something that doesn't have old people's DNA all over it?

  I wish I could stay home and hang out with my friend Savannah. At least I wouldn't have to get up before freaking six o'clock to drive from our hotel to the fairgrounds, but since you have to be sixteen for most real jobs, here I am.

  Savannah is on the swim team and she's working at the pool as a junior lifeguard most days until August. She had to go through lifeguard training so she can keep people from drowning. How could you be brave enough to be in charge of saving someone's life?

  Plus she's in marching band, which means she's busy all day long. They practice all summer for parades and football games. Band people are always reminding you that they actually practice more hours than the football team does.

  With Savannah lifeguarding and in marching band, we're living like pioneers because almost every day there are about five hours in a row when she can't text me.

  She's the kind of person who always has an extra hair tie on her wrist in case someone needs one. When our middle school used to have roller skating parties, she always kept me from falling. I was not a good skater. I guess I have weak ankles or something.

  We always have fun together, even if we're just doing homework. In eighth grade Spanish, we had to find six random new Spanish words, define them and use them in a sentence. Savannah and I worked on the assignment together. We flipped through the Spanish dictionary we had to buy for the class and found corazonada. It means gut feeling or hunch. Like intuition. We had to make up a sentence. Savannah said, "She kicked him right in the corazonadas." We almost peed our pants laughing. I guess you had to be there, but we still say stuff like, "I have a corazonada that I'm going to flunk this test."

  When I'm at the antique fairs I send Savannah random texts with pictures of some of the weirdest things I can find, then I make her guess what they are.

  Last summer, Savannah stayed with me at the lake house for a week before Lauren and Aunt Linda came. Savannah didn’t mind when Grandy made us watch The Andy Griffith Show with him. We got him the DVDs of all the episodes one year for his birthday, but he never opened the package. I think he forgot how to play a DVD, not that anyone watches DVDs anymore. At least he still remembers how to text.

  Savannah didn’t mind watching how Grandy makes signs out of old license plates.

  He uses tin snips to cut out the letters and numbers, then he mounts them on wood and makes signs that say "Man Cave" or "Road Trip" or "Roll Tide." We always have to look for old license plates that have a lot of letters, especially vowels. For E or L, he can use threes and sevens and turn them upside down. It's like putting a puzzle together. Or a mosaic. My mom sells the signs along with her antiques.

  My mom thinks he's going to get tetanus or bleed to death making someone a "Home Sweet Home" sign. At least he's trying to make something useful out of the broken junk.

  Chapter 3

  My parents named me Robin because I was born on the first day of spring. Supposedly robins laying their eggs in the spring are a sign of rebirth or something.

  Apparently, when I was about two years old, we went to an antique fair. This was when my mom was just starting a blog about antiques and she had just brought home an old quilt. She had just washed it. She took it out of the dryer and left it in a laundry basket in the living room. I liked how warm it felt straight from the dryer.

  Then I went into my room and brought back a bunch of little stuffed animals and laid them around the edges. I climbed into the laundry basket and kind of rolled myself into a ball and fell asleep in it. When my mom came back into the room she saw me and said, "Robin, you made yourself a nest!"

  Then she took a picture of me asleep in the laundry basket. So that's why she named her business Robin's Nest Antiques, and that's how a picture of my two-year-old self got posted on the "About Me" page on her website and is still there for everyone in the world to see. It's so embarrassing.

  Aren't parents supposed to keep their kids' information private so they don't get weir
do stalkers or something? Even the people we pass on the highway look at us when they drive by. She bought an old trailer to haul her stuff to the shows and it's kind of an attention grabber because it's a vintage classic or something. She got her friend to paint the logo on the trailer, so it says Robin's Nest Antiques with a picture of a nest with three blue eggs in it. It's supposed to look like one of those old luggage stickers that people used to put on trunks and suitcases saying where they had been or where their luggage is going next. The only place I really want to go next is the lake house, as soon as possible.

  Grandy's lake house isn't like some perfect Instagram cottage with all white painted beadboard and shutters and stuff. More like empty margarine tubs than mason jars. I mean, some parts are really cheap looking. And it's only cheap looking because Grandy won't spend money on fixing things when they break. He just tries to do these repairs with twist-ties and birthday candles and stuff. Like when something broke inside the back of the toilet, he made a chain out of paper clips instead of getting the actual thing that goes in there to let the water flush or whatever. He's cheap, but if he ever dropped a penny, he'd leave it and say someone else can find it and it will make their day.

  He's got silver birthday ribbon curls hanging off the house in strategic locations to try to keep the woodpeckers from pecking the house. There's cedar wood on the house, and woodpeckers love to drill holes in cedar. You can't even count how many woodpecker holes we've had to patch over the years. It's ironic that he calls me Birdie now since he hates the woodpeckers so much.

  We can be sitting there playing Scrabble or cards or something, everyone's relaxed and then he hears a woodpecker on the house and he runs outside like a maniac. He wants to kill them. I keep telling him that you can't shoot woodpeckers because they're on the protected species list. I know this because I'm constantly being asked to look online for "new research." There's never any new research, but there are new holes on the house. My mom said, "Maybe you should think about taking off the cedar and putting up some different siding." He said, "I'm not made of money." And the battle goes on and on.