We’ll getchye a barf bag.

Last Saturday Mother and Daddy picked me up in Atlanta, and we drove to Augusta to have lunch with Timber.

“Sorry, I’m still drunk from last night,” I notified them when they arrived. (I had prepared an enormous vat of rosemary gimlets for a dinner party including one of Ryan’s out-of-town best friends. Ryan’s stepfather calls the delicious but dangerously strong libation the Date Rape Cocktail.)

“Ugh…” Mother frowned.

“We’ll getchye a barf bag,” Daddy offered. “Just make sure you throw up in the front seat. I’m sittin’ in back.”

While I grasped my stomach in pain, Daddy talked a lot, during perhaps more than any car trip we’ve ever taken.

“Probably because he always has to compete with three women,” Ryan later suggested.

I learned a lot about Daddy as we coasted along Interstate 20: that he was an Eagle Scout, received the “Most Dependable” Senior Superlative at Hart County High School and managed his high school football team.

“I played my freshman year, but I decided I didn’t want to get the crap beat outta me anymore,” he explained. Daddy even received an offer to help train the University of Georgia football team but joined the North Georgia College Corps of Cadets instead.

At one point Mother and I reviewed Ryan’s and my wedding invitee list, which incited me to ask questions about their own matrimonial event.

“Whatever happened to your best man?” I asked Daddy.

“He lives in California now. He got real mad at me when he got engaged. I told him he was marryin’ the whore of North Georgia College,” Daddy reminisced.

“DAD-DIEEE!” I guffawed.

“She was the campus whore. Turned out to be true, too. He remarried a real nice woman.”

Daddy has worked God-awful hours since I can remember, often rising at 4 a.m. and returning home around 6 in the evening. At one point a couple years ago he labored until midnight at a carpet mill in Lyerly, Georgia. My whole life Daddy has worked, gone to church and slept.

“I’m seeing all this as an opportunity to spend more time with your Mother,” Daddy recently told me on the phone. His outlook inspires me. I’m looking forward to spending more time with Daddy, too, and learning about his history, like the Eagle Scouts and campus whores.