Day two of our Great American road trip.

Our little white van rolls into the Walmart Supercenter in Raleigh, North Carolina. My wife and I step out and stretch our muscles in the parking lot.

“Sandwiches?” my wife says.

“Yep,” I reply.

My wife has been driving the last shift. She uses this opportunity to do yoga stretches while simultaneously catching up on missed texts. She does this, skillfully, by placing her phone on the pavement beneath her while performing a uniquely unflattering squatting pose, a position which I call “Bear in the Woods.”

Then she scrolls on her phone while random onlookers watch her, squatting and concentrating on the pavement. You can see looks on people’s faces. Bystanders are seriously wondering to themselves whether any public sanitation laws are being violated.

My wife and I have been road warriors for the last decade. We have traversed almost the entire US in our tiny Ford Transit, taking my one-man train wreck to various theaters, civic centers, campus auditoriums, and used car dealership grand openings.

I doubt whether my wife envisioned marrying a man whose livelihood was showbusiness, but there you are.

We are a showbiz team. George and Gracie. Fred and Ethel. Mork and Mindy. She works behind the scenes, sending emails, fielding phone calls, and just generally making our whole lives possible. I am simply eye candy.

My wife, for example, drives the bus. She prefers to drive. I know this because whenever I get behind the wheel she grips the chicken handle with both hands and recites the Lord’s Prayer.

Mostly, we putter along the United States in our own mental zones, without conversing. She drives; I am the passenger-seat princess.

Often, I practice material for upcoming shows. I am usually playing a fiddle with mute affixed to the bridge; or a banjo with a sock stuffed inside. Likewise, my wife will be listening to an audiobook, ‘90s country music, or a podcast series that is entirely centralized around heinous murders.

And we sort of exist in our own separate worlds as we drift along the coronary tract of the US interstate system.

That’s showbiz.

You learn to zone out when you spend upwards of eight hours together in a vehicle per day. Your quasi-silence is only vaguely interrupted by the occasional shorthand remark.

Remarks such as: “Gotta pee.” “Low on gas.” “Did you leave your coffee cup on the roof again because a mug just shattered on the windshield of the truck behind us.”

We live on highways. We live in gas stations. We live in rented rooms. We subsist on hotel coffee.

In fact, we have grown so accustomed to hotels, to the rhythm of hotel life, to the quirks of each franchise hospitality chain, that sometimes we feel more at home in a Hampton Inn & Suites than we do in our own house.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our food choices. When you live on interstates, you get burnt out on road food. Sometimes you want something more substantial than barbecue, fried poultry, or a recently deceased iceberg salad. Sometimes you want “house food.”

So we visit Walmarts or supermarkets and purchase supplies for sandwiches. We prepare these sandwiches atop our cooler. We eat them right there in the parking lot, tailgate style.

And we catch up. I tell her about the new fiddle tune I’m working on. She fills me in on the details surrounding a serial killer’s recent bloodcurdling escapades.

We laugh a lot. We have inside jokes. We have blackbelts in sarcasm.

We’re more than lovers. More than spouses. More than mere chauffeur and passenger-seat royalty. We are best friends. I don’t know who I am without her. And how on earth could she live without a banjo in her passenger seat?

This is our life. I doubt whether this is a life many would choose for themselves. I doubt whether this was the life MY WIFE would choose if she could do it all over again. I doubt whether I am the man her mother would have chosen. I doubt whether anyone but drunks and clowns would ever choose a life of showbiz.

But I never doubt, not for as long as we both shall live, that Jamie Martin Dietrich is my realest example of Providence.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have sandwiches to prepare.