Chapter 2
Present day
Mack parked near a row of brightly lit garages, unclipped her seat belts, and shut off the engine.
Her body ached, tired from fighting an unfamiliar car through the corners, and her hands shook with the adrenaline crash that came after a race.
From the grandstands behind her, Mack heard the announcer calling out the heat order and she gave herself exactly one second to feel sorry that her name was swallowed in the ruckus of the next wave of cars taking to the track.
There’d been a time when she’d known how to use that energy—channeling it into another race, another man, a stupid prank—but now she winced as she set her feet on the gravel. Her knees buckled and she caught herself before falling forward.
“Mack? We got a problem in garage six.” She jumped and turned toward where a longtime employee waited. “Small fire, got it put out with the extinguisher, but it burned a hole in the siding. Needs fixing before it rains next.”
Don’t cry.
Tucking her helmet under an arm, she thanked the employee and avoided any conversation by taking the long path around the outside of Haubstadt Speedway.
She made her way to the track office, a narrow space tucked into a corner under the bleachers, where she surveyed the mess and renewed her vow not to cry.
She’d filled in for a sick driver, a one-time opportunity to race some laps, but this dingy room was her real life, the bills and work orders and schedules, even the damn plunger leaning against the wall.
She used to run in the biggest races, and now she simply ran her family’s small dirt racetrack in little Haubstadt, Indiana.
Her mouth tasted like soil and sorrow.
She gently wiped dirt off her helmet and set it on the shelf above the ancient desktop computer, next to a faded photograph of herself with Laurie, back when she and her sister had still been friends. Two dusty reminders of what she’d lost.
“Good night, huh?”
Her father stood in the doorway, leaning heavily on his cane.
The right corner of his mouth drooped slightly, but the lopsided grin only added to his charm.
A near-fatal wreck couldn’t take away the Wes Williams charisma, or his reputation in racing.
A sizable chunk of their ticket sales came from fans who wanted to meet the Goat of dirt track racing.
“Ticket sales are decent for opening night, lots of close races for the spectators, and concessions were up three hundred dollars last time I checked. Might start our season in the black,” Mack said.
“I meant your race.”
Mack rocked her head from side to side as she pulled off her racing coveralls—borrowed, six sizes too big—and threw on a hoodie, cutoff jean shorts, and work boots.
She wasn’t faking humility; she had raced well, pulling herself from the back of the pack to finish a respectable fourth in her heat, but the race tonight left her feeling melancholy and bitter.
“I’m out of shape,” she said as she laced her boots.
She needed to get out of the office and check in on everything.
It had been calm when she’d ducked out for her heat race, but running a small business meant she was the race director, the accountant, human resources, a bouncer, and more often than she liked, the plumber.
That’s who she was now, not a race car driver.
“Hard to stay race ready when you don’t make any effort to put your butt in a car.”
Mack gave Wes a sharp side-eye as she pulled her long blond ponytail through the back of her worn Hoosiers cap.
She knew Wes encouraged his buddies to call her to fill in for a sick or injured driver, but lately those sporadic races felt like punishment, not pleasure.
Like lashes from a whip, woven from the threads of the dreams she once had.
“Stop telling your friends to call me,” she said sharply.
Wes managed a smirk, unbothered by her tone. “Stop saying yes when they call.”
They’d barely spent a single day apart in the entire thirty years of her life, and it pissed Mack off that her dad knew she’d say yes to any chance to race. She grabbed her keys off the dusty desk. “I gotta go check in on ticket sales. You shook all the hands and kissed all the babies tonight?”
Ten years ago, her dad had been in the lead in Kentucky when he tangled tires with another driver, flipped end over end, and only stopped flipping when his car struck a light pole.
Wes still struggled with the aftermath, a traumatic brain injury and chronic seizures, and he’d slid into the role of ambassador for the track while Mack took over actual operations.
Wes liked to pretend he was still in charge even though he mostly schmoozed with spectators and advertisers.
“I can do the load out tonight,” Wes offered. “You leave early and get Shaw into bed at a decent hour.”
“The parking lot is one giant tripping hazard, it’s so soft and wet from all the rain.” She waved him toward the door. “Go shoot the shit with the fans. The young guys love that. Like a blessing from the Pope.”
Wes groaned. Sometimes Mack couldn’t tell if his disappointment was in his own limitations or in her. He lifted his chin toward the photo behind Mack. “Heard from your sister yet? She get moved in okay?”
Mack suppressed a flash of irritation. She was the conduit for communication between her father and sister, both of them too pigheaded to pick up the phone and call the other. “She texted to say that she was in her new apartment. She seems okay.”
It was a total lie; Mack had no idea how her sister felt about anything, or even why she’d left her cushy job in DC to move to Indianapolis, which was still four hours away from Haubstadt.
Growing up, she and Laurie had shared confidences but now they only traded bland, transactional text messages: Did Dad’s knee surgery go okay? Do you know how to file for SSDI?
“At least Indy is in driving distance. Maybe she’ll come visit.”
The hope in her father’s voice stoked Mack’s barely banked frustration. Wes and Laurie remained stuck in a toxic match of who-was-the-most-stubborn, and Mack felt like the eternal loser in their game in which Wes wouldn’t call and Laurie wouldn’t visit.
Mack sighed, watching as her breath disturbed the sooty office air. Her whole life was coated in dust.
“Uh, Ms. Williams?” A teenager they’d hired for seasonal work poked her head in the doorway. “Someone came to concessions saying the men’s toilet is plugged and spilling on the floor.”
Mack grabbed the plunger. Make that dust and shit.
Three hours later, the last teams had ambled out of the parking lot, the grandstands were empty and swept, and Mack flipped the master switch to turn off the lights encircling the track.
A tension-dehydration-dust-ponytail headache bloomed along her forehead, and Mack rubbed her temples as she tabbed through her mental checklist one more time.
Her hands and face were filthy, her feet throbbed, and the persistent smell of popcorn and disinfectant would haunt her forever.
At her side, her daughter turned cartwheels, pausing here and there to inspect the patchy grass for four-leaf clovers. Her clothes were grubby and her tangled blond hair was dotted with grass.
“You need a bath tonight, Shaw Westly Williams.”
Shaw paused long enough to wrinkle her freckled nose. “Mama, do you think mermaids have to take baths?”
Mack pretended to think it over. Shaw had recently turned ten, still a little girl, but occasionally Mack could see the early signs of puberty popping through when Shaw rolled her eyes or sassed.
Anytime she could indulge the childishness in Shaw, she tried.
“Mmm, they live in the ocean and swim underwater all day, so probably not.”
“Then I definitely want to be a mermaid!” Shaw giggled a second before turning serious. “Can we go to the ocean? Pretty please?”
Her light voice hit Mack with the force of a heavyweight punch.
They managed to get by on the income from the track, Wes’s social security, and the occasional odd jobs Mack pulled in the winter when money was tight, but they’d never had the funds to take any kind of vacation.
Ten years ago, Mack would have left right then, driving until they reached the surf, windows down and blasting music.
She’d lived for the moment, drunk on the wildness of doing whatever she wanted whenever she wanted.
But now she had to be solid and more stable for her daughter.
Shaw needed a schedule and sleep and the foundation of home and family, not a midnight trip to Florida.
“Someday, baby.”
“Daddy lives near the ocean. Maybe he could take me.”
Mack jerked, as if Shaw really had hit her. Shaw had stayed with her father exactly once, and Mack would never, ever allow her to go anywhere alone with him again. Not that he would make time for her anyway. Saying so would only hurt Shaw, so she nodded and said, “He does.”
“I have to swim in the ocean so I can learn to be a mermaid.”
“Solid logic,” Mack said as she swept strands of fine hair off her daughter’s forehead.
She was long-boned like her father, and had only a few inches to grow before she matched Mack’s height.
Recently she’d lost the chubby cheeks of younger childhood, and Mack could see glimpses of the teenager Shaw would be far too soon. Time truly was a goddamn thief.
Mack gestured at two suspicious red parentheses on each side of her daughter’s mouth. “Were you sneaking candy again?”
Shaw was a track kid through and through, roaming the grounds on race nights and wrangling free snacks from the septuagenarian who’d worked concessions since the mid-nineties. Shaw smiled and Mack saw remnants of popcorn in her teeth.
“Bath, brush, and floss.”
“I know, I know. Track night, bath night,” Shaw grumbled.
As she watched Shaw skip away across the parking lot, Mack tried to appreciate the youthful energy of her daughter instead of giving into the weariness that seemed to be her only remaining personality trait.
She packed snacks, washed load after load of clothes, cooked bland but nutritious meals, practiced spelling words, and drove Shaw to dance class and softball practices, all while keeping the track solvent and Wes in good health.
Next week there’d be another race, another load out, more bills and bathrooms and bleachers to hose down.
Mack wasn’t ungrateful. Shaw was a great kid, her dad survived an accident that should have been fatal, and she could pay their bills.
But on nights like tonight, when everyone needed something from her at the same time, when she could hardly feel her feet inside her worn boots and she knew she still had work to do, and when the mundanity of her future stretched out like a rural country lane, she had to shove away her grief for the life she might have had.
She hated herself for being unsatisfied with a good life.
“Mack Williams?”
Mack turned to see a tall woman with wiry gray hair leaning against the ticket office. She wore a wrinkled man’s shirt, ill-fitting jeans, and the Merrell slip-ons favored by old men. She shifted, as if she’d been standing in the same place for a while.
“We’re closed for the night. Sorry.”
“I already saw the races.” The woman held out her hand. “Janet Joyner.”
Holy shit.
Mack hadn’t recognized the woman at first, but the instant she heard her name, memories clicked into place.
She was more weathered, with grooves at her mouth and starbursts by her eyes, but the woman in front of her was definitely the same woman whose autographed picture still hung on Mack’s bedroom wall.
In the 1990s, Janet Joyner broke gender barriers in multiple forms of racing, from the Daytona 500 to the Indy 500, and now she owned a small IndyCar team.
Suddenly, Mack was eight years old again, standing on top of an aluminum riser and screaming at the top of her lungs as a silver-and-blue car zoomed by her.
That’s the girl driver, she’d told her dad.
I’m going to race in the Indy 500 just like her!
Embarrassed by her grimy appearance, Mack wiped her hands on her shorts and shook Janet’s hand.
“Oh wow. It’s . . . an honor. I . . .” She almost started spouting random facts about Janet’s career at her.
Mack’s face felt sticky and hot. “Like I said, we’re done for the night but we run races every weekend from now until the fall. I can give you some tickets.”
Janet looked at her oddly, as if she’d said something amusing. “You’re Wes’s girl, right? Mackenzie Williams?”
Mack returned her frown. “It’s Mack. You know Wes?”
To her surprise, Janet grinned, revealing straight, coffee-stained teeth. “Me and Wes go way back. I always said I’d visit and—” She held out her arms in an impressive wingspan. She looked more like a retired WNBA player than a race car driver. “I’m here.”
Mack gestured toward the infield, surprised her dad never mentioned that he went way back with one of her heroes.
They generally told each other everything.
“Dad’s home for the night. It’s only me and .
. . um . . .” Mack looked around for Shaw and saw her sitting in the cab of Mack’s car, pretending to drive. She held up a finger. Just a sec.
Janet grinned again. “I’m not here for Wes. I’m here to talk to you.”