Chapter 5
“Found that on the floor in the hallway. Not a speck of dust, so it’s pretty damn recent.”
Mack picked at her bottom lip as she stared at Janet’s card. He hadn’t technically asked her a question.
“How did you get this?”
Mack was torn between telling him everything and telling him nothing, so she deflected instead. “Did you ever race against her?”
“Nah, never that lucky. She was a hell of a driver. Shame she never went further in IndyCar. There was lots of folks then who didn’t think a woman belonged.”
“Look at it now, Dad. That attitude hasn’t grown mold yet.” Not a single woman competed in the Indy 500 last year. In the entire history of the race, only nine women had started. “How come you never told me you knew Janet Joyner?”
“Shit, Mack, I knew everyone back then. You know that. Don’t change the subject. How did you get this? Did you see her?”
There was no point in telling him about something that couldn’t happen.
Even if she admitted to herself that she wanted to accept Janet’s bizarre offer—geezus, she wanted to accept—she couldn’t leave her family.
They needed her, and the business would fall apart without her.
She’d spent years pretending she didn’t mourn her racing career, hiding the hurt so that Wes and Shaw would never think they were the cause.
She couldn’t up and leave. She picked at her cold oatmeal, letting the soft cereal muffle her voice. “It was nothing.”
Wes banged a fist on the faded table, rattling the dishes. Mack was used to his match-strike temper; it flared quickly but never held a flame for long. “You gonna start lying to me now? Why was she here?”
She didn’t lie to him. They’d been through too much together and Wes knew all of her tells. She simply . . . kept her feelings to herself. So she surprised herself when she blurted, “She wanted to talk about a ride. But it’s not going to work out.”
Wes’s left eyebrow shot up and he leaned forward, bracing his weaker elbow on the table. “What kinda ride?”
“It won’t work out, Dad. Let it go.”
“Why won’t it work out?” His voice got louder. “What kind of ride?”
“Let it go!”
Wes stood up surprisingly fast for a man who had limited use of his right leg. “What kind of fucking ride?”
“The Indy 500!”
Shock highlighted Wes’s face and he fell back into the chair.
Mack felt her cheeks turn hot and she hastily cleared the table to avoid facing him.
She didn’t know which would be more devastating to see on his face, pity or excitement.
Wes had always been her biggest cheerleader, but he knew better than anyone why she couldn’t accept Janet’s proposal.
“I have no business thinking I can handle an IndyCar. And we have races booked at the track every other weekend until October and Shaw has the end-of-year field trip and you’ve got that new physical therapy assessment—”
“Don’t you dare use me and Shaw as an excuse!”
Mack turned and held out both hands. “It’s not an excuse, Dad, it’s reality.
” Even if they didn’t have the track, even if she hadn’t taken almost a decade away from full-time racing, there would always be Shaw.
Her daughter deserved a childhood of calm stability.
“I’m not Kelley. I can’t leave everything behind on a whim. ”
They fell silent, both waiting each other out.
Mack wanted her dad to agree with her, to tell her he understood she couldn’t take Janet’s offer.
She wanted his complicity, not his blessing to chase an impossibly wild idea.
Her life changed direction ten years ago and she saw no point reversing course now.
At least that’s what she tried to make herself believe.
“The daughter I raised would have left rubber streaks on the driveway on her way out of town. Wouldn’t have even said goodbye. Like that time you were already racing at Sebring by the time I knew you were gone. Always such a spectacle.”
Mack bit her lip. She’d thought about taking off in the night, getting on the road before she thought over the details.
Instead, she’d crept into Shaw’s room and watched her daughter sleep to remind herself that she was steady now.
Sturdy. Not someone who rushed off on a whim.
“I’m still the daughter you raised, just less stupid. ”
Please tell me not to do this, she begged him silently. His words threw gasoline on the spark that had started in her chest last night when Janet had thrown the words Indy 500 at her. A long-buried wildness, the restlessness she could never quite kill off, kindled inside her.
Wes jabbed a careless hand toward the center of her chest. “Shaw has everything she needs right here. You love that girl. You’d give her a good life whether it’s here or in Indianapolis. Hell, you’d probably give her a better life there.”
Panicked, Mack tried to throw cold water on the fiery hope curling in her body. “You think it’s better for Shaw to leave the only home she’s ever known? During the last month of school? To live . . . geezus, where would we live?”
Why was she even talking about this? It couldn’t happen.
Wes grinned wickedly. “Ain’t that somethin’?
You got a sister who lives in Indianapolis now.
” Mack shook her head. Following this lark and uprooting her daughter was one thing; asking for a favor from Laurie was another.
“Anyway, Shaw can stay home with me and Billie. She’s an easy kid.
We can manage her for a few weeks while school wraps up.
You’ve got to take this chance, Spec. Might be your only shot at the Indy 500. ”
Mack frowned even as her heart rate picked up. Was her dad really considering this as a real opportunity? Did he believe she could make it all the way to the Indy 500?
No. It was impossible.
“Stop it,” she snapped at Wes. Her body was so overheated now that she felt her forehead for fever. Moisture dotted her hairline.
It had been too long. She couldn’t just dive back in, going from cleaning urinals to driving an IndyCar.
She couldn’t.
Could she?
Ten years ago, she’d been young, aggressive, and the daughter of legendary Wes Williams. People in the racing community had whispered that Mackenzie Williams had It: The rare combination of physical stamina and mental acuity that seemingly reacted to the car before it even moved.
By the time she was twenty, she’d won some of the biggest sprint races in the country and topped podiums at sports car endurance races, but she pursued one dream with single-minded focus: a chance to race at Indianapolis.
And by January of her twentieth year, she almost got what she wanted when Ampersand Autosport invited her to test drive for their IndyCar team.
As bold as she’d been on track, she’d been even wilder in her free time.
As a teenager, she regularly spent late nights playing euchre and drinking Jack and Cokes with men three times her age.
She laughed as she rode on the back of motorcycles with no helmet, swam with friends in abandoned strip mines, and drag raced down city streets.
At nineteen, she’d started hooking up with motorcycle bad boy Kelley Caruthers.
They didn’t even try to keep it quiet, and when Mack canceled her IndyCar test because she was sixteen weeks pregnant, no one was surprised except herself.
She’d been hot-blooded, living for the moment, and stupid enough to trust a man ten years her senior to wear a condom properly.
That choice irrevocably changed her life.
She’d spent years working to retrain herself: She was no longer impulsive, taking hours or days to make decisions on the smallest things.
She didn’t drink, didn’t date. Her life was about Shaw and preventing her from making the kinds of decisions Mack had made herself.
She walked to the sink and washed her hands in cold water, an old trick her dad had taught her when she needed to calm her heart rate.
It pissed her off that he knew exactly what she was doing.
He always knew because he’d always been by her side.
She dried her hands and turned to face him.
“That door closed a long time ago, Dad.”
Wes squinted at her. “Because you closed it, Spec.”
She used to love the nickname he’d given her, but right now she hated it.
Her hands were already hot again, her armpits damp with the anxiety of the conversation.
She gave into the anger, let herself be pissed off.
It felt so much better than the swirling terror of possibility her dad’s words had caused.
Shaw was only five weeks old when Wes had the accident that left him with headaches, seizures, memory loss, and a pinned and patched body.
Mack spent the first years of Shaw’s life in a day-to-day subsistence of single parenting, caring for her father, and learning how to run a small business.
By the time Shaw was three, Wes’s health had mostly stabilized, but those first years had been so stressful that when Kelley offered to bring toddler Shaw to Spain for two weeks, Mack jumped at the chance to have a break.
She would never make that mistake again.
She hadn’t slammed the door on racing because she’d wanted to; she’d had no choice but to push it softly closed. Shaw needed a parent who would focus on her safety, not one who chased down empty hallways.
“Stop,” she rasped.
Wes stood and shuffled to where she leaned against the sink.
The house was small but blessed with an embarrassment of windows, and pastel light filtered through the kitchen, highlighting the dull linoleum floor.
Her dad tipped her chin up, forcing her to make eye contact.
“I know you’re scared, but Shaw will be safe and happy with me and Billie, and I can run my own damn track for a few weeks.
This is the Indy 500 we’re talking about, Mack.
You will never, ever forgive yourself if you let this one pass you by.
Shaw will be fine, I will be fine, the track will be fine.
But if you don’t get your ass to Indianapolis .
. .” He swallowed, and his voice came back thick and high.
“If you don’t give the Indy 500 a shot, I worry you’ll never be fine again, Spec. ”
She closed her eyes against the burning tears that came out of nowhere.
She worked so hard to hide her boredom and regret from her dad.
She chugged through her responsibilities at the track, went to every PTA meeting and school function for Shaw, dutifully took Wes to medical appointments, and she thought she did it all with a smile.
She didn’t know if she was crying now because he was encouraging her to go or because he knew the truth of her unhappiness.
But of course he did. He knew the truth of her, that the wildness wouldn’t die no matter how hard she tried.
Of course she’d think about this lost opportunity every day until she died.
She’d stayed up half the night replaying her conversation with Janet, obsessing over every word.
Maybe she could take this one chance and bury the wildness forever.
She could go to Indy, chase checkered flags, and come home and shut the door on racing for good, but this time she’d turn the key in the lock.
“Even if it wouldn’t leave you and Shaw in a lurch, you’re forgetting that I’d have three weeks to learn how to drive a car I’ve never driven before,” Mack whispered. She was afraid to look at Wes’s face.
“Now that,” Wes grinned as he lifted her chin, “I ain’t gonna worry about. If it’s got an engine, you can send it.”