Chapter 18
Across the infield, hospitality kiosks stretched across the concrete, the bright colors of their tents standing out against the gray pavement.
Motorsports sponsorship was big business, with most teams relying heavily on funding from corporate entities to support the cost of running a million-dollar car.
Mack watched as people in logoed polo shirts scuttled between tents, schmoozing with sponsors, taking photos, and otherwise charming the executives who put money in their pockets.
With Laurie’s help, she’d purchased simple black trousers, a silky black button-down, and low black heels, and she’d let Laurie give her eyeliner and lip liner and everything in between.
Her blond hair was shoved into a painfully tight twist, and she stood outside a royal purple tent emblazoned with Hartley Harvester Manufacturing’s well-known logo, hoping she looked professional enough to get more sponsorship dollars.
“Rookie!” From behind her, Leo shouted over the din of whirring golf carts and loud conversations spilling from the hospitality tents. “Ready to unzip the corporate purse?”
She scowled at him, both because she dreaded the coming hour of schmoozing and because he looked so good dressed up in dark trousers and a pale blue button-down that made the dark brown of his eyes richer.
It was obnoxious that he could pull off polished and laid back at the same time.
He must have been surveying her as she checked him out because he said, low and soft, “You clean up nice, Mack.”
She should snap at him to cut it out but couldn’t get the words out of her mouth.
The way he looked at her—with awe and heat and want—was potent medicine, healing a part of her she hadn’t known was hurt.
After everything with Kelley, she’d stopped feeling desirable.
Everything about her felt hard and weathered, but Leo made her feel like the redbud trees in bloom, new and tender and lovely.
“You too, Leo.” She cleared her throat. “Thank you for yesterday, for helping me communicate with Janet and the team. And for all the help you’ve offered this week. For listening to me. For hearing me. Especially after I’ve been . . . not nice.”
Leo studied her, a half smile on his face, like he’d flipped over his cards in a poker game to find an ace. He leaned in ever so slightly, those intense eyes connected with her own. “I don’t scare easily.” He stepped back and gestured toward the tent. “C’mon, let’s do this.”
Mack plastered on her best smile-for-strangers grin and walked inside the tent alongside Leo.
He immediately started glad-handing, talking to random Hartley employees as if they were old friends.
From across the tent, Janet caught her eye and made a slight gesture toward the opposite side where a cluster of people in royal purple polo shirts sipped twenty-ounce beers.
Mack understood the message—Leo would work one side of the tent, Mack the other.
Striding up to the group, Mack introduced herself and asked a few inane questions.
How are y’all enjoying the practices so far?
What’s your favorite place to eat in Indianapolis?
For all her attitude about the event, she was good with strangers.
All those years of traveling around the country and then running the track had made her good at chitchat.
A woman wearing head-to-toe purple asked, “How long have you been in IndyCar? I’m sorry, I’m not familiar with your name.”
Mack glanced at her watch. “Oh, not even three weeks.”
The woman choked on a mouthful of food and her companions laughed nervously. “Wait, seriously?”
Mack smiled with a lightness she didn’t feel and recalled her dad’s bee-charming ways. Wes Williams had a folksy wit that made reporters and fans adore him. “Seriously. Janet and I wanted to really go for broke in the Rookie of the Year contest.”
The circle of purple shirts laughed politely. Another person asked, “What were you doing before IndyCar?”
No point in lying. “My family and I own a small dirt track in southern Indiana. I’ve been running that and raising my daughter. But I used to—”
“Oh my god, you have a kid?” the woman in all purple blurted. “Isn’t that dangerous? Racing these cars and knowing that your child is watching?”
All the hairs on Mack’s arms and neck lifted. She made her voice calm even though she wanted to shout. “No more dangerous than all the men out here racing.”
“But you’re the mom!”
In racing, there were two kinds of collisions: those the driver saw coming and could brace for impact, and the kind that came from the blind side and slammed the car into the wall before the driver even knew she was in trouble. The purple woman’s careless words rammed into Mack without warning.
You’re the mom.
She was still reeling, the silence in the little cluster of people becoming awkward, when Leo appeared at her side, oblivious to the emotional shunt she’d just experienced.
“Fortunately for all of us, breakfast is about to be served, but unfortunately, Mack and I have to sit elsewhere. Trust me, you want Mack to sign your gear later. You thought Sarah Fisher was tough?” He quirked his thumb at Mack.
“This woman once won a race with a broken elbow.”
Mack mumbled some niceties and followed Leo toward a round table, the sound of the purple-clad woman stuck in her ears.
But you’re the mom.
At the head table, Janet sat flanked by three men. One of the men, extremely large from his height to the girth of his belly, held out a hand to Leo. “Raisman! Good to see you running in the top ten.” His rheumy eyes flicked to Mack. “And who’s this lovely date you’ve brought?”
Mack was too stunned to speak. Every woman in racing heard insults on any given day of the week—she’d been on the receiving end of countless crude put-downs—but the assumption, at this level of racing, that she was Leo’s date hurt more than all the others combined.
Leo went into instant action, taking a step back and motioning at Mack as if he were Vanna White and she were the letterboard.
“This is Mack Williams, the newest driver for JJR.” He overemphasized driver.
“She’s made the podium at several famous tracks.
Eldora, Chili Bowl, 24 Hours of Daytona .
. .” If the situation wasn’t so mortifying, the panic on Leo’s face would have made her laugh.
“Oh my, I thought you were Leo’s girl. Pardon me.” The man extended his palm to Mack. “Hollis Whitfield. Head of marketing.”
She was about to lash out with a snarky comeback but Janet caught her eye with an oddly maternal look—sit down, shut up, do not embarrass me—followed by a silently mouthed, Your only sponsor.
Mack pulled her lips inward and bit down hard to stop herself from snapping at Janet, who’d done nothing to correct Hollis’s pathetic error, instead letting Leo do her dirty work.
Sports money could hobble the strongest people.
Still seething, Mack sat down and spent the next hour making small talk and answering inane questions, trying to be polite even though her insides were boiling.
Hollis’s whole demeanor changed after Leo’s introduction, morphing from Good Ol’ Country Boy into Lofty Executive.
He rarely spoke to her, focusing his attention on Leo to the point of awkwardness.
Ever the peacemaker, Leo tried to pull the conversation around to Mack but her temper got the best of her and she turned in her chair and spoke to the other two marketing people.
When plates were cleared and coffee was offered, Mack stood and made a lame excuse to leave.
She stomped out of the tent as well as she could in her heels, heading for the team trailer. She knew without looking that Leo followed her. When she was out of sight of the Hartley tent, she turned. “Don’t you dare make excuses for that asshole.”
Leo held up both hands, frowning. “Give me some credit. Hollis is barely tolerable on a good day.”
“But,” she prompted, pulling her hair out of the tortuous pins.
Leo ran his hands through his hair in frustration, loosening the curls from their gelled hold. Hair that good was obnoxious, honestly. “Hartley is our biggest sponsor.”
“So it’s okay for him to assume I’m your fucking girlfriend?”
“No!” Leo looked around them, then gestured back toward the garage. “Let’s talk somewhere more private, okay?”
“There’s nothing to talk about, Leo,” she said, but started walking anyway.
Even though she was speed-walking, Leo took one step for every two of hers and it sent her into a fury.
She was practically running by the time they hit Gasoline Alley.
“Do you see what I mean now? This sport . . . geezus, the shit we have to put up with for daring to be a woman who wants to race. I’m starting this race two laps down just for having a goddamn vagina!
You want to think that men like Hollis are nothing unusual but they’re the norm.
The only woman in the room is a girlfriend, a secretary, a nurse, not the driver or the CEO or the doctor.
” She whirled to face him. “Do you see? Do you see why—?”
Suddenly aware of the dozens of people in the garage area, she stopped. Her body shook with rage, and she wanted to throw something or hit someone or put the pedal on the floor and drive so fast she nearly lost control.
She wasn’t just mad, she was mortified.
“I’m sorry for what he said, Mack. It was unacceptable.
But you’re never going to change a prick like Hollis by running your mouth.
But you can prove him wrong”—he pointed toward the track—“out there. I’ve been there too, where no one believes you belong and the only way you can make them believe is to go faster than everyone else.
You have to show them you’re too good to be ignored.
Show them what you can do there.” He stabbed his finger in the direction of the track once more for emphasis.
Hollis’s comment had embarrassed her, but Leo’s words humiliated her.
Janet had thrown the same line her way: You’ve got to give them a good story, or be sexy, or show them you’re five times better than anyone else.
But no matter how Leo looked at her, Mack wasn’t the type of woman that could pull off sexy, and her story wasn’t one she was willing to share.
But you’re the mom. All she had was her driving skill.
In the past she’d relied on her ability to put any car at the front of the finish line, but here at Indy, she could hardly get out of the pit box.
“Fuck you, Leo. You think I’m not trying to be faster than everyone else?
You think I don’t want this? I want this more than you will ever understand.
I need this.” She paused, not wanting to think of what came a week from now, not wanting to tell him that she needed the memory of racing in the Indy 500 to get her through the next decades of her life.
If she wasted this chance, she’d be worse off than ever before, stewing in self-pity and self-loathing, unbearable to herself and her daughter because she’d have no one to blame but herself for ruining her single shot at Indy.
“This is all I’m ever going to have, Leo.
You’ll go on to the next race and the next year and the next 500, but no matter what, I’ll go home on Memorial Day. ”
She hated how her voice broke on the word home.
Leo reached for her hand but stopped before actually touching her, as if remembering they stood in the middle of the paddock.
“Then get out there and prove Hollis wrong. Show Janet she made the right choice. More importantly, get in the goddamn car and believe that you belong in the Indy 500.”