by Shey Stahl
Tommy came by for coffee, as he usually did, and brought Paxton with him.
“Paxton is going to draw tonight. He’s feeling lucky if you know what I mean…,” Tommy hinted. I was assuming that meant he got lucky last night, but by the flush to Paxton’s cheeks, and the kids sitting around, I didn’t push that conversation. It was strange seeing a kid his age around Tommy and Willie, and knowing damn well no good was going to come from it.
“Shouldn’t you be in school?” Rager asked, peering sideways at Paxton.
Paxton took a drink of his Gatorade in hand and then stared at the cap, as if it was far more interesting than why he showed up out of nowhere to follow Tommy around. “We’re out for the summer.”
In May? I guessed times had changed since I went to school, since that was over ten years ago.
“And your mom is cool with you hanging around Tommy?” I asked, curious myself how all this got started. I couldn’t even fathom Tommy Davis having a kid, let alone hanging out with one and being a father figure. He’s great with kids, but as the cool uncle. “Does she not remember him?”
Paxton shifted his stance nervously. “She said she didn’t know him. I thought I’d come find out.”
The whole situation seemed weird to me. Who would let their fifteen-year-old son take an Uber to find his dad? I certainly wouldn’t let my sons do that, but then again, they knew their dad. Caden talked to Paxton while I pulled Tommy aside.
“Do you know his mom? Have you talked to her?”
Tommy shrugged. “No. I mean, I remember her, but I haven’t heard from her.”
“And you don’t think this is a little weird this kid came to find you… alone?”
“Well, yeah, when you put it like that.” Tommy scratched his head, taking another drink of his coffee as his eyes drifted to Paxton. “Do you think he looks like me?”
I stared at the kid, still not seeing the resemblance. “No, not really.”
“Me either.”
“Tommy,” I gasped. “What if he ran away? You’ve been traveling with him for two weeks now. That could be kidnapping.”
“How so?” He looked offended. “I didn’t tell him to run away and find me.”
“Still. We should maybe look into this and check to make sure he’s not some runaway.”
Tommy stared at the kid again. “Yeah, okay,” he said, and then walked away from me with Paxton. “Have you met Josephine?”
Paxton followed along with him. “No. Who’s that?”
“A good time for you.”
Yep. He said that.
Rager snorted. “I bet you a hundred bucks that kid ran away from home.”
“Right?” Caden sat up in his chair. “I thought the same thing. He said he was from Terre Haute, but then he didn’t know shit about the Hut Hundred. How do you live there and not know?”
“He’s not real bright,” Rager argued. “I had to explain to him seven times why the tires are staggered.”
Hudson made his way out of the motor home, missed the last step and landed face first in the dirt. Didn’t bother him one bit. He stood, brushed his hot dog off—where he got that from I had no clue—and went strolling over to where my parents were parked.
“Hornet is the toughest little dude I know.”
Rager smirked. “He’s been that way from the beginning. When they circumcised him, he didn’t cry at all. Just stared at the doctor with a blank expression.”
Kinsley’s eyes went wide. “Is that normal?”
“The doctors said he has a high pain tolerance, but it’s normal, I guess,” I told her, watching Hudson in the distance. Dad had him in his arms now, talking to him and glaring at us.
Caden looked over at Rager. “Why is he glaring at us?”
“I know why,” Kinsley noted, burping the baby after she fed her. “So Gray walked by me earlier and said, Jameson shit her pants. Clearly talking about the baby.” We laughed, but then she added, “Well now there’s a rumor going around that Jameson, you know…. He won’t talk to me now. I think we should start calling her by her middle name.”
The guys laughed, their attention on DIRTVision where they were watching highlights from last year at Eldora where Caden swept the weekend.
Kinsley and I talked about the baby when she grinned at Caden and then me, slowly raising her left hand up. “So… he did this last night….”
My eyes drifted to her hand, and more importantly, the rock she was wearing. “Holy shit.” I grabbed it and stared at her finger. “Oh my God, congratulations!”
Kinsley burst into tears. “It’s so exciting.”
“Then why are you crying?” Caden asked, handing the laptop to Rager and shifting forward in his chair to rub her knee.
“Because I’ve dreamed of this happening since I met you.” Her teary eyes moved to his. “And it all feels like a dream.”
“Ah, babe.” Caden laughed, hugging her with one arm. The baby squirmed between them as Caden pressed his lips to her temple.
“So, how’d he do it?” I asked, wanting details. They were so young, it made me curious how Caden went about it.
Caden chuckled, settling into his chair. “Maybe leave out some of the details.”
Kinsley’s blush was immediate. “Well, yeah.”
Hayden plopped down next to me in the camp chair, coffee in one hand, a muffin in the other. “Tell us everything.”
Gray, who’d followed her, took the muffin from her mom and glared at Caden. “I don’t want to hear this.”
Caden watched Gray walking away. “What’d I do? She won’t talk to me now.”
“She’s in love with you,” Hayden told him, slurping her coffee. “Fuck, that’s hot.” She leveled Caden a serious look. “But don’t go getting a big head. She loved Harry Styles too.”
Laughing, I glanced over at Rager to see him watching me. Noticing my legs were crossed, his eyes made a brazen pass over my body and then he winked. For some reason, I flashed back to the day he first told me he loved me.
The blanket around me, soft cotton touching overly sensitive skin, slipped off my shoulders. My body hurt to the point that I didn’t move to adjust the blanket. Every muscle had been pushed beyond comfort from sleeping on the air mattress.
Everything from the warm breeze kissing my skin, the light blue and gray clouds, and the man next to me relaxed me in ways I had no words to describe. A gentle sway of the trees, a bird chirping, sky growling, all reminders of why this place would forever hold a memory for me.
Coasting his nose along my shoulder, his lips pressing lightly to the freckles that kissed my skin, his touch torched mine. I breathed out, long and slow, wanting to hide everything I was feeling.
“I love you….” His lips brushed over my clammy skin as he spoke.
I twisted my head around at the words. My breath caught in my throat, pulse pounding in my ears as a shock of nerves rushed through me.
I’ve always loved you.
He’d never said those words to me before. He’d said he was in love… but never uttered the words in that context, delivered in that way.
“Rager—”
“Shhh. Don’t say anything. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because, whatever comes next, I don’t care.” His arms bound around my shoulders forced me to stay against his chest. “I didn’t say it because I wanted to hear you say it. I said it because I wanted you to hear it and to think about what it means. I don’t want to hear anything back because those words were meant for you to feel, not to reply to.”
I would have said it back.
“I don’t want to let go,” he muttered into the breeze after a long pause, his lips pressing to my temple. His voice sounded so far away, so regret-filled that I hardly recognized it from the cool, collected boy I knew.
“I hate that this isn’t easy.”
In reality, Rager had no idea how much anxiety I had over this and how with every word we didn’t say, I felt like it was going to overwhel
m me completely.
“Nothing is ever easy when it comes to us,” he noted, feeling the warm breeze against my back. “This could be us forever.”
“It will be us forever.”
A smiled played at his lips, and though it was a familiar sight, one I’d seen often these last two days, something seemed different about it. I wanted to say so much then, only anything I could say seemed inadequate to what I was really feeling.
The baby crying brought me back out of my trance to see Rager holding Bristol in his arms now. Tears stung my eyes. At the time, before that I love you, I had secret kisses with question marks. I didn’t think Rager and I would work out, and now that we had, I was even more thankful we found our way to one another.
As we sat around the camp lot that morning, time moved slower than usual. I watched Rager play with the kids and dance to Creedence Clearwater Revival with Bristol. I snapped pictures as he lay on the ground and played cars with the boys. And I soaked up every minute of our time with him.
“I WANNA WATCH Daddy tonight,” Pace told me, grabbing his hat from the counter in the T-shirt trailer and a sweatshirt.
“Me too,” Bristol added.
And then the younger two—“Me!”
Although I wasn’t entirely sure what Hudson said. It sounded like pee followed by him trying to take his diaper off. It was hard to take all four into the stands. I usually appreciated that when you have four kids, they never wanted the same thing at the same time.
Kinsley reached for a blanket she’d brought with her and adjusted the headphones she had on Grace’s head. They looked huge compared to her tiny head. Kinsley motioned to the pack on her chest. “Think she will be okay in this?”
I nodded. “I carried all my babies in a pack when I went up into the stands.”
We ended up having a couple of other regular drivers’ wives tend the T-shirt trailers. We took turns doing that each night depending on who made the main event and who hadn’t made it past the Last Chance Showdown.
The kids wouldn’t sit still during the pre-race activities. The twenty minutes it took for the cars to roll onto the track and introductions, they must have made over a dozen requests for what they saw others eating, anything from cotton candy to beer. Hudson was insistent that he needed beer.
And then came the heart-pumping anticipation of the four-wide salute my kids loved so much. They stood on the bleachers, cheering on their dad, grandpa, uncles, and all the other drivers out there tonight putting on a show for us. Jerry’s voice rang through the loudspeakers. “Eldora Speedway, you wanted the best, we got ’em four abreast, often imitated, never duplicated, the greatest show on dirt… the World of Outlaws!”
Orange light glowed from the above track lights, which burst on, bouncing sparks of light off the fancy painted wings of twenty-five fire-breathing sprint cars ready to show the five thousand fans in the stands what nine-hundred horsepower could do. There was no other racing like the World of Outlaws sprint cars.
After the four-wide salute, I kept one eye on the kids, and another on Rager who had started second behind Caden. An eerie feeling settled over me during the parade laps. I couldn’t place what, but I knew enough about that particular emotion that I wanted to run down to the track and stop the green flag from waving. So much so that I looked over and Kinsley, and then my mom.
Neither one of them seemed fazed by anything so I shrugged it off.
“Mommy!” Bristol yelled beside me, yanking at her shoe.
I looked down at her foot. “What’s wrong?”
“My sock hurts.”
Mom laughed and leaned into my shoulder. “She put on my socks today and keeps complaining the socks hurt.”
I tried to fix her sock, and Mom was right—she was wearing socks that were too big for her. With all that going on, I missed the opening laps of the race.
The race got underway fairly quick, but the track was dry, glazed over, and hard. Bunched up in the top groove, there was no passing by anyone and Caden was lucky he got that number-one starting spot. Most of the guys were lucky if they could keep it off the wall.
And that was when the feeling settled back in. A knot forming in the pit of my stomach I couldn’t ignore. Eldora in the spring wasn’t nearly as hectic as the week in July when we were there for the Kings Royale, but I still loved being here. The atmosphere was electric and the racing exciting. The track itself was amazing with plenty of good food and they had an infield care center. Because they held a NASCAR dirt race, they had been required to up their care facility game, and they did. They could now stabilize patients and even had a heli pad so a CareFlight could land.
Never, when the night started with Rager dancing with Bristol in the pits, to the most laidback morning we’d had in a long time, did I think we would need to use those facilities.
But we did. It was with fourteen laps into the main event when I heard it. The deafening screech of metal on metal and then a horrifying bang that followed. Everyone around me stood, trying to see what happened.
“Oh my God!” Kinsley screamed, clasping her hand over her mouth.
The shock of the crowd, the silence. One by one, the cars shut down outside turn three, the eerie quiet compared to the roar that had come before it.
It was a moment, a scene I couldn’t look away from, and it replayed in my head in a sickening loop. It was a moment thousands of fans at Eldora Speedway thought to themselves, “Did that just happen?”
I didn’t want to believe it myself. Beside me, Hayden reached for my hand. Mom took a hold of Knox, who was asleep in my violently shaking arms. My thoughts raced. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even comprehend a thought to decide what to do next.
Hell, I couldn’t even speak. It looked awful from where we sat. No movement from either driver.
In the distance, sirens cut through the silence, their lights reflecting off the glazed-over clay. “What happened?” I asked. “I didn’t see it.” I looked to Mom, then Hayden. I hadn’t seen anything, but I’d heard it, and then my eyes landed on my husband’s car, mangled on the backstretch.
“I, uh… Caden….” Mom’s voice faded, unable to finish her sentence. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to.
The guy seated directly in front of us turned around, his eyes widened in fear. “Carson came out of two flipping and Sweet had nowhere to go, or didn’t see him.”
My focus stayed on the track, safety officials rushing to them. Commotion was all around the cars, the lights flickering with the tears forming in my eyes. I couldn’t look away from the cars. Caden’s car was on its side, the wing torn off and Rager’s car up against the top of his roll cage. He’d hit Caden’s car directly on its top.
Please be okay, I prayed. Please!
I could see Lane near Rager’s car now, his hand on his head, the other holding a phone to his ear. Dad was at the wreck now, his helmet still on having ditched his car in turn two, along with Casten, all three of them huddled around the cars.
I scanned the crowd around us, some staring to see what we’d do next, some taking videos. Knox woke up, squirming in my mom’s arms and for some reason, Pace and Bristol became quiet, their stares on Rager’s car. “What’s wrong?” Bristol asked, watching me, waiting to see what her reaction should be. I didn’t want to scare them. I didn’t want them to hold the same fear I did knowing this was bad. I’ve heard my brothers talk about the sickening feeling that settles over you when you know a crash is bad. I’d never experienced it, until now.
I pulled Bristol and Pace closer. “It’s okay.” That was all I could manage to say. I was trying to remain calm, but I couldn’t help my voice from trembling.
Mom held onto Hudson who was squirming all over the place.
Beside me, Kinsley gasped. “Why haven’t they gotten them out of the cars? What’s taking so long?”
My body tensed, the silence around us seeming deafening. “I… uh….” I didn’t have an answer for her.
The look on her face as she waited for m
e to respond was like nothing I had ever seen before. My heart ached, feeling like it’d been torn in two. I wanted to be supportive and spring into action. I wanted to be the role model for her she needed, but I couldn’t. Not in those moments. Not when my future was suddenly up against the wall.
I drew in a quick breath, trying to calm myself. The air around us began to settle, dirt from the cars caked on my face, and when I wiped my eyes, trying to clear my vision of the scene before me, it scrapped against my skin. No. This wasn’t happening. Caden was fine. My husband was fine.
I couldn’t stand here and wait. I had to do something. I had to get to Rager. Shifting my weight, I pushed the kids toward my mom and Hayden. “I’m going down there.”
“I’ve got the kids, Arie.” Mom held up her hand, her phone in her palm. “Take Kinsley down with you.”
Kinsley started undoing the straps of the baby carrier and handed Grace off to Hayden. “What’s happening? Are they okay? Why haven’t they gotten them out yet?”
I kissed the top of each kids head and stared at my mom, waiting for an answer. “Why?”
“They’re calling in a CareFlight,” Mom whispered, her eyes darting from the kids at our feet to me, waiting on our reactions.
No. God no. This couldn’t be happening. Not to us. Not again. “F-For who?” I stuttered, tears stinging my eyes.
“Both,” Mom whispered.
Kinsley stared back at me in horror. “What does that mean? Why would they call in a lifeline?”
Mom snapped into action. “Hayden and I will take the kids to the motor home. You two go.”
I couldn’t answer her. Or maybe it was that I didn’t want to. Grabbing Kinsley’s hand, I motioned with a nod toward the track. “Let’s go.”
DOWN IN THE pits, everything was quiet, all fearing the worst. Lane, Tommy, and all the other crew keys stood in silence, looking to Dad as to what we did next. They’d call the race as is.
“How’d he look?” I asked Lane, who looked pale and ready to throw up as he loaded the mule into the back of the hauler.