What You Have Left

by Will Allison

  When Lyle got off the phone, he came back into the den and put his arms around me. In between sobs, I tried to make him understand this was all my fault, but he kept insisting I wasn’t to blame, that regardless of what I’d said or done, things had turned out more or less the way Cal planned—he’d simply done what he thought was best, and we had to accept that. I knew Lyle was right, but even so, it would be a long time before I could forgive any of us. He was still holding me when the medics arrived, sirens splitting the morning air. “Careful,” he said, gently prying my fingers loose from Cal’s. “You don’t want to bruise him.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  1971

  Wylie

  Around the time Wylie Greer’s daughter was born, he had the bad luck to get mixed up with a man he knew—a brand-new father like himself—who got drunk one night and accidentally killed his infant son. The man’s name was Lester Hardin, and on Thursday nights he raced his old Ford in the hobby division out at Columbia Speedway, same as Maddy used to. Lester kept to himself in the pit area and never had two words for Maddy and Wylie, but there was nothing in particular about him to make you think he’d hurt his own son. He was just another gearhead who hated racing against a woman and no doubt wished Maddy good riddance when she got pregnant and quit.

  It wasn’t until Lester heard Maddy was selling the Fair-lane that he tried getting friendly with them. One night in the summer of 1971, he buddied up to Wylie in the infield to inquire about the car. This was a few months after Wylie and Maddy had moved into a clapboard cottage on her father’s dairy farm, trying to save for the baby. At the time Wylie was working as a mechanic at the Ford dealership, but on Thursday nights he’d been moonlighting at the track, picking up a few extra bucks clearing wrecks for an outfit called Atlas Towing. Mostly the job was an excuse to watch the races now that Maddy wasn’t driving anymore—that and a chance to talk up the Fairlane to the other drivers. After all the blood and sweat he’d poured into that car, after all the races he and Maddy had won, he hated the thought of selling it, but they needed the cash.

  Wylie didn’t resent Maddy or the baby or even the prospect of fatherhood in general, though it was true, here in the homestretch, that he’d started second-guessing himself. Every time Maddy grabbed his hand and held it to her stomach (and she did this constantly) he was more convinced that he didn’t have what it took, that he lacked the enthusiasm or patience for kids—in short, that he’d make a half-assed father, no better than his own, the kind of man who ends up ruining his family or leaving it.

  When Lester ambled over, Maddy was holed up inside the wrecker reading Dr. Spock while Wylie watched the late models take practice laps. Lester offered him a beer from the six-pack dangling on his finger, then tapped his can against Wylie’s.

  “To fatherhood,” he said. “To babies that sleep all night and look like their daddies.”

  Lester’s wife, Gladys, was pregnant, too, eight months to Maddy’s six, but Wylie didn’t feel like talking babies with a guy who acted as though they were just another notch on his belt. In fact, he didn’t much feel like talking babies at all. When Lester started telling him about the fancy cigars he’d bought for the big day, Wylie tuned him out and found himself staring at the wrecker’s door, the hand-painted silhouette of Atlas straining under the weight of the globe.

  By the time Lester finally got around to asking about the car, Gladys had started back from the concession stand with a milkshake, picking her way through the muddy infield. She had the glazed-over look in her eyes that Maddy was starting to get—like she was so deep in her own private babyland that any minute she might wander off or float away—but the second the mothers-to-be recognized each other, they both clicked into focus. Maddy hauled herself out of the truck, the two of them suddenly carrying on like long-lost sisters, though before that night they’d been nothing more than casual friends. After a minute or so, Lester horned in, trying to make nice with Maddy. He pointed at her stomach and asked her did she have a little Richard Petty in there.

  “It’s a girl,” Maddy said, an idea she’d been clinging to since the day she learned she was pregnant.

  “Ah.” Lester crushed his beer can and tossed it in the grass. “Future race queen.”

  Maddy stood there with her arms crossed, staring Lester down until he understood he’d put his foot in his mouth.

  “Louise Smith, then!” he said. “Ethel Flock!” These were old-time lady drivers, a couple of Maddy’s heroes. She let him off the hook with a thin smile and turned back to Gladys, leaving Wylie and Lester to talk money.

  Lester wanted the Fairlane at half the asking price. Wylie almost told him where to stick it, but no one else was interested and Maddy’s due date was coming up fast; half was better than nothing at all. At the end of the night, worn down by Lester’s haggling, Wylie finally caved. They shook on it, Lester said he’d call as soon as he got the cash together, and that was the last Wylie heard from him.

  Over the next few weeks, though, their wives were on the phone almost every day, and before long it wasn’t just the details of Maddy’s pregnancy that crowded out all other topics of conversation between her and Wylie—now he had to make room in his head for Gladys’s pregnancy, too. Maddy had gained x pounds so far; Gladys was up to y. Maddy had terrible leg cramps. Gladys had terrible gas. Neither of them believed in pacifiers. Both of them were going to breast-feed. Early on, Wylie had been willing—even eager—to listen, but the more he’d learned about babies, the more he realized he’d never know all that was required, and after a while, he’d simply given up.

  When Nat was born, Maddy visited Gladys in the hospital, and afterward she kept Gladys company and helped out with the baby over at the Hardins’ place. Wylie got regular reports on Nat—what thick brown hair he had, what a bruiser he was, how much he drooled. Occasionally Wylie also got word through his wife that Lester was having trouble coming up with the money for the Fairlane, that Gladys was on his case for even thinking about buying it, but now that she and Gladys were so close, Maddy didn’t want to get involved.

  Then one night, when Nat was about two months old, Gladys came home from work to discover him facedown in his crib. The deputy coroner ruled it an accidental suffocation. Wylie heard about Nat before Maddy did, from a guy in parts who’d stopped by the car wash that Lester managed over on Rosewood Drive. Wylie left the dealership early, drove straight home in a steady rain. Maddy was already two days overdue, gingerly pacing the house, and he wanted to give her the news himself, rather than have her hear it from a hysterical Gladys. When he told her, she dropped the ladle she’d been stirring the chili with and walked out of the kitchen. He found her in the bathroom on the edge of the tub, poking at her stomach, and when she looked up at him, her look said, Promise it’ll be okay, but also, You can’t make it okay, and if it’s not, I’ll always blame you.

  “She’s been kicking all day,” she said. “Now she won’t move.”

  Wylie put his arm around his wife and told her that what had happened to Lester and Gladys wasn’t going to happen to them. He told her, as they sat there listening to the rain and waiting for the baby to kick, that Lester and Gladys’s loss tilted the odds in their favor.

  Five days later, Wylie was standing in a recovery room at Richland Memorial with his mother and father-in-law, holding his daughter for the first time. “We are so lucky,” Maddy said. “Do you have any idea how lucky we are?” She was propped up in bed, bleary-eyed and red-faced from thirteen hours of labor, but happy—crying with happiness and relief, and gazing at her husband and daughter as if the world started and ended right there. She’d never seemed to doubt that Wylie was cut out for kids, and so he’d been living off her faith in him as if it were his own, although he was sure that faith had less to do with him than with how badly she wanted a baby. Now, as she sat there beaming, he clucked his tongue at Holly and waited to feel something besides scared. He had hoped for what Maddy was feeling—love at first sight, love washing over him like a
wave. But here he was, just holding a baby. It could have been anybody’s baby. His mother and Cal kept saying she was the prettiest little thing, and she did have pretty lips, but her hands looked too big for her body, and she seemed so feeble, so raw. He took a seat on the bed and played This Little Piggy with her toes, telling himself to give it some time.

  Later, after the parents left and the nurse had taken Holly away, Wylie went down to the cafeteria. On his way back, he stopped at the nursery. Looking through the window at the row of babies, he doubted he’d be able to tell which one was Holly, but there she was, staring off into space like a little insomniac, as if she already had a head full of worries. He tapped on the glass and waved, trying to get her attention.

  When he got back to the room, Maddy was still awake, sitting up in bed and looking out the door. “I think that’s the room Gladys had,” she said. “Right across the hall.” She leaned back, moved her dinner tray so Wylie would have a place to sit. “Do you think I’m a terrible friend?”

  It had been five days since Nat died, and Maddy still hadn’t spoken to Gladys. This was during the time when everyone still believed Nat’s death had been a natural one, before Lester confessed. Out at the track, the hobby drivers had held a charity race to help pay for the funeral, but Maddy had stayed home. She’d skipped the funeral, too. She’d even stopped answering the phone, afraid it might be Gladys.

  Wylie kissed Maddy’s neck. She tasted salty, like she used to after a race. “You haven’t heard from her, either.”

  “But I should have been at the funeral. I didn’t even send flowers.”

  “Then call her,” he said. “She’ll understand.”

  Maddy sighed. “The thing is, I don’t want to.”

  Maddy had wanted Wylie to take a week off work when the baby was born, but without the money from the Fair-lane, all he could manage was a couple of days. His mother and Cal were eager to help out with Holly, but Maddy wanted to feel like she was in control before she let the grandparents swoop in, and from the looks of it, that wasn’t about to happen anytime soon. It was amazing, really, how quickly things went to hell. Holly cried and cried and wouldn’t stop. Crying wasn’t even the word for it. Screaming, shrieking, wailing, she worked herself into a frenzy. The only thing that shut her up was Maddy’s breast, and she wanted it constantly—every two hours, every hour. Wylie and Maddy never slept. She accused him of sulking; he accused her of spoiling the baby. In no time, they were on the brink of hating each other, and Wylie felt the weight of it bearing down on him, despair like nothing he’d ever known.

  On the third morning, before work, Wylie slipped out of the house during one of Holly’s meltdowns, telling Maddy he needed to give the Fairlane a tune-up. She followed him to the door with the crying baby.

  “That’s it,” she said. “Just run off and hide. Like father, like son.”

  Wylie stopped halfway across the yard, made himself breathe. “Fine, honey. You do the car, I’ll watch the baby.”

  “You wouldn’t know where to start,” Maddy said, letting the screen door slam shut.

  Wylie had finally gotten around to running an ad in the paper once he realized Lester couldn’t afford the car, but in the whirlwind leading up to Holly’s arrival, he’d let the ad lapse, and the car had been parked at the end of the lane ever since, a FOR SALE sign fading in the windshield. He swapped out the spark plugs and was almost done changing the oil when he looked up to see Maddy coming down the gravel lane, stone-faced and barefoot, Holly asleep in her arms. She patted the car’s fender. “I’ve come to say my good-byes,” she said.

  For three years, that car had been their life, and during the early months of Maddy’s pregnancy, it stung Wylie to think of the summers they’d spent in the hobby division, how their climb up the NASCAR ladder was finished before they’d reached the second rung. But eventually he bought into the idea that a baby could be better than racing, that a baby could bring him and Maddy closer together.

  He asked Maddy if she wanted to take the car for a spin, and she said no, she just wanted to sit in it for a while. As soon as she settled in behind the wheel, Holly woke, hungry again. The baby was so frantic she had trouble latching on to Maddy’s nipple. Normally Wylie would have helped, parting Holly’s lips the way the nurse had done, but his hands were slick with motor oil, so he waited until Maddy had things under control, then lowered the hood and gave her a thumbs-up, just like he used to do before each race. Maddy was focused on the baby, though, and with the morning dew still streaking the windshield, she didn’t even seem to see him.

  In between fitful meals, Holly continued to wail, so after Wylie got off work they took her to the doctor. The doctor told them she was fine. Maddy despised him for saying so—“Nat’s doctor said he was fine, too”—and Wylie despised her for despising him. The night before, she’d ventured that maybe Holly’s crying was God’s way of punishing her for abandoning Gladys. This from a woman who hadn’t set foot in a church since she was confirmed. Wylie didn’t think God had anything to do with it; the problem had to be that Holly wasn’t getting enough to eat. Something was wrong with Maddy’s milk, or there just wasn’t enough of it. Otherwise, why was Holly always hungry? But the doctor told them her weight was right on target. “If you’re still worried,” he said, “you can always try formula.” Maddy sneered at this, too. If God wanted babies to drink formula, she told Wylie, she’d have tin cans for tits.

  That night, after Holly’s midnight meal, Wylie drifted off into a hazy twilight between waking and sleeping and then rolled over to find himself alone in bed. A light was on in the kitchen. Maddy stood at the counter in her nightshirt, paging through a cookbook and marshaling ingredients: eggs, flour, a bottle of vanilla extract.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making Gladys a pound cake,” she said.

  “It’s one in the morning.”

  She cracked an egg and dropped the shell into the garbage. “Then go back to bed.” She wouldn’t even look at him.

  Twenty minutes later, Holly started crying. He got up and changed her diaper—the only one of her problems he knew how to fix. When he was done, he brought her to Maddy.

  “I think she’s hungry again.”

  “The kitchen is closed,” Maddy said. “I just fed her an hour ago.” She was sitting at the table, looking like she’d had about all she could take. There was flour everywhere.

  “If we got some formula,” Wylie said, rocking Holly against his shoulder, “I could give her a bottle while you slept.”

  Maddy sighed, as if the very sight of him wore her out. “How many times do I have to tell you? There’s a reason milk is coming out of me.” She got up from the table and took a few bills from the coffee can on top of the refrigerator. She told Wylie to go to the bakery in the morning, buy a pound cake, and deliver it to Gladys. “Try to get one that looks homemade.” She rummaged under the counter. “Put it in this.”

  Wylie stared at the Tupperware container she was holding. “You’re kidding, right?” Going to see Lester and Gladys was the last thing he wanted to do. He was sorry Maddy felt bad, but he was tired, and they weren’t his friends, and frankly he didn’t want to face them any more than she did. The whole business with the Fairlane just made things that much worse. Though he didn’t appreciate Lester stringing him along, wasting his time, he didn’t want to show up on the guy’s doorstep and make him feel like he had to apologize—not at a time like this.

  “Go ahead and get a card, too,” Maddy said. “Sign my name. But don’t be gone long. I can’t do everything here.”

  Wylie took the container and held it up for Holly to touch. He was determined not to raise his voice. “Honey,” he said, “if you want to give Gladys a cake, take it over there yourself.”

  Lester and Gladys lived in a neighborhood of small brick duplexes in West Columbia, about a mile from the track. Wylie found their place easily enough, but he didn’t know what he was going to say to them, so he kept driving, aimless, hopi
ng their rusty Dart would be gone by the time he came back. He ended up out by the track and turned off into the rutted meadow that doubled as a parking lot. It was Thursday, and he was due back there that night; he’d called in sick at the dealership, but he hadn’t been able to find anyone at Atlas to cover his shift at the track. He wished he could curl up in his car and sleep until then. The gate on the front stretch was wide open, and inside he could see the owner, Sid Gooden, slowly working his way around the banked oval atop his state-surplus motor grader, pushing the clay and sand back toward the bottom of the track.

  The summer before, Maddy had been leading a qualifying heat when she fishtailed and hit the guardrail, which wasn’t much of a rail at all, just sheets of plywood nailed to a fence. As she sat there crosswise on the track, stalled out and waiting for the red flag, the rest of the pack came sliding through the turn. You could hear the whole infield suck in its breath, bracing for a crash. Wylie always told himself that Maddy was invincible out there—he couldn’t afford to think about it any other way—but seeing her come so close to getting T-boned rattled him. When she got back to the pit area, he asked her to sit out the feature race so he could look over the car. He didn’t think she’d go for it—she’d been in wrecks before, had shrugged them off and hopped back in the saddle—but that night, after she finished cursing her luck and loose dirt, she allowed that maybe it wasn’t a bad idea.

  The following Sunday, he took her over to Darlington and dropped half a paycheck on good seats for the Southern 500, the race Maddy dreamed of running. He was thinking it’d be just the thing to help them shake off the cobwebs, but Maddy spent most of the race staring at the pregnant girl next to them—was so busy staring, in fact, that she missed Buddy Baker’s Dodge crossing the finish line. Wylie was lowering his binoculars when she hooked an arm around his waist and shouted into his ear. “Let’s! Have! A baby!”