The Rookie (Racing On The Edge #7)

by Shey Stahl

  “No.” Standing from her place at the eating bar, she pushed Gray back at me, then reached in the garbage and retrieved the magazine. “I was reading the articles.”

  Rosa was no help. None. Made me change that dirty diaper and she fucking fell asleep before Gray did. By ten that night, I was beginning to wonder where the hell my brother went to have sex with Hayden because it’d been like six hours. I was also wondering why this kid never slept.

  All she wanted to do was play with helmets and handful of sprint cars she had. Funny thing about it was she always had my dad’s car in front and would literally scream in your face if you moved it.

  Her other quirky behavior was her skin. She had my dad’s skin phobia and demanded that she take three baths in a span of four hours. I was afraid she was going to rub her skin off at one point.

  Dad came through the door at eleven and smiled when I was trying to paint Gray’s toes. Yeah it was eleven at night and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was silently hoping the fumes from the nail polish would gently put her to sleep. Not for good, just maybe pass out.

  Instead she stood, took the nail polish from me, glared, and threw it in the garbage.

  “She’s so hard to please.” I groaned curling up on the tile floor in the kitchen.

  Dad laughed again, picked up Gray and curled up on the couch with her. Little shit was asleep within a minute of her head hitting his chest.

  Shaking my head I went up to my room. Casten was right. Parenting was exhausting so I grabbed that bottle of tequila on my way up to bed.

  It felt weird sleeping at my parent’s house and in my old room when I could have easily have gone home to Charlotte. But I didn’t want to be in a home where Easton and I had memories.

  I didn’t want to think about anything right now. I didn’t want to think about how we were going to fix this, how Easton was going to fix this, if I wanted this fixed, and where we would go from here. I needed time and space and more time. Damn you, Easton, just damn you.

  I wondered what he was doing right then and if he was thinking of me. Where did it go wrong? Was it racing that led us here? The very thing that brought us together was tearing us apart, was it that? Were we not trying hard enough?

  Mechanical Failure – This refers to an engine failing by either not firing or blowing up.

  I wasn’t sure how long I would stay away from Easton. I just knew right now I couldn’t be around him. I didn’t want the pressure and he’d do nothing but pressure me to try and repair this broken part of our marriage.

  Monday morning we were getting ready to fly out to Kokomo Speedway when I saw my mom in the kitchen packing some snack for the plane ride.

  It’s been hard for my mom and me to communicate at times. And it was never that I didn’t love her. I respected and looked up to her in more ways than she’ll ever know. She’s strong, raised three kids practically by herself and still kept her marriage going strong. I don’t know how she did it.

  I often wonder if I’ll ever be as strong as she is and have ability to just enjoy life the way she does. Her grace amazes me.

  Racing is her passion in many ways too. Just as it is for my dad. I think that’s why it worked so well for them.

  As much as I wanted, my relationship with Easton would never compare to what my parents had. Maybe it was that I needed to leave and see it from a different angle but I knew in my heart that having a marriage like my parents had was a once-in-a-lifetime sort of thing.

  But as I watched her packing up the last of the snacks, face gaunt and eyes rimmed with dark shadows that weren’t there simply because of a bad night of sleeping. Whatever was going on with her, this was starting to concern me. I knew my dad wasn’t going to tell me what was going on but I wasn’t going to allow my mom to evade the questions I wanted answers to.

  I looked at her pale complexion. “I know something’s going on.”

  With a resigned sigh, she said, “There is.”

  “You said you would never keep a secret from us.”

  “It’s not that I’m keeping a secret. It’s that I didn’t know how to tell you kids. I always told myself I wouldn’t keep anything from you kids but it was harder to tell you than I realized it would be.” The caution in her voice made me sick that I hadn’t called her sooner or ran into that house when I knew she was sick after my night outside with my dad on the dock.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She drew in a deep breath and as she looked up from packing, a solitary tear rolled down her face. “I have breast cancer. Stage two. My doctor found the lump when I went in for my yearly mammogram.”

  At that point, I stopped breathing, my heart sank into my stomach and I couldn’t even begin to process what she was saying. I wanted to run like I’d ran from Easton, I wanted to scream like I wanted to do to Easton, I wanted to do lots of things that ultimately became a pity party for me. But I couldn’t. This wasn’t my fight, it was my mom’s and she needed me. She didn’t say it but she was my mom and I was her only daughter. That female bond over something that binds you to other women became a weight that I wanted to bear for my mom. My issues paled in comparison to what she, and this family, were going to go through.

  “Can you beat it?”

  “It’s still contained to the breast tissue.” Mom was shaking. “So, the doctors have assured me that it’s the best-case scenario…I’m hopeful.”

  “How is dad taking this?”

  I remembered the night on the dock and thought that he wasn’t handling this as well as he should have been. We all knew she was sick.

  “Yeah,” her eyes held a distant memory she didn’t want to have, the Earth shattering day she probably heard those words. “He was with me when I found out and you know him, he’s internalizing a lot.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “We found out in December and tried some herbal remedies. They didn’t work so we went to see a specialist in Charlotte two months ago.”

  Looking at my dad these days, he’s hopeful but so reserved, you can certainly see that. There’s also a side that’s scared. I know it. I’ve seen the looks of desperation he gives her lately. Like considering the possibility that he can’t go on without my mom. My dad’s strong but my mom is his foundation. It’s always been that way.

  “What did dad say about all this?”

  Mom’s eyes were distant for a moment. “He said he’s in it with me. He said we don’t give up until the engine lets go,” she smiled, so tender, so real I felt it in my heart that she would be okay. “And then we rebuild. Whatever the cost, we rebuild.”

  I laughed as tears streamed down my cheeks. “Of course he said that.” And then it hit me that I didn’t know what this meant. Was she dying? Did she stand a chance at beating it? I knew enough about breast cancer that I knew stage two was better than five, which was what her mother had when she was diagnosed and what Alley’s mother died from ten years ago. “What are they going to do?”

  “Cut the funbags off and give me new upgraded ones.”

  “Do you have to have radiation and chemo?”

  “No. They think they can get it because it hasn’t spread to the lymph nodes. I was having yearly mammograms so it was an early detection.”

  “Then why have you been losing so much weight and disappearing right before our eyes? Everyone’s worried about you, Mom.” I leaned against the counter at this point, scooting just a little closer to her, needing that connection that a mom and daughter share.

  “Arie, it’s just the stress and the not knowing that’s weighing heavily on me,” she said. “I promise that I’ve told you everything now and that’s also been part of the problem, keeping it from you kids and the family has been harder on me than you can ever imagine. My mom died of breast cancer and I didn’t even know she had it until she died. I told myself I would tell you kids but when I found out…I couldn’t do it.”

  I reached for her and enveloped her in a hug that we both needed.

>   Dad came in, his eyes wide when he pushed his hat up with his left hand, watching us, obvious that something was up. “What’s wrong?”

  Mom wiped away her tears with the sleeve of her sweatshirt as she leaned back from my hold. “I told Arie.”

  He sighed, slightly relieved but then remembered. His expression matched that of the one he held on the dock that night when his eyes were misty. “We gotta go.” He motioned toward the door with a nod. “Plane’s waiting.”

  I couldn’t imagine how hard this was for them. They’d been through so much already. I wanted them to have all the time in the world together. This family has survived so much over the past twenty-five years. Was this just one more event in the Riley timeline that made this family stronger? If I knew one thing, I knew that my brothers and the rest of the family had to be told. This family is stronger because we work together and my mom needs everyone in it to win it at this point.

  Now was telling the rest of the family and my brothers. It wasn’t easy because she kept waiting for the right time. There was no right time for bad news. She ended up telling them on the way to Kokomo. Probably because I was acting so weird that they knew something was up.

  “I have breast cancer. Stage two. But they’re hopeful and don’t think it has spread to the lymph nodes.” Mom blurted out on the plane, barely able to look at them.

  Casten’s face went pure white, as did Axel’s. Dad stared at the ground, no emotion to his downcast stare. I knew what he was doing. He thought if he didn’t show any emotion, he wouldn’t feel the weight of it. That’s how men solved problems. Face them head on or ignore them. There was no middle ground.

  At some point, he would feel it. And I knew when that would happen.

  Casten stood and walked over to mom and sat on her lap. She immediately started crying as she held her baby boy. It looked a little funny, her holding him, but it wasn’t surprising at all. Casten was that way.

  “What happens now?”

  “I go in for surgery in two weeks where they’re going to do a double mastectomy and then they’ll do reconstructive surgery at the same time.”

  And that was all that was said. No more questions were asked. Much like my dad, my brothers didn’t know how to process the thought of our mom not being around or being so ill that she couldn’t take care of all of us that it scared them. So they gravitated back to what they could control…the next race at the next dirt track. They’d all process it in their own way. I imagine a night of heavy drinking was in their immediate future.

  After Kokomo, there was a day break and the teams headed to 34 Raceway in Burlington, Iowa, for a Wednesday night show and we went home. It paid to have a team plane. That’s when she told the rest of the family.

  I always thought telling her family would be the easiest but it wasn’t. Grandma cried, as did Emma and Alley. Spencer was speechless and Aiden looked nervous, as always. No one knew what to say. Dead silence surrounded us and mom started crying. I think in her mind she felt like she was letting us down.

  “You know what we need?” Emma interjected.

  “What?” Mom asked, looking up through her tears.

  “A girl’s night!” Emma squealed clapping her hands together.

  Aunt Emma always wanted an excuse for a girl’s night. We hadn’t had one since the night of Frost Nationals. Thankfully the boys weren’t drinking, but supposedly there was no racing involved.

  So girl’s night out was born.

  It was Mom, me, Hayden, Gray, Grandma, Emma and Alley on Tuesday night. Even Lexi came over.

  Lexi and I were in the kitchen putting the jalapeño poppers in the oven when I asked about Easton. “How’s E doing?”

  “He’s miserable, Arie. Miserable. I actually feel bad for him. All he does is mope around when he’s not in the car and he hasn’t won a race since you left.”

  “He should be miserable. He did this, not me.”

  “I don’t think he slept with them. Neither does Brody. He said E didn’t leave with them so he doesn’t know how they even got in there.”

  “Well, a lot can happen from the time he leaves someone to the time he gets to his bed.” But then I started to second-guess what I saw.

  I was silent, thinking about that morning again. “You don’t honestly think he did, do you?”

  “I did think so. But part of me wonders. It’s not like him and with all the stress he’s under, why would he add additional stress onto himself and to you?” Lexi said.

  “I’m just battling with myself over what I think and what I saw,” I said to her as the doubt slowly crept in.

  “You should talk to him.”

  “I will. I just can’t right now. I know if I do I’m going to say the wrong thing. And I need to be here for mom.”

  Lexi looked over at my mom, her face glowing with excitement. “She’s happy right now.”

  “It’s nice to that smile on her face. We have to all be here for her but I can’t leave her right now.”.”

  “Look what I found!” Emma said bringing a box full of DVD’s with her when we walked inside the living room with the snacks. “They’re old videos of Jameson racing.”

  “Really?” Mom perked up like I’ve never seen before. “Where did you find them?”

  “In the garage when I was trying to find the beer.”

  That box was filled with hours of video footage. His first Coca-Cola 600 win, his emotional speech, their proposal. His first championship speech.

  Chili Bowl, Knoxville, Turkey Night, it was all there. Him and mom dancing in the hauler, riding around the track together on a 4-wheeler that said “just married” and then stopping to kiss on turn four. Clips of me and my brothers as kids and hanging out at the tracks with them.

  There was some of dad’s really early days. It was amazing seeing that side of them and to know where they came from, and where they were now. My parents were the true definition of soul mates. Look that phrase up in the dictionary and I just know that there’s a picture of the two of them with no additional definition needed.

  Seeing my dad in this way made me laugh. He was so young but it was easy to see he hadn’t changed at all when it came to his personality and demeanor. He loved with every fiber of his being yet still managed to have a successful racing career.

  How does that happen? How did he never lose himself to this lifestyle?

  I guess it goes back to those two traits you have to have to be in this sport. Desire and persistence.

  He never wanted to change. Therefore he didn’t.

  Watching the videos also made me realize how much my parents loved each other. There was never a video in his younger days where she wasn’t far from him. And you could always tell when she was around. His attitude was completely different.

  There was this one video of Knoxville Nationals from the year he graduated. It wasn’t great quality but it showed my parents before they were married, or even together.

  It reminded me of Easton and me when we were first hanging out and that night in Texas when we kissed.

  “Would you let me kiss you…” he asked, his eyes as bright as the track and celebrated his victory.

  “I think I would.” I told him, watching his reaction to the night around us.

  He didn’t wait for me to say anything before he kissed me, soft beer soaked lips finding mine.

  I still remember that first kiss. It gave me hope, a way, an opening in the draft.

  Easton Levi came into my life for a reason. I knew that when I kissed him, felt it in my very being. But why wasn’t I feeling that closeness anymore? Where did our turns go from both of us always turning left to one of us seeing where the other turns might take us?

  I shook my head at the memory and focused on the television again taking notice in Gray sitting on the floor. She was so intent on the racing videos we all laughed. She was even more obsessed than the boys in our family.

  “You know she’s going to race, right?” I asked Hayden who was sitting beside me
eating Dad’s gummi bears he left on the end table by the couch.

  “Whatever she wants,” Hayden smiled.

  I never doubted their love for Gray. Maybe their parenting at times, but never their love. Right now it was easy to see they’d do anything to make sure she was happy. They were happy with a family and a life of racing. What was different about their relationship that Easton and I couldn’t have?

  Spinning – This refers to a car that’s spinning on the track, either from an ill handling race car or a wreck.

  The race at 34 Raceway was cancelled for rain. There was horrible weather going through the Midwest so they cancelled it before the boys even left.

  Wednesday morning I went to Riley-Harris Racing to go over orders with Bailey and Hayden. We got our stuff done fairly quickly so I walked through the shop to see if Casten was in there. I wanted to talk to him about what he thought of throwing mom a party. Emma had this idea that we could do a little get together for her. And by get together she meant party. Mom would love it though.

  Casten was in there with the engine specialist for Riley-Harris Racing talking details about the engines going into Easton’s car. Gray was there too, crawling all over one of Easton’s cars that was parked in the shop getting ready to be loaded for the Michigan race this next weekend.

  When Gray saw me, she gave me this half smile like she knew who I was but didn’t care enough to actually say anything. Typical.

  When the engine specialist left, Casten smiled at me. “What are you doing here?”

  “I was going over orders with Bailey and Hayden.” I grabbed Gray before she fell off the hood when she tried to stand up and walk up the windshield. Casten laughed and then took her from me and set her back on the ground.

  “Emma wants to throw a party for mom.”

  “To celebrate cancer?”

  “No, dumb shit. To keep her upbeat and positive. Now that everyone knows we have to try and keep her mind in that happy place.”