The Outside Groove (24 page)

I wasn't in my room for more than a minute or so before Mom knocked on my door. I sat at my desk, picked up a magazine, and said, “Come in.”

“Hey, Casey,” she said. “How are you doing?”

“Fine. You?”

“I'm fine. Any big plans for the week?”

I stared at my blank computer screen for a moment, gathered my thoughts, and gave my mother one last chance to show me that she was on my side, that she agreed that Big Daddy's ultimatum was a pretty lousy way to treat me, that she understood Uncle Harvey was a living, breathing person who deserved more respect than she or anyone had given him. “I don't know what to do,” I said. “On the one hand, it seems like I should get in my racecar and run some practice laps somewhere. I mean, I was the Fans' Pick, after all.”

“Well, Casey,” Mom said delicately, “as I know your father asked you—”

“He didn't
ask
me anything.“

“He'd prefer—”

“Demanded.”

“Casey,
please
/” Mom snapped. She rested a hand on her forehead for a few moments, like I'd given her a headache. “Wade has been working extremely hard for this opportunity to race for the scouts.”

“I understand. I do. I just...” I stared at the ceiling, as if reading the answer among the glow-in-the-dark stars I'd stuck up there when I was ten.

“What is it?”

“I just wish he'd come about this golden opportunity more honestly.”

Mom sat on my bed but said nothing.

I faced her. “Why did you come in here?”

Mom ran her hands along the knees of her pants as though warming her palms. “I just wanted to see how you're doing.”

“This isn't about Uncle Harvey?”

Mom looked into the corner, as if more pleasant words might be over there, waiting for an opportunity to enter the conversation. “What about Uncle Harvey?”

“Oh, just that I think it's awful the way he's been treated by people around here. By you and Big Daddy. Like he doesn't exist.”

Mom pressed her hands more firmly onto her pants and rubbed.

“You know,” I continued, “I could almost forgive the ultimatum Big Daddy gave me, despite the fact that it's a lame way to treat a kid who's worked so hard to get into a school like Cray College, if he were just big enough to apologize to Uncle—”

“Casey, that matter does
not
concern you,” she said, rocketing to her feet.

“Why not? He's my uncle and I love him. But when did family ever matter to anyone here at Wade LaPlante Motorsports?”

Mom loomed over me for a second, then crossed to the door. She grabbed the doorknob but didn't turn it. “Do you have
any
idea what this means to your father?” she said in an unsteady voice. “Do you have
any
idea what he's sacrificed for this? Do you
know
how hard he works so that you and Wade can—”

“I just think that—”

“Well, maybe you don't know everything, Casey. Maybe there are things that you just don't know.”

She glared, a curtain of black hair hanging over one eye, her chest rising and falling.

“What happened to Big Daddy that day,” I said, “that day the Circuit scouts came? He had some kind of meltdown.”

Mom's glare softened, as if punctured by a memory flashing in her mind. Her hand loosened on the doorknob and, a few seconds later, slid to her side. She leaned on the door and placed a hand on her forehead again. “Your uncle told you about that day?” she said.

“Yes. He said it was a disaster. He said he took the blame for it. Sounded like it wasn't his fault, though.”

Mom looked at me for a long time, almost a minute, it seemed, staring blankly for part of it, seeming to drift into a memory for another part. “I cared a great deal for your uncle,” she said quietly, as though sharing a secret.

“You loved him.”

Mom's eyes widened, as if I'd sworn at her, but then settled back into a sad, distant look. “Yes.”

“But you married his brother.”

“I loved your father, too.”

“You loved them both?”

Mom closed her eyes and sighed. “I was young,” she said, eyes still closed. “Things were starting to really take off for your father.” She opened her eyes. “I was swept up in it, you might say, drawn into his dream.”

I didn't know how to respond. I knew that, in the time when my parents were growing up, relationships developed differently than they did for me and my peers. Still, this whole being “swept up in it” made their courtship sound like something out of an old movie. Then again, life in Fliverton often felt like an old movie. Not exactly the most cutting-edge town on the map.

“So, what do you think set him off that day at the track, when the Circuit scouts came?” I said.

Mom crossed her arms and looked past me, out my bedroom window, the curtain billowing in the night breeze across my desk.

I privately noted that my mother had just admitted, in acknowledging that Big Daddy had been upset “that day,” that his lousy racing performance might not have been Uncle Harvey's fault. The blood rose in my face, coaxing beads of sweat along my temples. “No clues at all?” I said, trying to conceal my snippiness. For the first time in my life, I was actually getting something close to answers from Mom about what had gone on in my own family all my life.

“He and I had a conversation the morning of the race,” she said. “A good conversation.”

“You and Uncle Harvey.”

She nodded. “Before the rest of the team arrived. I guess I wanted to apologize. ”

“For what?”

Mom shook her head in a strange way that seemed not to convey disagreement or anything negative, just a sense of bewilderment at how life unfolds. “For not letting him know how I felt ... before it was too late.”

“Too late?”

Mom looked at me and smiled, then laughed to herself, as if amused to have shared any of this with me, as if the notion that I might understand were laughable. “I'd agreed to marry your father in front of all those people—people who worshipped him. And I loved him, I really did, but...”

“But...?”

“I know it sounds silly to you, being so independent, but my feelings were complicated, and I was uncomfortable with that. People considered me lucky to be with your father, and I listened to them. I was ready for something new, something bigger than the life I lived here. Like I said, your father had a dream, a big dream, and I guess I couldn't resist it.” She crossed her arms as if feeling a chill. “And I don't regret it. I love your father.” She looked at me. “And he and I love you very much.”

The sound of Wade's voice carried through my open window as he complained to one of his crewmembers about some automotive matter. Mom's face darkened, her gaze fixed on the window. “It's hard to find any privacy around here, isn't it?” she said.

We both listened as Wade then told a crude joke, which drew someone's grating laugh. It sounded like Lonnie.

“You think Big Daddy overheard you and Uncle Harvey that day?”

Mom nodded, eyes still fixed on the window. “I know he did.” She shook her head. “It was reckless, talking so openly about it.”

“It doesn't sound reckless,” I said. “What's reckless is that Uncle Harvey had to take all the blame. It's not just reckless. It's mean—”

“Casey,” Mom interrupted and reached for the doorknob again, her crisp, formal, motherly tone now returned. “We want the best for you, your father and I. Try to understand. ”

“That's the end of the discussion?”

“There's nothing more to discuss. Please do as your father says. I can't even tell you how important this is to him. And when it's all over, we'll all sit down for a long chat.” She stared at me, and when, after a few moments, I hadn't said anything, she opened the door and left.

Listening to her footsteps retreating down the stairs, I believed her. I believed that she and Big Daddy did want the best for me. But if that came at someone else's expense—someone I loved—how could that possibly be
the best?

The week that followed was bizarre. As angry as I was at my parents, especially Big Daddy, at times I wished that he'd broadcast to the whole town his command that I not race again. Then maybe Vin Coates wouldn't have sent me e-mail after e-mail asking whether I was running in the Firecracker 50. Wade's crewmembers could've withheld the cold looks they gave me as I passed them in our driveway, where they worked more or less around the clock on car 02. Fletcher's expression was a little harder to read, but I was able to avoid eye contact with him most of the time. If Big Daddy had shared with others the news that he'd sent me permanently to the pits, then people in town might've stopped giving me smiles and thumbs-up as I walked along Main Street, minding my own business. One day that week, as I walked through town on my way home from a morning run, I had to stop four times to chat with people—my seventh-grade art teacher Ms. Rhiele, some random friends of my parents, and even two Dolphins, Squeaky and Beachball. At one point, while I was tying my shoe in front of the Coffee Pot Café, two girls in a passing car shrieked, “Go, Casey, Go!”

So I took longer and longer jogs across the summer fields, trying to erase racing from my mind and replace it with thoughts of Cray College. It didn't work. No matter how much I feared the prospect of not being able to go to Cray if Big Daddy refused to pay for it, I was having trouble accepting the idea that my racing days were over. My short-track fever hadn't broken. Not even a little.

Though it didn't make much sense, given my father's threat, I was still spending time hammering around Uncle Harvey's pasture in the Thundermaker car 06. I mean, my uncle had built me the car, so I figured the least I could do was drive it. Besides, I knew that Big Daddy and Wade were too caught up in preparing to run for the scouts to keep track of where I went and what I did. And, no offense to Theo, but the way that eight-cylinder Thundermaker engine rumbled in my bones made driving the Road Warrior car seem like a major step backward. Like spending a week at college and then getting sent back to high school. I just had to drive that Thundermaker ride.

As I wound around the pasture, I carefully studied the snappy yank of the tires at the gentlest touch of the steering wheel. I learned to judge how close I was from the trees lining the meadow from my way-sunken-down seat. I flew across the field as fast as I could, braking in the turns, setting the car for another straightaway. Brake, accelerate, brake, accelerate. Once in a while Uncle Harvey came out, usually with a sandwich for me and something to drink, and asked me what I was doing. I told him I was just messing around. Then I'd spend the next couple of hours running practice laps in Theo just to assure Uncle Harvey that I wasn't thinking crazy racing thoughts. In truth, I was consumed by them.

Toward the end of that week, on Friday, as I was flying around the pasture in the Thundermaker, I noticed Jim watching from the path cutting through to Uncle Harvey's yard. I ran a good, hard lap, showing off a little, and pulled over beside him.

I popped the steering wheel and climbed out the window. “Now
this
is a racecar,” I said and slapped the roof.

Jim walked over and, standing next to the hood, ran his eyes along the length of the car. “Your uncle does nice work. I think I've seen bits and pieces of this rig somewhere else.” He flipped his chin at me. “You going to race it?”

I leaned against the car. “Haven't decided.”

“Harvey says you're not.”

“So you already know. Why'd you ask me?”

“You just said you haven't decided.”

I crossed my arms. “Well, that's because I haven't.”

Jim leaned against the car next to me. Neither of us said anything for a few moments. Finally he turned to me, his eyes narrowed as if in concentration. “Can I ask you a personal question?” he said.

I laughed, remembering how I'd tried to pry into his background a few weeks earlier. “Sure,” I said.

“Don't take this the wrong way.”

“I'll try not to.”

“Well...” He scratched at his shoulder and crossed his arms. “What is it you've got against this place?”

“Fliverton?”

He nodded.

“Be easier to tell you what I
don't
have against it.”

“I don't think you mean that. I mean, how could you?”

I gazed across the meadow toward Uncle Harvey's cottage and thought of how I'd felt the night he and I crossed paths down at the fishing access. I was already drifting away from Fliverton, and no one noticed or cared. Then I'd gone and made all that noise—the sound of Theo's unstoppable engine—and became somebody. But who? A Demon's Run racecar driver, complete with my own nickname. I was a licensed member of the very community I desperately wanted to escape. But how long had that even lasted before I became unwelcome, an intruder—at least to my very own family? Wasn't that, in essence, how Big Daddy saw me? As an obstacle, a pothole, a wreck to drive around on the path toward his racing destiny? If someone had to be driven off the road to clear the way, even if that someone was his brother or daughter, then that's what he'd do.

I looked toward the sound of Uncle Harvey working on a car in the garage on the other side of the trees, tucked away in the little box Big Daddy and everyone else had stuck him in. “Trust me, Jim,” I said, “I'm nobody around here.” I might just as well have said,
My uncle and I are nobodies around here.

Jim shook his head. “I hear them talking about you. On the streets, in the grocery store—”

“That's ridiculous.” Blood rushed into my face as I considered how invisible I'd once been, never mind my crosscountry ribbons and my academic achievements, and how popular I suddenly was by virtue of being able to make four left turns faster than a bunch of guys. There really was something ridiculous about it—ridiculous and unfair.