Page 15 of Speeding Hearts

Of course,after I dropped Stella off, I spent the rest of the week trying to forget about her. I concentrated on continuing to clean up Oak Bend Automotive and even came up with some ideas with Stu around how to drum up some more business. It wasn’t that it wasn’t busy enough to stay afloat, but it wasn’t the bustling place it had been the last time I worked there. I knew why, too. It was because Dad had let it slide. He used to have three employees, including me, but Stu was the only one who’d stuck around. A surge of guilt ran through me when I thought about how it must have started to decline when I’d started messing up, using up all of Dad’s time on dealing with shit I’d gotten into as a teen and in my early twenties.

In a lot of ways, things must have gotten better for him after I left. But that hadn’t resulted in a thriving business and social life for him. It hadn’t exactly helped his health, either.

All of that was why, even if he was a total pain in the ass, I knew I had to be the one getting him back on his feet. That was what got me through each day. My plan was to get the shop back to thriving, get dad back to as healthy as he could be, clean up his place, and then GTFO.

And somewhere in there, maintain my friendship with Stella without messing that up too. Even if it was only while we were both here, I knew it would be a hundred times easier if she was around.

The good thing I discovered that week was that the Back Track was still up and running, sort of. While it wasn’t the most popular place since the Speedway had started to decline and didn’t have as many spare cars to give away, it wasn’t completely overgrown. When I went out to check it out one night, I found a tree had fallen across the main stretch, which was easy enough to pull away with a chain on my hitch, and a few other saplings had started coming up along the ditch that needed to be tied back, it was still wide enough for a couple of cars to run simultaneously.

This would be a helluva place for Stella to get her training in, though. It was pitted and dusty, the turns more treacherous than at the clay oval down at the Speedway. It wasn’t as safe here, and that worried the hell out of me.

As I stood there picturing her flying around the curved track that wended its way through the trees, a knot grew in the pit of my stomach.

But racing at the track wasn’t without risk either. I had a sudden flashback to myself as a kid—the car I’d snuck out in crumpled, smoke curling up into the night air, and the sounds of sirens on the wind.

I took a long breath. Stella didn’t have to bring the car up to speed here, and I’d be with her the whole time. So long as she wanted to race, the Back Track it was for now.

* * *

On Thursday,two days before I was supposed to see Stella again, I had dinner at Mom’s place. I’d only seen her once since I’d been back, and she’d been hounding me to come over.

“You look different,” she said, her hands still on my cheeks after greeting me at her door. If there was one thing about Candace Hughes, it was that she always knew when something was up with me. It was unnerving.

But somehow comforting, too. I couldn’t hide anything well from her.

“I cut my hair,” I tried.

“It’s not that. Is it something with Victoria? Are you back together?”

She looked so hopeful my stomach turned.

“Mom, I told you, Victoria and I are done. Forever.”

There must have been something in the way I said that—the words I’d almost caught myself saying—that had Mom arching a brow.

“There’s someone else!” she said suddenly.

Unnerving.

“Mom, no.” I lowered the toolbox I’d brought over. I’d promised to help her fix a broken closet in her spare room. Mom lived in our old family home—a pretty farmhouse outside of town, on a long, meandering property that included a meadow in the back that was dotted with trees and cut through with a little brook. I used to catch frogs in that creek. But since Dad had moved out—and especially since I’d moved out a decade ago—Mom hadn’t kept it up with the kind of maintenance it needed.

Mom followed me down the hall, not willing to give it up. The good thing was, I knew her tricks. She may have known something was up, but I could be an iron vault if I needed to be.

I’d spent my life practicing.

“If it’s not another woman, who is it? Or what is it? You’ve got a… a light in your eyes I haven’t seen since before—”

She cut herself off. The accident was what she was going to say. The one I’d had stuck in my mind ever since Stella told me she was determined to race.

The one that had driven a wedge through our family. Estranged Mom from her brother and saw my dad moving into his apartment downtown fifteen years ago.

When I stepped into the second bedroom on the main floor, I sucked in a breath. It looked like a craft store had puked all over the place. Paper, binders, paints, and endless pairs of scissors with funny blades on them lay all over the place. “Mom, what the—”

“Scrapbooking! It’s what I wanted to show you. I promise I’ll make it more organized—that’s why I want you to take the closet door off, to build a little station.”

As Mom showed me her vision of some kind of fancy desk with rows of shelves overhead, I lowered the box once more and ran my hand through my hair. I needed to help Mom out too. The house needed a ton of work, and she’d gotten into all kinds of strange hobbies since I’d been gone. Maybe if I built her this craft room, she’d focus on one thing at a time.

Mom worked part-time as the administrator at the kids’ art school downtown, which barely gave her enough money to pay the bills. But she swore if she took on more work, she’d have no life at all. “Your father lived to work, and look where it got us,” she used to say.

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