by Shey Stahl
Growing up, my life was spent at NASCAR tracks. Motor coaches that were nicer than most people’s homes and the extravagant suites high above the super speedways. And it was best not to get me started on the wives. Though my dad was one of those super stars of NASCAR, my mom was nothing like the WAGS of those drivers. She grew up at the dirt tracks and stayed a dirt wife.
Me? I went down that road and thankfully, here I was, back at my roots and living my life out of a forty-foot motor home with four kids. And I wouldn’t change it for anything. I loved our life. Random Walmart camping only to wake up and ask the cashier what city you’re in. Pilot truck stop coffee at two in the morning to get through that nightmare stretch on I-70 and singing to Garth Brooks with your husband as the sun comes up on the highway. I even loved rationalizing what clothes to wear until we found a laundry mat and the shady truck stops. And I think most race wives would agree with me on this one when I say, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
With Hudson on my hip, I watched Rager as he walked through the pits, his head down. Smiling at the attention he received from the female fans lingering around the cars, I glanced down at the baby in my arms, a spitting image of his father in every way. Dark hair, impossibly piercing blue eyes and that cute little dimple on his chin when he smiled.
It was hard to believe that five years ago I didn’t have this security. Sure, our life had changed drastically since I had, you know, gotten knocked up by him and was technically married to another. “Technically” is used loosely here. It goes to show you that no matter how planned your life was, it could and might change right before your eyes.
But security of knowing that our lives had a plan? No, I didn’t have that. You couldn’t when your husband raced cars for a living.
“Hey, Arie,” a familiar voice said behind me.
When I turned around, fear jolted through me. Easton stood in front of me, his hands buried in the pockets of his racing suit. My heart jumped into my throat, unprepared to see him here, of all places, and wearing a uniform.
Easton Levi was the hottest driver in NASCAR these days. So people said. Not me. I knew the real Easton. The one who let fame go to his head and destroyed relationships in the process. That wasn’t to say our relationship ended because of him, because it didn’t. I played my part in the end too.
And he was the last person I thought I’d see at a dirt track.
Shifting nervously, I drew in a deep breath. “Hey.” A memory flashed in my head.
Easton’s eyes darted around, confused, irritable, and then settled on the sand because that was so much safer than looking at his wife who he had disappointed time and time again. “This isn’t working, Arie. You and I both know that.”
Did I know that? Yes.
“I know,” I said, not knowing what else to say. My palms felt sweaty, so I rubbed them on my shorts and straightened out my legs in the sand.
I feared divorce, because it felt like I failed. Everyone warned me when Easton and I got married, we should take our time. This day and age, who married that young?
Well, I did. I did because I thought it would work.
As he twisted to face me, his hand touched my leg sincerely. “Just hear me out… okay?”
That wasn’t the way to start a conversation.
“Okay….”
Hear me out? Who says that?
“I know you’re not happy,” he began, staring at his hands as he spoke, “and I don’t want this to be something where we blame each other and shit gets ugly.” With a deep sigh, he looked at me.
I nodded, relief washing over me that he felt it too. It wasn’t me, and it certainly wasn’t him. We had grown apart, a life distanced by the very thing we’d sworn wouldn’t happen a year ago. The distance in our marriage. The need to choose everything else over our relationship. It was me working with JAR Racing and him choosing racing constantly.
This life and everything we didn’t do and say had ruined us.
My attachment to Rager made me wonder if there was someone else Easton was turning to.
Would I have blamed him for turning to someone else at that point?
“Are you seeing someone?”
His stare caught mine, his answer just as quick. “No, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Are you wanting someone else?”
I supposed seeing someone, and wanting to, were entirely different.
His stare dropped, his answer a little slower. “No… it’s not that.”
Easton lied. He’d been fucking a model for the last year of our marriage. When I was dealing with the loss of my nephew Jack, and my mom was recovering from breast cancer, that was when he chose to end our marriage. It was a messy, awful divorce, and the day it was final and announced to the world, I was seven months pregnant with twins. That weren’t his. I didn’t cheat on him, but I guess, emotionally, I’d been cheating on him since the day we said I do. My heart never belonged to him, and looking at him now, he knew that.
I should have known he’d show up here, being that NASCAR was here too—at the same complex for the weekend, just a different track. But given the circumstances, why would he? He makes millions a year to race NASCAR, why would he even risk it?
Swallowing thickly, he lifted his sunglasses, his weight shifting from one foot to the other. I looked at his eyes, the creases in the corners. “How are you?”
Better without you. I didn’t say that. No matter how bitter I was that he cheated on me, or whatever the reasons were that we didn’t work, I didn’t want to hurt him. “I’m… good. Uh, what are you doing here?” I motioned to his racing suit. “Appearance?”
His eyes dropped from Hudson, to his racing suit and helmet in this other hand. “Oh, yeah. Well, actually, I’m racing tonight. Thought I’d see if I still had the open wheel side in me.”
Really? Jesus Christ. This is going to be horrible.
I knew exactly how my night was going to go. Easton and Rager were going to get into it, either on or off the track, and I’d have to explain it because I was the PR manager for JAR Racing. And maybe that was Easton’s plan to begin with. I didn’t know. I never know with him.
Hudson wiggled in my arms, trying to free himself when he spotted my dad in the distance. Dad and I made eye contact. He frowned, eyeing Easton.
Shifting Hudson to my other hip, I tried to hold him tighter because cars moved in the pits now. When I didn’t let him go, he stuck his hand down the front of my shirt and tried to rip my boob out. Another drawback to breastfeeding a two-year-old. They think your tits are their property.
Easton laughed and cleared his throat, sliding his sunglasses back into place. “I see you’re busy. Nice to see you again.”
Yeah, I bet, asshole. It was also not lost on me that his obsession with sunglasses was still there. Those sunglasses were the start of our problems. Okay, not the sunglasses, but the sponsorship that came with them and the model he fell in love with because of the commercial they had him do. So no, I didn’t like his stupid sunglasses.
And then he walked away and left me standing there. I eyed Hudson. “What did I say about touching Mommy’s boobies?”
“Boobies,” he repeated, staring at them, like he can’t figure out why I’d call them that.
Dad approached me, his eyes on Easton walking away. “What’d Easton want?”
I handed Hudson over to my dad as a sprint car was pushed by and onto the track. The throaty rumble that followed vibrated through my chest, the sweet smells of the methanol invading my senses.
“I don’t know that he wanted anything. He said hi, and that he was racing tonight.”
The frown on my dad’s face deepened as he pushed his hair from his eyes. For being damn near fifty-five now, you would never know it looking at my dad. He was the same Rowdy Riley he had always been, just older. Grass-green eyes, bright with the fading sun blinding him, flushed cheeks a product of the heat, and the same rusty-brown unruly hair he had yet to lose. Sure, there was some gray in there
now, but not much had changed about him over the years.
He’d stepped away from NASCAR completely recently and even signed over Riley-Harris Racing to Uncle Spencer. At first I didn’t understand why he’d done it, but now that our lives for the last year had been on the road from February to November, I understood. This was our way of life.
One would think Dad would step away from racing dirt, too, as that had been speculated by many, but not Jameson Riley. This guy on a track, unstoppable. In fact, he broke the track record last night and tonight, quick time so far.
Dad turned and watched Easton disappear into the Riley-Harris hauler parked at the far end of the pits. “I saw his name on the sign-in sheet.” His eyes met mine. “Think he’ll cause problems?”
“If I know Easton, yes.” Sighing, I checked my cell phone for the time. Shortly after three. “Could be a busy night for me.”
Dad laughed, hauling Hudson onto his shoulders. “I’d say it won’t be from me, but I’d be lying.”
“Oh, by the way, Tommy has a squirt gun filled with vodka. If Jerry finds out he has alcohol in the pits, you know what he’ll do.”
“Oh, I know. I already told him.”
“Told who?” I followed behind him, looking down at my shoes, the white now brown from the dust in the pits.
“Jerry.”
“Why?”
“Because Tommy shot me in the face with it and I got pissed off.”
Shit. If Jerry banned Tommy from the pits, then who would pit for Axel? Just as I was going to voice my concern, Rosa walked by, Knox in her arms, but no Pace or Bristol. “Rosa?” I yelled, chasing after her and her fanny-pack-wearing ass. Rosa used to be my parents’ house cleaner, but she sucked at it and never cleaned. So after I had my fourth baby in three years, we hired her to be a nanny.
Believe me, everyone warned me this would be a bad idea. Turned out, they were right.
“Rosa?” I yelled again when she started to jog through the pits. “Where are my children?”
“You’re only missing two,” she defended, as if that should make me feel better.
I caught up with her because Rosa was not a runner. Unless she was running to try to catch a glimpse of my husband naked—part of the reason she agreed to be our nanny. “I shouldn’t be missing any. You said you were watching them.” The cars doing motor heat in the distance jolted fear inside me. We shouldn’t have even had our kids in the pits to begin with, but they were until the start of the heat races when we usually banned them to motor homes, merchandise haulers or the grandstands with supervision. For good reason.
Six years ago, my nephew Jack was killed in the pits at Cottage Grove. It was a freak accident, but it shook our family to the point that my dad had been insistent on the kids not being in the pits during races. For that reason, I held onto the reality that it could happen again if we weren’t careful.
I scanned the pits again. “Were they in the motor home?”
“No.” She sighed. “I’m looking for them.” She pointed to my dad. “And there’s one, so we’re only missing two.”
“How’d you lose them?”
Rosa chewed on her lip. “I was making a sandwich and they got away.”
“You mean a drink?”
“Yes.”
“Look who I found,” someone said from behind us. “Looking for these two?”
Twisting around, I found Kinsley standing before me. Thank God. I sighed in relief, reaching for the twins. Bristol took off the other direction the minute Kinsley let go of her hand. “I was looking for the shirts in the merchandise hauler and found them in the back of Willie’s truck.”
Figured. Pace and Bristol had been little escape artists since the day they learned to crawl. Taking a hold of Pace’s hand, he smiled up at me. “Hi, Mama!”
“Hey, buddy. You have to stay with an adult. You can’t run wild in the pits.”
He looked at me like he didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. And he probably didn’t because I had to tell them that every damn night. When I was a kid, this was literally burned into our brains. Do not run away the pits unattended. My dad actually made us repeat it to him before we ever entered the pits for the night.
“I’m serious, Pace. You guys keep running off and you’ll be confined to the motor home until the races are done.”
That got his attention and a pair of bright blue eyes landed on mine. “Okay.”
With little regard to anything around her, Bristol ran straight toward Rager where he was getting his helmet on. I wanted to warn him that Easton was here but hadn’t gotten that far.
Kinsley smiled tenderly at me, her mess of brown curls tied up out of her face. Her cheeks red, her belly sticking out past her shorts. Being nine months pregnant and on the road, I knew exactly how she felt. I went into labor with all my kids at dirt tracks. Okay, the twins I was at Disney World, but it still felt like the track because we had been racing that week.
I had a feeling Kinsley would be the same. “Hey, Caden is looking for you,” she told me. “Something about an autograph session tonight?”
“Right, thanks. Yes, they have one scheduled between time trails and the opening ceremonies. I’ll go find him now.” Caden was our newest driver to join JAR Racing after Justin and Cody retired. He was only nineteen and Kinsley eighteen, but they were the cutest kids ever, and making one of their own.
I watched as Knox stumbled in the dirt and then fell face first into it. “Ouch.” He frowned, staring at his busted-up knees.
“You okay, buddy?”
He nodded and wiped the blood, smearing it on his hand.
Sighing, I picked him up. “Rosa, do you have any Band-Aids in your fanny pack?”
Her eyes widened. “No. I have juice boxes.”
And by juice boxes she meant wine she poured into used apple juice boxes. Yep. I left my kids with this crazy.
Back at our pit, Knox in one hand, Pace in the other, I found Rager as he was getting inside his car for motor heat. Bristol bounced beside me, a tear-off in her hand and one of Rager’s gloves in the other, trying to get it on her tiny hands.
Taking it from her, I handed it back to Rager, who was strapping into the car. He nodded, taking it and I leaned in. “Easton’s here,” I told him, trying to carry my voice over the sound of the motor.
He looked at me, shook his head and tapped the side of his helmet. Which meant he couldn’t hear me. “What?” he yelled.
I shook my head and stepped back. There was no sense in trying to yell over the noise of the engines.
As the lights in the pits burst to life behind us, the team pushed the car back away from the hauler when the pit horn sounded.
I didn’t get a chance to warn him who’d be on the track with him.
Shit. Guess he was about the find out sooner rather than later.
I’d love to say my ex-husband and my husband got along, but I’d be lying.
They hated each other. And they technically drove for the same guy. My dad.
Tonight should be interesting, especially considering my kids were drinking apple juice from boxes, and I wasn’t entirely sure if Rosa gave them the wine-filled ones or actual apple juice. Judging by the fear in her eyes, I didn’t think she knew either.
Dicing – Close, exciting racing between two or more racers. Positions are exchanged frequently.
I knew at some point Rager and Easton would be on a track together. It was inevitable. But I didn’t think it would come like this, with Easton racing sprint cars. He hadn’t been in one in ten years. And that he showed up tonight made me think it was planned. He knew we’d be in town. It wasn’t like he showed up at a random dirt track to try his luck at open wheel again.
He showed up at a World of Outlaws event. That was planned.
I also wasn’t sure what to make of being around Jessie, who’d been his assistant when we were married, now his wife and carrying around a kid on her hip. It was all very strange. I had absolutely no idea how to react. Par
t of me wanted to laugh that it didn’t work out with him and the model, but then again, ha fucking ha. Bastard.
Before the trophy dash started and driver introductions, I took the kids out of the pits.
At every track we visited, there were a row of motor homes the crew guys called JAR Alley. The JAR Racing team and its crew and drivers were seldom separated. We traveled, ate meals, and partied together. Our motor homes were parked next to one another and we planned everything from laundry days to the days drinking most of the day was suitable. Which happened often. Most of the crew guys stayed in hotels, but they knew where to come for a good time. JAR Alley. It was also where we took care of our kids.
With my brood in hand, I made my way outside the pit gates and to the row of JAR Racing motor homes. No sooner did I go around the corner, I heard the door to Casten’s motor home open.
“That lady is crazy.” As the guys left the pits, one by one, Gray, Casten’s oldest daughter, came out of their motor home and slammed the door behind her. “She expects me to do this crap.”
I smiled at Hayden, who had their youngest little girl sleeping on her hip. “I agree. She’s a bit crazy, but you still have to do it.”
Just because we all traveled most of the year didn’t mean we had to get out of schooling our kids, or paying bills. Two realities that followed everyone, regardless of your fame or fortune.
“Says who?” Gray planted her hand on her hip. For being only eight years old, Gray had the pre-teen attitude down to a fucking art. She could say fuck you with a look while the words never left her lips.
Hayden shifted Rowyn in her arms and brushed away her dark curls matted to the side of her head. “The State of North Carolina.”
“Ugh!” Gray flopped herself down in a chair between the motor homes. “Ugh” was Gray’s favorite word these days.
The crazy lady appeared at the door with Jonah and Jacen, Axel’s boys, trailing behind her as they stepped down from the steps. Josephine, or JoJo as the kids called her, was the tutor Lily and Axel hired for their kids, and somehow ended up with Gray. If this was a real school, having to teach Gray Riley was like an out-of-district transfer you didn’t want.
