Racing the Sky

by Layla Dorine

  Vic checked his watch as he parked, glad it was almost closing time. It would save him the trouble of going in. He’d been agonizing over this moment ever since River and Nicky had left that morning, and he still wasn’t sure if this was a good idea. He listened to classic rock on the radio as he waited for Gray to come out, honking at the other man as he stepped out the door.

  Gray spotted him and waved him over. Vic climbed out of his car and crossed the parking lot to where Gray waited, a puzzled expression on his face.

  “What’s going on?” Gray asked as soon as Vic reached his side.

  “Wanted to talk to you and didn’t really want to do it over the phone,” Vic admitted.

  “That doesn’t sound good. You wanna come in and have a beer? It sounds like I’m going to need one.”

  “Yeah, a beer sounds really good right about now.”

  Vic followed him into the trailer. Gray yanked two from the fridge, popped the tops, and headed to the small living room with its two chairs. Gray dropped into one and gestured for Vic to take the other. Vic sat and took a long drink, then pulled a slip of paper from his pocket and passed it over to Gray.

  Gray studied the address, a bewildered look on his face. “What’s this?”

  “A rehab center that specializes in traumatic injuries like Nicky’s. He, umm, left this morning, didn’t even want me to ride along with him and River, but he said it was okay if I gave you the address.”

  “You could have given this to me over the phone. Why drive all the way up here?”

  Vic sighed. “Because he loves you, and I love him, and I want him to be happy.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah,” Vic said. “When Terry and Nicky broke up I figured I’d wait a couple months, hope he had a fling or two in the meantime, then tell him what I felt and we’d go from there.”

  “And instead he ended up with me.”

  “Yeah, and seeing the way you were with him, it was easy to see that it wasn’t a fling.”

  “Could have fooled me,” Gray grumbled, taking a long drink too. “What happened to Terry? Figured they’d have done the whole reconciliation thing over drives back and forth to PT.”

  Vic chuckled at the underlying jealousy in Gray’s tone, glad he’d slipped up over the phone one night and told him that Terry had taken over driving Nicky to PT. It was quite clear that Gray still harbored feelings for Nicky.

  “Nicky got kicked out of PT,” Vic told him. “He refused to try, and Terry was too chicken-shit to push him. The whole week was a disaster that ended in River helping Nicky find a place out of town where he could go and get his shit together.”

  “So they’re not back together?” Gray frowned, studying him.

  “Hell no! Terry admitted to River that Nicky was suicidal, but couldn’t figure out how to do it, so he asked Terry to do it instead. Terry freaked out and tried to make up for everything by helping with PT, but Nicky used his guilt against him, and Terry didn’t know how to handle it. He sort of implied that you deserved better than a broken mess, and since Terry was the one that broke him, then Terry should deal with it.”

  “That little shit,” Gray growled and downed the rest of his beer. He quickly retreated to the kitchen and got them both another. “I suspected he was up to something when he broke things off, but I wanted to give him his space.”

  Gray stared at the address and carefully took a moment to copy it in a book on the shelf beside him.

  “Will you write him?” Vic asked.

  “Oh yeah, and I’ve got plenty I plan to say to him too. I know things happen for a reason, but if this had to happen to him, I wish it had come after we’d been together long enough for him to have realized I was in it for the long haul. Hell, I was looking for a new job and a place in the valley when he broke things off; that’s how important he became to me.” Gray tapped the book against his palm. “This is the perfect opportunity to spend the months he’s rehabbing writing letters and coming to know each other better.”

  Vic smiled at that. “He’s a lucky guy.”

  Gray shook his head, the corners of his lips lifting just a little bit. “No, I’m the lucky one. He came into my life, this hesitant ball of sunshine and energy, and reminded me that I’ve been hiding away up here since my last relationship fell apart. There are a million and one things I’ve been dying to do with him, and I’m going to make sure he knows all about them letter by letter, so he has something to look forward to when he comes home.”

  There was little left to say on the subject after that, so the pair settled in with their beers for a conversation that ranged from sports to conservation. Vic ended up spending the night in Gray’s old chair after both of them passed out. It was the best sleep he’d had in weeks.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Pulling into his grandmother’s yard was like stepping back in time. For a moment, Terry sat in the cab of his truck watching chickens scratch for bugs in the dirt and an old hound dog asleep on the stairs to the porch. In the distance he could see rabbit hutches and pigeon coops, cows chewing cud in a pasture, and a few goats nibbling grass in their pens.

  Exiting the truck, the sounds hit him: the barnyard symphony of clucking and mooing. It smelled like hay and earth and manure, and Terry couldn’t help but grin when the screen door banged open and a stout woman with gunmetal gray hair stepped onto porch with a meat cleaver in her hand. Blood dripped from the blade, probably belonging to whatever poor creature had been designated tonight’s dinner. His stomach rumbled at the thought of a home-cooked meal.

  “Well, don’t just stand there for the flies to land on,” his grandmother called before turning around and disappearing back inside. “Come on in.”

  He hurried to follow her, catching the faintest whiff of fresh-baked bread mingling with the coppery scent of…glancing left he saw what looked to be rabbit on the chopping block, a bowl full of meat already sitting beside a bowl of vegetables. His mouth watered; he hadn’t had rabbit stew in years.

  “Coffee is in the pot,” she told him as she resumed her chopping. “Help yourself and tell me what’s going on. Your mother isn’t running around with a man half her age again?”

  “No, Granny. I’m pretty sure she’s learned her lesson after that ski instructor.” He grimaced, not wanting to think too hard about his mother’s long series of affairs with men who were all just a few years older than himself.

  “Somehow I doubt that,” his grandmother muttered. She finished off the rabbit with a series of loud whacks before moving the all the pieces to a sizzling pot. Eyeing Terry, she peeled an onion, waiting for him to talk.

  “Was I a mean kid?” he blurted. “Did I go out of my way to do stuff to my cousins if you wouldn’t let me have my way?”

  She sighed and began carefully chopping the onion. “You are your parents’ only child, thank the goddess, since they barely made time for you. I can’t imagine them with another one to look after. But because they were so wrapped up in their own foolishness, their method of parenting was to give you whatever it was you were asking for, in the hopes that you’d take it and go away. Still, I’d say you were more of a selfish child than a mean one. You didn’t understand why you had to share toys when you came here, or why I never made everyone play what you wanted to play. In fact, I had to ban you from board games, even checkers, because you hated to lose and would throw a real fit when things didn’t go your way: throwing things, pushing, shoving, hitting, biting. Though you learned better than to cuss after I washed your mouth out with soap. Your grandpa wanted to tan your hide more than a few times, but I’d hoped sitting you down and making you think about your behavior would help you to see why it was wrong.”

  “Only Mom and Dad stopped letting me come here.”

  “Yes, and there wasn’t much I could do about it either,” she admitted.

  “Do they ever ask about me? My cousins? Do they still visit you? Do they ever watch me race?”

  She shook her head sadly and added the onions to
the pot. “They still come for Sunday dinner, almost every week, all but Jackson. He’s overseas now, but he writes, and I send his unit care packages when I can. None of them ask about you though. They stopped asking if you were coming back years ago and, to be honest with you, some were relieved that you didn’t. I never realized how much you were getting away with when my eyes weren’t on you.”

  He hung his head as she went about cleaning and chopping carrots from the garden.

  “Has something happened, Terence? Why all these questions about the past?”

  He sighed and rubbed at a gouge in the wood, remembering the day he put it there while carving a pumpkin. His Grandpa Lou hadn’t even been mad at him; he’d just shown him how to hold the knife the right way and how to carve out the eyes and nose he’d carefully drawn. He still had a picture of that pumpkin somewhere. Halloween on the farm had been filled with spooky walks through the woods and his uncle trying to scare the piss out of them. Not to mention the fact that his granny’s homemade caramel apples were the best things on Earth.

  “I hurt someone really important to me,” Terry admitted at last. “Way worse than anything that an ‘I’m sorry’ is gonna fix.”

  For a moment, the only answer was the rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunk of the cleaver through potatoes. An uneasy silence filled the kitchen, and Terry looked up to see her staring down at him intently.

  “Who was it?” she asked.

  Terry blushed and worried the scarred wood for several moments, unsure how she would react to the news that he was gay. “My, umm, boyfriend, Nicky. He was...we’d been dating for almost five years.”

  Her eyebrows lifted a little and he shrank back from her gaze, drawing himself into a tight curl of restless muscles. The scrape of the chair on the wooden floor surprised him, as did the feel of her gnarled, work-worn hand settling on top of his.

  “Five years is a feat at your age. He must have been very special,” she remarked, giving his hand a squeeze.

  Terry nodded and didn’t bother brushing away the tears falling down his cheeks. “You’d have liked him. I wish I’d brought him out here; he would have loved the farm. He wanted to learn to ride horses, but I’d told him I had hay fever allergies, so we never went.”

  “For land’s sake, child, why would you tell such a bold face lie?”

  “’Cause I was afraid he’d be able to tell I already knew how to ride, and I didn’t want to have to explain how I’d learned. I never told him about coming here as a kid, or that I’d had any other family around besides my parents.”

  “Were you ashamed of where you came from?” she asked, moving her hand away from his.

  “No, Granny, nothing like that. It was just that Nicky, well, I’m pretty sure everyone here would have loved having him around. He’s funny and loves animals, sings along to the radio and loves listening to stories. You could have filled the hours giving him history lessons and he’d have taken it all in with a smile. He didn’t have any family left, so it’s not like we visited them or anything.”

  “You simply did not wish to share yours… Nicky?” She looked thoughtful as she tested out the name. “Isn’t he the long-haired young man that races with you? Beautiful green eyes almost too pretty to be on a boy?”

  A soft smile played across his lips at hearing that. “Yeah, that’s Nicky.”

  “I haven’t seen him race lately. Or you either. Are you taking some time away?”

  “I didn’t know you watched,” he commented, shocked and more touched than he was able to admit.

  “It’s about the only way I can keep track of you,” she admitted. “Isn’t always easy. That old TV of ours finally died a few months back and it took a while to convince your grandpa that we needed another one. You remember how he loved to sit in his chair and listen to baseball games on the radio. He still complains that other sports don’t offer that kind of play by play.”

  “They do, but it’s all online now,” Terry pointed out. “He’d need a laptop so he can sit in his recliner and listened to the pod casts.”

  She scratched her cheek and gave some thought to it, then stood to stir the pot and add seasoning. “I just might have to look into that,” she said at last. “So you never did answer my question about you and Nicky. Why haven’t I seen you two racing across my new flat screen?”

  “Because I’ve had my license to race suspended for the next two years, and Nicky isn’t able to race anymore. He had an accident, I…” Terry stared down in his hand. “He beat me in a race, a huge one, the kind that landed him a sponsorship. I tried to be happy for him, but I couldn’t. I just kept getting madder and madder, so first I cheated on him, and then I wrecked his bike in the middle of a race.”

  She gasped, spoon stilling in the pot. Turning, she looked down at him in shock, a sheen of tears making her rheumy eyes seem far too bright.

  “I tell myself that I didn’t mean to hurt him, but then I started thinking about the past and the way I acted when I was here, and I started to wonder if hurting him wasn’t exactly what I set out to do,” he admitted.

  “That poor young man,” she said sadly. “And you, your past has finally caught up to you. Now you see the lessons I was hoping to teach.”

  Terry ducked his head. “Nicky isn’t going to forgive me, and I don’t blame him for that. I just feel so lost right now. Guys I’ve worked with have been telling me what an arrogant jerk I’ve been to them all these years, and now I have to wonder how many other people have seen me that way too. I never thought about what I was doing, I was just being me; only that’s not who I want to be anymore.”

  “Who did you think you were?”

  Terry shrugged and rubbed his fingers along the tabletop. The scent of rabbit stew filled the kitchen. “I guess I wanted to be the guy everyone noticed. I needed the attention, but I wasn’t always able to grab it. Nicky’s freestyle was always better, he was a way bigger daredevil than I was, and I found myself looking at him as more of a competitor than a boyfriend, at least in the end. I was angry that he didn’t let me win. What I realize now is that I was angry that I wasn’t good enough to beat him. I feel like I’ve been falling short my whole life, never living up to expectations. Dad’s still pissed that I didn’t go to college, but I hated school and never understood why he wanted me to study how to crunch numbers when he always came home talking about how much he hated it.”

  “Your father left with a very skewed outlook on what life away from here was going to be like. He expected that he would be happier working with money than working hard to earn it. He looked up at those high-rise buildings with the offices kissing the sky and he wanted to sit in one. But once he got there, he saw how empty his life had become. He’d already missed your childhood and turned blind eyes to your mama’s cheating, all in the name of having the word ‘partner’ added to his door. Now he’s starting to see how empty and meaningless it was. I think you need to go talk to him. I know you’ll find that his views on you and your lifestyle have changed. He was proud of what you were accomplishing out there on the track, proud that you chose something you loved over the promise of just making steady money.”

  “Really?” Terry asked. “Because the last time I was home, he called me a disgrace and couldn’t wait for me to grab what I’d come for and leave. Maybe, I guess it wouldn’t hurt anything to stop home and see him.”

  “Where do you think home is?” she asked quizzically as she stirred the pot.

  “What do you mean, Granny? It’s where it’s always been.”

  “Then it really has been a while since you two have talked,” she remarked. “He sold the house and moved back out here, just a few miles up the road on the left. Bought the old MacAlister place and turned the barn into a workshop.”

  Terry scowled, unable to imagine what type of activities his old man would need a workshop for. As far as Terry was concerned, the man was the least inspired or creative person he knew. His granny laughed at his expression, her mirth echoing around the room. She step
ped away from the stove and over to the far wall, gesturing toward the top. Terry’s eyes followed the worn rose-patterned wallpaper until they reached a large metal clock that looked to be made out of the hubcap of an old car and several silver serving spoons. A sun pattern had been cut into the metal and it looked both rustic and artsy.

  “Your father made that, and the weather vane on the roof, as well as the large metal dragonfly in the garden with the bright green stones for eyes. He makes all kinds of things in that workshop of his and sells them from the stand he built outside of his place, as well as at some of the craft fairs and artistry events in town. It started as a hobby and just grew, which wasn’t very surprising considering how much he always loved tinkering with that old Packard your Great Uncle Donald had out in his yard.”

  Terry blinked, utterly and completely baffled. The only thing he’d ever seen his father do with a car, besides drive one, was take it to the service station every three months like clockwork. The man had even called roadside assistance if one of his tires had blown.

  “I never knew Dad knew anything about cars. Why didn’t he ever come out and help me when I was working on my bike?” Terry demanded.

  “That’s for him to explain, but I suspect it had a lot to do with the fact that he was trying to be someone he wasn’t. I think now is as good a time as any for you to ask that and any other questions you have for him. Family has always been the most important gift we can offer one another as people, not the money and possessions of the world. I hope you remember that going forward, and not be such a stranger around here. I’ve missed you, Terence, and I know your Grandpa Lou has too. Speaking of the old goat, why don’t you go out and talk to him while I finish getting this stew ready. I’m sure there’s plenty of advice he can give you, if you’re finally willing to listen.”