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A smiled played at his lips, and though it was a familiar sight, one I’d seen often these last two days, something seemed different about it. I wanted to say so much then, only anything I could say seemed inadequate to what I was really feeling.
The baby crying brought me back out of my trance to see Rager holding Bristol in his arms now. Tears stung my eyes. At the time, before thatI love you, I had secret kisses with question marks. I didn’t think Rager and I would work out, and now that we had, I was even more thankful we found our way to one another.
As we sat around the camp lot that morning, time moved slower than usual. I watched Rager play with the kids and dance to Creedence Clearwater Revival with Bristol. I snapped pictures as he lay on the ground and played cars with the boys. And I soaked up every minute of our time with him.
“I WANNA WATCHDaddy tonight,” Pace told me, grabbing his hat from the counter in the T-shirt trailer and a sweatshirt.
“Me too,” Bristol added.
And then the younger two—“Me!”
Although I wasn’t entirely sure what Hudson said. It sounded like pee followed by him trying to take his diaper off. It was hard to take all four into the stands. I usually appreciated that when you have four kids, they never wanted the same thing at the same time.
Kinsley reached for a blanket she’d brought with her and adjusted the headphones she had on Grace’s head. They looked huge compared to her tiny head. Kinsley motioned to the pack on her chest. “Think she will be okay in this?”
I nodded. “I carried all my babies in a pack when I went up into the stands.”
We ended up having a couple of other regular drivers’ wives tend the T-shirt trailers. We took turns doing that each night depending on who made the main event and who hadn’t made it past the Last Chance Showdown.
The kids wouldn’t sit still during the pre-race activities. The twenty minutes it took for the cars to roll onto the track and introductions, they must have made over a dozen requests for what they saw others eating, anything from cotton candy to beer. Hudson was insistent that he needed beer.
And then came the heart-pumping anticipation of the four-wide salute my kids loved so much. They stood on the bleachers, cheering on their dad, grandpa, uncles, and all the other drivers out there tonight putting on a show for us. Jerry’s voice rang through the loudspeakers. “Eldora Speedway, you wanted the best, we got ’em four abreast, often imitated,never duplicated, the greatest show on dirt…the World of Outlaws!”
Orange light glowed from the above track lights, which burst on, bouncing sparks of light off the fancy painted wings of twenty-five fire-breathing sprint cars ready to show the five thousand fans in the stands what nine-hundred horsepower could do. There was no other racing like the World of Outlaws sprint cars.
After the four-wide salute, I kept one eye on the kids, and another on Rager who had started second behind Caden. An eerie feeling settled over me during the parade laps. I couldn’t place what, but I knew enough about that particular emotion that I wanted to run down to the track and stop the green flag from waving. So much so that I looked over and Kinsley, and then my mom.
Neither one of them seemed fazed by anything so I shrugged it off.
“Mommy!” Bristol yelled beside me, yanking at her shoe.
I looked down at her foot. “What’s wrong?”
“My sock hurts.”
Mom laughed and leaned into my shoulder. “She put on my socks today and keeps complaining the socks hurt.”
I tried to fix her sock, and Mom was right—she was wearing socks that were too big for her. With all that going on, I missed the opening laps of the race.
The race got underway fairly quick, but the track was dry, glazed over, and hard. Bunched up in the top groove, there was no passing by anyone and Caden was lucky he got that number-one starting spot. Most of the guys were lucky if they could keep it off the wall.
And that was when the feeling settled back in. A knot forming in the pit of my stomach I couldn’t ignore. Eldora in the spring wasn’t nearly as hectic as the week in July when we were there for the Kings Royale, but I still loved being here. The atmosphere was electric and the racing exciting. The track itself was amazing with plenty of good food and they had an infield care center. Because they held a NASCAR dirt race, they had been required to up their care facility game, and they did. They could now stabilize patients and even had a heli pad so a CareFlight could land.
Never, when the night started with Rager dancing with Bristol in the pits, to the most laidback morning we’d had in a long time, did I think we would need to use those facilities.
But we did. It was with fourteen laps into the main event when I heard it. The deafening screech of metal on metal and then a horrifying bang that followed. Everyone around me stood, trying to see what happened.
“Oh my God!” Kinsley screamed, clasping her hand over her mouth.
The shock of the crowd, the silence. One by one, the cars shut down outside turn three, the eerie quiet compared to the roar that had come before it.
It was a moment, a scene I couldn’t look away from, and it replayed in my head in a sickening loop. It was a moment thousands of fans at Eldora Speedway thought to themselves, “Did that just happen?”
I didn’t want to believe it myself. Beside me, Hayden reached for my hand. Mom took a hold of Knox, who was asleep in my violently shaking arms. My thoughts raced. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even comprehend a thought to decide what to do next.
Hell, I couldn’t even speak. It looked awful from where we sat. No movement from either driver.
In the distance, sirens cut through the silence, their lights reflecting off the glazed-over clay. “What happened?” I asked. “I didn’t see it.” I looked to Mom, then Hayden. I hadn’t seen anything, but I’d heard it, and then my eyes landed on my husband’s car, mangled on the backstretch.