His Uncle's Obsession: After I Seduced Him novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Barn

Emmy sets her terms at Sutton's pole barn with the Old Boys, and then Tillery Racing buys out his engine lease eight days before Daytona.

Lincoln County was forty minutes west and about fifty years back.

Reba drove with one wrist and talked the whole way.

She talked about the six a.m. phone call, and the assistant reading off a card, and the hauler she'd driven for sixteen years that she wasn't allowed back in to get her coffee mug.

"Twenty-two years old," she said. "Called me ma'am four times. Every one meant something different."

I had on a flannel shirt and a pair of her jeans from behind the seat, rolled three times at the ankle.

My dress was in a grocery bag at my feet.

"I'm only going to look," I said.

"Mm-hm."

"I told him no, Reba."

"Sugar, you told him no in his jacket."

We turned off the two-lane onto gravel.

The barn sat at the end of it in a field gone brown for winter.

Green metal walls, a rusted roof, and four trucks out front so old they'd come back into style.

A white farmhouse sat up the hill behind it with smoke coming out the chimney.

The big barn doors were rolled open.

Under the work lights sat a stock car in gray primer with a black 4 painted on the door by hand.

I was out of the truck before Reba had it in park.

A hound trotted out to meet me.

He had one ear, and he looked at me.

Three old men stood around the car holding coffee cups.

The tallest wore hearing aids and a cardigan.

The skinniest worked a toothpick.

The third was round and bald under a welding cap.

Sutton rolled out from under the car on a creeper.

Jeans, a gray thermal shirt, grease to the elbows.

He didn't look one bit surprised to see me.

"Coffee's on the bench," he said.

"Is it any good?"

"No."

It wasn't.

It tasted like he'd boiled a tire in it.

I drank it anyway and walked around the car.

Once.

Twice.

Then I got down on the concrete and looked under the rear.

"Who set this rear?"

The toothpick moved from one side of a mouth to the other.

"Him," said the hearing aids, and pointed at Sutton.

"It's wrong."

"Told you," said the welding cap.

Sutton crouched next to me on the floor.

"Wrong how?"

"You set it like the cars you retired in. It'll get loose in the draft by lap ten, and you'll put it in the fence."

"Can you fix it?"

"In a day."

"Then fix it."

I stood up and brushed off Reba's jeans.

"Terms," I said.

The three old men leaned in.

"I'm crew chief. In everything but the title, because the series won't give me the title yet. One of y'all signs the paper till Martinsville."

"I'll sign it," said the welding cap. "I've signed worse."

"Half the say," I told Sutton. "Not advice. Half."

He nodded.

"And my name goes on the car."

That one made him look at me.

"Where?"

"Roof rail, over your door. Crew chief Emmy Burcham, in letters a camera can read."

"Series'll fine you for that," said the hearing aids.

"Then they can fine me where everybody can see it."

Sutton looked at the car a long time.

Then he picked a paint marker off the bench and held it out.

"Go on, then."

I wrote my name over the door on the gray primer, big and crooked.

The old men clapped.

Reba blew her nose and said it was the dust.

"Where am I sleeping?" I asked.

"There's a loft up top," Sutton said. "Bed, bathroom, a space heater that works if you kick it. I'm in the farmhouse up the hill."

"That's a long way to walk for coffee this bad."

"That's your rule," he said. "Nobody owns anybody."

He went back under the car before I could think of an answer.

My phone rang at noon.

Daddy.

I took it out behind the barn, where the field ran down to a creek.

"Saw the news," he said.

"How much of it?"

"Enough to turn it off." His voice was rough and slow, the way it had been since October. "You told the truth on a microphone. Your mama would've done the same and thrown the drink after it."

My eyes stung.

"I'm okay, Daddy."

"I didn't ask. Now. The other part. Sutton Tillery."

"He's got a car."

"He's got a last name," Daddy said. "Every Tillery I ever met wanted something off of you."

"He hasn't asked me for anything I didn't offer."

"That's how they do it." He coughed. "You eating?"

"I'm drinking his coffee."

"Lord. Then you're already in trouble. You need parts, you call me. I'm not saying I approve."

"You never approve."

"I approved of your mama," he said. "Took me a year."

"Are you taking your pills?"

"Are you eating?"

We hung up on each other, both of us still talking.

When I walked back in, Sutton was standing by the empty engine bay with his phone to his ear.

He didn't say anything.

He just listened, and his jaw got tighter and tighter.

Then he set the phone down on the fender, very gently.

"That was the engine shop," he said.

The old men stopped talking.

"They're out. Tillery Racing bought out my lease this morning. Paid them double to walk away." He looked into the hole where an engine was supposed to go. "Daytona's in eight days, and the #4 doesn't have an engine."

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