Chapter 12: Talladega

The grandstand laughed.

Not all of it.

Enough.

I stood on our pit box with my headset around my neck and every camera on pit road swinging around to find my face.

I didn't give them anything.

I wound up my headset cord, slow and neat, the way Daddy taught me to coil an air hose.

In my ear, Sutton's voice came over the radio, low.

"Don't you dare look down."

"I'm not."

"Fourth place, crew chief. Two tires. That was yours."

"Fourth isn't first."

"Talladega's in three weeks," he said. "We'll fix that."

Talladega is two and a half miles of banking where forty cars run three wide at two hundred miles an hour, inches apart, for three and a half hours.

The boot lady came with a busload of women from her factory in matching #4 shirts.

Reba had a cooler of pimento cheese sandwiches on the spotter's stand and a megaphone she'd been asked twice to put away.

The old men wore their good feed-store shirts.

Daddy came down from Hickory and sat in the grandstand, because he said he'd rather die than stand on a pit box at his age.

The race went the way Talladega goes.

A wreck on lap sixty took out nine cars.

With twenty-five laps left, I looked at our fuel and did the math three times.

We were a lap and a half short.

So was everybody who'd pitted with us.

"Sutton," I said. "We need to save a lap and a half of fuel. That means you lift early in every corner and ride at the back of the lead pack."

The radio was quiet.

"That's twenty-five laps of losing," he said.

"That's twenty-five laps of staying alive. Everybody up there's short too. They don't know it yet."

"Your call."

"My call. Ride."

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