His Uncle's Obsession: After I Seduced Him novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: Start-Finish Line

"You booked it," I said. "Before I said yes."

"I booked it in November." Daddy blew on his coffee. "I watched him take four tires at Phoenix. I didn't need a notebook."

Sutton laughed so hard he had to sit down on the arm of the couch.

"When?" he said.

"Second Saturday in January. Track's shut for the winter. They owe me for forty years of fixing their wrecker."

The second Saturday in January came up cold and blue and bright.

The Hickory track looked the way it did every winter.

Faded walls, a grandstand with peeling paint, the old wooden scoring tower.

Daddy and the old men had spent a week making it something else.

There were hay bales along the frontstretch with quilts thrown over them.

There were strings of lights on the catch fence.

The crackling PA had been fixed, more or less.

And the whole town was in the grandstand in coats and scarves, with thermoses.

The hearing aids had gotten himself ordained on the internet.

He stood on the start-finish line in his good cardigan, holding a little book upside down until Reba turned it over for him.

Reba was my maid of honor.

She wore green sequins under a parka and had already cried through two packs of tissues.

The boot lady sat in the front row with her whole factory behind her in #4 shirts.

My kid from Concord sat with them and called me boss when I walked by.

The hound wore a bow tie.

He had eaten part of it.

I came out of the pit gate on Daddy's arm.

I had on a plain white dress with long sleeves, and Daddy's old garage jacket over my shoulders, because it was thirty-eight degrees.

Daddy wore the brown suit again.

He didn't say anything on the walk.

When we got to the line, he took my hand off his arm and put it in Sutton's.

"Don't you put her in the wall," he said.

"No, sir."

Sutton was in a dark suit.

The same kind he'd had on in the penthouse, the night I shut his door behind me.

He looked at me in my daddy's jacket on the start-finish line, and his eyes went wet before the hearing aids had said a word.

"We're gathered here," the hearing aids began, and then forgot the rest, and said, "Well. Y'all know why we're here."

The grandstand laughed.

"They wrote their own," he said. "Go on, Emmy."

I didn't have it on paper.

"Sutton," I said. "I promise to tell you no when you're wrong. I promise to ask you first, every time, even when I already know the answer. I promise four tires when it's slick."

People laughed.

"And I promise that if you ever walk two miles in the dark to knock on my door, I'll take the chain off."

He had to look at the ground for a second.

Then he looked back up.

"Emmy," he said. "I spent three years watching you from the stands. I promise to spend the rest of it close enough to hear you. I promise to argue with you. I promise never to sign anything on the hood of a truck again."

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