What You Have Left (20 page)

He imagines himself, come sunrise, walking through the wreckage with Holly. Only so many chances to see up close what a hurricane can do, and it seems to him there's something he could teach her there, though what, he's not sure. Lessons about calamity, maybe, and picking up the pieces. When his feet reach the bottom rung, the first few waves aren't much, just enough to catch him at the waist and send him slowly swinging between the pilings. It's as if the sea is taking a breather. But Wylie doesn't have to wait long before he sees a big one rising up like
Jaws
behind two or three smaller waves. Judging from the noise on the pier, they see it, too.

“Oh, mama!” Roy shouts. “That one there's supposed to be
mine.
”

Of course the waves look bigger down here, face to face, but even so, Wylie has never seen anything like this—a vertical plane of water that almost brushes the underside of the pier as it swells forward, big enough to pluck a man from the ladder as easy as a farmer picking a peach. To Wylie, it seems like the whole day has funneled down into this one moment, and as he gets ready, as the wave suddenly blocks out the sky and the wind, what he's thinking is,
Bring it on.

Maybe it's the angle of his swing. Maybe the wave isn't ready to break. Or maybe it's because he spins around and it catches him from behind. But before Wylie knows it, he has slid up the wave's face like a buoy, passing through the crest with barely a splash—almost as if it had been a wall of fog and not water, almost as if he wasn't even there.

 

I'd long since given up on my father, but Lyle couldn't leave well enough alone. He finally turned up his name on the website of some racetrack called the Indianapolis Speedrome, which billed itself as “Home of the World Figure 8.” There was a photo, too, a martini toothpick of a man ID'd as Wylie Greer, winner of the July 12 feature race, Bomber division. Checkered flag in hand, he stood leaning against a banged-up Caprice in front of a sign that read
VICTORY LANE
. He wore a pained smile, as if a bird had just shit on his head: yes, it's supposed to be good luck, but it sure doesn't feel that way.

Lyle tapped the screen. “That's him, right?”

“So what if it is?” But I glanced long enough to know.

That night, I took out a sheet of engraved stationery and wrote him in care of the track.

Dear Father,

First of all, I'd like thank you for the gracious (if irregular) financial support you provided me in the years following my mother's death. I understand that you and my grandfather had no formal arrangement and that you were under no legal obligation to continue sending money. It has
always been my assumption that you were acting in good faith, providing for me as best your circumstances permitted. Of course, I also assume you realize your contributions were inadequate.

Here's your opportunity to rectify the situation. I'm writing to request $28,800 in back payment of child support for the twelve years between my sixth and eighteenth birthdays (12 years = 144 months
[c450]
$200). I admit this is an arbitrary figure, no doubt well below what a judge would have ordered, never mind interest or inflation. Please contact me at your earliest convenience to work out a mutually agreeable payment schedule, and thanks in advance for your continued commitment to meeting your paternal obligations.

Your daughter,

Holly Greer

P.S.—All monies received will be placed in a college savings fund for my daughter, Claire, and you will be provided copies of the deposit receipts. (Congratulations. You have a granddaughter. She's ten.)

Knowing my father's whereabouts unsettled me more than I cared to admit. At the antique mall that week, while Lyle was up front with customers and I was in the office dealing with the online auctions, I found myself at the website again and again, studying my father's photo and wondering if he'd ever visited our site to do the same. Wondering why he was so thin. Wondering if he was ill. I was still trying to break this habit when, six days after I mailed the letter, a FedEx envelope arrived from Indianapolis.

I slipped out to the loading dock and drew a cigarette
from the pack Lyle kept stashed there. It had been almost thirty years since I'd heard from my father. He'd stopped calling when I was seven, though I'd received cash in dribs and drabs until I turned eighteen, loose bills that arrived in envelopes with no return address—unlike this one.

I hadn't wanted his money then, and I didn't want it now. I'd only been trying to rankle him. It took two smokes before I worked up the nerve to open the envelope. Inside were ten hundred-dollar bills and a brief note written in palsied, back-slanting script.

Dear Holly,

The day your letter arrived was one of the happiest of my life. Last summer, when you didn't return my calls or reply to my postcards, I could only assume you were through with me. Then, out of the blue, your letter. When can I see you? When can I meet Claire? It would mean the world to me. I'll meet you anytime, anywhere, and of course you are always welcome in my home.

With hopes of seeing you soon,

Wylie

No doubt I'd have been deeply touched by my father's words had they not been a big, steaming pile of b.s. I flicked my cigarette into the weeds and marched back inside. Lyle was at the register, pricing a collection of old fishing lures. I thrust the letter at him and waited for him to finish it.

“I mean, really,” I said. “Can you believe?”

Lyle just shook his head. “I suppose it's possible he dialed the wrong number, or got the address wrong.”

“I suppose it's possible he's just a pathological liar.”

It was bad enough he'd strung me along as a child. Now,
after all these years, for him to say he wanted to see me, to go so far as claiming he'd actually tried to reach me—it was more than I could stand. That night, against my better judgment, I told Claire to pack a suitcase, we were going to Indianapolis.

Lyle frowned. “Don't take the bait.”

“It's not bait,” I said. “It's a bluff. And I'm calling it.”

I remember the car rides best, weekend trips to the tracks at Martinsville, Rockingham, Darlington. I remember the drivers' names, too: Buddy Baker, David Pearson, Cale Yarborough. Once upon a time, that was the company my mother wanted to keep, when she and my father dreamed of winning the Southern 500. By the time I came along, though, they'd sold their '62 Fairlane and settled for being fans. We'd leave before dawn on Saturday morning, arrive at the track in time for qualifying, pitch a tent in the infield overnight, then watch the Grand National race on Sunday afternoon. We traveled in my father's pride and joy, a chocolate-brown, turbocharged 1973 Pontiac Firebird Formula 455, one of only five hundred or so made, but unlike most Formulas, ours didn't have the big firebird decal on the hood because that's where my mother had drawn the line. On the way to and from the races, I'd lean between the bucket seats and sing along to my father's Jim Reeves tapes. Sometimes we played a game where you got points for spotting certain things: a dualie, a speed trap, a box turtle crossing the highway. Other times my father would offer me a penny for every new word I read on the billboards we passed, and I'd try to earn enough for a Reese's by the time we stopped for gas and more beer.

I also had a job, which was manning the ice chest. The
big red Hamilton Kotch Cold Flyte took up half the back-seat. When my father cocked an empty over his shoulder, I'd glance around for smokeys, whip the can out the window, then fish out a cold one. At which point my father would wink at me in the rearview and crack wise. “Thank you, Nurse.” “Is there an angel in the car?” I assumed this was how all families passed the time on car rides.

The trip was a smooth one until we hit stop-and-go traffic on I-640. Claire put down her
Sports Illustrated for Kids
and stared up at a truck-stop sign advertising diesel and free showers. She'd long since outgrown the billboard game, though not before amassing a small fortune in copper she donated to the local cat shelter. “Do you think I'll be taller than five-seven?” she said, stretching out her legs. “That's how tall Jeff is.” Jeff was NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon, her current heartthrob and the square-jawed subject of a poster tacked above her bed. She'd been sharing bits of Jeff lore with me throughout the trip, occasioned by the fact that Pittsboro, near Indianapolis, was his adopted hometown.

I'd yet to mention that her grandfather raced cars. In fact, I'd yet to mention he was alive. The story had always been that both of my parents died as a result of the boating accident. Not telling Claire the truth had been easier than trying to explain how a father could just up and leave his daughter. Since Wylie's letter, I'd been trying to craft an explanation that took into account his side of things while at the same time not letting him off the hook, but I wasn't having much luck, and so, as we merged onto I-75, I simply laid out the facts. This wasn't actually an antiques-hunting trip, I told her. Not strictly speaking. The main reason we were going to
Indianapolis was to visit my father, who as it happened wasn't really dead. I told her the story of how, on the day of my mother's funeral, he'd dropped me off at Cal's farm. He said he'd be back soon, and that was that.

Claire lowered her magazine and studied her knees. “Um, I'd like to buy a vowel, please?”

“I know. It's pretty crazy. I'm sorry I didn't tell you sooner. I didn't know where to start.”

Claire nodded. Suddenly I felt overwhelmed. I wished Lyle were there to take the wheel, but he'd stayed home to look after the mall, which he'd been doing a lot of since his dad retired and they sold the company. The truth was, I'd been looking forward to having Claire all to myself. Now I fiddled with the radio, checked the odometer, adjusted my seat. After a few miles, Claire reached over without looking up and patted my knee. The knot in my stomach loosened. If any ten-year-old could handle this, she could. She was a star at Heathwood Hall. As the counselor, Mr. Lindy, once put it, “You have your garden-variety gifted kids, and then you have kids like Claire.” Now she was examining the contents of the brown-bag lunch Lyle had packed for us: turkey and Swiss on rye, low-fat trail mix, Bartlett pears.

“So is he supposed to be like my grandfather now?”

“He
is
your grandfather.”

She sighed. “You know what I mean.”

I told her I wouldn't get my hopes up. She opened one of the Ziplocs, pillaged the Swiss, then dropped the rest of the sandwich back into the bag.

The track sat alongside a rail bed in an industrial area on the city's fringe. It reminded me of the dirt bullring they once
had in Columbia, only the Drome, as it seemed to be known, was paved, with no infield. Claire and I stood in the summer dusk at a chain-link fence that separated the stands from the track. At lunch, she'd been excited to hear about the evening's entertainment. She informed me, between bites of her Big Mac, that Jeff Gordon sometimes raced incognito at small tracks as a way of staying close to his roots. Now she seemed doubtful that he'd be caught dead in such a place. “Hey,” she said, “why don't we put some bleachers around this parking lot and call it a racetrack?”

We bought general admission seats and made our way into the stands. It was a beer-and-corn-dogs crowd, little kids covered in ketchup, shirtless young guys with tattoos, mothers balancing infants on their knees as they lit cigarettes. While I looked for the earplugs Lyle had sent along, Claire studied the program and gave me the lowdown. We were just in time for the Bomber Figure 8s, which was the main event on Friday nights. A beginner's division, she said, excitedly pointing to a list of drivers that included my father. I resisted her enthusiasm, letting my eyes fall instead on an ad for the “Rent a Hornet” program.
Are you not sure that racing is for you? Try our Rent a Hornet program.
For $75, you got a car, practice laps, heat, feature, and a trophy.

The crowd perked up as the Bombers began filing through a corrugated metal gate on the far side of the track. Everybody in the stands seemed to know one or another of the drivers, calling out to them as they lined up. Most of the cars looked as if they'd been decorated with a bucket of paint and a stick. Here and there a copilot was visible: stuffed Pooh bears and Elmos lashed to the passenger seats. My father was the last car onto the track. He had his arm out the window, fingers drumming the door above a silver eleven,
my mother's old number. As he took his place among the other cars, my throat went dry. I could just make out his face, the slight upturn of his nose that made him look younger than he was. Claire stood and cheered as they announced his name over the loudspeaker. When I shot her a look, she shot it right back.

“Like you said, he
is
my grandfather.”

On the day my father dropped me off at Cal's farm, I remember standing out front, waving good-bye and trying to be brave—after all, he said he'd be gone only a few days—but as he eased down the lane, careful not to kick up dust, I could feel myself starting to lose it. Cal was standing behind me with his hands planted on my shoulders. I ducked away and broke into a run, the grass and trees blurring green all around me. I'd almost caught up to the Firebird when my father stuck his arm out the window to wave, only it wasn't his arm, it was his leg, bare toes wiggling a dainty adios. Cornball stunts were a specialty of his. He'd always been able to make me smile, even in the dark days between my mother's death and her funeral. I came to a stop by the mailbox at the end of the lane. My father never slowed down, but he never pulled his foot in, either. It was still poking out the window as he turned onto Bluff Road and sped off into the afternoon.