The transmission shop on Mulberry Street had been dark for three weeks when Maren Holloway pushed the last of her uncle's forged invoices into a cardboard box. The building smelled of old gear oil and the particular sourness of solder flux, a scent she associated with her father more than the shop itself. The bay doors were chained shut. A lien notice, the second in a month, was taped to the roll-up door, its edges already curling in the November damp.
She carried the box to her truck, a 2003 F-150 with a missing tailgate and a bench seat upholstered in duct tape and faded plaid. The night air carried the first real bite of autumn, the kind that made the chrome on parked cars look like ice. Somewhere down Route 9, a trucker downshifted, the Jake's gear a low growl that rolled across the empty lots.
The diner her grandmother had left her sat six blocks east, its neon sign stuttering between words. LUNCH. DINNER. COFFEE. The CH in each syllable had been dead since August. Maren had been running the place for eleven months, and the transmission shop for the six years before that, ever since her father died and left her a business that had been quietly hemorrhaging money since the Clinton administration. She had inherited two things from her family: a diner that turned a profit in the summer and bled through the winter, and a stubbornness that prevented her from selling either.
Her phone buzzed on the seat beside her. The screen showed a number she had not seen in four years, Rico Vela, the half-brother of her dead fiancé, a man who had drifted into town for the funeral and, against everyone's quiet expectations, stayed.
She let it ring twice before answering.
"Holloway." His voice had the particular crackle of someone calling from a truck stop, all payphone static and echo. "You eaten?"
"I'm standing in a parking lot that smells like despair and gear oil, so no."
"Good. I bought you a pie at the gas station. The kind with the lattice top that probably tastes like someone's first cigarette. Meet me at the ShopCo lot on Industrial. Bring the Camaro."
Maren closed her eyes. The 1969 Camaro SS, code 69 396, was the only collateral she had left. Her uncle's shop had been built around that car in the late nineties, a restoration that had stretched into a second mortgage and finally, a tax seizure. She had bought the title from the bank for pennies during the divorce, when everything else had been carved up like a Sunday roast. The car sat in a climate-controlled bay at her grandmother's old garage, covered in a cotton drop cloth, its interior still carrying the faint chemical ghost of the reupholsterer's adhesive.
"You want to bet my car in a street race," she said.
"I want you to win your car in a street race. There's a difference. Big emotional distinction. Very nuanced. I might cry."
"Who's the mark?"
She heard the click of a lighter, then a long exhale. "Jase."
Maren opened her eyes. Jase Caldwell, her dead fiancé's older brother, had come back to town a week after the funeral to sort out his father's estate. He had bought a four-bedroom house on Oak Street, the one with the widow's walk, and had been quietly buying up parcels of land along the south end of Route 9 with the methodical patience of a man who had spent two decades approving insurance claims for other people's catastrophes.
"Jase doesn't race," she said.
"Jase's Buick does. Jase himself does not know this, which is the best part. There is a Buick Grand National in his garage right now that has not been started in eleven days, and there is a man at the ShopCo tonight who would like to own it."
"A man."
"A gentleman. A person of interest. A fellow named Pruitt, drives a ten-second Fox-body, has been looking for an outlet for his horsepower since the track closed in September. I have done the math. The numbers work."
Maren turned the engine over. The F-150 caught on the second try, a familiar rattle in the timing chain that she kept meaning to fix. "Why is Jase racing his Buick without Jase?"
"Because Jase is at his daughter's volleyball game in Roanoke, and the Buick is in his garage, and I have the keys."
"You stole his car."
"I borrowed his car. In a preventative fashion. Before Pruitt could borrow it first. It's a community service, really."
She pulled out of the lot, the headlights cutting across the cracked asphalt. The diner's stuttering neon fell behind her, replaced by the orange wash of the streetlights on Route 9. "Rico."
"Holloway."
"If this goes wrong, I am going to be very calm about it, and then I am going to be very not calm, and you are going to wish you had stayed in Texas."
"Yes, ma'am. I have factored this into my risk assessment. I am still coming out ahead."
She hung up. The transmission shop fell away in her mirror, a dark shape against the darker sky. Ahead of her, the route climbed toward Industrial Avenue, where the old ShopCo had been a lighting showroom in the seventies, a carpet outlet in the eighties, and now stood empty except for the occasional drag racer and the pigeons that lived in the ceiling. She had grown up watching her father run his race there, a stretch of pitted asphalt behind a strip mall that had seen better decades.
The Camaro was in bay three of her grandmother's garage, behind a roll-up door that had not been opened since August. She parked the truck outside and stood for a moment in the dark, listening to the wind move through the gaps in the siding. The garage smelled of concrete dust and the faint sweetness of the old wood stove her uncle had used to heat the place in the winters.
She found the key on a nail behind the electrical panel, where it had hung since the bank had signed the title over. The roll-up door rattled up on its tracks, the sound a long metallic yawn that the neighborhood dogs ignored. The overhead fluorescents clicked on in sequence, one, two, three, the third one buzzing with the particular frequency of a ballast that was about to give up. The Camaro sat under its drop cloth, the shape of it unmistakable, the long hood, the short deck, the cowl induction scoop that rose an inch above the hood line.
She pulled the cloth back. The paint was correct, code 71 Rally Green, a color her uncle had specified in a letter to his insurance company in 1996 that she still had in the box in her truck. The chrome bumpers caught the fluorescent light and threw it back in long, clean lines. The interior was black vinyl, the seats still carrying the creases from the restoration, the steering wheel a three-spoke unit with a woodgrain rim.
She sat behind the wheel. The seat was too far back. She adjusted it, and the mechanism moved with the smooth, oily ease of a machine that had been properly maintained. Her uncle had built the engine himself, a 396 bored sixty over, with a solid lifter cam and a set of heads that had been ported by a man in Detroit who was, by all accounts, a perfectionist and a drunk in equal measure. The car had dyno sheets in a folder in the trunk. It made 425 horsepower at the rear wheels, on a chassis that weighed 3,400 pounds without her in it.
Her uncle had died in 2014, six months after the restoration was complete. He had driven the car twice. She had driven it four times. The last time had been the morning of her wedding, which had not happened, because the man who was supposed to marry her had been killed two days before the ceremony in a single-vehicle accident on a road he had no business being on.
She started the engine. It turned over once, caught, and settled into the lopey idle of a big cam, the exhaust note a deep, rhythmic bark that bounced off the concrete walls and came back to her changed. The garage filled with the smell of unburned hydrocarbons, the heat of the catalytic converter warming the floor beneath the car. She let it idle for a minute, then revved it once, listening for any knock or rattle that did not belong.
None did.
She backed out of the bay and onto the street, the transmission engaging with a solid, mechanical certainty that felt like an old handshake. The route to the ShopCo was seven blocks, mostly residential, the houses dark at this hour, the streetlights casting their orange circles on empty sidewalks. She took the long way, not to warm the engine, but to delay the moment when she would have to explain to Rico Vela why she had agreed to this.
She had not yet decided what to say.
Rico was waiting at the ShopCo lot, leaning against a tow truck that did not belong to him. He was wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves cut off, a look he had been cultivating since high school and which had aged, in his favor, into something almost deliberate. His hair was longer than it had been at the funeral. He had a toothpick in his mouth, and he was talking to a man she did not recognize, a short, wide man in a NASCAR jacket who was looking at the Camaro with the expression of a man who had just been told his flight was canceled.
"Holloway," Rico said, pushing off the tow truck. "You made it. This is Pruitt. He is very excited about the Buick."
Pruitt nodded. He had a handshake that was all knuckles.
"Rico tells me you're racing for pink slips," Pruitt said. His voice had the rounded edges of someone who had grown up watching stock car racing on a television with rabbit ears.
"I'm racing to keep my car," Maren said. "Which is not the same thing."
"Semantics." Rico produced a folded piece of paper from his back pocket. It was a photocopy of a title, the Buick's VIN circled in red ink. "His is here. Yours is here. We go from a dig, best of three. First to win two. Quarter mile. Standard street rules. No nitrous. No slicks. If you lose, he gets the Camaro. If he loses, I get the Buick, and I sell it back to Jase for parts value, and everybody pretends this never happened."
"And if Jase finds out?"
"Jase finds out that his brother borrowed his car to win a street race against a woman he has a crush on, and he has a very complicated evening, and then he forgives me because he always forgives me, and we never speak about it."
Maren looked at the title. The VIN matched a car she had seen in Jase's garage the week before, a black Buick with a turbo six and an interior that still smelled like the original owner's cologne. It was a clean car. It was also, in the specific economy of late-night horsepower trades, probably worth about what her uncle's Camaro was worth, give or take a sentimental premium.
"What's the Buick run?"
Pruitt answered. "Mid-twelves on a good night."
Maren looked at Rico.
"She's a mid-eleven car," he said, with the particular restraint of a man who was trying not to grin. "On a bad night. On a very humid night with a tailwind."
"The track closed," she said.
"The track closed for insurance reasons. The asphalt didn't close. The asphalt is still right there, behind the carpet store, exactly the way it was in 1987."
She looked at Pruitt. Pruitt looked at her. Rico looked at both of them with the patient, slightly unhinged energy of a man who had bet everything on a coin flip and was trying to enjoy the spin.
"One condition," Maren said. "I pick the line."
Rico spread his hands. "Holloway. You can pick the line. You can pick the song. You can pick the prayer. I am here in a supportive capacity."
She turned the Camaro around and drove it to the far end of the lot, where the asphalt was older and the surface had a slight crown to it from years of frost heave. The quarter mile was measured by the cracks in the pavement, the same cracks her father had measured with a steel tape in 1994, when he had last run the strip in a car he had built himself.
She cut the engine. The exhaust ticking cooled in the night air. She could smell the carpet store, a permanent industrial odor that had soaked into the walls during the outlet years and had never quite left. Somewhere out on Route 9, a truck downshifted. The sound rolled across the empty lots and faded into the dark.
Rico appeared at her window. He had the tow truck parked at the starting line, its amber lights turning slowly, casting a slow orange circle on the pavement.
"Ready?"
"No."
"Good. That's the correct answer. I'll go flag Pruitt in."
He walked away. Maren sat behind the wheel and listened to the engine tick and the wind move through the broken windows of the carpet store. She thought about her uncle, who had spent the last year of his life sitting in this car, adjusting the idle mixture by ear, talking to the engine as if it were a horse he was trying to gentle. She thought about her father, who had run this strip in a GTO with a 455 and had never lost, not once, not in all the years she had watched him race.
She put the Camaro in neutral, set the parking brake, and got out. The asphalt was cold under her shoes. She walked the strip once, her footsteps loud in the empty lot, counting the cracks by habit. The crown was more pronounced near the center, where the old sewer line had settled. The traction would be better on the outside. The inside line would be shorter, but rougher.
She chose the outside.
Pruitt brought the Buick up beside her. The driver was smaller than she had expected, a man with a careful haircut and the focused, slightly distant expression of someone who did a lot of math for a living. He nodded once. She nodded back.
Rico stood between the cars, holding a flashlight that he did not need. "Gentlemen. Holloway. When I drop the flag, the world begins. Best of three. No nitrous. No slicks. No crying."
Maren got back in the Camaro. She buckled the harness, an aftermarket four-point her uncle had installed, the straps stiff with disuse. She put the car in first, let the clutch out to the engagement point, and held it there. The engine note dropped, then steadied. She could feel the cam through the floor, a low vibration that was almost a purr.
Rico raised the flag.
The amber lights on the tow truck turned slowly.
The Buick's turbo whistled.
Maren held her breath.
The flag fell.
The flag fell and the Camaro's clutch met the floor in the same instant Maren let it out. The rear tires bit, broke traction, bit again, and then the car straightened and went. The world outside the windows blurred into a long smear of gravel and sky. The shifter moved through second with a clean mechanical snick, and the engine note climbed past the rust-tinged threshold where it stopped sounding like transportation and started sounding like a warning.
Beside her, the Buick was already ahead. Not by much. A length, maybe less, the turbo's whine a high, thin needle threaded over the deeper growl of Maren's small-block. Pruitt had launched better. He had launched better and his car made more power and his car had four tires of contact patch designed for exactly this surface and Maren had none of those things. She had a thirty-year-old car on sixty-year-old asphalt with a driver who had not raced in fifteen years and a transmission that liked to fight her in second.
She shifted to third early, before the powerband, because she did not trust the synchros. The Buick pulled a half-car ahead through the lights. The Christmas tree was a smear of green turning to gold, the pre-stage and stage bulbs stacked on the tow truck's tailgate, and Maren watched them from the corner of her eye because she had forgotten, for one stupid heartbeat, that she was not supposed to have a Christmas tree. She had built one in her head. She had built it anyway. The gold light found her peripheral vision and held it, and the Buick kept pulling away, and Maren drove the car the way her father had taught her, which was to say she stopped trying to think and let the thing under her hands do the work.
The strip ended. The turnaround was a wide gravel apron, lit by a single yard light on a tilting pole. Maren turned the Camaro without braking, using the handbrake to rotate the rear, and the car's back end stepped out maybe a foot farther than she had wanted. The tires barked once. She straightened it. She caught her breath. She had forgotten to breathe.
The Buick was already pointed the other way. Pruitt had been faster through the turnaround by a good two seconds. He knew the gravel. He knew the lights. He had the home-field advantage and he had used it without hesitation, the way a man uses a tool he has held all his life.
Maren pulled up beside him. The cars idled, the engines falling into a low conversation of cooling metal and tired belts. The night air came through the Camaro's cracked window vents and smelled of diesel and cut grass. From the turnout, she could hear Rico's voice, a low indistinct rumble, and the lighter clatter of Tasha Greer laughing at something. Someone, she thought, had probably already bet on the Buick.
She did not wait for the flag.
"Two," she said, to no one.
Pruitt looked across the gap between the cars. He did not smile. He gave her a small, professional nod, the kind a man gives when he has done the job he came to do and is willing to do it again. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been waiting fifteen years for someone to make him work for it.
Rico raised the flag.
The amber lights came on again. The Buick's turbo spooled, a high reedy whine climbing. Maren watched the lights instead of Pruitt this time, because Pruitt was going to be there when she needed him to be there, and the lights were the variable. The gold light found her again, on schedule, and she was already moving when the green hit, the clutch out, the engine roaring into the rev limiter, the tires hooking and pulling the car forward in one long shuddering lunge.
The Buick was even with her through first gear. Even through second. Pruitt had launched cleaner this time, but he was also shifting earlier, he was being conservative, and Maren was not being conservative about anything. She held second until the engine screamed for third, then shifted hard and felt the transmission resist, then forgive her, then pull. The Camaro's nose lifted a quarter inch. The traction held. The outside line held. The Buick began to fall back, half a car, then a car, then a car and a half by the time the lights came back into view.
She had won the second pass.
She turned the Camaro around with the handbrake again, more gently this time, and pulled up beside the Buick. Pruitt was looking at her through the open window. His expression had changed. The careful distance was gone. He looked like a man who had been slapped awake.
"Good shift," he said, across the gap.
"Bad shift," Maren said. "The synchros are shot in third."
"You made it work."
"I made it work."
He nodded, once, and looked forward. His hands on the wheel were tight. He wanted the third pass in the worst way, and he was trying not to show it, and he was failing.
Rico did not bother with the flag. He held up three fingers, then two, then one. The amber lights came on.
Maren watched the gold light come for her. She watched it arrive. She let the clutch out and the world dissolved again into gravel and speed and the long shuddering scream of an engine that had no business still running. The Buick launched well. Pruitt was on his game now, the careful accountant replaced by something sharper, something that had grown up on this strip and remembered, in the muscles of his hands, how to hurt a car down a quarter mile. The Buick pulled ahead through first gear. Through second. Through the shift to third, which Maren missed by a fraction, the transmission grinding for one sickening half-second before the gear caught and the engine note changed and the Camaro lurched forward and began, very slowly, to come back.
The lights were coming. Maren watched the gold light find her again, on schedule, and for the first time in fifteen years she thought about what it would feel like to lose this race. She thought about it and she did not let it change anything. She held the wheel steady and she drove the line her father had taught her, the outside line, the line that gave up distance for traction, and the Buick pulled ahead by a nose, by a hair, by the width of a headlight, and then the strip ended and the cars idled in the gravel apron and the night came back, quiet and cool and smelling of diesel and cut grass.
"Goddammit," Pruitt said, quietly, into his own windshield.
Maren sat in the Camaro and breathed. The engine ticked as it cooled. The transmission whined in third. The cam in the rear whined in sympathy. She did not move. She did not unbuckle. She sat in the car her father had given her and she tried to remember what it had felt like to drive that GTO down this strip, the 455 under the hood, the tires hooking on the outside line, the Christmas tree gold light finding her at the end of every pass. She tried to remember and she could not quite get there, but she could feel the shape of it, the way you can feel the shape of a room you have not entered in fifteen years.
She unbuckled. She got out.
Pruitt was already out of the Buick, standing by his door, his hands in his pockets, looking at the Camaro with the expression of a man who had just been shown something he had not known existed. He looked up when her door opened.
"Holloway," he said. "That was the best pass I've ever made."
She walked around to the front of the Camaro and looked at the Buick. It was a beautiful machine, low and wide and serious in the way that serious machines are serious. She could see the tape marks on the tires from the previous passes. She could see the small cracks in the headlight covers where gravel had hit them.
"You made two," she said.
"One," he said. "That last one. The first two were just racing. The last one was driving." He paused. "I'm sorry I won it."
"Don't be. I made you drive it."
He considered this. He nodded, slowly, the way a man nods when he has been told something true and is trying to decide whether to be flattered or insulted. He decided, apparently, on both.
"I'd like to do it again sometime," he said. "When you have a working transmission."
"I'll put it on the list."
He held out his hand. She took it. His handshake was dry and firm and brief, the handshake of a man who did not waste motion. He let go and walked back to the Buick and got in and drove away down the strip, the headlights sweeping across the gravel, and Maren watched him go until the red taillights disappeared around the bend at the turnout.
The turnout was quiet. Rico was leaning against the tow truck, arms folded, watching her with an expression she could not read. Tasha Greer was sitting on the trunk of the Lincoln, legs swinging, a half-eaten chili dog in her hand. Donut Rat was nowhere to be seen. Wendell Pritchard was standing by the picnic table, holding a clipboard and a pen, looking at her with the look of a man who has just watched a thing he did not believe in become a thing he could not deny.
Maren walked over to the picnic table. She sat down on the bench. The wood was cold through her jeans. She put her hands on the table and looked at them. They were shaking.
"Hollis," Rico said, from the tow truck.
She did not look up. "Don't."
"You drove that car like your old man."
"I drove it like me."
"That's what I said."
She looked up. Rico was smiling, the kind of smile that did not involve his mouth so much as the rest of his face. Tasha Greer was also smiling, broadly, with chili on her chin. Wendell Pritchard was writing something on his clipboard with great intensity, as if the act of writing could keep him from having to feel anything.
"I need a beer," Maren said.
Rico reached into the cab of the tow truck and produced a can, already open, already cold. He walked it over and set it on the table in front of her.
"You also need a new transmission," he said.
"I know."
"And a new clutch."
"I know."
"And probably a new driveshaft, the way you were shifting."
"Rico."
"I'm just saying."
She took the beer. She drank. It was cold and it was terrible, some kind of macro lager that tasted like beer-flavored water, and it was the best thing she had ever tasted in her life. She drank half of it in one long pull and set the can down and looked at the Camaro, sitting where she had left it, the engine ticking, the headlights still on, the small red eyes of the taillights watching her from across the lot.
She thought about her father. She thought about the GTO. She thought about the gold light at the end of the strip and the way it had found her, three times, on schedule, the way it had found him, she was sure, a hundred times before her. She thought about Pruitt's face when he had looked across the gap between the cars and seen her for the second time. She thought about the way the Camaro had felt under her hands, alive and stubborn and slightly broken, the way a thing you love is always slightly broken.
She finished the beer. She set the empty can on the table. She stood up.
"I'm going home," she said.
"Need a ride?" Rico asked.
"I'm going to drive."
"You sure?"
"I'm going to drive."
He nodded. He did not argue. He walked back to the tow truck and started loading the Camaro, gesturing for Tasha Greer to move the Lincoln, and Maren walked to her car and got in and sat for a moment with her hands on the wheel. The engine was off. The transmission whined in third. The night was quiet. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of someone starting a car in the turnout, and then the sound of that car driving away, and then nothing.
She turned the key. The engine caught on the second try. The Camaro idled roughly for a moment, then smoothed out, the small-block settling into a low, steady pulse that she could feel through the seat and the steering wheel and the soles of her shoes. She put it in first. She let the clutch out. She drove home.
The strip unrolled behind her, empty, lit by a single yard light on a tilting pole. She did not look back. She watched the road, and the road watched her, and the gold light in her peripheral vision faded, slowly, as she turned onto the highway and pointed the car toward home.
The highway was a dark ribbon and the Camaro ate it in long, easy pulls of torque, the small-block hammering out a rhythm that was almost musical, almost conversation, the way a heartbeat is conversation when you have been alone in a room too long. Maren drove with her left hand on the wheel and her right hand on the gear lever and her windows down because the night was warm and because she wanted to smell the air, which smelled of cut hay and cooling asphalt and the faint, sweet rot of a dead skunk somewhere in the median. She passed the Quillan place with its dark windows and its collapsed porch awning. She passed the old Pickett farm with its new NO HUNTING sign nailed to a fencepost. She passed the turnoff to the lake and did not take it, though for a moment the Camaro seemed to want to, seemed to lean that direction the way a dog leans toward a remembered scent.
She thought about the title. She had been turning it over in her mind since the first turn of the engine, the way you turn over a coin in your fingers, feeling the weight of it, the ridged edge. The title had been in the glovebox. She had pulled it out at the light on Route 9, the one that had been blinking yellow since the budget cuts, and she had read it under the orange sodium glow, and she had felt the coin drop.
RICO M. VELA. The middle initial was a surprise. She had not known he had a middle name. She had not known he had a middle initial that was an M, and she did not know what the M stood for, and she supposed she would never know. The address on the title was a P.O. box in Deming, New Mexico. The purchase date was five years old. The lien section was blank. The odometer reading was 147,632, and there was a small box checked that said NOT ACTUAL MILEAGE, and a line above it that said WARNING: ODOMETER DISCREPANCY.
She had folded the title and put it back in the glovebox. She had driven the rest of the way home with the feeling she had now, which was the feeling of a woman who had bought a ghost.
The diner was dark when she pulled into the gravel lot. The neon sign was off. The chrome trim caught the moonlight and threw it back in dim, fractured lines. She killed the engine. She sat for a moment and listened to the cooling ticks, the small metallic percussion of a heat-cycled engine settling toward ambient, and then she got out and stretched and walked around the front of the Camaro and looked at it.
It looked good. It looked like a car that had been raced hard and won. The scoop was canted slightly to the left from the impact with Pruitt's bumper. The passenger-side taillight was cracked. The front valance was missing two of its four plastic screws. There was a long, shallow crease along the rocker panel where Pruitt's tire had kissed it at the start. None of it was structural. All of it was cosmetic. All of it was the kind of damage that a person with a socket set and a Saturday could fix, and she had a socket set, and she had Saturdays, and the diner did not open until eleven on Saturdays, which meant she had four hours in the morning to work before she had to put on the apron and pour the coffee and pretend that the world was a place where people came in and sat down and ordered eggs and paid her money and left.
She went inside. She flipped the switches on the breaker panel in the back hall, and the kitchen lights came on, and the buzzing fluorescent in the back office came on, and the red light on the phone came on, indicating a message. She pressed play.
"Holloway, it's Pruitt. Look, I just wanted to say, that was some real nice driving. I mean that. You got me fair and square, and I, uh. I want you to know I ain't sore about it. Well. I am a little sore. About the bumper. But the race, no. Anyway. I pulled the title out of the glovebox when I was getting my stuff out of the car, and I, uh. I think there's a problem. The title's got my brother's name on it, not mine. I been driving the car for two years, but it was never in my name. I was gonna transfer it this spring, and then I, uh. I didn't. Anyway. You might want to look into that before you go registering it or anything. I ain't trying to be a sore winner. I mean a sore loser. I mean. You know what I mean. Call me if you need to. Okay. Bye."
The message ended. The tape clicked. The red light stayed on. Maren stood in the dark office and looked at the phone and felt the coin in her hand again, and this time it had a sharp edge, and she had been holding it wrong.
She played the message again. She played it a third time. She sat down in the office chair, which was her grandmother's chair, a green vinyl thing that had been in the diner since 1962, and she put her hands flat on the desk and looked at them. They were still. They were not shaking. They were the hands of a woman who had once audited a manufacturing firm in Waukegan and found six hundred thousand dollars in misallocated overhead, and who had then driven home and cried in her car for twenty minutes in the parking lot of a Steak 'n Shake, and who had then gone inside and ordered a milkshake and eaten it slowly and driven home again.
She picked up the phone. She dialed Rico's number. He answered on the second ring, which meant he had been holding the phone, which meant he had been waiting.
"Hey," he said.
"You didn't tell me the car wasn't in your name."
A pause. She heard the creak of the tow truck seat. She heard the faint hiss of the CB radio. "Now, see," he said, "I was gonna mention that."
"When."
"Eventually."
"Rico."
"Look, the title's clean. It's just got the wrong name on it. My brother, he, look, he left the car with me when he went back to Pendleton, and I been driving it, and I was gonna put it in my name, and then I figured I'd put it in your name when you bought it, but then we got to talking about the race, and then Pruitt showed up, and then there was a whole thing, and I never got around to it."
"Pruitt called me."
"Yeah, he called me too. About ten minutes ago. He's real sorry. He feels bad."
"About the title or about the race?"
"Both. He's real sorry about both."
She closed her eyes. She opened them. The green chair creaked under her. "Rico, the title's in his name. His legal name. Not yours."
"His name's the same as mine. We're brothers. Same last name. It's just, the transfer paperwork, it never went through. It's an administrative thing. I'll fix it. I'll call the DMV in the morning. It's a Monday, so they'll be open. I'll get the form, I'll sign it, I'll get it notarized, I'll mail it in. It's a thirty-day process, but it's clean. There's no lien. There's no salvage. It's just a paperwork thing."
She sat with that. The fluorescent buzzed. The phone cord curled against the desk like a sleeping snake. Outside, a truck passed on the highway, its headlights sweeping the parking lot and moving on. The red light on the answering machine blinked, patient, waiting for the next message that was never going to come.
"Thirty days," she said.
"Give or take."
"During which time I cannot register the car."
"You can register it. You just can't get the title in your name until the paperwork clears."
"During which time the car is, legally, still your brother's property."
"He's not gonna want it back. He left it with me. He's in Pendleton. He's got a job. He's got a kid. He ain't coming back for a '69 Camaro with a blown 350 and a cracked taillight."
"During which time," she said, and her voice was very even, very measured, the voice she had used in the Waukegan audit meetings, the voice that had made six men in suits sit up straighter in their chairs, "if I drive the car, and I get pulled over, and the officer runs the plate, the registration is going to come back to a P.O. box in New Mexico belonging to a man I have never met, who is not you."
"Technically, yes."
"Technically."
"It's still a free country, Maren. They ain't gonna, like, confiscate the car. They'll just give you a fix-it ticket. You pay the fee, you show the paperwork, it's done."
She rubbed the bridge of her nose. She thought about the diner. She thought about the mortgage. She thought about the fact that the fryer had started making a sound last Tuesday that sounded like a small animal in distress, and that she had not yet called the repair guy because the repair guy cost two hundred and fifty dollars just to show up, and that two hundred and fifty dollars was the same amount as three months of car insurance on a vehicle she did not technically own. "Rico," she said. "I need you to understand something."
"Okay."
"I need you to understand that I did not race that car to win a ghost."
"I know."
"I need you to understand that I cannot afford to fix a ghost. I cannot afford to insure a ghost. I cannot afford to register a ghost. I cannot afford to park a ghost in my lot and have Pruitt drive by and see it and remember the race and remember that his brother-in-law's car is sitting in a diner parking lot with the wrong name on the title, and start a thing about it."
"He's not gonna start a thing."
"Pruitt will absolutely start a thing. Pruitt has been starting things since he was twelve years old. He started a thing with my grandmother about the height of her hedge in 1987. It went to the township. There were letters."
"The hedge thing was real, though. That hedge was a menace."
"Rico."