Terence looked at the leering faces and protruding ears on a row of brown pottery jugs-ceramic jack o’lanterns, he thought. Still wondering if the conversation had a subtext, he made a guess. “Would you like any of these pieces as a keepsake?”
She smiled. “That’s kind of you, but they would wreak havoc with my Williamsburg decor. Your father liked American primitive, but I favor the cavalier-in-denial school of decorating-the furniture of the settlers who pretended they were still in London instead of on the eighteenth-century frontier.”
“What would my father have wanted me to do with all this?” he asked.
Mrs. Nash shrugged. “Enjoy them if you can. If not, there’s a good auction house in Asheville. Brunk’s. Collectors prize these things. Or there are museums and universities that would be glad to have them.”
“I was hoping to get some idea of what my father was like from seeing his things, but this isn’t telling me much, except maybe why he didn’t stay married to my mother. She’s a cavalier-in-denial type, too.”
“Why didn’t you ever come to see him?”
Terence hesitated. “Shyness, I guess. He never asked me and I was afraid to push it. I thought about going when I turned twenty-one, but I had so many other things to do. Job hunting, moving…I thought I’d like to have figured out who I’d grown up to be before I met him. I always thought I’d have time for him when the chaos subsided in my life.”
“We always think that. I guess we’d go crazy if we didn’t. Well, if knowing your father’s interests will get you any closer to him, you might want to take a look in the den there.” She nodded toward a closed door at one end of the kitchen. “That was Tom’s study. Go look.”
Terence turned the handle of the door, wondering if he were about to be inundated with more face jugs, quilts, and wood carvings, but the exhibits displayed in the paneled den suggested quite a different sort of museum.
The pine-paneled walls were covered with color photographs of men in coveralls leaning against brightly painted race cars. A bookcase held volumes of coffee-table books on racing and a shelf of small die-cast cars. There were hats and clocks and calendars. Terence noticed that the white number 3 figured prominently in most of these displays, and the same familiar face-a chicken hawk of a man with dark shades and a caterpillar mustache looked back from most of the photos. Terence barely glanced at the leather sofa, the oak desk, or the big-screen television, afterthoughts in a room devoted to an obsession.
When Terence was nervous, he smiled and smiled, waiting for someone to come to his rescue before he said the wrong thing.
“Tom wanted to do this himself in his younger days,” said Mrs. Nash from the doorway. “He told me he felt deprived because his family was too well-off to run moonshine, so he used to volunteer to make runs for some of the poor farmers hereabouts.”
Sarah Nash nodded. “Nearly fifty years ago now. And it wasn’t just Junior Johnson. That’s how most of that first bunch learned to drive. Outrunning the law. Then there were the little races-Wilkesboro, Hickory, Darlington. Your father raced in those a few times-against Ralph Earnhardt, to hear him tell it. Some of them worked in the mills or the furniture factory to support themselves. Raced instead of sleeping, sometimes. He took pride in that.”
“Did you know him back then?”
“No,” she said. “My husband owned the factory. But that was a long time ago. By the time Tom tried to make a go of racing for a living, NASCAR had become big business and it took serious money sponsors and a team of mechanics to keep you in a ride. He said he missed his chance. Always regretted it, I think.”
“But he still followed the sport, obviously.”
“Yes. Especially Dale.” She nodded toward the man with the number 3 car. “Sometimes I think Tom gave up fighting that cancer after Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona. Anyhow, the rest of the items in this house can wait until you’ve had time to decide what to do. The one thing you have to make up your mind about fairly quickly is this.” She walked to the desk and picked up a travel agent’s brochure. “Tom had already paid for this trip. And you need to decide what to do about that.”
Terence took the brochure. A Dale Earnhardt Memorial Tour. He scanned the contents. Ten days, beginning in August…visit Winston Cup Speedways…see the races at Bristol and Darlington…“My father planned to do this?”
She nodded. “Almost enough to stay alive for, in spite of the pain.”
He looked around the room, at all the familiar faces of NASCAR’s heroes looking out at him from signed photographs. The Allisons. The Pettys. Cale Yarborough. At the artifacts of a pastime he had watched only from a distance. Familiar faces whose images had also been taped to his walls at home-much to the consternation of his mother. Funny thing about DNA, he thought. You spend your whole life assuming that your absent parent is a total stranger with whom you have nothing in common, and then one day you walk into a room and discover another version of yourself.
“I wish I had known him,” said Terence.
“I wish you had, too. I think you two would have got along well.”
He looked again at the travel brochure. “A ticket to Bristol!” he exclaimed. “They’re impossible to come by.”
Sarah Nash nodded. “That’s exactly what Tom said. There’s two tickets there by the way. Tom gave me one for Christmas.”
“Oh. You were an Earnhardt fan, too?”
“Not the way your father was,” she said. “I respected him.” She paused for a moment, as if searching for a diplomatic way of putting it. Then she smiled. “I thought he was a roughneck, if you want the truth. Tom used to enjoy teasing me about that. I’m partial to Bill Elliott myself. But Tom didn’t want to go on the tour alone. Couldn’t, maybe. He was pretty sick by then. So there’s two places booked on the tour, if you’d like to take a friend with you.”
If Terence had thought about it for even ten more seconds, his practicality would have overruled the impulse. He heard the back door open and then the sound of footsteps: the mourners were filing into the kitchen to pay their respects and the moment would be lost. “I want to go,” he said quickly. He could do it. The tour was months away, and he had vacation time coming. “Will you come with me? It’s the one thing I can find in common with my dad. We could talk about him along the way.”
“A memorial tour to Tom Palmer as well as to Dale Earnhardt?” Sarah Nash sighed. “Well, I did promise him that I’d go,” she said. “Me. On a Dale Earnhardt memorial bus tour, God help me. Wherever Tom is, he must be laughing right now.”
Chapter IX
After the obligatory posing for photos of hat waving and three peace salutes against the backdrop of the giant Earnhardt face, the Number Three Pilgrims threaded their way toward the Speedway entrance through a solid mass of race day crowd: spectators, ticket hawkers, photographers, and souvenir vendors. As they walked, Harley pointed out a catwalk bridge shielded with red nylon strips of privacy covering. The elevated walkway snaked its way up from an enclosed area of the parking lot and led down to a private entrance to the building. “Anybody know what that is?” Harley asked, pointing up at it. “You don’t have to raise your hand, Matthew. Lord knows this isn’t school. Okay, then, what?”
Matthew’s eyes grew round with awe as he contemplated the walkway above them. “That’s where
“That’s right,” said Harley, remembering the feeling of having several hundred people look up to you even if you’re only five feet eight. You get used to that feeling. He had walked up there once. Up there with Elliott and Earnhardt and everybody. He was glad that there was nobody up there now to see him down here. “Well, come on,
