top of things,” one of her pet phrases. Jim resolved to send her a postcard of a speedway or a stock car from somewhere along the way, just for the pleasure it would afford him to picture her dismay at receiving it.
Jim looked again at Arlene. Soon it would be time to wake her up and find out if this would be a good day or a bad day. The people on the tour had been nice about it, though. He was glad of that. The other ladies all took turns making sure that Arlene did all right at the rest areas, and they’d talk to her over meals-better still, they listened, no matter how much she rambled or got tangled up trying to tell them something. He was glad that they’d come. Whether she remembered or not, Arlene had come to say good-bye to Dale, but he had come to say good-bye to Arlene.
“So,” said Harley, “next stop Martinsville, right?”
Ratty nodded. “I-81 east to Roanoke and then south on 220. All four-lane. With this bus, I’d say maybe five hours, not counting lunch.”
“Let’s eat fast food for lunch along the way,” said Harley. “For dinner we can go to Clarence’s Steak House near the Speedway. It’s a landmark. All the drivers used to eat there, and it can’t be too far from where we’re staying. Where are we staying, by the way?’
“Days Inn on 220, a mile or two from the track,” said Ratty. “Since we’ve got the place to ourselves, there’s no problem. We can eat anywhere you want.”
“Good,” said Harley. “This will be an easy day. We ought to be done by four o’clock.”
“Enjoy it while you can,” said Ratty. “ ’Cause once we get south of Charlotte, there’s so many miles between tracks that you’ll get saddle sores from riding on this bus two to three hundred miles a day.”
“I know,” said Harley. “Atlanta to Daytona takes forever.”
Too drowsy to bother with talking or even to play his Game Boy, Matthew Hinshaw pressed his cheek against the cool glass of the window to watch the gray pavement of the Interstate slide past. The bus was traveling east on a broad highway called I-81, and he thought they might already have crossed into Virginia, but he wasn’t sure. He might have closed his eyes for a few moments and missed the road sign. The land looked the same as it had in Tennessee-a wide green valley bordered on either side by darker green mountains. He had never been in either state before, and he had hoped for some dramatic changes in the scenery to mark the boundary. The silver expanse of a tractor trailer pulled alongside the bus for a moment, obscuring his view, and for an instant he thought it was his father’s rig keeping pace with their journey, and that any moment now the bus would pull level with the cab of the truck and he would find himself looking into his father’s dead eyes.
He blinked a few times to clear the smoke from his thoughts, careful not to let any tears fall on his cheeks. All he had to do was turn around and start talking to Mr. Knight or to any of the other passengers, and the spell would be broken, but he remembered something the counselors had said in one of their sessions: that he would not be able to move on until he faced what was bothering him. So he held his peace.
Maybe his father had driven this highway before, but he wasn’t here now. His 18-wheeler, its cab so high that Matthew had to stand on a stool to get in, had ended up on I-93 north of Concord, like a giant metal frog in a puddle of oil and broken glass. The image was clear in his mind, but he realized now that he probably had never seen it. In the hospital, they had told him over and over that he had been unconscious when the rescue squad pulled him out through the window of the cab. The doctors thought that Matthew would stop remembering it if they could convince him that he had not actually seen it, but it hadn’t worked that way. His imagination, fed on a lifetime of TV car chases and movie collisions, was more than equal to the task of fashioning an image of the wreck. He dreamed it every night for weeks after the accident, but the nurses never knew it, because he neither screamed nor cried when the images jolted him awake.
His father was dead. Okay. And his mother-might as well be. She wasn’t going to wake up. They hadn’t wanted to tell him that for a long time, but finally they took him to see her, and a tall man in a white coat had explained it all very carefully. The man kept looking around nervously, as if he wanted somebody to come quickly in case Matthew started to scream, but he hadn’t. The first time he saw his mother lying in that hospital bed, white and shrunken amidst all the tubes, he had been so numb that he couldn’t have made a noise if they’d asked him to.
He just kept staring at the wax doll that had been his mother, while the man in the white coat showed him a chart and explained that his mother wasn’t going to die, but that she wasn’t going to wake up, either.
“But who’s going to stay with me?” he had finally asked.
At that, the hospital people had brightened as if he’d just answered a particularly hard question. You tell us, they’d more or less said. Who else have you got?
He had explained to them that he didn’t even belong in New Hampshire. Not really. His dad was a long-haul trucker, so he hadn’t been around much, but this one time he had got some days off in July, and he’d been taking Matthew and his mom to the New Hampshire Speedway to see the July race. They hadn’t made it, though. They were riding over from upstate New York (
And there wasn’t anybody else. Dad was an orphan, and his mother’s mother had just died of a heart attack the winter before. Maybe there were distant relatives, but nobody he knew. Nobody who wanted him.
They explained that New Hampshire would take care of him, since the wreck happened there. So he was never going to get to go home, back to his school and his friends. His dad had turned the stupid truck over-maybe he had been arguing with Mom and not watching the road. That wouldn’t be anything new. It was all his dad’s fault for having the wreck, but Matthew and his mom were the ones being punished for it. She wasn’t going to see or hear anything ever again, and Matthew was now a prisoner in New Hampshire.
It turns out that they didn’t have orphanages anymore. Not like the kind you see in old movies around Christmastime. Nowadays, kids without parents went to group homes for a few months while the state scurried around trying to find them a new set of parents. He didn’t have any say in the matter. Whoever wanted him could have him-like the dog pound, he thought.
They kept him for a couple of weeks in the hospital, because he’d had some broken bones and various injuries from the wreck. Later, he had to spend a couple of hours a week talking to a marshmallow of a woman who was forever dabbing at her own moist nose with the tissues meant for her patients. “How does that make you feel?” she would ask him, leaning toward him until her black plastic glasses almost touched his nose.
He didn’t feel anything, but he knew that was the wrong answer. If he said that, he might have to come even more times a week to see the marshmallow woman. He tried to work out what she wanted him to say. “Sad,” he said at last. “I feel sad.”
Most of the time he sat through the counseling sessions playing Eminem in his head. “Cleaning Out My Closet.” That said it all. Matthew thought they should have played that at his father’s funeral. Every time he thought he might cry in counseling, he’d crank up Eminem’s voice in his mind until the numbness came back. The marshmallow woman didn’t try too hard to get him to open up, though. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that in Child Services, if you were quiet and did what they told you to, they forgot about you. There were too many kids with problems on the outside; the kids with problems on the inside were easy to overlook.
His bruises from the accident had nearly faded away before he figured out what it was he really did feel, which was that “I feel sad” had been the truth, but the rest of the sentence would be, “…sad that Dad wasn’t alone in the truck when he wrecked it, but not sad that he’s dead, because he was never around much anyhow.”
He had breezed in from one of his long hauls with speedway tickets, and announced that they were going to have a family outing. He had a short run in the truck that weekend in the vicinity of Concord, so they’d ride along with him, and go on to the track after he made the delivery. Matthew’s mother had been doubtful about the idea. Would he get into trouble taking them along as passengers on his run? Matthew knew that she’d have been just as happy to watch the race on television. She didn’t like the noise and the crowds of the speedway itself, and she was always worried that things cost too much. But she had allowed herself to be persuaded to go along. After all, Matthew didn’t get to spend a lot of time with his dad, and both of them were so excited at the prospect of going. They never made it to the race, though. The wreck happened on the Interstate just a few miles from Loudon. The last lap, Matthew thought to himself. Just like Earnhardt-almost home free, but not quite. He had never cried for his
