Daddy Issues

It isn’t the first forced-bonding experiment Danny Ackerman has cooked up in eleven weeks.

There was the engine rebuild. Three days in his garage, me sleeping across Monte Carlo’s backseat,

eating chicken tenders out of Styrofoam and showering at a rest stop with a quarter in the slot.

There was the yacht club. Yes. Yacht club in Idaho. National sponsorship summit. Where I wore a dress and he wore a tie clipped to the dick side.

Now this. Sunday at midnight, glued to his hip. Two days at Sawtooth Speedway. Sleeping in his forty-foot trailer. No plus-ones. Given, not complained about.

Racing is dark right now.

Handful of quick-money shows between the end of summer and the Icebreaker at Firebird, and the shows run mid-week so the authorities won’t know they’re missing out.

Illegal.

Depressing. I can handle it.

Standard operating procedure for a Boyle.

My mother is definitely devoting every spare second to her bored daughter (that’s a joke, she won’t

phone).

Instead, I’ll get updates/shopping lists on Sawtooth High’s petri dishes. The neighbor across the street on her fourth pregnancy and a screener for a dating site.

Search terms: birth control.

Diane may not check in, but I checked the forecast twice. Sixteen percent rain on Saturday. I packed the purple umbrella.

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At first glance, it could be a line for a bounce house at a Fourth of July barbecue. It’s a line to sign a waiver, giving the Sawtooth Speedway permission to kill me.

Triplicate pads so the signature line sits low—and the cord on this motherfucker’s pen doesn’t reach.

I hold the clipboard in the air. My hand cramps. That’s not the only reason I take my sweet time—and no, it’s not so the men sitting behind the table can peep my cleavage.

One of them is signing something with KNUCKLES tattooed on his four fingers. One is texting with both perverted thumbs on an Android with a belt clip. The third wipes his nose on his forearm.

Knuckles reads the name at the top of the form.

“Barbie Boyle.”

Here it comes. Eleven years of practice and I still wait for it.

Nothing. He flips the waiver and hands the pad to the guy behind me. “Drop it in the slot. Next.”

What I’m looking at now is a big denim ass, because somebody has parked himself between me and the table. Bigger than all three of them. Six-five easy. Dirty-blond hair cut close from the flat back of his skull to the collar of a gray Dickies shirt with ACKERMAN over the pocket.

Comma-shaped burn scar on the back of his left hand. Bruises down the edge of his jaw. Crimson rag hanging out of his back pocket.

“Thank you.” He takes the pen and pad out of my hands and squares them on top of the stack.

That I let him surprises me.

Walking out, I look back and he’s looking at my ass. So I run the experiment: if I put on another show for the men at the gate, does Ackerman body-check anybody twice?

I try it. Up on my toes, hips loose, turning to face front. Short shorts are mandatory at these things. Not for comfort. Men extend a hell of a lot more respect when they can see the camel toe.

Nobody hides anybody’s eyes from anything. I don’t get to be disappointed long, because the inside of his truck is a kiln.

The window’s down. The door’s open. Doesn’t matter. I’m peeling off my Sawtooth T-shirt before my ass hits the bench seat.

Father Time clomps around the front, does something insulting to the rearview with two fingers, rolls the window up, and slams his door.

“No AC?”

He puts the key in. “We had AC. In Nixon.”

The two-word autobiography. He loves that one.

My toes cook on the dash. Black polish chipped down to nothing, and I wiggle them anyway. “So. Nothing fancy. When do I get to drive?”

“You can test the brakes when I stop for gas.”

The Allman Brothers tattoo on his forearm is a yardstick for judgment calls. He uses the mushroom on it to scratch under his jaw.

Direct hit, ground floor. This might be a summer thing, but I’m not just driving that car. I’m going to use it up.

My phone buzzes. I know who it is, so I let it sit. Didn’t answer the guys from last night either.

Ignore a man and he’ll never pass up a chance to punish you for it. That’s why I feed him.

It pings again, and now I have to look.

have fun this weekend better than sitting home picking sand out of your cooter like me

I read it out loud so Danny can hear how much I want his answer. “She says you’re lucky to get out for the weekend.”

“Yup.”

Pit setup pays like a double at Red Lobster, which is what Ackerman hiring me two, three days a week all summer amounts to. Spring, summer, same groundhog day—gym twice, decompression playlists saved for the speed limit. Alanis, Ludacris, Mary J.

The quarter-mile clay oval sits eleven miles southwest of Pocatello, and it’s a bastard to find. Fork off the main road, under a cow tunnel, out at the back end of a wooden grandstand.

I grew up on the Mississippi, where at least there was a casino. This place is a double-wide at the bottom of a valley ringed by foothills and tailing piles.

Run by normals, though. Their sign says so. LET’S GET READY TO CRUMBLE—cookie dough, whipped cream, and Oreos. Rocky Mountain oysters. Mountain Dew in the twenty-ounce. Home of the Summer Sizzler. NO REFUNDS ON WEATHER, hand-lettered on the concession trailer.

The draw is the clay. Baked dry all morning, soaked by the tanker truck the second afternoon hits. Diesel and brake dust go straight up into twelve rows of benches and thighs in tube skirts. The ground gives under my heels from a