Thirty Days

You read it standing up, in the middle of bay two, with Nash's sprint car ticking as it cools and the radio playing something about a highway you'll never drive on.

Dear Ms. Wrobel,

We are delighted to offer you the position of Associate Race Engineer with Valcourt Racing, reporting to our Chief Engineer and supporting our No. 7 prototype entry for the coming season.

There's more. A salary that makes you read it twice, because it's more than you and Jo will pay yourselves this year combined. Then three times what you'll pay yourselves. Moving costs. Health insurance with a dental plan. A start date: Monday, October 6.

And at the bottom, in its own paragraph, as if somebody wanted to make sure it couldn't be missed:

This offer will remain open for thirty days from the date of this letter. We ask that you respond no later than September 20.

It's signed in blue ink with a big confident loop: Lux Valcourt, Team Principal. And under the signature, in the same blue ink, handwritten:

Jodie. I've seen the dyno sheets from that barn of yours. Nobody builds like that by accident. Come build for me. L.

The letter is dated August 21. Friday. You think about Jo in the parking lot on Friday afternoon, pacing, phone pressed to her ear, forty minutes, hanging up fast when you came out with two Cokes. Spam call. Her ears pink.

Twenty-eight days.

You fold the letter along its creases, slide it back into the envelope, slide the envelope under the foam liner in the fourth drawer exactly where it was. You close the drawer. You open it again and push the envelope a quarter-inch further back, because that's where it was, you think, maybe. You close the drawer.

You don't find the 9/16 socket. You forget you were looking for it.

Jo gets back from Portsmouth at four with a box of fuel filters and a bag of beef jerky, and she talks the whole time she's unloading. The guy at the parts counter tried to sell her a cold-air intake for a minivan. A lady in the parking lot asked if she was "lost." She saw a heron on the river, just standing there in the shallows, staring at nothing, like it had a lot on its mind.

"Like you," she says, and bumps your shoulder.

You bump hers back. You're so careful about it that it's not right, and she frowns at you for half a second.

"You eat today?"

"Mom brought lasagna."

"Did you eat it, or did you stand at the window glaring at Nash Ondrejka?"

"I wasn't glaring at Nash."

"Bud. You were glaring so hard the paint on his trailer blistered." She grins, but it's quick, and she looks at the floor right after. "Anyway. I'll do his car tonight. You go home."

"I can stay."

"Go home, Ethan. You look like you've been hit by a truck. A small, sad truck."

You go. You don't go home.

Leszek's barn sits behind the farmhouse on Pike Road, a long red pole barn with a concrete floor he poured himself in 1991 and a door that groans like a cow when you roll it open. It smells exactly like it smelled when you were sixteen: cutting oil, hot metal, old coffee, the dusty corn smell from the field outside.

The Mutt is under a blue tarp in the corner. You and Jo rebuilt it at seventeen out of a 1970 Chevelle that was mostly rust and optimism. It's primer gray, the hood's a different gray, the passenger door is a third gray, and it pulls left at anything over sixty. It's the best thing you've ever built.

Leszek is at his lathe with his glasses on, turning something small and shiny. He doesn't look up when you come in.

"She's at the shop," he says.

"I know."

"So you're here to see me." He shuts off the lathe and lets it wind down, the hum dropping until it's silent. He takes his glasses off and lets them fall on their cord. "Sit."

You sit on the overturned five-gallon bucket you've sat on since you were sixteen. He sits on the stool across from you. For a while neither of you says anything. A swallow comes in through the open door, loops the rafters and goes out again.

"I found a letter," you say finally.

Leszek doesn't ask what letter. That's how you know.

"How long have you known?"

"Since it came. Courier brought it to the house." He picks a curl of brass off his sleeve. "She opened it at the kitchen table, read it, put it down, read it again. Went upstairs. Came down two hours later in that green dress, and I didn't say a word, because I've been her father for twenty-six years and I'm not stupid."

"She applied?"

"Two years ago. Before the garage. She was building a motor for a guy who races at Mid-Ohio, and his crew chief sent the dyno numbers to somebody, who sent them to somebody." Leszek shrugs one huge shoulder. "She filled out an application at that table at one in the morning. Said she wanted to find out if she could. Then she forgot about it. Or said she did."

"Since she was twelve," you say. "She's wanted this since she was twelve."

You know because you've heard about it. The poster over her bed of a car that won at Le Mans. The way she watches the twenty-four-hour races every year in June, all night, on a laptop on the barn workbench, eating cereal out of the box. The way she talks about them, like other people talk about the ocean.

"Since she was twelve," Leszek agrees.

"She has to take it."

"Does she?"

"It's Valcourt. It's the big leagues. She'd be on a pit wall at Daytona. At Le Mans, maybe. She's the best engine builder I've ever seen, Leszek, she's wasted on oil changes in a town with one stoplight."

"That's a lot of opinions about what my daughter has to do."

"I'm just saying."

"I know what you're saying, Ethan." He looks at you for a long time, the way he looked at you last night in the front hall. Measuring. "You going to say it to her?"

"Say what? That she should go?" Your throat does something unpleasant. "Why hasn't she told me? We tell each other everything."

Leszek laughs. It's a short, rough sound, not unkind. He leans forward and puts his elbows on his knees, and suddenly he's very close, and very serious, and his voice drops.

"She hasn't told you because she's waiting, kid," he says. "Waiting to see if you'll ask her to stay."