The Oval

You don't sleep much, and it isn't the radiator's fault.

You keep reading the texts from last night, the ones that came after the first. You keep trying to decide whether you said too much or not enough. In the gray morning, with the tire shop's compressor thumping through the floor, the whole conversation feels like something that happened to another man in a better life.

At seven-thirty she comes down the garage steps nine minutes late, which Bassani notes out loud, in a black turtleneck and a camel coat, hair loose. She gets in the back. She doesn't look at you. Nothing about her suggests she spent any part of the night typing to her driver.

Bassani hands you the route sheet. You read it twice.

8:00. Lakeshore Motor Speedway, south gate. Site visit, concessions audit (Ravello Holdings). 10:30. Merchant Street.

You look up at him. He looks back. "Problem, Ethan?"

"No, sir."

"The family runs the food and the parking down there," he says. "She checks the books every quarter. Don't make a face."

You weren't aware you were making one.

The speedway sits on the flat south edge of the city where the factories used to be, a great gray bowl of concrete grandstands rising out of empty parking lots. You haven't been within a mile of it in two and a half years. You take the exit you used to take every race weekend with the radio loud, and your stomach turns over like it did then, except not in the good way.

The phone buzzes on the console.

South gate. I have a key.

The gate is chained. She gets out before you can open her door, unlocks the padlock herself, swings the gate wide and stands there in the wind with her hair blowing, waving you through like a flag marshal. Then she gets back in. The back.

Tunnel under turn four. Then onto the apron.

You know where the tunnel is. You know where everything is. You drive down into the dark under the grandstands and come up into the light, and there it is: two and a half miles of banked gray asphalt, the infield gone brown, the empty stands rising on every side like a held breath. Scorched paint is still visible on the outside wall at turn three. They never really cleaned it.

You stop the car on the apron. You don't turn off the engine. You can't.

The back door opens and closes. A moment later there's a tap on your window. You lower it. Gianna Ravello leans down, her face very close, her eyes doing something careful.

"The office doesn't have mics," she says. "Neither does this. I checked the press box last spring. It's just us and a lot of pigeons."

"Why are we here?"

"Concessions audit." She doesn't smile. "Also I want you to drive one lap."

You stare at her.

"At speed," she adds. "In this."

"This is a four-thousand-pound family sedan with all-season tires."

"It has a five-liter engine my father had tuned because he likes to feel important. It'll do a hundred and fifty." She holds up something that catches the light: an old silver stopwatch on a chain, the kind coaches used to wear. "One lap. Start at the line, finish at the line. I'll time it."

"Why?"

"Because I want to see it." She says it simply. "And because you want to do it so much your hands are shaking, Ethan, and I'd like to see if they stop."

You look down. They are shaking. You hadn't noticed.

She gets back in the car. The back. Of course.

You roll forward to the faded start-finish line. The sedan idles. Your heart is going the way it went on the morning of the Harvest 300, when you sat in the 17 car and believed you were about to become someone.

"Whenever you're ready," she says from the backseat. Aloud. The car hears it. You realize she doesn't care.

You put your foot down.

The sedan is heavy and stupid and loud, but it goes. The engine climbs into a howl. You run it up through the gears down the front stretch, and the first banking comes at you like the side of a wave, and you lean into it the way you used to, low line, eyes up, the wheel light in your hands. Sixty. Ninety. A hundred and twenty. The grandstands smear into gray. The world gets narrow and clear.

The back stretch. A hundred and thirty-five. The car floats a little. You feel the tires talking.

Turn three.

The scorched wall comes up on your right and for one second you're not in a sedan, you're in the 17 car with smoke in your helmet and the brake pedal going soft and long under your foot, all the way to the floor, nothing there, nothing, and the wall getting bigger and bigger and—

Your hands stop shaking.

That's all. They just stop. You brake early and light, check the pedal, and it's there, firm as a floor. You turn in. You come off three and through four with the sedan wailing and the back end twitching, and you catch it with a flick that you didn't know you still had, and you come down onto the front stretch and cross the line.

Behind you, a click.

You coast. You breathe. You're soaked through your shirt.

"One minute, two point four," Gianna says. Her voice is unsteady. You realize it's because she's laughing. Not at you. The other kind. "In a sedan. With one lap of warm-up. You know how fast that is?"

"I know how fast that is."

"You flinched at three."

"I braked early at three."

"You flinched," she says, "and then you didn't." A pause. Very softly: "I wanted to see that."

You stop the car on the apron with the engine ticking. You want to ask her what kind of person takes a burned driver back to the wall he hit. You want to thank her, which is insane. You do neither.

The back door opens. You hear her step out onto the asphalt. Her footsteps go around the rear of the car, the trunk, the passenger side.

The front passenger door opens.

Gianna Ravello sits down beside you for the first time, close enough that you can smell orange peel and rain and the hot engine. She clicks the stopwatch back to zero and holds it up between you so you can see the hand sitting on twelve. Her eyes are bright and dangerous.

"Again," she says. "This time I'm in the front seat."