I can borrow?”
Pax gave him a regretful smile. “Wish I did, man. All my spare change goes into reopening the speedway. You are gonna race when we open, right? You’re just shitting me about not running, ’cause I know you want to.”
Hell, yeah, Raleigh wanted to race. “I’ve outgrown the need for speed.”
“That’s a big load of bull. You didn’t buy that ‘Cuda just ’cause you look purty in it.”
“I bought the car because it looked purty,” Raleigh said, imitating him. He’d tried hard to eradicate his southern accent. Pax, from more money than he came from, could afford to keep it without being judged as white trash.
Pax dug into his pocket and tossed something to Raleigh. Reflexively, he snapped it out of the air, then eyed the key in his palm. “What’s this?”
“Key to the gate at the track. Do your tuning there.”
Raleigh curled his hand around the key’s jagged edge. “Trying to tempt me? Figure once I’m there I won’t be able to resist running?”
Pax gave him the conspiratorial wink he used when they’d been planning some misadventure or another. “I’m countin’ on it. We have rules and regulations. No drinking. No screwing around. It’ll be like the good ole days, only better.” The good old days, when they were wild, young, and free. Before the crash that shattered Mia’s life and landed him in jail. “And safer.”
“I’m not afraid to crash again.” It went deeper than that. “Look, I’d better get back to work.”
Pax flattened his hands on the car’s roof. “I got some bad news, Raleigh. Nancy passed last night.”
Raleigh’s heart thudded painfully. “How?”
“She was eighty-two. Her doc thinks her heart probably just stopped tickin’.”
Raleigh fought the tingle in his eyes by jabbing his fingers into them. “I know she was older, but she was feisty. Full of life.” He never thought about her dying, even though she talked about it. And she was so damned nonchalant, too.
“She bought a plot at the Chambliss cemetery,” Pax said. “The funeral will be here. I bet she’ll come down for that.”
Pax was talking about Mia. Mia, here. Raleigh didn’t think his heart could beat any slower after hearing about Nancy, but apparently it could. He fought not to close his eyes and sink into the bittersweet ache Mia’s name evoked. What would she look like now? She’d be twenty-four. Grown up.
“Thanks for letting me know,” Raleigh said.
Pax patted Raleigh’s arm and headed out. Raleigh stared off into the dark long after Pax’s taillights disappeared into the night. Twin emotions battled inside him. Nancy gone. The woman who’d been like a grandmother, when she should have hated him the way Mia’s parents did.
Nancy wrote to him shortly after his incarceration, giving him an update on Mia and assuring him that she would survive. Nancy figured Raleigh must be frantic not knowing how she was. Both the update and the kindness behind it brought tears to his eyes.
His thank-you letter had started a continuous correspondence that made all those days and weeks and months tolerable. News of Mia’s treatments, her progress, her victories. After his release, she invited him over for a home-cooked meal. That was when he noticed the loose boards on her front steps, the latticework that needed staining. He’d volunteered to fix them. They shared another meal when he had. He spotted more things that needed fixing. And, over time, they’d become friends and, in a way, family. Better than any family he had. She had fed him pictures and news about Mia over the years. Not many pictures, and most of them dimly lit or long-distance shots—the only ones Mia would allow, apparently.
Mia had finished high school with private tutoring as she’d healed, though she’d managed to walk across the stage. Raleigh had pretended mild interest in Mia’s life, but Nancy probably saw the way he devoured every tidbit.
Now she was gone. His friend. Surrogate grandmother. Link to Mia.
Then there was the other emotion fighting for dominance inside him: hope, with a heavy dose of fear. Seeing Mia would be heartbreaking in a different way. How scarred would she be? How angry at him still? He could remember the pain in her voice during the one phone call they’d had since the accident. She’d barely given him a chance to say how sorry he was for letting her ride with him that night. Sure, she’d wanted to, but he should have said no.
He couldn’t refuse Mia anything, with her hunger for speed and life and him.