Night fell fastwhen Danica was elbow deep in engine grease. The rest of the team had taken off, leaving to have dinner with their significant others and families. Leo had invited her to join him and his girlfriend, but Danica had needed to keep working, if only to distract herself from everything going on. She wasn’t sleeping already at night. She hoped that tiring herself out from work would do the trick.
The smooth sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd echoed around the empty shop, giving an eerie feel to the atmosphere that had the hair on Danica’s arms raising on instinct. She set down the torque wrench she’d been using and wiped the back of her arm across her brow to take some of the sweat away. Glancing at the clock, she blinked in surprise when it read nearly midnight. She’d been working on the 1951 Hudson for hours without realizing it.
When the music switched to something else on the radio, her eyes trailed over to the blue tarped car sitting in the corner. Dust covered the tarp, the only signs of disturbance that of where she’d placed her hand the night before. Dust accumulated quickly in the busy shop. Straightening, she moved over to the tarp and touched the edge of it. For a moment, she lingered there in limbo, unsure of what she was doing, but she couldn’t help the instinct that suddenly overtook her.
Carefully, Danica gripped the edge of the tarp and began to slide it from the car, revealing the purple metal-flaked paint inch by slow inch. The tarp fell to the floor in a heap, dust dancing in the air at the disturbance, and the Indy car came into view. It was a beast of a car, beautiful, and at one point, it had been mutilated. It was the same car her father had wrecked, the same one that had caught fire before anyone could have stepped in and saved her father. She’d fixed it up after the wreck, sad to see the mottled metal and melted fiberglass. Her dad would have wanted it working, but beyond driving it to park it and mechanical checks, Danica hadn’t set foot inside the Indy car. The regular maintenance she did to keep the car in working order didn’t include having to drive the car. No one knew she took the car out of the garage once a month late at night after the others had gone home. It had been her secret, though Leo probably suspected it.
The name “Daniel Dyers” was replaced on the side, the yellow and white typography bright against the purple, and her throat grew thick with the memory of the wreck. She’d replaced every part of the car down to details that had always been there. She hadn’t wanted it to look any different from before the wreck, but seeing it only made it harder.
It hurt to see the car parked and never seeing the light of day, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to drive the car before. Tonight felt different. Some instinct had her grabbing the helmet and slipping into the cockpit of the Indy car. Danica pulled the pin and pressed the start button. The engine roared to life easily, as if it had just been waiting for her to do so.
NASCAR was always a treat, but while Danica had enjoyed NASCAR, she much preferred the rougher racing, the kind done on dirt tracks in small towns. Demolition Derby was always a fun time but breezing by your competitors when they expected nothing much of the girl entering a race dominated by men made Danica’s heart sing. Their faces at the end when she took her helmet off if she kept it a secret was always the best. While the Indy car was meant for the racetrack, she’d changed the tires to ones capable of driving on dirt, just in case she needed to drive it on the track out back. She could race with the best of them. She’d learned from Daniel Dyers, the best racer there was until a loose lug nut ended his career.
The purr of the Indy car filled the garage around her as she pulled on the helmet and took a deep breath. She sat there, staring at the photo of her father and her taped to the dash, a photo that had somehow survived the inferno that had taken her father away. The edges were just a little singed, a rough spot above their heads as if the flames had just kissed it, but it had otherwise outlasted the fire. They were both smiling in the photo, laughing, grease on their faces after having worked on a ‘Cuda all day. She remembered it so clearly.
“I could really use your help, Dad,” she said, but he still didn’t answer.
Instead, something pushed her to put the car into gear and pull out of the garage.