All The Way

For a moment she lay perfectly still. She wasn’t sure she could move. “What’s so different about that? Louisiana, New Mexico, Maine…now California. You’re always heading somewhere.”

“I have a chance there, Livie, a great chance. I met some guy in Bangor. He’s got a garage in Anaheim.”

“A garage?”

“Stock cars.”

“What’s a stock car?”

“Pared-down, fast-as-lightning, zoom around the race track.”

“Zoom,” Liv repeated.

“Livie, I was talking to him. He thinks I have the right stuff. This could be the one thing I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Chasing alligators was the one thing you always wanted to do.”

“This is different. I can’t explain it.”

“Try.”

He was quiet for a very long time. “From the time I could walk, people were always putting me somewhere. My parents couldn’t stay together. I lived with relative after relative while they tried to sort out their own mess, until I acted up enough and the auntie or uncle of the week would call them home. You know that.”

She nodded against his body, back in his arms again, waiting, praying…for something, some word that would make all this right.

“My father always said I was trying to kill myself.”

She knew that, too.

“When they finally broke up for good, when Mom stayed on the Navajo res and Dad went back to Tuba City, she sent me with him because I was too much of a handful. Then he sent me right back for the same reason.”

“Hunter,” she said, exasperated. “You went eagle-hunting, fell down a cliff, lay there with a broken leg for three days while the whole town frantically combed the mesas looking for you. Then you practically crawled home on your hands and knees and the Feds arrested you for poaching. You were a handful.”

“I was just looking for…I don’t know, something that made me feel right.”

Tell me it’s me.

“I sort of feel that way when I’m driving. Complete.”

Her heart couldn’t have fallen to her feet any quicker if she had been standing. “This guy let you drive a race car in Bangor?”

“No, no. I gave him a ride home from a bar. But there was nearly an accident and I avoided it and he liked what he saw.”

Liv was quiet for a long time. “You’re not coming home, then.”

“Livie, you’re my home. Wherever you are. That’s all I need.”

But I need more. She punched his shoulder as she sat up. “Home is a place you go to each night to lay your head on your pillow!”

“I lay my head on dreams of you.”

“That’s not enough!”

“I want you to come with me this time. Can you?”

Her heart staggered. “Where?”

“I just told you. To California. You can find a resort to work at there.” He sat up slowly, watching her, looking both sad and confused again, maybe even a little angry. “Babe, you’re really off the wall tonight.”

He didn’t understand.

It hit her then, in all its enormity. She was probably pregnant. And he was going to run off to California tomorrow to try his hand at racing cars. When that failed, it would be something else. God help her, it would always be something else.

She wasn’t—had never been—enough to hold him in one place. Whatever it was that he was looking for to make him feel complete…it wasn’t in her arms.

She drove her hands into her hair. She slid out of bed, shaking. “I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

Raise a child like this, while you chase the wind.

This time she didn’t say it aloud. She snatched her bathrobe off the hook on the back of her bedroom door. When was it going to stop? Never, Livie, never, and you always knew that. The voice in her head mocked her and scoured the life right out of her soul.

She’d accepted him on his terms, and their crazy life together, apart more than they were in each other’s arms. She loved him with all of her heart. But how—oh, God, how?—was she supposed to explain his whereabouts to a child when he was gone for months, here for a day? How could they go with him? How could she tell this child, “No, baby, this isn’t home, but maybe the next stop will be?”

How could she pawn off on this little one the same kind of upheaval her parents had destroyed her with when they had died?

“I’ll have to learn the business from the ground up,” Hunter said from the bed, “and a lot of drivers have a head start on me. They cut their teeth in their daddy’s garages. And, granted, they’re all pretty much a bunch of Southerners, so I’ll break the mold. But this guy—his name is Pritchard Spikes—he says he’ll let me test drive at his track in Anaheim and he’ll see what I can do. If I really have the right stuff, he’ll give me a chance.”

“What?” Liv turned to him vacantly, belting her robe. “What are you talking about?”

“The stock car circuit. This chance. This is it, Livie, I feel it in my bones.”

She stared at him. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Liv went to the bathroom to throw up.

Liv found herself leaning against the bathroom sink now, fighting nausea again. Only this time she wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t been with a man since…that night.

She’d done the test kit that weekend after Hunter had gone again. It had turned up positive. That had been in October.

He’d written, once, to tell her that Pritchard Spikes had indeed liked the way he handled his cars. He was going to give him a shot in his NASCAR garage in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Not driving, not yet, but in the background, learning. Hunter told her that starting in February, he’d spend the next ten months in a different part of the country every weekend, on the race circuit.

He’d said he would stop in Flag on his way to the East Coast. She’d told him not to bother. It was over for them.

She had a child to raise. So she had married Johnny Guenther. He’d given her security, a home, everything she’d always needed. She had given him…nothing.

What she had done to Johnny out of sheer desperation had been cruel and despicable. She’d never been able to be a wife to him. She’d ended up alone after all. But she’d raised her daughter in one place, in one home, if not conventionally.

Shuddering, Liv went back to her bedroom and slipped out of her robe. She pulled on a pair of khaki slacks and a sleek, black top. Shoved her feet into black sandals.