What You Have Left (6 page)

He asked Maddy if she wanted to take the car for a spin, and she said no, she just wanted to sit in it for a while. As soon as she settled in behind the wheel, Holly woke, hungry again. The baby was so frantic she had trouble latching on to Maddy's nipple. Normally Wylie would have helped, parting Holly's lips the way the nurse had done, but his hands were slick with motor oil, so he waited until Maddy had things under control, then lowered the hood and gave her a thumbs-up, just like he used to do before each race. Maddy was focused on the baby, though, and with the morning dew still streaking the windshield, she didn't even seem to see him.

In between fitful meals, Holly continued to wail, so after Wylie got off work they took her to the doctor. The doctor told them she was fine. Maddy despised him for saying so—“Nat's doctor said he was fine, too”—and Wylie despised her for despising him. The night before, she'd ventured that maybe Holly's crying was God's way of punishing her for abandoning Gladys. This from a woman who hadn't set foot in a church since she was confirmed. Wylie didn't think God had anything to do with it; the problem had to be that Holly wasn't getting enough to eat. Something was wrong with Maddy's milk, or there just wasn't enough of it. Otherwise,
why was Holly always hungry? But the doctor told them her weight was right on target. “If you're still worried,” he said, “you can always try formula.” Maddy sneered at this, too. If God wanted babies to drink formula, she told Wylie, she'd have tin cans for tits.

That night, after Holly's midnight meal, Wylie drifted off into a hazy twilight between waking and sleeping and then rolled over to find himself alone in bed. A light was on in the kitchen. Maddy stood at the counter in her nightshirt, paging through a cookbook and marshaling ingredients: eggs, flour, a bottle of vanilla extract.

“What are you doing?”

“Making Gladys a pound cake,” she said.

“It's one in the morning.”

She cracked an egg and dropped the shell into the garbage. “Then go back to bed.” She wouldn't even look at him.

Twenty minutes later, Holly started crying. He got up and changed her diaper—the only one of her problems he knew how to fix. When he was done, he brought her to Maddy.

“I think she's hungry again.”

“The kitchen is closed,” Maddy said. “I just fed her an hour ago.” She was sitting at the table, looking like she'd had about all she could take. There was flour everywhere.

“If we got some formula,” Wylie said, rocking Holly against his shoulder, “I could give her a bottle while you slept.”

Maddy sighed, as if the very sight of him wore her out. “How many times do I have to tell you? There's a
reason
milk is coming out of me.” She got up from the table and took a few bills from the coffee can on top of the refrigerator.
She told Wylie to go to the bakery in the morning, buy a pound cake, and deliver it to Gladys. “Try to get one that looks homemade.” She rummaged under the counter. “Put it in this.”

Wylie stared at the Tupperware container she was holding. “You're kidding, right?” Going to see Lester and Gladys was the last thing he wanted to do. He was sorry Maddy felt bad, but he was tired, and they weren't his friends, and frankly he didn't want to face them any more than she did. The whole business with the Fairlane just made things that much worse. Though he didn't appreciate Lester stringing him along, wasting his time, he didn't want to show up on the guy's doorstep and make him feel like he had to apologize—not at a time like this.

“Go ahead and get a card, too,” Maddy said. “Sign my name. But don't be gone long. I can't do everything here.”

Wylie took the container and held it up for Holly to touch. He was determined not to raise his voice. “Honey,” he said, “if you want to give Gladys a cake, take it over there yourself.”

Lester and Gladys lived in a neighborhood of small brick duplexes in West Columbia, about a mile from the track. Wylie found their place easily enough, but he didn't know what he was going to say to them, so he kept driving, aimless, hoping their rusty Dart would be gone by the time he came back. He ended up out by the track and turned off into the rutted meadow that doubled as a parking lot. It was Thursday, and he was due back there that night; he'd called in sick at the dealership, but he hadn't been able to find anyone at Atlas to cover his shift at the track. He wished he could
curl up in his car and sleep until then. The gate on the front stretch was wide open, and inside he could see the owner, Sid Gooden, slowly working his way around the banked oval atop his state-surplus motor grader, pushing the clay and sand back toward the bottom of the track.

The summer before, Maddy had been leading a qualifying heat when she fishtailed and hit the guardrail, which wasn't much of a rail at all, just sheets of plywood nailed to a fence. As she sat there crosswise on the track, stalled out and waiting for the red flag, the rest of the pack came sliding through the turn. You could hear the whole infield suck in its breath, bracing for a crash. Wylie always told himself that Maddy was invincible out there—he couldn't afford to think about it any other way—but seeing her come so close to getting T-boned rattled him. When she got back to the pit area, he asked her to sit out the feature race so he could look over the car. He didn't think she'd go for it—she'd been in wrecks before, had shrugged them off and hopped back in the saddle—but that night, after she finished cursing her luck and loose dirt, she allowed that maybe it wasn't a bad idea.

The following Sunday, he took her over to Darlington and dropped half a paycheck on good seats for the Southern 500, the race Maddy dreamed of running. He was thinking it'd be just the thing to help them shake off the cobwebs, but Maddy spent most of the race staring at the pregnant girl next to them—was so busy staring, in fact, that she missed Buddy Baker's Dodge crossing the finish line. Wylie was lowering his binoculars when she hooked an arm around his waist and shouted into his ear. “Let's! Have! A baby!”

At first he thought she was joking, making fun of the pregnant girl for the way she'd been rubbing her stomach all afternoon. Anyhow, the plan had always been that they'd try
for a baby after they quit racing, a day Wylie figured was a long ways off. But Maddy was in his ear again, ahead of him as usual, telling him she was afraid she might not be around to
have
a baby if she kept racing.

Now, as he watched Sid take another turn on his grader, smoothing out the grooves, Wylie thought of the two hobby titles Maddy had won, how good he'd felt knowing she couldn't do it without him and that he'd never let her down. That's how he felt that afternoon at Darlington when he said yes to having a baby. It was the last time he'd felt that way.

Gladys answered the door. It was almost lunchtime, but she was still in her bathrobe, squinting at Wylie through the torn screen as if she hadn't seen sunlight in days, a road map of red in her eyes. When she noticed the cake, she invited him in like she didn't have a choice.

“Lester,” she called, “friend of yours.”

The curtains were drawn in the narrow living room, and except for the traffic out on 321, the house was quiet. Wylie hadn't expected Lester to be home. He hadn't even meant to come in. He'd hoped to hand off the cake at the front door and be gone. Now he tried for a sympathetic smile and told Gladys how sorry Maddy was that she couldn't come herself. “She had the baby on Sunday,” he said.

“Please tell her I've been meaning to stop by,” Gladys said, but it didn't sound like she meant it. It sounded like she just wanted to be left alone. She stood there cinching her robe until Lester came out of the kitchen. When he shook Wylie's hand, he clasped it with both of his, the way a preacher does. Wylie told them he and Maddy had been praying for them ever since they heard about Nat. “We're
deeply sorry for your loss,” he said. This was something he'd rehearsed in the truck, and to his ears, that's how it sounded.

“You're a good guy to come all the way out here,” Lester said. “I just put on some coffee. Let's sit down and have some of that—what do you got there?”

“Maddy's pound cake.”

“Gladys loves pound cake, don't you, hon?” He put an arm around his wife, but she shrugged him off.

“I'm not hungry,” she said, and then she went into the bedroom and shut the door. Lester looked embarrassed. He rubbed a hand back and forth across his crew cut. Wylie was about to say he should be getting home when Lester cleared his throat.

“I keep telling her we can try again,” he said, shaking his head. “She don't want to hear it.” He glanced at the bedroom door, then held up the cake as if to say,
But there's this.
Wylie followed him into the kitchen and sat at the dinette while Lester cut two slices. “You know, it could have been a lot worse,” Lester said, lowering his voice. “I mean, Christ, the kid was only eight weeks old. It's not like we had much time to get attached to him.” He set a cup of coffee in front of Wylie. “Right? You must know what I mean.”

Wylie supposed he did. If something terrible was going to happen to your baby, better sooner than later, before she started trusting you to make everything okay. Still, as soon as he nodded, it felt like a betrayal. Pretty soon he'd be telling Lester he wasn't sure why he'd wanted a baby in the first place. “Me and Maddy,” he said, “we just feel so lucky—”

Lester cut him off. “Goes without saying.” His smile was tight. He took a bite of cake and Wylie got to work on his, too, promising himself he'd get out of there as soon as he was done. He was almost finished when Lester lit a cigarette
and warmed up to him again, apologizing about the Fairlane. Wylie told him it was no big deal, but Lester went on and on, saying he'd never meant to leave Wylie in the lurch. Things had gotten so busy with the baby, he said, and money was tight. He still wanted to buy the car, though, assuming Wylie hadn't already sold it.

“Not yet,” Wylie said.

Lester slid the pack of smokes across the table, said that originally the car was going to be a present for himself, to celebrate the baby, but now he wanted it as a surprise for Gladys. He said that since she started hanging around Maddy more, she'd been talking about entering a powderpuff derby—not
racing
racing, just girls versus girls—and although he'd been against it at first, now he thought it might do her some good. Wylie shook a cigarette from the pack and nodded along. He didn't believe Lester would end up buying the car any more than he believed Gladys would want it, but he decided to give Lester the benefit of the doubt and told him he'd hold off renewing the ad, give them time to work something out.

“In that case,” Lester said, “why don't I come get the car today?” He said he could swing by the bank, bring Wylie a deposit that afternoon, and pay him the rest next week. Wylie tapped the end of his cigarette on the table. This wasn't at all what he'd had in mind, but he was in too deep to back out now, and he was too tired to argue. He hadn't slept in four days, his wife would sooner growl at him than smile, and he was starting to think he'd rather sit there smoking with Lester than go home and face his own kid's howling. He took one last gulp of coffee and stood to leave.

“Deal.”

•   •   •

On the way home, Wylie fell asleep at the wheel and drifted off the road, his tires biting into the grassy shoulder. A row of scrub pines floated before him. He jerked upright and wrestled the car onto the blacktop, cursing Maddy for sending him to see Gladys, cursing himself for giving in to Lester again. Shaken, he stopped at a convenience store for another cup of coffee and—debating whether to buy it even as he approached the register—a can of formula. Just in case Maddy changes her mind, he told himself. When he got home, she was asleep in bed with Holly. The baby stirred as he looked in on them, and before he had time to think twice, he whisked her out of the room. He knew you were supposed to heat the formula, but he was afraid Maddy would wake up, so he told Holly she'd have to drink it cold. He sat at the dining room table with her in the crook of his arm like a football, brushing the nipple against her cheek the way he'd seen Maddy do, dribbling formula onto her lips. She turned her head from side to side, trying to get away from it. “Come on, cupcake,” he said. “Let's be reasonable.” She began to fuss, and when he persisted, sweating and shaking, she started to cry in earnest. He had to remind himself that she wasn't doing it on purpose; she was only a baby. She needed to eat, whether she wanted to or not, and he didn't know when he'd get another chance. Finally, he worked the nipple between her lips, and when she tried to spit it out, he held firm, determined that she'd at least have a taste, no matter how much she fought and flailed her little arms. It wasn't until she began to choke that he finally eased up. As he pulled the bottle away, she coughed formula onto
his arm and shrieked, a sound as terrible as a loose fan belt. “Now, now,” he said, “there, there,” but she went on and on, screaming bloody murder. It was all he could do not to shove the bottle back into her mouth, just to shut her up.

Somehow Maddy slept through the whole thing, and Wylie spent the next hour trying to make it up to Holly, carrying her around the house and singing nursery rhymes while he waited for Lester. Once she stopped crying, she didn't seem to hold a grudge. It was as if Sid had come along with his grader, smoothing out all the ruts between them.

Lester never showed up with the money, and he wasn't at the races that night, either. Same old, same old, Wylie thought. He'd been a half hour late getting to the track himself and, despite three large Cokes, nodded off in the wrecker. A track steward had to tap on the window to wake him when one of the drivers blew a tire.

Back home, it was business as usual—distraught wife, crying baby. This time Wylie suggested they get out for a walk. The night was warm and breezy, and they followed the dirt lane past the soybean field, past the farmhouse where Cal had been cooling his heels until Maddy lifted her restraining order. Holly was asleep on Wylie's shoulder within minutes.