John Miller: The Last Day

“This is so fucking cool. Could I get one?”

“Well, not this one. This one is the first one my father had made,” he explained. “This is the prototype. He didn't have a lot of money and that car only raced one year. As it turned out, he made other models and they did sell and so he ordered more, but this one was handmade. Mostly he used it to show to bankers and investors, who weren't all that impressed. In those days NASCAR was only popular with relatively few people.”

He started to tell her why he had it with him, but didn't. What he did say was, “I can get you a new one-driver of your choice.”

“No shit?”

“Absolutely none.” He took another note card and scribbled his office number on it. “Call and ask for Leslie, and she'll send one to you for your mother. We have thousands of them in our warehouse.”

She narrowed her eyes, suspiciously. “How much will it cost?”

“My treat.”

“No shit? Thanks. That is so sick.”

“Sick?”

“Sick as in cool.”

“Who's your mother's favorite driver?”

“I dunno. I can find out.” She ran the wheels back and forth on her lap and made a motor noise as she did this. “Is this you on the card?” she asked, pointing at the card he'd given her with her inked likeness. “Ward McCarty That's you?”

“It is,” he told her.

“Why were you in Vegas?” she asked. “Gam bling?”

“No. Work. You?”

“I fly back and forth a lot,” she said. “My dad lives there and I live with my mother in Charlotte. You married?”

“Yes.”

“What's your wife do?”

“She's a pediatric surgeon,” Ward said.

“What's that mean?”

“Pediatric means children,” Ward said.

“I know that. So she like cuts little kids open?” Her eyes were wide, her mouth a circle.

“Yes, but I think it's more complicated than making cuts.”

“Y’all got any kids?”

“No,” he said.

“You're like too old?”

“I expect you're right,” he said, trying to smile. This wasn't true… as far as he knew.

When she handed the car back, Ward put the padded envelope back in his briefcase, closed it, and placed it under the seat.

“I need to slip out past you,” he told her.

“Why?” she asked.

“Visit the little boys’ room.”

After the man beside the girl unbuckled his seat belt and stood in the aisle, she tucked her feet up in her seat so Ward could get out.

After he'd finished in the tiny bathroom, Ward left the enclosure and found a man in Bermudas waiting his turn. When Ward returned to his row, the girl, who was back again listening to her iPod, smiled up at him and pulled in her feet to let him get to his seat.

When the plane landed ten minutes later and parked at the terminal, the girl grabbed up her bag of toys and was off the plane before Ward got his carry- on and filed out.

He thought about what the girl had said about him being too old to have children, and realized it wasn't true. He and Natasha hadn't talked about having another child since Barney's accident, and the thought comforted him. For the first time in a very long time, Ward McCarty felt a degree of optimism about the future.

While standing on the curb, waiting for the shut-tle, Ward spotted his young seatmate climbing into a dark green Porsche Cabriolet. The driver, a woman with blond hair and pale skin, wore a flowery scarf and dark glasses that obscured her features. Perhaps the woman was the girl's mother, the NASCAR fan.

Six minutes later he climbed down from the bus, walked to his car, and frowned at the thin film of red dust coating the original black paint. Leaving the car in the open sunlight wouldn't do anything to prolong the paint's life. The vehicle, a pristine 1994 BMW 740i, had been his father's only admission to the world that he was a man of above- average means. Ward climbed in and started the engine. Aiming the heavy sedan toward the exit he pressed on the accelerator and felt the powerful V-8 respond.

Ward turned on the radio, which was always set to NPR. He didn't listen to music much when he was driving. He had never felt the need for a soundtrack in his life. Natasha had joked on more than one occasion that her husband danced to the melodious voices of liberal commentators.

Although it should have been just the opposite, Ward's heart seemed to grow heavier as he drove north on I-85. After leaving the Interstate at the Concord Mills exit, Ward drove past the racetrack, up Highway 29, and entered Concord on Cabarrus Avenue, using the new roundabout. He drove out Highway 73 and turned left at the Exxon onto Gold Hill Road. Two miles later he slowed for a doe and her two spotted fawns, which ran across the road near a farm owned by the grandson of a mill owner whose last name was synonymous with bath towels.

Turning onto the asphalt driveway a mile farther down the road, Ward drove through the woods, past the front door, and on around to the side of the house, where he used his remote to open the center garage door. He parked beside Natasha's Lexus, the hood cool to his touch. His other car, a dark blue Toyota Highlander, was parked in the third bay. He rarely drove the Toyota, preferring his father's old BMW

Ward paused in the kitchen where the answering machine blinked a red 4. Natasha hadn't bothered to listen to his short dispatches from the red- hot West. Ward held his finger over the button and hesitated before he finally hit delete.

A stack of unopened mail on the counter lay beside a bottle opener with one cork still impaled on its screw and another nearby. It was Natasha who'd said you never leave a cork impaled on the screw. He hadn't asked what law of winery that violated. Strains of canned laughter drifted into the kitchen from the den. Since the wall of windows overlooking the woods behind the house was dark and there was no moonlight, the television screen was the sole illumination.

Natasha, wearing a light robe over her nightgown, lay sleeping on the sleek sectional sofa. An empty bottle of wine stood on the coffee table, and a blister pack of Ambien rested nearby. Ward frowned to see that of the original eight tablets, only two remained.

He frowned at the empty wineglass standing on the stone floor beside the couch. She appeared pale, but at least her chest was rising and falling. Ward stared down at her delicate features, washed by the uncertain light of the screen. One of his fears was that he would arrive home and find her dead.

Life was fragile.

Death happened just like that.

This he knew far too well.

Natasha was even more beautiful than she'd been the day he met her in Seattle a dozen years earlier. She had been a surgical resident attending a party given by a college friend of his- an artist whose paintings depicted a perfect, though surreal, rural world. There had been an immediate and mutual attraction, and they'd been married three months later in her parents’ living room. Hastily arranged, the service was attended only by her three brothers, her best friend, their parents, and his uncle, Mark Wilson. Gene Duncan, his best friend, who'd been in law school at the time, had flown out from Duke to be his best man.

Natasha Crossingham had just entered her last year of residency at a children's hospital, and Ward had remained in Seattle until she'd completed her term and, as soon as a group of pedi-atric surgeons at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte made her a partnership offer, they'd moved back to North Carolina. Ward had gone to work for his father's company, Raceway Graphics Incorporated, just in time to find out that his father had lung cancer, which despite the best available medical treatment took his life less than two years later. Ward had taken over as the company's president; he'd worked there during the summers for most of his life and he knew the business and the majority of their clients.