Motocross Me (2 page)

In the kitchen, Molly leans over the counter reading the newspaper and singing a song to herself. She picks at a cinnamon roll, eating only the bits with the most icing. She’s wearing sweat pant capris and a black tank top and I wonder why my dad chose to marry her after being with my mom. Molly smiles a lot and doesn’t care about the few extra pounds around her midsection. My mom doesn’t eat breakfast ever, and spends an hour a day at the gym to keep up her skeletal figure. My mom has never, ever, worn sweat pants and she absolutely does not smile a lot. I clear my throat from a distance so I won’t startle my step-mom.

“Good morning,” Molly says to the tune of her song.

“Where’s Dad and Teig?” I ask, sitting on the barstool next to her.

“They’re at the track. You can walk over there and see them if you want. I think Teig is out there riding.”

Blegh. Dad’s dirt bike track is nothing but a barren, ridiculously hot wasteland of dry dirt jumps and loud annoying motorcycles. I hated spending time there as a kid. “I’d rather just stay here,” I say. She offers me some of her cinnamon roll and I do her a favor by taking a piece with no icing.

“Have you talked to your mom?” she asks.

“Nope,” I say quickly, drumming my fingers on the granite countertops to fill the silence that follows. I beg her with my eyes to not bring this up now. Why ruin a perfectly good morning?

Molly nods as if agreeing with my unasked question. “Want some coffee?”

I shake my head and suppress a curl from forming in my lip so I won’t hurt her feelings. Coffee is so gross – all the men my mother dates loves coffee. I had the impression that only hideous mid-life-crisis-men liked it, but maybe I’m wrong because Molly is drinking it now. And there isn’t anything the least bit gross about her.

My phone doesn’t ring for the rest of the day. And it rings even less the day after that. I spend all my time at Dad’s house sitting on the couch in the living room watching Netflix on their huge TV and checking my cell phone twenty-thousand times an hour. I don’t even bother driving around town because there’s nothing but boring country roads and the occasional gas station or farmer’s market. Sometimes I just wander around the house, sliding my hand over the long wooden banister that separates the second floor balcony from the living room below.

Molly is a stay at home mom, and unlike my mom, she is very organized. Everything is in its place in decorative baskets, floating shelves or clear bins that are marked with a blue and white label. Except for the occasional pair of shoes kicked off by the door, or open magazine on the coffee table, everything in this house looks like it was arranged for an HGTV photo shoot.
Dream Homes in Texas
, the article would say.

I can’t stop thinking about Dad’s old house, the one he used to live in with Mom and me. It was small and needed remodeling in just about every room, and Dad always had plans for fixing it up but Mom never wanted to. She longed for the bright lights of a big city, New York or Miami, and a big house to live in. But Dad wanted to stay here in Mixon and work at his motocross track. When they divorced, Mom pursued her dream and Dad pursued his. We moved to the biggest city Mom could afford: Dallas, Texas. Dad stayed here. It’s easy to see who was more successful.

I know nothing about real estate, but this house couldn’t have come cheap. I smile as I think about my truck – a present from Dad on my sixteenth birthday last year – and remember how I figured he was making monthly payments on it. I worried that he might ask me to take over the payments when I got older. But looking around at this beautiful house with its nice furniture, I somehow don’t think that’s the case. He probably handed the guy at the truck dealership a wad of cash, tipped his hat and said, “Keep the change my good sir.”

On my third morning of waking up to the unfamiliar plaster blobs on the ceiling, I start to think that maybe my mother is dead. There is no other reason for her to ignore her daughter (who is still a minor, by the way) for three whole days.

After another slightly awkward morning conversation with Molly, homemade kolaches and the newspaper, I sneak into Dad’s office between Teig’s room and mine and log into his computer. I check Mom’s Facebook page and discover that she isn’t dead. Guilt consumes me when I get annoyed that she isn’t dead. I mean, come on. She’s ignoring me!

All of her recent status updates have nothing to do with her missing daughter and everything to do with her upcoming Vegas wedding. It takes a lot of effort to resist throwing Dad’s laptop out the window.

I’m helping Molly make dinner by overseeing the immensely important task of peeling and chopping potatoes when Dad comes home from work. Though working at the track all day makes him come home dirty and worn out, he looks a million times worse tonight.

“Jason went off to boot camp today,” he says, reaching over my shoulder and grabbing a piece of raw potato to eat. “I never realized how much work that boy did around the track until he wasn’t there anymore.”

“Maybe you should hire a replacement,” Molly says. He kisses her cheek and she crinkles up her nose and tells him he stinks. I should be used to their incessant displays of affection by now, but it still makes my stomach tense up every time they share an intimate moment around me. They are so cute together and for some reason, that makes it even more awkward to witness.

I focus on chopping the potatoes into equally sized cubes. “I talked to your mom today,” Dad says. The butcher knife in my hand plunks onto the counter as fast as my jaw falls open. I’m lucky my index finger wasn’t under the blade. “She called you?” I ask. I can almost hear the crackling of ice as hell freezes over. Mom hasn’t talked to Dad since that Fourth of July two years ago.

“I called her. Just wanted her to know you were staying with me for a while.”

“What did she say?”

Dad eats another piece of potato, taking longer to chew it as he did last time and I can tell he’s wondering if he should tell me the truth or gloss over it. “She said that was fine. You can stay for the whole summer if you want.”

Somehow, I don’t think that’s what she said. “I would like that,” I say, ignoring the pain in my stomach that’s gnawing at me for obligating them to let me stay. “If that’s okay with you guys,” I add. “I just don’t want to go back there right now.”

“I have an idea,” Molly says, her voice muffled with an ovenmit in her mouth. She slips the mit over her hand and shoves a rack of meat into the oven. I wait for her to say something like maybe I should stay in a hotel instead of their guest bedroom. “Hana can be your replacement at the track. That way she can make friends and won’t have to stay in the house all day.”

Dad considers this a moment. “Can you lift fifty pounds?”

I shrug. “Probably not.”

He laughs. “Shit, Jason’s scrawny arms couldn’t either. You want the job? You could use a little sun.”

And a distraction.
The motocross track is
so so so
terribly boring. But since it looks like I’ll be here all summer, I’d be stupid to say no. If anything, this can take my mind off my mother and give me some money to put gas in my truck so I can attempt to find something to do in this tiny town.

“Yeah,” I say, shoving my chopped potato pile toward Molly. “Totally.”

“Great!” Dad tries to steal another raw potato cube and Molly slaps his hand away from the pile. “You can start tomorrow. I’ll wake you up at five.”

“You’re totally shitting me!” Felicia’s squeal pierces through the air so loudly, I might have heard it even without a phone.

“Not shitting.” I arrange my clothes in the dresser drawers of the unused furniture in what is now my room. They smell like freshly cut wood inside. “I start work tomorrow.”

“Do you know how many insanely hot guys ride motocross?” she asks, but I can barely understand her through all the rabid foam filling up her mouth as she talks about delicious man candy.

“My dad still rides motocross. Are you calling him hot?”

She groans. “Haven’t you ever watched ESPN? Ugh, I would kill to be you right now.”

“Would you kill to wake up at five in the morning? Because that’s when I have to be at the track tomorrow.”

She sighs, all dreamy-like. “You’re going to be swimming in sexiness this summer and here I am stuck working at the Pizza Palace with greasy stoners who won’t stop hitting on me. So not fair.”

Yeah,
I think.
You’re stuck at home with your nice parents who are in love and still married, living in your happy house with no worries, stuck working a job you chose because you had a crush on those stoners a month ago. Totally not fair.

“Sorry,” I say aloud. “I’ll send you pictures.”

Chapter 3

Molly wakes me up at ten minutes after five in the morning and makes it seem like she did me a favor by letting me sleep in. I’m eager to get out of the house today, even if it is before the sun comes out, so I’m able to curb my usual morning bitchiness just for her.

I throw on the shabbiest outfit in my drawer – paint splattered cut off jean shorts and a Blood Donor T-shirt that’s three sizes too big that I usually use as a sleep shirt. I’m not stupid. I’ve been to the track before, and it’s basically a desert that smells like exhaust fumes in the hot Texas sun. My few good outfits would be ruined with sweaty armpit stains by the end of the day. Crappy clothes it is.

Molly hands me a basket of warm breakfast burritos wrapped in aluminum foil. There’s enough to feed a small army in here.

“Who are all of these for?”

“Your father eats three, Marty eats three, and I made two more for you,” she says, handing me the basket. She fills a large thermos with coffee and puts it in my other hand.

The burritos are the fattest I’ve ever seen. Though they smell delicious, I certainly don’t need two. For a woman who cooks just for men, I guess Molly doesn’t realize what a girl my age actually eats.

“Now that you’re working for Jim, you can take his breakfast to the track and I’ll get to go back to bed.” She squeezes my shoulders and smiles so big I can see her crooked front teeth. She tells me to have a great first day of work and promises to bring lunch to us at noon. Hopefully I survive until then.

The track isn’t far from our backyard but trudging through the thick grass carrying an armful of warm food on an already warm morning is not glamorous. I hate the way the morning dew sticks to my legs and face.

The best part of the walk is going over a white bridge that crosses the large ditch separating our yard from the track. It’s about twenty feet long and has handrails on either side. The water in the ditch is probably deep enough to fish in, if I knew anything about fishing, which I don’t.

Marty waves to me from his bulldozer and I wave back, surprised he hasn’t aged a bit since I last saw him. Marty has been working at the track with my dad since before I was born. Every time I see him he looks exactly the same. Maybe when people reach a certain degree of old, they always look that old. His wife Dorothy is a retired nurse and also works at the track. I’m anxious to see her again.

My dad’s four-wheeler is parked by the score tower, so I go there to find him. The score tower is a two-story white building in front of the finish line of the main track. This tower is newer than the one I remember, but if it’s anything like the old tower it will be dusty, smelly, and hot. All the memories of my childhood come back to me. Mom making me play with dolls in the tower while she went to get her hair and nails done. Me digging holes in the ground by the bleachers and Dad complaining that people would trip in them.

My body longs for cushiony chairs and a cool breeze, not elbow grease and sweaty clothing. I’m seriously starting to question why I agreed to take this job last night.

I climb the stairs to the score tower and kick on the door with my foot. The stairs keep going up to the flat roof which is surrounded by handrails. It must be a new way for spectators to watch the race. I bet the view is amazing.

Dad opens the door. He wears a purple Mixon Motocross Park polo with khaki shorts and Nikes.

I laugh out loud. “I think I need to make a call to the Fashion Police. No bail until you burn that outfit.”

“Your old man is pretty classy, huh?” He takes the basket and thermos from me then spins around slowly showing off his ridiculous outfit. The front of his shirt has JIM embroidered on it and the back says STAFF in huge letters.

“Please tell me I don’t have to wear a shirt like that.” I get this horrible vision that he already has a purple polo with my name on it waiting to ruin the rest of my day.

“No, but at least my shirt isn’t covered in paint,” he says, pouring himself a cup of coffee. He puts the basket on a small dining table – already an improvement from the old tower where as a kid, I ate sitting on the floor. I sit next to Dad and look around the room. This tower has air conditioning and it doesn’t smell like sweat or rotten wood. Sweet.

The wall facing the track is the most important part of the whole building. It has a row of glass windows and a long table with microphones that helps the score-keepers and the announcer see the track. The announcer’s seat is eye level with the top of the finish line jump.

“Aren’t you gonna eat?” Dad’s words are muffled through the large bite of burrito stuffed in his mouth. He takes another bite and the burrito is more than half gone. Beside him on the table are two crumpled up balls of aluminum foil and the third one will join its fallen comrades shortly. I’m not hungry but take a burrito anyway, figuring the longer I take to eat, the less I’ll have to work. Underestimating the power of a hearty breakfast burrito, I eat the entire thing in just a few moments. When I reach for another one, my dad’s eyes beam with pride.

“So, let’s talk money,” I say. “What do I get paid here?”

Dad chuckles. “Fifty bucks a day, one hundred on race days.”

“When are the races?”