Race weekends, the house fills up whether we planned it or not. Daddy comes down from Wilkesboro with the cooler and the pot, Mama brings a book she will finish before the halfway point, and by early afternoon the race is on somewhere in the background of everything else.
Daddy runs the room. Forty years around short tracks earns you that. He does not trust anybody under fifty to talk about racing, which rules out most of the internet and every suggestion I have ever made.
So it stopped me to walk through and hear a podcast going on his phone. A young woman named Taylor Kitchen, breaking down the short-track history like she had been standing in the turns for it. Above the Yellow Line, the show is called. He had it turned up. Coming from him, that is a trophy.
Asked him about it later and he did the thing where he shrugs like it is nothing. She knows her stuff, he said. That is the whole review. From a man who quit trusting the sport's storytellers somewhere back in the nineties, it is practically a monument.
Mama never looked up. She reads between cautions, always has, forty years of it, a paperback held together with a rubber band. The chili sat on the burner doing what it does, which is nothing anybody can rush.
None of it was about the race, in the end. The race was just the reason everybody came. What we were really doing was the same thing we always do, which is sit in a good room with the people who raised us and let an afternoon run long.
Daddy left the podcast playing after the race went off. First time I have seen him keep listening once there was nothing left to watch. Some torches get passed quiet, on a phone, on a Sunday, with nobody making a thing of it.