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The asphalt at Atlanta Motor Speedway was melting. Not literally, though at 140 degrees track temperature, it felt close; he knew was pushing the #14 Chevrolet hard enough to make the rubber scream, obviously.
Lap 187. Twenty-three to go.
"You're burning the left-side tires." Jack's voice crackled through the comms, tight and technical, masking the worry Robby knew was there. "Lift on three. I mean it."
Robby touched the brake for half a second, just enough to mock the suggestion, then buried the throttle through Turn 2. The car drifted high, kissing the wall - kissing, not hitting, a brushstroke of paint transfer at 180 miles per hour.
"Dammit, Robby."
"She likes it rough," He couldn’t help but joke, despite his knuckles being white on the wheel.
The caution flag whipped out three laps later. Debris on the backstretch. He rolled into the pit box with smoke curling from the wheel wells like cigarette breath.
That's when he saw him.
Abbot wasn't at the pit wall monitoring the stop or at the front of the car checking the engine where he should've been. He was at the driver's side window, grease-blackened hands gripping the door frame, his face too close, eyes too bright.
"Heard you promised Whittaker a date if you won." Jack said, shouting over the idling engine and the air guns screaming two stalls down. "Isn't he a little young for you?"
Robby didn't look at him. Couldn't. "Listening in on my comms again, Jack?"
"Don't make promises you can't keep, Robby. I saw you driving out there."
"I drive how I want to drive, you fix the car the way you want to fix it."
The crew swarmed like a bunch of bugs on him; tires off, tires on, twenty-three pounds of fuel dumped in. Twelve seconds. An eternity when Jack was staring at you like he could see the cracks in your soul.
"Yeah, well-" Jack leaned closer, his voice dropping to something raw, stripped of the radio's static. "-I can't fix you, Robby. I don't want my friend to be broken too."
The jack dropped. The engine screamed, but he still heard himself mutter "Too late..." just loud enough for the altter to hear, seeing Jack flinch like he'd been shot, seeing his mouth open to say something else, something that might have been please or stop or come back, fucking who knows, but the #14 was already launching back onto the track, leaving Abbot standing in a cloud of ethanol exhaust and dust.
He simply drove like a man who'd already made peace with the wall.
He won by half a car length, bumping the leader on the final lap, sending sparks cascading down the front stretch like a steel waterfall. The car was scrap metal just like it had been the last few times lately - fender crushed against the tire, rear decklid peeled back like a sardine can.
He'd driven it over to Victory Lane on sheer spite with a manic grin on his face
The crowd roared. The uppers cursed. The champagne sprayed. Under all of it, Dennis, nineteen years old, wide-eyed, a college intern who fetched coffee and torque wrench settings, standing at the edge of the celebration with his hands shoved in his jeans pockets.
"You promised." Dennis said when Robby finally came out of the fray, legs shaking, helmet under his arm.
Robby looked at him, really looked. The kid was sunburned, nervous. Innocent in a way that made Robby's chest ache a little too much for his liking.
"Yeah." Robby said. His voice sounded like gravel in a blender. "I did."
Jack was there too, hovering at the periphery of the victory photo, his arms crossed, oil staining his uniform from where he'd touched the wrecked car.
He didn't say anything when Robby walked past him, didn't stop him when Robby led Dennis toward the transport hauler, but Robby could feel his eyes on his back.
He wished he had been brave enough to meet them.
They went to Waffle House.
It wasn’t his first pick, but he knows the kid meant well. They couldn’t be too far away from the track and they only had bare pickings till both of them got paid, so it was fine for the most part if he really had to put in a comment.
Whitaker filled the silence easily, talking about aerodynamics and suspension geometry, nerdy and excited and passionate like he used to be, oblivious to the way his hands trembled around his coffee cup, to the dark circles under his eyes that had nothing to do with fatigue and everything to do with the things Abbot had seen in him that evening.
"You drive different than everyone else." Dennis said, pancakes halfway to his mouth. "Like you're angry at the track and you’re trying to find a way to make sure it remembers that."
Robby stared out the window at the I-85 traffic. "I'm not angry, kid. I'm just..."
Broken. Too late.
He thought of Jack, back at the garage, peg leg working overtime, probably already stripping the ruined transmission from the #14 with the precision of a cradic surgren, probably already ordering parts they couldn't afford, probably listening to radio recordings from several races previous to fill the void like the one inside his own chest, trying to hear something positive.
"You gonna make this a regular thing?" Dennis asked, hopeful, pulling him out of his mind.
If he didn’t want to kill himself more…
He just stood up, threw a fifty on the table- it was too much, enough to pay and give their server a windfall, but he didn't care -and shook his head. "No. This was a one-time thing. I don't... I don't make promises, kid. Not real ones."
He left Dennis there, confused and more than likely hurt, making his way back to the track in the slowly increasing Chicago humidity. The hauler lights were on. Jack was there, alone, holding a driveshaft in his hands like he didn't know what to do with it.
"You didn't have to scare him." Jack said, not looking up. “Kid was only wanting to make you feel something for once.”
"I had to." Robby said, leaning against the tool cart. His adrenaline was crashing. He felt seventy years old. "He's too young to know what a wreck looks like up close."
Jack set the driveshaft down. He crossed the garage, slow, and stood in front of Robby for the first time thast day, close enough to smell the sweat and brake dust and despair.
"You gonna tell me what's wrong?" Jack asked.
Robby laughed, dry and hollow. "You already know. You said it yourself. You can't fix me."
"I could try."
"You've been trying for six years."
Jack reached out, hand hovering near Robby's face, then dropping to his shoulder, heavy and warm and solid. "Then let me try for seven. Just... stop driving like you've got a death wish. Stop making promises to people you don't intend to keep. Stop-"
"Stop being broken?" Robby asked, meeting his eyes finally.
The garage was quiet. Somewhere, a clock ticked toward midnight.
"Yeah." Jack said softly. "Or let me, hell, someone, hold the pieces together while you figure it out. You’re about to take a break from racing for 3 months at the end of the season, Mike. I’m concerned you aren’t even going to make it there. Please. Just fucking let me in."
Robby closed his eyes. The roar of the engines was still in his ears, the vibration in his bones, the wall - waiting for him, mocking him, calling him - it was all too much.
"Too late." He whispered, again.
There’s a beat, before fingers find his shoulder and squeeze.
"Not yet." Jack whispered back. “Not yet.”