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Shay
My new schedule is a choreographed dance.
Get home from school. Stash my books. Lie to my dad about where I’ve been and where I’m going.
At least I was spared the last part tonight. After getting home from campus, I found my dad passed out on the couch in our two-bedroom house, his foot elevated at the end. I tucked a blanket around him, quietly showering and grabbing leftovers from the fridge before swiping the overdue bills from the mailbox and hiding them before I headed out again.
The drive takes twenty minutes in the dark. My vintage Mustang rumbles under me, the deep forest-green paint flashing along the edge of the hood as I pass beneath the streetlights. The ’67 Fastback is temperamental, but I love it. It’s one thing in my life that no one can touch.
When my adoptive dad gave me the car for my sixteenth birthday, I insisted we fix it up together. It was a thrill using my own tools—the wrenches with padded handles, the custom welded breaker bars—to bring it back to life one piece at a time.
I might not have inherited his genetics, but I got my love of cars from him.
The ARI garage is humming when I pull up. I type my code into the keypad by the door, the Ashford “A” above the nine digits.
“MacDonald. You’re five minutes late,” calls Keane as I step inside.
“I’m sorry.” It’s on the tip of my tongue to mention I put in a full day on campus, but I don’t want to give our shift supervisor any excuse to send me home.
In the break room, I open the locker with my name on it. My dad’s name, technically, and his locker too. Inside are photos and stickers from F1, artifacts of his career spent working for ARI.
No less prominent are photos of me doing things he was proud of. Losing both my front teeth at once so I whistled for an entire month when I spoke. Making my first pancakes, which I forgot to add eggs to but he ate them with a smile anyway. Getting my driver’s license while he paced in the back of the DMV, wringing his hands the entire time.
Dad’s only ever been based here at headquarters, in contrast to the traveling engineers and mechanics who work on the F1 grid. Each week, the mobile city builds their garages, kitchens, and data centers at a new track to race Thursday to Sunday. Then they tear it all down and go to a new country. It’s glamorous and grueling.
When I burst into his world sixteen years ago, Dad was a race car mechanic without the first clue what to do with a little girl. We figured it out together.
The first time I went into our home garage, I wanted to know what all the pieces were that made up a car. How they fit together. What made them break and what made them fast.
Dad would try to shoo me out, but I always snuck back.
I shrug out of my jacket and hang it up. In the smudged mirror inside the locker door, the necklace around my neck glints in the fluorescent lights overhead.
“Keep working on this.” Keane gestures to the aluminum chassis in the corner housing a direct-injected Mecachrome V6 engine. It was damaged in a race before the summer break but wasn’t a high priority to fix.
“What’re you working on?”
“Something above your pay grade.” The shift supervisor has ten years on me but looks even older with his full beard and crinkled eyes. He waves before disappearing through a door I’ve never noticed—probably leading to a different section of the garage.
When Ashford HR called the house to tell Dad he couldn’t take the medical leave he requested after his knee replacement surgery, there was no room for the anger I felt knowing he’d worked there his entire life, yet there was no protection for him when he needed it.
I did what I had to do: promised the shift would be covered.
I didn’t volunteer that it would be a different MacDonald showing up to work for a month.
Now, I pop an antacid from the roll in my pocket before reaching for my headphones only to remember they’re broken. I grab a seat and get to work fixing the F2 car. It’s a standard make, and I know what parts go where.
At night, the garage at headquarters is quiet and climate controlled. These vehicles get shipped off to races, then shipped back when they fail. We don’t see the excitement of the track, but we make what goes onto it.
It’s peaceful. Here, I can block out my dad’s bills. The emptiness I feel when I think about the parents I barely knew. I can figure out what’s wrong and set to putting it right.
Engines make sense. A car doesn’t try to hide why it’s broken. With a little patience and skill, you can always, always put one back together.
“What you’re doing is gonna come out,” Bo, one of the other mechanics, grunts as we both head for the break room a while later.
“Only if you say something,” I counter as he digs cigarettes from his locker while I fix a coffee. “Keane hasn’t.” I’m grateful our shift supervisor’s had my back so far.
