Justine considered it. “You think she’d like NASCAR mugs better than Royal Doulton?”
“I don’t think they’re mutually exclusive, Justine. Shall we do it?”
“Sure. I’ll pass the word,” said Justine. “Oh, look! A Prince Charles and Princess Diana! Aren’t they adorable?”
Cayle sighed. “I wonder if Princess Diana has a Richard Petty doll in her museum at Althorp,” she muttered.
“Nope,” said Justine. “I went there last summer. It’s just dresses and old pictures-stuff like that. This is much more interesting.”
Terence Palmer and Sarah Nash stood at the knee-high picket fence surrounding Adam Petty’s tricycle, which was parked beside Adam Petty’s multicolored race car. Terence thought that the 45 car, a Chevrolet Monte Carlo, looked quite appropriate parked beside a tricycle, because its flamboyant paint scheme suggested that it had been designed by a kindergartener with crayons. The car’s roof and doors were shamrock green, its hood a royal blue, and the bumpers bright red. Various sponsor decals in yellow and white lettering and the 45 on the sides and roof in buttercup yellow gave the car a festive air, as if it ought to have been a parade float instead of a race car. It seemed strange to think that someone so young, driving such an exuberantly colored car, should have died.
“The tricycle is a nice touch,” said Sarah Nash. “It reminds you that the drivers are just ordinary people, not superheroes in firesuits.”
“Seeing his car here in his grandfather’s museum makes me feel that I missed something,” said Terence. “Not family exactly. My childhood was fine. I know people hate it when privileged people complain, and honestly, I’m not. I think what I’m lacking is a sense of continuity. Look at Adam here: the fourth generation in the same family business. It seems to me that he could share much more with his father and grandfather than most people.”
“It’s rare, though, that kind of closeness.” Sarah Nash gave him an appraising stare. “You’re not about to tell me you wish you’d gone into farming with your father instead of being a tycoon in New York?”
“Hardly a tycoon,” Terence said quickly. “More like one cog in a big machine. And after all the education and training I’ve had, it would be a waste to walk away from that. No, I don’t think I’d have any aptitude for farming-or for stock car racing,” he added, nodding toward the car. “I just think it would be nice to feel like a part of something that started before you were born and will continue after you’re gone. Do you think my dad felt that way about his farm?”
“It’s hard to tell,” said Sarah Nash. “We never talked about it. I know that he enjoyed living there. It could have been no more than that. He wouldn’t want you to feel obligated to do anything you didn’t want to do, just out of some misguided sense of family tradition. And if you threw away a high-paying job to go broke farming in Wilkes County, he’d have called you a fool.”
“I used to wonder why he didn’t come and see me when I was a kid,” said Terence. “Why he didn’t try to forge a relationship with me. Do you know why he stayed away?”
“I think so,” said Sarah Nash. “During his last illness, there were days when he was in quite a lot of pain, and I’d go and sit with him. Once I said that I’d be tempted to take an overdose of the painkiller just to get the suffering over with, but you know what Tom said? He smiled at me-as much as he could smile, hurting as bad as he did-and he said, ‘I can’t do that, Sarah. I’ve got too much mountain blood in me to kill myself. Mountain people never go where they haven’t been invited.’”
Terence nodded, and they walked on to the next exhibit. No, Tom Palmer had certainly not been invited to visit his son. He was sure that had he turned up on the doorstep, his mother would have been gracious about it, but Terence knew that without so much as a harsh word or a raised eyebrow, she could make people feel profoundly out of place, so that they took the first opportunity to flee and never come back. He wasn’t sure how she managed it, and his two old girlfriends from his high school days who had been thus exiled would never explain to him exactly what had happened.
The truth was, he hadn’t made any effort to contact his father, either, but he told himself that he’d had no way of knowing whether his father had wanted to see him or not. Terence had always preferred to do without rather than to risk rejection.
Bill Knight had wandered up, reading the label on each exhibit, as if he were going to be tested on the material. “I really must get some postcards to send back to Canterbury,” he told them. “So many folks up there would love to come and see this. Well, this is a colorful car-practically a Christmas tree on wheels.”
“It was Adam’s,” said Terence, indicating the sign.
Bill Knight’s smile faded. “Oh, my,” he said. “Adam Petty. It’s odd, but I feel as if I knew him. My church is near the speedway where he was killed. I wish I could tell him how many people cried for him up there when it happened.”
“I’d like to think he knows that,” said Sarah Nash.
An hour later, and a few miles down the road, Shane McKee stood in a dimly lit entry foyer, beside the roped-off black number 3 car. He gazed down the dark and cavernous hallway, illuminated only by the faint glow of picture lights above each exhibit, and then he began to walk away from the sunshine of the entryway, and down the long dark hall of memories.
The place looked more like church than church, he thought. The visitors were acting like it was church, too. Singly or in pairs, the visitors wandered down the hall with its cathedral ceilings and its glass-encased Earnhardt trophy collections. If they spoke at all, it was in whispers.
“This isn’t much like the Petty Museum, is it?” said Karen, looking around her. “Mr. Petty’s museum looks like a branch bank in Mayberry. But this place feels like the Lincoln Memorial.”
“Richard Petty isn’t dead,” said Shane with a catch in his voice. When they first arrived he had stood in the foyer, staring at the black number 3 car on display, and wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. Karen had pretended not to notice.
“Well, no, Mr. Petty isn’t dead, Shane, but Adam Petty is, and yet they had his car out there on display with that little knee-high picket fence around it, right alongside the cars of his father and grandfather. With his tricycle parked next to it. I got the feeling there that they remembered Adam fondly, but that they weren’t wallowing in their grief.”
Shane turned on his bride with glistening eyes. “Wallowing?” he said. “Wallowing? Dale was a seven-time Winston Cup champion. He deserves all this respect and more!”
“Richard Petty was champion seven times, too,” Karen said softly as her new husband stalked away. Maybe she ought to run after him and tell him she was sorry, but she couldn’t figure out what she ought to be sorry for, except telling the truth when he didn’t want to hear it. Maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t made a habit of that.
She watched him for a few moments. Better give him time to get over it, she thought. Shane always took things to heart. Instead of following him down the hallway, she wandered over to the back of the foyer where Sarah Nash and Terence Palmer were standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling glass wall at least twenty feet high.
The room behind the glass wall, the size of a school gymnasium in an electric twilight, contained an exhibit of several incarnations of Dale Earnhardt’s rides-the black number 3, each emblazoned with sponsor stickers, all set many yards back from the glass, so that the cars were too far away for sight-seers to tell much about them.
“We’re not allowed up close to the cars?” Karen asked, still thinking of the knee-high picket fences at Richard Petty’s cheery public attic.
Terence shrugged. “Can’t even photograph them through the glass. I suppose it’s a security thing.”