MILES APART Ken Casper TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND To Florence and Jack Domin Who’ve been there through thick and thin For more than sixty years. You’ve inspired more than you realize. CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENT CHAPTER ONE CHAPTER TWO CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR CHAPTER FIVE CHAPTER SIX CHAPTER SEVEN CHAPTER EIGHT CHAPTER NINE CHAPTER TEN CHAPTER ELEVEN CHAPTER TWELVE CHAPTER THIRTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FIFTEEN CHAPTER SIXTEEN CHAPTER SEVENTEEN CHAPTER EIGHTEEN CHAPTER NINETEEN CHAPTER TWENTY CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE ACKNOWLEDGMENT None of this would have happened without Marsha Zinberg and Tina Colombo. Thank you for your confidence and support CHAPTER ONE JACK SLAPPED HIS GLOVES on the table and stomped over to the refrigerator. He needed to shuck his driving uniform, get under a cool shower and scrape the grime off his sweaty body. But first he needed a drink. A two- and-a-half-hour, four-hundred-mile race left him as dehydrated as a prune. He grabbed a lime-flavored sports drink, twisted off the cap and drank so greedily some of the green liquid dribbled down the sides of his mouth. At the moment he didn’t care. He’d gone into this last race of the season with high hopes after winning the number three position in the qualification round on Friday afternoon. His car, Number 424, had been running in top form. Everything seemed set for Victory Lane and the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Championship, and he needed a win badly. His last two seasons hadn’t gone especially well, to the point where pundits were beginning to wonder if Jack Dolman, three-time NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Champion, might be getting ready to hang it up. At fifty he was an old-timer in a sport that saw most of its players in their twenties and thirties. No, dammit, he wasn’t ready to call it quits, not yet. He’d been racing cars of one sort or another for forty years. As far as he was concerned, they’d have to pry him out from the driver’s seat and probably bury him with the steering wheel still clutched in his cold, dead fingers. But simply being an “also ran” wasn’t good enough. It never had been. He had to win. That was why he raced. He heard footsteps coming down the aisle of the 18-wheeler between the tool bins toward the lounge. Haulers were off-limits to reporters, but occasionally one, usually an eager novice, would violate the rules and have to be asked to leave. Jack peeked around the corner. Cal. That was all right. Caleb Farnsworth had been his crew chief for more than two decades. Ten years Jack’s senior, he’d been something of a father figure in the early days, but the relationship had evolved over time so they were more like brothers now. There wasn’t much one didn’t know about the other. “Rough break,” Cal said, as he entered the cramped lounge. He went to the refrigerator, got out a small can of tomato juice, pulled the soft silver tab off the opening and took a long sip. “Barney all right?” Jack asked. “Fine. His car’s history, but the medics gave him a clean bill. A small abrasion on his cheek. Nothing that won’t take care of itself in a few days.” “Good.” The pileup that resulted when Barney Constantine lost a wheel, slid up against the outside rail and bounced back into the pack behind him was nothing short of spectacular. He’d then been rammed by two other cars and bulldozed into the infield where he rolled four times before finally coming to a halt upside down. The media would no doubt be showing the video many times over the next few weeks and months. Fortunately the safety features built into NASCAR stock cars were such that it wasn’t uncommon nowadays for drivers to walk away from even more scary crashes. Cal sat on one of the gray vinyl-covered couches, threw an arm across the back and balanced one ankle on the other knee. “You happen to look at the bottom of page three?” Jack knew what he was referring to and had been expecting the question since he scanned the Greensboro newspaper in his motor home that morning over his first cup of coffee. “I saw it.” He took another long glug of his drink. “You going?” “No.” Cal didn’t seem shocked by the answer or its terseness. “Why not?” “Why should I? It’s not like we were friends.” Cal examined the tomato juice can in his hand, took another sip and gazed up at this friend. “She was the only wife you ever had, Jack. But she isn’t really the point, is she? Funerals aren’t for the dead. They’re for the living, and the living in this case is your son, the son you haven’t seen in twenty-five years.” “And whose fault is that?” “A little late for the blame game, don’t you think? Lillah’s dead, Jack. It’s a hackneyed phrase, but she can’t hurt you anymore.” He was tempted to say she would never stop hurting him, but why bother? He’d lost that argument a quarter of a century ago when she left him, taking their son, his son, with her. “The service is Tuesday.” Jack shrugged. The truth was he was sorry she was dead, not because he had any feelings for her, no positive ones, at least, but because even after all these years he still wanted her to tell him why. What had he done to make her toss him aside like so much road debris? What offense had he committed to warrant having his son torn from his life? He also wondered if she would have told him she had no regrets, that she’d done the right thing. How could it have been right to take a child from his father, a father who loved and cherished him, then give him to another man? But he knew it was all futile. Unless Lillah had changed dramatically over the past two and a half decades, which he seriously doubted, she wouldn’t have given him a completely honest answer anyway. In truth it had never been about the boy, never been about Jack. It had been about Lillah. Everything had always been about Lillah. “I’ll go with you, if you like,” Cal offered, because he was a friend, and because he knew how painful it would be for Jack to face the son he hadn’t seen since the boy was four years old. “I said I’m not going.” Jack tossed the empty plastic jug into the recycle bin