The Pinewood Derby in Our Hayloft

He just walked over to the table, said “Excuse me, Jen,” and picked up the blue car.

Then he walked back to Carter, crouched down so his knees popped, and put the car in both of Carter’s hands, and closed Carter’s fingers around it with his own big rough ones.

“Let’s go home, partner,” he said. “We’ll get some supper.”

Carter nodded. He did not cry. He walked out of that gym with his chin up and his car held against his chest, and I followed him, and I could feel every eye in that room on our backs.

At the door I looked back once. Jen was writing on her clipboard.

Cody was looking right at us, and when I caught his eye, he looked down at his shoes so fast it almost hurt to see.

It is six miles from town to our place, three on the blacktop and three on gravel. We live on the farm I grew up on.

My mother passed four years ago, and Dad sold the cows after that, but he kept the barn and the shop and the house.

When my marriage ended, Carter and I moved into the house with him. People in town said it was so Dad would not be alone.

Dad says it was so I would not be. I think we were both right.

Carter rode home in the back seat of Dad’s pickup with the car in his lap. He did not say anything for the whole six miles.

He just held it and looked out the window at the dark fields and the snow blowing across the road.

I kept waiting for him to cry. I would have known what to do if he cried. I would have pulled over and held him.

But he just sat there, small and quiet, and that was worse than any crying could have been.

At home I warmed up the hotdish from Wednesday, and nobody ate much of it.

Carter set the blue car on the kitchen table next to his plate, right where he had built most of it.

That car had lived on our kitchen table for a month. I want you to understand what went into it, because it matters for the rest of this.

The kit came home in a little cardboard box the first week of January.

A block of soft pine about seven inches long, four plastic wheels, four nails for axles. That is all a Pinewood Derby car is when it starts.

Carter drew his design on graph paper first. He drew eleven of them.

Dad made him pick one and tape it to the refrigerator for three days to make sure he still liked it. That is a shop teacher rule. Measure twice, sleep on it once.

The one he picked was low and flat in the back and came up into a little wedge in the front, like a doorstop.

He said it looked like a race car. Dad said it looked like it would be fast, which was the more important thing.

Out in the shop, Dad traced the design onto the block and cut it on the band saw while Carter stood behind the yellow line on the floor in his safety glasses.

That took about four minutes. It was the only part of the car Dad did with his own hands.

Everything after that was Carter. Every night after supper, he sat at the kitchen table with a sheet of newspaper under him and a little block of wood wrapped in sandpaper, and he sanded.