The Pinewood Derby in Our Hayloft

Cody was in the back seat with his face pressed to the window.

He was holding his car up against the glass in both hands, the way Carter had held his at the weigh-in.

Jen sat behind the wheel with the engine running. For a long minute, she did not move. I could see her hands on the steering wheel.

Then her door opened.

Cody got out first. He did not wait for his mother. He came across the yard in his too-big snow boots with his car held out in front of him, and he walked right into the barn and right up to the finish line, where Carter and I were kneeling.

He looked at Carter. Then he looked at me. His nose was running from the cold and his cheeks were bright pink, and he was holding that car like it might get taken away from him too.

“Aunt Melissa,” he said, very quietly, so only the two of us and Carter could hear him, “can I race too?”

Thirty kids and maybe forty grownups were watching. I could feel all of them watching.

Before I could open my mouth to answer him, Carter stood up out of the straw and brushed off his knees.

“Yeah,” Carter said. “You can go in my heat. You can have the left lane. The left lane’s a little faster, Grandpa says, because of the way the barn floor sits.”

That was all. My son did not make him ask twice. He did not make him wait one second.

I have been proud of Carter a lot of times in his life, but I do not think I have ever been prouder than I was right then, kneeling in the straw.

Jen was standing in the barn door. She had her hands jammed in the pockets of her parka and her face was red, and not just from the cold.

She looked like a woman walking into a room where everybody had been talking about her.

I got up and went to her. I did not hurry and I did not make a show of it.

I just walked across the barn floor and stood in front of my sister-in-law in the doorway, where the cold was coming in.

“You came,” I said.

“Cody wouldn’t stop asking,” she said. Then she shook her head hard, like she was mad at herself.

“No. That’s not fair. That’s not why. Can I say something to you? Just you, not in there?”

We stepped outside into the cold, around the corner of the barn by the old stock tank, where the sun was.

She did not look at me at first. She looked out at the fields, white all the way to the shelterbelt.

“Last year,” she said, “when Cody won his den, one of the dads went to Rick. He said I rigged it. He said the den leader’s kid always wins. It went all over the pack. I heard about it at the grocery store, Mel. I heard about it at church.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, and it was the truth. Nobody had ever said a word about it to me, maybe because they knew I was family.

“I wasn’t going to let it happen again,” she said. “Not this year. So I bought Cody a kit car, so nobody could say a thing. And then Carter walked up with that car, and it was so nice, and it was my own nephew, and all I could think was what they would say if I let it through.”