"Hey, Trent, you're on TV ."
Trent Matheson didn't look up from his laptop computer. "Am I with a blonde?"
He didn't know how the media managed to get so many different shots of him with so many different blondes. At the very least, it seemed like discrimination against brunettes. Trent had dated a brunette a couple of months back, he was certain. Almost certain.
The regular sounds of Matheson Racing's race car prep- aration—the clang of metal on metal, the hiss of the air guns, the whine of the welding torch—ceased as everyone except Trent looked up at the TV. Then Rod Sutton, Trent's crew chief, said, "She's blond, for sure. But not your kind of blond ."
Trent hit the Send button that would transmit his e-mail newsletter to thousands of NASCAR fans all over America, then checked out the TV high on the wall at the far end of the workshop. The sound was off, but sure enough there he was, his face blown up large behind the woman. Like Rod said, she was blond. Pretty, but awkward-looking. The on-screen caption read Kelly Greenwood, Sport Psychology Consultant.
"Not another one," he muttered. Another expert with an opinion on what made Trent Matheson a winner. He shook his head—he'd rather spend his time answering the dozens of fan e-mails that had come in today than listen to what other people said about him. Then a picture of Danny Cruise flashed up on the screen alongside Trent's face. Cruise was his number-one rival for the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series.
"Turn up the sound, will you?" Trent called to Rod. When the volume came up, the camera had panned back to show the TV network's traveling prerace studio. Kelly Greenwood was one of four guests being interviewed by host Chris Spires. Trent recognized the other three: a regular race analyst, a former Cup champion who wasn't racing this year and a retired crew chief. All male.
"Okay, folks, let's have your picks," Chris Spires said.
"Trent Matheson won last week's NASCAR race here in Charlotte—can he do it again this Sunday?"
The analyst spoke up first. "Cruise is good, but I'm picking Trent Matheson ."
"Matheson, without a doubt," the retired driver agreed.
A cheer went up around the Matheson Racing workshop. Trent flashed a grin to his team. "Smart guys, huh?"
The ex-crew chief took a little longer to make up his mind. He sounded reluctant when he said, "It'll go down to the wire, but Matheson will win it ."
A grumble ran around the workshop, but Trent waved it away with good humor. He knew the ex-chief's reluctance stemmed from the fact that Trent had dated his daughter, then ended it when she refused to accept what he'd told her all along, that he wasn't after a serious relationship. The old guy just plain didn't like him. But he couldn't deny Trent was the standout driver in this year's field.
"What about you, Kelly?" Chris Spires turned a smile on the blonde.
For a bare second, she froze. Then her tongue came out to moisten her lips, and she cleared her throat. She lifted a hand to push a stray strand of hair behind her ear, but her watch tangled in the cord of the microphone clipped to her shirt. There was a brief, inelegant tussle that had the guys in the to the TV and hit the off button before she could sentence. He turned to the assembled company. "What say we invite her to join me in Victory Lane after I win tomorrow?"
There was a chorus of support from every corner except the one that mattered. Chad Matheson, who sometimes forgot he'd been Trent's older brother for thirty-one years and his boss for just five, was rubbing his chin as if he actually lent some credence to the garbage that woman had spouted. Chad said, "She's right, you did crash out twice in a row ."
"Eight million Americans could have told you that," Trent snapped. Thanks for the vote of confidence, bro.
"You did that last season," Chad said. "You won two, lost two, won two, lost two ."
Deliberately, Trent stayed where he was, next to the life- size poster of himself pinned to the wall below the TV set. They'd sold thousands of those posters when Trent won the NASCAR Busch Series. he'd autographed so many, he'd practically gotten carpal tunnel syndrome. "I finished top- three the next five after that, and I won the Busch series. For the second time," he reminded his brother. He knew what Chad would say to that.
"The Cup is different ."
Bingo.
Chad continued, "There's more pressure, you don't have the same experience in the series ."
So what if Trent had been the highest-performing rookie in the history of the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series on his debut two years ago? So what if last year he'd set the fastest lap time more often than any other driver and had finished fifth in the series, leaving everyone to predict another quantum leap in his performance this season? Chad wouldn't be confident of victory until he was standing next to Trent in Victory Lane, helping hold up that coveted sterling silver trophy.
"I'm ready for this," Trent told his brother. The two men locked glares for several long seconds. Chad looked away first, and it was as if a spell had been broken, freeing the crew to return to their work of setting up the Number 186 car for Sunday's race.
Trent let a confident swagger into his walk as he did the rounds of the workshop, checking on the cars, cracking jokes and giving the guys the encouragement that helped bond them into an unbeatable team.
He planned to win on Sunday. No sport psychologist was going to tell him otherwise.
KELLY GREENWOOD popped the top of her soda and set the can down on the coffee table. She sank into the comfort of her leather couch. What more could a girl want than a Sunday spent watching the most exciting motor racing in the world? Even better, it counted as work.
She switched on the TV just as the NASCAR theme music played. Along with the 170,000-odd people at the track, she closed her eyes for the invocation, then sang along to the national anthem.And when the grand marshal said those time- honored words, "Gentlemen, start your engines," she felt the familiar lurch in the pit of her stomach. Who needed to go to the race, when watching it at home was as good as being there?
Who am I kidding? She'd have loved to be at the race track, rather than sitting here in the condo she'd rented for the duration of the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series. But insulting Char- lotte's favorite homegrown race driver had made her Public Enemy Number One. Who knew Trent Matheson had so many fans?And who knew one little TV interview would make Kelly instantly recognizable to the complete strangers who'd up- braided her this morning at the mall, at the park, even in church?
Turning up at today's race might start a riot. She should never have been so rash as to predict Trent Matheson wouldn't go more than half of today's four hundred laps.
I'm a psychologist, not a psychic.
Kelly huffed out an anxious breath that lifted the bangs off her forehead. Maybe she'd gone too far. But Suze, her friend who was a production assistant on the network's NASCAR show, had warned her to make the most of this opportunity to stand in for Don Carson, motor racing's foremost sport psy- chologist, after he had a minor car accident.
"Don't say 'uh." Don't fiddle with your hair. Smile. Talk in sound bites." Suze had fired instructions at Kelly as an as- sistant applied makeup that felt heavier than normal, but would apparently come out okay on TV. "Whatever you do, don't go along with everyone else—say something different ."
Which sounded fine, until Kelly heard who the other guests were.
"Those guys have a combined experience of about a thousand years in NASCAR," she said, horrified. How could she, a longtime fan but with zero professional involvement, contradict them?
When they all picked Trent Matheson to win, that's exactly what she had to do. If a snappy sound bite would help estab- lish her as a sport psychology consultant in NASCAR—well, she wasn't about to blow it. She'd been knocking on the doors of the top racing teams for months, getting only dumb jokes about shrinks and offers of driver autographs for her trouble. No use at all to a woman who had to resurrect her career before her family discovered just how badly she'd failed.
She'd done what she had to.
Trent Matheson is a casualty of my ambition. Kelly chewed on the thought then spat it out. Matheson was the poster boy of this year's NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series. Never without a pretty blond girl, always with a charming smile on his lips— maybe he'd spent a fortune on dentistry and didn't want to waste the results—Matheson had the ego of a champion.
And the brain of a—well, put it this way: Trent Matheson wasn't the sharpest tool in the box.
She could tell from the way he gave long consideration to the most inane of the journalists' questions, always delivering his eventual answer in a drawl punctuated by "uh's" and "huh's ."
Kelly's comment would have slid off him like a race car off a wet track.
She watched as the cars circled the track in their starting order. In any case, she was probably about to be proved com- pletely wrong. Matheson was starting this race in pole position, thanks to an outstanding performance in Friday's qualifying, and he had a record of being hard to catch off the pole.
Kelly winced as they showed once more that clip of her saying "not a chance" and predicting Trent wouldn't last two hundred laps. Couldn't they just start the darned race?
Suze had assured her after the interview that it didn't matter if she was wrong. Viewers had been phoning and e-mailing the station, some to agree with her, more to disagree. "We love that," Suze said. "I'm certain you'll be invited back ."
"Which means," Kelly told herself aloud now, "it's fine by me if Trent Matheson runs all four hundred laps without a problem." But if something goes wrong—nothing that might hurt him...
