“Rotate it just a tad,” Tate said in a breathy moan. They had been going at it for the last hour and her back had just about had enough.
“There?” Beau asked as he hovered above her.
“Just a little. . .there! Right there!” She shouted. Twisting her own body, Tate reached up and made a slight adjustment hoping that Beau could figure out that she needed him to stay still for a moment.
“How much longer, Tate?” he asked as she lifted her bent knee to get better leverage.
“Another minute. Anyway, it’s not like you have anything else pressing.”
“Maybe I have a lunch date,” Beau added as he tweaked his hold once again.
“You don’t,” Tate added on just as she could feel everything tightening into its right place. She grunted once more before finally releasing her hold.
“There, that should do it,” she said as she slid free and righted her clothes.
“So, clinical.” Beau was staring at her with a smug grin as she tugged the grease-smeared coveralls over her denim cutoffs and white tank.
Tate grunted out a laugh as she hopped onto the top of the new desk she and Beau had just finished putting together. It should have been an easy project considering she could take apart a car and put it back together without missing a single nut or bolt, but the instructions weren’t in English and came with far more parts than were necessary. Story of her life, really.
“So, do you actually have a lunch date?” She would feel a bit bad if Beau had plans that she interrupted, but it’s not like she expected the new desk to take an hour to put together instead of a few minutes. Besides, he had been the one to break the old one with a date last week—something she really didn’t want to think about happening in her office.
“You know that I don’t unless you want to join me today,” Beau asked with a hint of hope in his eyes. They’d been down that road before and she knew that they were better off as friends and coworkers. And they had come to that conclusion a few years ago.
“Come on, Beau. You know that the shop is crazy busy. For such a small town, we seem to have a never-ending supply of cars with issues.”
“And yet, you let me and Hugh take a lunch break every day. Demand it, actually.”
Rolling her eyes, Tate ignored Beau’s comment and jumped down from the desk, righting her coveralls in the process.
“Come on. I bet Hugh is pissed I left him in charge for over an hour.”
Opening the door, Tate found herself face to face with the Fitzgerald siblings. Fred, the former Sheriff of Carson, and his sisters Shirley and Temple were part of one of the town's founding families and treated all of its residents like their personal grandchildren. The siblings were landmarks of Carson in their own right, so much so that most of the townspeople gave up guessing their age. A constant smile was normally plastered on their faces, but as Beau exited the office behind her, their jaws dropped and a scarlet coloring flushed over their cheeks.
Temple was the first to break the silence. “Well, I see that Beau is good with more than just his hands.” Tate had always appreciated the older woman’s bluntness, but usually at the expense of others. She felt differently being the one under the trio’s scrutiny.
“Come on now, Temple,” Shirley chimed in. “Can’t you see that you’re embarrassing them? Look at young Beau’s ears. I’ve never seen them quite so red.”
“We weren’t. . .I mean. . .nothing happened,” Tate stuttered, but she could tell that the siblings had already come to their own conclusions about what took place in her office.
“We were just putting together a desk.” Beau looked at the trio with pleading eyes, but Temple simply scoffed in reply.
She reached up a wrinkled hand with ruby red polish coating her nails and tapped Beau’s cheek. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
Tate stood in shock for a split second, then turned her attention away from Temple and spoke directly to Fred. She figured if the sisters wanted to assume that she had slept with Beau in her office, she could let them. Tate was rarely in the local gossip fodder. Most of the time, she figured most people forgot that she even lived in the town until they needed her to fix their car, and even then, it was probably because she owned the only garage in Carson.
When she had Fred alone, he explained how his over a decade-year-old Crown Victoria sedan was making noises and the electronics on the driver side had stopped working. She raised her eyebrow at that comment alone. It wasn’t the car's fault that the electronics weren’t working. It was due to the fact that Fred had found himself up close and personal with an eight-point buck two years ago, which dented the driver’s side door. But the man was stubborn and refused to get the door replaced.
Being the town’s past Sheriff, Fred was tied to the Crown Victoria as much as he was to donuts, despite how much Tate tried to convince him to purchase something newer, especially as he got older. And if Tate was honest, even though she wished the man would drive something safer, Fred wasn’t Fred without the Crown Vic.
It took her about fifteen minutes of convincing him to allow her to replace the door, and therefore the electronics, as well as checking out the noise coming from the engine. She had a loner car that she kept around when someone didn’t have a backup and she offered it to him, but Shirley and Temple chimed in and said that they would cart their older brother around. She bit her lip in the hopes of holding back her chuckle at Fred’s reaction, but she failed miserably.
“Hey, Tate. Hugh and I are going to grab lunch. Sure you don’t want to join us?” Beau called out from the exit.
“That’s okay. I’ll hold down the fort,” she called out as she twirled Fred’s keys in her fingers.
“You know,” Shirley said as she passed by, heading toward the exit, “it would do you some good to loosen up and live life a bit.”
Tate wanted to scoff at the comment, but she knew better. Instead, she shook her head, the tip of her pony tail sliding across her upper back. “I live life, Ms. Shirley.”
“I meant doing more than racing a car in a circle for hours. We want to see you settled down with a nice man.”
You and me both, Tate thought to herself, but the problem with men was that she didn’t have the time to devote to them. They required more attention than her project car, and that was really saying something.
Instead, Tate found herself saying, “The men here think of me as one of the guys, Ms. Shirley. Not that the grease helps that. And really, none of the guys here do anything for me.”
Tate hated talking poorly about herself, but she knew that she wasn’t someone outstanding. Good with a wrench? Sure. Good with makeup and styling? Not so much. She could find her way around a mascara wand and that was as close as she got.
“You sell yourself short, young lady. But nevertheless, you need to make sure that you find the time for someone special when he comes around.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Tate replied, placating the woman.
She watched the trio move toward the exit where Beau and Hugh were taking off their coveralls.
“Hey, Beau,” she shouted, her friend’s gaze landing on hers instantly. “Can you grab me a chicken caesar wrap? I’ll give you cash when you get back.” She ended the request with a timid smile.
He quickly returned her smile with a sincere one of his own, the dimple in his left cheek prominent as his lips lifted upward.
When everyone left through the single exit, Tate took a minute to look around the shop. It was hers and had been for a couple of years, regretfully. But even though her name was on the sign, she still didn’t feel like she deserved any of it. What had she done but been a dutiful daughter and niece? She finished high school and took night classes to get a bachelor's in business, but she had been born with a wrench and an oil can in her hands. Mechanics came easy to her. Too bad relationships didn’t.
Instead of working on the minivan jacked up on the lift, Tate headed back to her office to begin unloading the half dozen or so boxes that contained her files and office supplies.
Sighing as she swiveled in around in her office chair, Tate came to a stop as she faced her desk and leaned forward, banging her head gently on the wooden surface.
“This is as good as it’s going to get.”
***
“How does it look, Doc?” Noah asked the physician as he strolled into the room carrying two sets of x-rays.
“You said you saw one of the official doctors after the crash?” The older man asked as he cocked a bushy eyebrow in Noah’s direction, shoving the two films onto the backlit mount.
Noah bit back a groan. When he crashed his car during the race in Nashville, his father was adamant that he get cleared by the team doctor despite Noah walking away from the crash. Except he had hit the track barrier head-on when he lost control of the wheel during the seventieth lap and wasn’t surprised that the doctor told Noah that he had a concussion for the second time. But Noah had made sure that he hid any evidence of the injury he was sustaining.
That scenario brought him to an unknown doctor on the outskirts of town. As he woke the following morning, Noah had noticed how red the joints on his right hand had become. He thought little of it, popping a couple of pain meds with his breakfast, but as the day wore on, the joints seemed to grow more and more inflamed. He also noticed how difficult it had become to flex his fingers.
And that was the point that drove him to seek out help from someone not associated with his family, someone that wouldn’t immediately share any injuries with his father. Racing was in his blood. It was his family’s legacy. Generations of racers before him were champions and it was expected that he would fall in line and do the same and carry on the torch. Being his father’s only child, Noah was burdened with the task despite his father and mother wishing for more children. And depending on how someone looked at it, he was both blessed and cursed with that birthright.
Sure, he liked driving fast cars. He didn’t know a single male that didn’t, but he didn’t love it the way his father did. He only followed in his family’s footsteps because he was good at it. And that seemed to be both a blessing and a curse in Noah’s mind.
“Mr. Langley? Did you mention your injury to the team doctor?” the physician repeated, bringing Noah back to the moment.
“No, sir,” Noah confessed. Unfortunately, his hands had been bothering him weeks prior and weren’t related to the crash that he had found himself in. His hand had locked up and there was nothing he could do, but he lied and told the team that he simply lost control. Noah could only be thankful that he hadn’t caused anyone else to crash when he lost control of the wheel.
“Well, then. Let's go over these scans and get a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”
Noah wasn’t sure what he had expected, but as the doctor glanced at the scans and then back down at his tablet resting on top of a clipboard, the doctor’s expression turned from curiosity to bleakness in the blink of an eye.
“Noah, can you tell me when you started experiencing stiffness in your hand?”
“Probably a month or two ago, but it went away in a day or two. I just thought that I had a reaction to the new gloves sent by our sponsor.” Noah hadn’t spent much time considering the reason for the stuff joints. Sure, he considered the new material in the gloves was an irritant, especially since the only time the stiffness seemed to occur was when he was racing. That was until recently. The day before the Nashville race, he noticed that he could barely move his fingers and they were frozen in a position that reminded him of a letter C. It wasn’t until he took a pain killer and a hot shower did the rigidness subside.
Moving toward the x-rays, the doctor used his pen to point toward the knuckles on the first image.
“Do you see the joints here on the screen? This is what a normal skeletal x-ray for a hand of someone your age. Now,” he said as he pointed to the second x-ray, “this is your hand. I’m not sure if you can tell, but there is erosion happening along the bones at the joints and you’ve already begun to lose cartilage in the joints.”
The doctor was taking his time explaining and showing the erosion and cartilage loss, but Noah didn’t comprehend what he was trying to explain.
“Doc.” Noah interrupted. “Can you just tell me what’s going on? Forgive me, but I’m not really following you here.”
“Noah, you are showing early signs of rheumatoid arthritis.”
“What?”
Noah had no idea what the condition was; he only knew that arthritis was something his grandfather suffered with.
“Isn’t that something old people get?”
“Sometimes, Mr. Langley, but not always. But RA explains why your fingers are locking up and the joints looking inflamed as they are now.”
Noah took a deep breath. He was glad to have a diagnosis, something to explain what was going on with his body, but he wasn’t sure what this meant. Could he still race? Could he even drive? He had all of these questions swirling through his brain that he almost missed the doctor pointing out his wrist on the image.
“I’m sorry, what?” Noah spoke.
“It appears you also have some tendonitis in your wrist. It’s not uncommon for rheumatoid arthritis and tendonitis to appear together.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Instinctively, Noah grabbed his right hand and rubbed at the fingers while the physician continued to explain how the arthritis would affect both hands, but right now seemed to only flare up on the one hand.
“So, give it to me straight. Am I done? No more racing, no more driving, no more doing anything with my hands?”
“Not necessarily. There are treatments and ways to manage flare-ups, but we need to be proactive. There is no reason why you can’t continue racing, but in the off chance of a flare-up or simply continued repetitive use of the joints can cause more harm.”
“What do I do? How can we fix it?”
The thought of flushing all of his family’s legacy down the toilet because of this diagnosis caused sweat to bead at the back of his neck.
“Well, we take it one day at a time. For now, I want to prescribe you some meds to treat the pain and inflammation. I can also give you a cortisone shot for your wrist while you’re here. But what I’d like you to do for the next few months is to start a symptom journal. Note it in the journal whenever you experience something different than normal movement in your hands or any other joints. We’ll reassess your treatment in three to six months depending on the symptoms you’re experiencing.”
“Will I need surgery?”
“Right now, no. We can manage what you’re experiencing. But, Noah, let me be very clear, this diagnosis is not the end of the world, but you will need to really consider taking a step back from the racing. The stress and environment will hinder any progress, as will holding your hand in a tight position for an extended amount of time.
“You’re young, much younger than most RA patients, which leads me to believe you probably have a family history of this that maybe even you are unaware.
“I can help you get through this, but I’m going to need you help me. This is not the end of the world.”
“But it’s the end of my career,” Noah murmured. His heart started pounding, his palms grew sweaty, and his lungs felt like an elephant had taken a seat right on top of them. It wasn’t until right then that the gravity of the situation bulldozed him. How was he going to tell his father, his team? There were hundreds of employees that relied on him racing. And not just getting around the track, but winning. The more races he won, the more money the sponsors sent his way, which meant all of his employees were handsomely rewarded for their efforts.
Because racing was more than just sending a car around the track at two hundred miles per hour, it required both mental and physical strength and the mechanics of the car, which his employees kept up.
And his father and grandfather’s names meant something in the racing world. Langley Racing was more than just a team; they were a legacy in the community. Between the three of them, they had hundreds of championships beneath their belt.
“It’s not the end of your career,” the doctor specified. “What you’re looking at is maybe a new direction. You’re only thirty and still very healthy. Look at this as an opportunity to turn Langley Racing into something more.”
“You don’t understand,” Noah argued. “What am I if not a racer?”
“You’re right; I don’t. But here is a good chance to figure that out. Take care, Noah. I’ll send the prescription to the pharmacy across the street. In the meantime, let’s schedule an appointment in six months, but keep in touch with me. I would like monthly updates with your symptom journal. Okay.”
“Thanks, doc,” Noah muttered as he hung his head low.
The doctor reached out and rested a gentle hand on Noah’s shoulder, causing him to look up into the man’s kind blue eyes.
“You’re going to be fine.”