The Legend (3 page)

He hated
that.

Spencer
and I looked over the truck for a few minutes when Casten, the youngest of my
three kids, appeared at the end of the driveway in a pair of board shorts.

“Does he
ever wear clothing?” Alley laughed reaching inside the back of the truck for
what appeared to be a salad that she had made.

Cole
jumped down from the overly large truck and smiled at me before saying. “He
never wears clothes. Why start now?”

Cole and
Casten took off to the backyard where the pool was being finished. For now, it
was a skateboard park for the boys and a very large hospital bill waiting to
happen.

“Jameson,”
Sway watched them dig out their skateboards from the garage. “That doesn’t look
safe.”

“Logan’s
not here. It’s safe.”

“Good
point.” She pushed a pile of steaks into my chest. “Get to cooking, champ.”

Having
just come off my fifteenth NASCAR Cup Championship, my wife and family
frequently called me champ. If I was being honest, I liked it.

I caught
her by the wrist balancing the plate of steaks in my left hand. “You have so
much to make up for tonight.”

She
grinned and purposefully licked her lips backing away across the slate patio, her
hand lingered on my forearm. “Oh I plan to.” She caught notice of my jeans
after that. “I’d change before Aiden comes over. He’ll notice.”

She had a
very good point. Hide the evidence.

Sway
disappeared to the kitchen with Alley when the rest of the family showed up. I
thought it was just Spencer and Alley coming over tonight but it turned out, as
with any given night we were all in town together, my sister Emma showed up as
did my parents. Before Aiden came outside, I changed out of my bleach stained jeans
so he wouldn’t notice.

It was
both nice and horrible having a large family since Sway’s parents were both
gone. Her biggest fear was growing old without a family. A family is what we
had.

Congregating
around our dining room, I listened to the boys arguing. Axel, our eldest son,
wasn’t here tonight because he was at Volusia Speedway doing promotional
appearances for the upcoming season. This past winter came with not only the
announcement of my dad retiring from racing, but with the news that my son would
be taking over his legendary ride in the World of Outlaws. I had mixed emotions
over that as did
Sway
.

Most of
the time was spent listening to Casten and Cole making the night eventful.
Thankfully, Emma and Aiden’s twin boys were at a friend’s house and not
instigating these two.

My
daughter Arie, our middle child, and Spencer and Alley’s daughter, Alexis, were
somewhere on these two hundred acres but who knew where they were. They usually
found entertainment where grown-ups weren’t. Being sixteen-year-old girls, you
can imagine their love for their parents.

They, at
least, showed up for dinner and then I knew they’d be out again. Sway and I
tried to get her to be friendly but she thought we were the least cool people
and rolled her eyes every chance she could.

“I tried
calling to see what I should bring but you didn’t answer.” Emma said to
Sway
as she shuffled a few dishes from the kitchen onto the
table. “And by the way, change that street name. It’s inappropriate.”

“I think I
lost my phone again,” Sway shrugged, “and you have to talk to Jameson about the
street names. He had the signs made, not me.”

“We are
not changing anything!” I yelled into the kitchen smiling at Spencer.

Tommy,
Spencer and I got together one night, albeit drunk, and made street signs on a
website Sway had found. When they arrived, everyone excluding us boys thought
they were vulgar, rude and apparently now, inappropriate. I didn’t think they
were that bad. Who wouldn’t want to live on a street named
Poontown
?
I didn’t but Tommy did. We lived on Victory Lane naturally. Spencer lived on
Chasing Tail and Aiden and Emma lived on
Vag
Hill. I
knew eventually they’d take those down but it was funny to me.

“What’d
your dad say about it?” Cole whispered to Casten as they took a seat around the
table.

Casten
shot Cole a frantic look.

“He didn’t
say anything.” Casten whispered back and smiled up at me avoiding his cousin.
“How’s the shop coming along, dad? Did you get the lifts installed?”

“What did
you do now?” I asked sitting down beside Sway. She gave me a wink when my hand
brushed her thigh under the table.

“Why do
you automatically assume I did anything wrong?” Casten smiled as though he’d
just won the lottery. “Maybe I did something right?”

Let me
tell you something about my youngest son. He was here on earth for a good time
and nothing would stop him. And everything, I mean everything, was funny to
him.

Spencer,
who was sitting on the other side of me, looked at Cole. “You couldn’t keep
your mouth shut for one evening?” His voice took on a fatherly tone but still
lacked authority and I knew what’d happened. He’d put the boys up to something
and it backfired.

Casten
raised his hand.

“Why are
you raising your hand?” Sway asked just about the time my parents entered the
dining room with a few dishes of what looked to be pasta salad and pie. The
girls followed close behind them holding their phones a few inches from the
faces.

Casten
shrugged and smiled at Sway. “It seemed appropriate given the circumstances. I
wanted to plead my side of the case before it went to trial.”

“Weirdo,”
Sway mumbled scooping salad onto her plate. “Stop watching those court shows.
You don’t even know what you’re talking about and no, at fourteen you cannot be
Tommy’s attorney.”

“I didn’t
ask to be his attorney.” Casten laughed and leaned back in his chair preparing
for an argument. He lived for this shit. “But if he needed me to support him
through his legal battles, I would help. A good friend would.”

My eyes
drifted to
Sway’s
ass as she leaned over the table to
pull the steaks closer.

Damn I
wished we wouldn’t have been interrupted earlier.
Maybe no one would notice if I took her
inside the bathroom. Who was I kidding? Everyone would notice. They always
noticed which was precisely why we were always being interrupted.

“You two
never listen to
all
the directions I give you. If you would, you
wouldn’t get caught so often.” Spencer pointed to the boys as though he was
giving a lecture. “You need to get good at coming up with lies to protect
yourself.”

“Don’t
tell them that!” My mom scolded him, “they are good nice boys. Don’t teach them
to lie.”

“Clearly
you’re not talking about these two,” my dad, Jimi snorted pouring sauce over
his steak. “They lie worse than politicians.”

“Back to the
point,” gaining focus, I spoke up before I drug my wife upstairs. “What did you
guys do that backfired?”

Casten
raised his hand again and then broke out into giggles. With his flushed cheeks,
bright green eyes and contagious smile, it was hard not to find him funny.

“Stop
raising your hand and answer me.”

“In my
defense, I didn’t know it was illegal.”

Cole
coughed appearing to choke on his
Pepsi
he’d taken a drink from, “That’s
bullshit.”

My mom
gasped covering her mouth at their language.

“All
right,” Casten threw his arms in the air, “I spray painted the mascot at school
today.”

“How is
that illegal?” Sway asked knowing we’d done that a time or two back in school.

“Well,”
Casten took on a formal upright posture folding his hands on the table. “This dumbass
beside me,” he tipped his head to Spence, “
...
also
known as my uncle Spencer,” Spencer’s eyes widened, his fork falling to his
plate, “
...
told me that if I managed to paint the horse
too, he’d give me fifty bucks. I needed some extra cash.”

Spencer
grabbed a handful of grapes from the middle of the table and tossed them at
Casten’s face. “I’m not helping you anymore.”

“Spencer!”
My mom balked, “what were you thinking?”

“Wait,” I
waved my hands around trying to grasp what happened. “How is that illegal?”

“Uh, well,
apparently that horse at school is a police horse.”

“Jesus,
were you arrested?” Sway asked.

“No, I’m a
minor but I do have detention until the end of school.” He looked up at Sway
using his pouty face that he had perfected for her. “Can I be home schooled?
I’m clearly not suitable for public schools.”

Casten
constantly argued that he needed to be home schooled. We weren’t buying it nor
did either of us have time to home school him.

“No, you
can’t be home schooled. How come the school didn’t call me today?”

“I’m
pretty sure they did.” Casten’s eyebrows rose in amusement. “You can’t find
your phone again, remember?”

He was
ballsy, I’ll give him that, but I wasn’t convinced and he wasn’t getting off
the hook that easy.

“Listen,”
I pointed to Casten taking on my own fatherly tone to which Spencer chuckled,
“you’re thirteen
...
or fourteen
...
whatever
...
you’re still a child and shouldn’t be doing
shit like this.”

“Jameson,”
Spencer interrupted. “Take it easy on him. It was a crap shot to begin with and
that little shit Devin told on him. If it wasn’t for him he would have never
got caught painting the horse. Which I might add wasn’t in uniform. How were we
to know it was a police horse?”

“You were
there too?” I gasped.

Casten
clapped slowly with a smirk. “Well played jackass,” he said throwing the grapes
back at him, “you nearly had him convinced.”

Sitting
beside Casten, Arie, who’d remained glued to her phone, glared at him. “Stop
throwing shit around the table.”

Arie
didn’t eat meat. She wasn’t a vegetarian but didn’t actively eat meat. So
Casten knowing how to fluster his older sister took a steak from the plate and
threw it onto her plate over her salad.

She eyed
the offensive meat carefully and then looked at Casten, “and you wonder why,
when you were younger, I dressed you like a girl.”

“Real
mature Casten,” Spencer added attempting to cause a war between my kids. He
knew how to play the game with them. Problem was that I could start a war with
his too. He just didn’t realize that I was behind the majority of their fights.

“Hey, I’m
thirteen
...
or fourteen
...
or
whatever. I’m immature and too young to know the difference,” Casten replied
cutting into his steak and then purposefully chewing as loudly as he could to
annoy Arie. “I don’t think maturity has kicked in yet. More than likely it’ll
come in sometime after commonsense, which I seem to be lacking too. After all,”
he paused and smiled, “I did paint a police horse.”

“Or it may
never,” Emma added speaking for the first time in this argument. Up until now,
she and Aiden has remained quiet watching with smiles on their faces. They
probably had the worst kids out of all of us so I could only assume this was a
nightly occurrence for them. Emma continued to chew her food slowly gesturing
to Spencer and me with her fork. “It never kicked in for Jameson and Spencer.
So, it might not for you either.”

Though I
wasn’t entertained by Emma’s remarks, I had to laugh at how much our family was
changing. It’s strange to me how when something in your life begins, you think
about what it will be like twenty years later, at least I did. Now here I was,
almost twenty years since Sway and I got together. It was similar to what I
imagined but paled in comparison to what it really was.

“I know
what I want to be when I grow up,” Casten announced out of nowhere carrying
plates into the kitchen for Sway.

I wasn’t
sure if it was a rhetorical question or not, but decided to reply when he stood
next to me, “That’s great buddy. You’re only thirteen, way to have your life
figured out.”

He rolled
his eyes. “I’m fourteen. How do you always forget my age?”

“Whatever,
what do you want to be?”

“A lawyer,
with the amount of times you’ve been arrested; my sister and her poor choices
in men and my uncles, I think it’d be beneficial to our family.”

“We have a
family lawyer and Tommy is not your uncle.”

“Might as
well be,” Casten shrugged scooping a few more plates in his hands. I could hear
Sway laughing in the kitchen at something Emma told her. It made me smile too,
just hearing her soft laughter ring throughout our home.

“All
right,” my dad stood. “It’s been fun but I have things to do. Let’s go honey,”
he said reaching for my mom’s hand. Mom looked up at him resting her hand in
his. They both exchanged a look of adoration and then looked at the rest of us
still gathered around the table fighting over the last piece of pie.