She cleaned and polished both cars until they shone. She’d scraped Maxie against a concrete pole in the school parking lot, and she tried to paint it herself but couldn’t match the color. Only two people came to look that week, and one made an offer. It was half of what the car was worth. Jamie’s dad raced at the California Speedway the next weekend, and people from their church gathered to watch at the house. It was a tradition that the people in her mom and dad’s Bible study got together and prayed before the races in the spring and fall, when the family didn’t travel with him. Jamie was as polite as she could be, but when she saw Vanessa Moran, she couldn’t believe it. “Jamie, you know Vanessa from church, don’t you?” her mom said. “Yeah,” she said, not impolite but not necessarily inviting either. As soon as she could, she excused herself and retreated to the garage. She flipped on the black-and-white TV on the workbench and changed Maxie’s oil. “So this is what you do in your spare time?”
