One Christmas Knight

Chapter 14

“Westbound, you got a smoky comin‘ your way with his lights on-don’ know where he’s goin‘, but he’s in a hurry.” “’Preciate it.”

I-40-Oklahoma

The way Jimmy Joe saw it, it wasn’t a case of being a coward. There was a difference between being a coward and being sensible. And he didn’t think he was being stubborn and muleheaded, which his sister Jessie accused him of, either. What he was, he told himself, was patient. Patient and sensible.

All he needed was time. Time to forget. Time to forget everything that had happened to him out there in that Panhandle blizzard, and all but the haziest memories of a selfish and uppity redhead from California and her tiny pink scrap of a baby girl.

If only, he thought, she hadn’t gone and named her Amy.

Still, he was sure it was just a matter of keeping busy and letting enough time go by so that the memories would start to fade. So he wouldn’t keep thinking he heard Mirabella’s voice talking to him above the highway hum and the growl of a big diesel engine. So he wouldn’t keep waking up alone in his hand-carved walnut bed remembering the way her body had felt in his arms. Then, if he could get those memories out of his head, maybe the feelings that went with them would go, too-the aching sense of longing, and loss.

The problem was, it didn’t seem to be working. Instead, it seemed the more time that went by, the more vivid the memories got. And the stronger the feelings. Sometimes he would tiptoe downstairs in the dead of night and plug the interview tapes into the VCR and run them over and over until his eyes smarted; the feel of her skin, wet and slick against his cheek, the smell of her hair, the salt taste of her sweat vivid in his mind, and every nerve in his body feeling as if it had been rubbed with sandpaper.

He couldn’t even remember anymore how he’d felt about her back then, when he’d been handcuffed and hog-tied by the knowledge that she was a pregnant woman, a woman in labor, and almost certainly someone else’s woman besides. All he knew was the way he’d come to feel about her since; the way he felt about her now, which was a way he hadn’t felt in so long he was astounded to discover he still could.

The last time he’d felt like that he’d been-oh, about sixteen, grappling and groping with Patti in the back of his oldest brother’s car, unable to think about anything in the world but how good her breasts felt in his hand, and how if he didn’t get himself inside her he was going to blow apart into a million pieces. She’d been a virgin, too. They both had been-he, too randy and dumb to know that she’d lied to him about the bruises he’d found on her body, or that because of them there were blacker ones on her soul, and that he was about to make the biggest mistake of his life.

That was what those kinds of feelings did to a man, he thought. Made him forget everything he’d been taught about what was right and what was wrong, everything he knew about common sense, everything he believed in. He might have had some kind of excuse back then, being just sixteen. But he wasn’t sixteen anymore. He was a grown man with a child of his own, and a future to make for him. And no matter what his mama had told him, going after something just because it would make him happy was a luxury he couldn’t afford. If, in his longing for Mirabella, he sometimes felt like an addict at the end of his tether, well… too bad. He’d gotten over worse. He would get over this, too.

I’ll get over you, Marybell.

No. Marybell had been his name for her, his fantasy. But that was just what it was…fantasy. Mirabella…that was who she really was-a woman as exotic and foreign to him as her name.

But… why did she have to go and name her baby Amy?

The week after J.J.’s Christmas vacation ended, Jimmy Joe hit the road again. It was a pretty good trip-a long one, which was okay with him-another load of textiles headed for L.A., after which he was supposed to go out to San Pedro to pick up a bunch of electronics components just come in off a boat from Taiwan and run them up to Boise. He planned it so he would take the southern route out and the northern route back, and that way avoid 1-40 and the Texas Panhandle altogether.

But when he called in from Boise, his broker told him there was a load of designer-label beer down in Denver, if he wanted it, headed for Fort Worth, so he wouldn’t have to deadhead it all the way home. He couldn’t very well pass up an opportunity like that, could he? So much for well-laid plans.

The weather was downright balmy for January as he dropped down out of Denver and headed into New Mexico. He hit a little rain in Albuquerque, but none of the frozen stuff. In fact he couldn’t see any traces at all left of the blizzard that had paralyzed the whole midsection of the country just a few short weeks ago.

Butterflies began to stir in his belly when he rolled past the Santa Rosa truck stop where Mirabella had spent the night in his sleeper, and he remembered how he’d rubbed her back and fed her chicken soup, and that they’d argued about Walt Disney movies.

From there, with the road dry and dusty, it was only two hours to the rest stop east of Adrian. It seemed incredible to him now, rolling along with his tires singing and the radio placidly droning on about the whereabouts of any bears in the vicinity, to recall that the last time he’d driven through there it had been in a single-file convoy creeping along at no more than walking speed.

The pounding of his heart didn’t ease up after he passed the rest stop, either. Still to come was Vega, and Riggs’s gas station where he’d left the keys to Mirabella’s car. He wondered if she’d picked it up yet, or if it was still there, waiting for her.

He wasn’t going to pull off and see. He’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t. But suddenly there was old Route 66 and the sign that said Riggs’s RoadSide Service, and the next thing he knew the Kenworth was heading up the exit ramp, and he was turning left onto the overpass, all the while cussing himself and calling himself several kinds of fool.

Riggs was tickled to death to see him; had to tell him all about how he’d seen Jimmy Joe on TV, and how he’d become something of a hero himself around those parts, and asked half-jokingly for his autograph. He took Jimmy Joe out to his garage and showed him the Lexus, all washed and polished and covered up with a nylon tarp to keep the dust off.

“Don’t know how long she plans on leavin’ it here,” said Riggs. “Guess she’s gonna be stayin’ with her folks down there in Pensacola for a few more weeks, anyways.”

“You talked to her?” Jimmy Joe asked, his heart flapping against his ribs like a tire going bad.

“Oh, yeah, she called me here, couple weeks ago, now. Right after New Year’s, I guess it was. Wanted to know if I’d send her stuff to her, UPS. She had all her Christmas presents for her folks in the trunk, you know. She said she’d send me some money to do it, but, ah, you know, I went on ahead and sent ‘em for her. I knew she’d be good for it, and she was-the money come just a few days later. Say, you know, she is just the nicest little ol’ gal-sure am glad everything turned out okay for her.”

“Yeah,” said Jimmy Joe. Funny thing-it seemed like all of a sudden he couldn’t get enough air to breathe. “You, uh, you say you shipped her things to her UPS? You, uh…” He gulped oxygen and plunged. “You wouldn’t happen to still have her address, would you?”

“Well, now, I sure do.” Riggs looked at him sideways, kind of sly. “You thinkin’ about gettin’ in touch with her? Saw her on TV-my, she sure is pretty, ain’t she?”

“Aw, you know,” said Jimmy Joe, shuffling his feet like a teenager facing down his prom date’s daddy, “I just thought I’d maybe drop her a note, or something. Find out how she and that little baby are doin’…”

“Well, sure ‘nuff-I would,” said Riggs, and added casually, “You can give her a call, if you want to. I got her phone number, down there in Pensacola where she’s stayin’ at her folks’ place. Come on in where it’s warm and let me find it for ya.”

Ten minutes later Jimmy Joe was back on the interstate, heading east with a trailer-load of beer and a grin on his face, as his daddy would have said, “Like a possum with his paws full a’ paw-paws.” He felt jangled and so weak in the knees he didn’t know how he was going to shift gears. “You’re an idiot,” he said to himself. “You know that, don’t you?”

He did. But that didn’t keep him from wanting to blast everybody he met with his airhorn and shout to the heavens, “Hallelujah!”

In Amarillo he left I-40 and headed down to Fort Worth on Highway 287, which was a long, straight shot, and once he’d left the little Panhandle towns and their speed traps behind, about as fast a one as a driver could ask for, for not being an interstate. He drove most of the night, pulling over on the outskirts of Fort Worth to catch a few hours’ sleep, then slipped on into the city ahead of morning rush-hour traffic. When the wholesaler’s warehouse opened up, he was there at the loading dock, waiting.

He unloaded, then pushed on down to 1-20, to a truck stop he liked where he knew he could always find clean towels and plenty of hot water, plus a fairly decent cup of coffee. After a shower and a shave, and with a good hot breakfast under his belt, he screwed up all his courage and made a phone call.

Not long after that he was on his way again, heading east on 1-20 in a cold, misty rain.

“I have this theory,” Mirabella said, on the phone to her friend Charly Phelps in Los Angeles. “What I think is, that it’s all just a matter of chemistry.”

“No kiddin’,” said Charly in her dry Alabama drawl.

“No-I mean actual brain chemistry. To be more specific, oxytocin.”

Laughter bubbled against her ear. “Oxytocin?”

“Yeah, remember? They talked about it in childbirth class, It’s this chemical that’s released naturally during pregnancy, also during touching and during nursing. They call it the bonding chemical. It’s what triggers contractions-atso triggers orgasm, by the way.”

“Oh, that’s good to know.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been reading up on it in my childbirth books since I got my stuff back last week-did I tell you the man with the service station shipped them to me UPS? The one that talked us through the delivery, and then Jimmy Joe gave him my keys and had him pick up my car? Turns out he’s the nicest guy. Anyway, when you consider all that oxytocin oozing around inside me, then all that close physical contact-he was always touching me, Charly, rubbing my back, my legs, my feet, even my face…” And, he kissed me-don’t forget that. I’ll never forget that. “Then you throw in a whole bunch of endorphins on top of it, and I must have been a walking chemical love potion. It’s no wonder my emotions were so susceptible.”

“So what you’re saying is, it wasn’t that this Jimmy Joe guy was so wonderful, just that he was there?”

“Charly, at that point I’d have probably bonded with a BarcaLounger.”

This time Charly’s hoot of laughter held the derision that is completely permissible between old and trusted friends. “Bella,” she said fondly, “you are such an idiot.” And then, after a brief pause to see if she would deny it: “So that’s your theory, huh? Tell me this-are you buyin’ it? Because I’m not.”

“I’m working on it.” Mirabella sighed and kissed the top of the downy head nestled like a sun-ripened peach against her heart, then leaned her head back against the crocheted afghan that lay draped, as it had for as long as she could remember, across the back of her mother’s old rocking chair. “Right now it’s too soon to tell. I mean, I’m nursing, you know? And that oxytocin is still flowing, so…it stands to reason I’d still have all those feelings and memories.”

Just as strong and clear as if it had been yesterday we were together in that truck… Christmas carols playing on the radio, and Jimmy Joe’s arms holding me and his voice yelling in my ear, “One more… one more!” And his face when he laid Amy on my stomach and said, “Marybell, say hello to your new baby girl…” so vivid in my mind I feel sometimes he’s just in the next room, and if I call to him, in the very next moment he’ll be here beside me, smiling his sweet, Jimmy Joe smile…

On her chest, Amy stirred and uttered a tiny squeaking sound, and Mirabella’s hand began a slow stroking and patting rhythm to counteract the effects of her own rueful laughter. “Anyway, I’m hoping it will all go away once I get my body back to normal-like a bad dream, you know?”

“How’s that coming, by the way? I know you, you’re probably thinkin’ you ought to already be wearing your regular clothes by now, and driving yourself nuts if you’re not. Are you working out?”

It was Mirabella’s turn to snort-but softly, so as not to disturb Amy. “I’m not that compulsive.” But she smiled when she said it, because she knew full well that a few months ago she had been, about her physical self, anyway, and especially about her weight.

But now…she didn’t think she could have explained it, certainly not to Charly, but since Amy’s birth she’d noticed, well, a distinct difference in the way she viewed her own body. Where once she’d focused on and criticized its every flaw, now when she looked at her body she felt what could only be described as pride. Yes, the feelings seemed to say, what a wonderful, marvelous body you are, to have done this miraculous thing! Instead of her usual restless dissatisfaction, her constant drive to improve herself, she felt a kind of complacency that was almost catlike, bordering on smugness.

And something else-something she’d never known before, and so couldn’t begin to explain. It was as if something sleeping deep inside her had been awakened, like jillions of tiny seeds sprouting where everything had been barren before. As if all those tiny new shoots and buds were pushing, straining, reaching for warmth and light, because like all newborn things, they demanded nourishment. She felt a new restlessness now-not of dissatisfaction, but of longing; an itch not of compulsion, but of desire. Having a child had fulfilled her, as she’d known it would; fulfilled the caring, giving, loving and nurturing woman she’d always known herself to be. But at the same time it seemed to have awakened a strange new woman, one she’d never met before. One who needed nurturing. One who needed, one who yearned, one who deserved to be cared for…given to…touched…loved.

“It’s coming pretty well.” she said, drawing a shaken breath. “I feel really good-I think the nursing’s helping me get back in shape, if you don’t count my chest, which of course is still enormous. I’ve been walking-not today, though. It’s raining, and it’s cold.”

“It’s beautiful here,” said Charly with typical California smugness. “Just your basic January in L.A. After all the lousy weather in December, suddenly the sun’s shining and the hills are green. So, when are you coming home? I miss you, and I’m dyin’ to see Amy.”

Home? Mirabella gazed at the rain-drenched Mandevilla vine growing up the trellis beside her parents’ patio door and wondered how she was ever going to tell her best friend that Los Angeles didn’t seem like home to her anymore. It seemed as far away to her as the moon, and about as hospitable. Sometimes her life there seemed like a rapidly fading dream.

But if my home isn’t there anymore, she thought with a vague sense of bewilderment and sadness, then where is it?

“I’m not sure-” she began, just as a truck’s air brakes hissed explosively out in the street. Her heart jumped and the hand holding the phone jerked so violently it startled Amy, making her tiny body jerk, as well. What is this? Mirabella thought. Am I going to leap out of my skin every time I hear that sound for rest of my life? Suddenly furious, she swore under her breath.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing-just some truck making noise out in the street. One of my mom’s neighbors is probably having something delivered, repaired or hauled away. This is a retirement community-there’s a lot of that going around. Listen-I’ll be home soon, I promise. I’m planning on it. Pop’s doing a lot better. I think they’re going to schedule him for a bypass in a month or two, and Mom would probably have an easier time of it taking care of him if Amy and I are out of her hair.”

She paused to chuckle. “She made him go grocery shopping this morning, can you believe that? Said he needed to get out and get some exercise. They’ve been gone quite a while-Oh, now what? Damn. Someone’s at the door. Looks like I’m going to have to get that. Hold on a minute while I get out of this chair-”

Supporting the sleeping baby with one hand and juggling the cordless phone with the other, she pushed herself awkwardly upright.

“Uh, Bella, maybe I should let you go.”

“No, no, that’s okay, it’ll just take me a minute to get rid of whoever it is. It’s probably just somebody collecting for the Heart Association-there’s a lot of that around here, too. Hold on-” She had to use the hand with the phone in it to open the door.

“Yes? I’m sorry, but the Wasko-” The words flew away on an exhaled breath, like whispers in the wind. The cordless phone fell to the floor with a clatter as, in a purely instinctive reaction, her hand flew to cover her baby’s head. Her lips moved, soundlessly forming his name: “Jimmy Joe.”

No smile, no dimples, although one corner of his mouth twitched slightly upward, obviously trying. The light in his eyes was uncertain and brooding as he stood with one thumb hooked in the pocket of his Levi’s, one hip and shoulder canted higher than the other, raindrops sparkling on his skin and beginning to drip from the spiky-wet ends of his hair. Dangling from the other hand as if forgotten was a bouquet of pink roses wrapped in cellophane.

“Hey, there, Marybell,” he said with a rueful sniff. “Guess your mama must not a’ told you I was comin’.”

She looks like she’s seen a ghost, he thought, which was about the way he felt. Her hair was even brighter and her skin more translucent than he remembered, and she seemed tinier, too, somehow. She was wearing white cotton pants and a long-sleeved button-up-the-front shirt in some sort of gauzy material that draped gently over her voluptuous breasts and nested the sleeping baby’s cheek like thistledown. The soft, sea colors of the shirt made him realize something he hadn’t before-that in certain lights and moods, her eyes were more green than gray. Standing there in the rain and gloom of January, she seemed to him all sunlight and flower-scented freshness, like a spring breeze that had come without warning to snatch his breath away.

“Mom knew you were coming?” Her voice was an airless whisper of disbelief.

His heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t think straight, but he managed a little half-smile of apology. “Yeah, I called yesterday from Dallas. Tried to again, a little while ago when I got into town, but your line was busy.”

He stepped up onto the doorstep, and she sucked in air in a startled gulp. Cautiously, with a light touch on her arm and a raised eyebrow to ask permission, he leaned past her to pick up the telephone she’d dropped. Without taking his eyes from her face, as if she were some rare wild creature that might vanish in a blink if he did, he mumbled into the phone, “‘Scuse me, but can she call you back? ’Preciate it,” then laid it carefully, along with the roses he’d brought, on the little table that was there in the entryway behind her.

Even with the rain coming down, he could hear the small, sticky sound she made when she swallowed. As dry as his own mouth was, he wasn’t surprised that her voice would still only come in a whisper. “Jimmy Joe…what are you doing here?”

Ah, you know, I was just passin’ through-That was what he started to say, until somewhere in the back of his mind he heard his mama’s voice saying, “Son, I never raised you to be a coward.” So he took the deepest breath he could and in an adolescent’s cracked and terrified voice, told her the truth.

“I came to see you. And because…there’s something I’ve been wantin’ to do.”

In a world gone suddenly silent, Mirabella watched his hand float across the space between them and come to rest on Amy’s head, a touch as sweet and reverent as a benediction. She didn’t breathe; her heartbeat rocked her as the hand rose and she felt that same touch on her own cheek. The warmth of it flowed like oil into her neck, and when his other hand came to cradle her head she gave a sigh of gratitude, for it had grown too heavy for her own muscles to bear. The warmth poured downward into her shoulders and chest, into her belly and farther yet-deep, deep down. Her breasts tingled and her legs grew weak, and all the hungry new shoots inside her lifted and swelled with joy.

“Oxytocin…” she murmured.

“Pardon?” His breath misted her lips.

“It’s just…chemistry.”

“You got that right,” he growled, and brought his mouth the last sweet distance.

Their lips met like lovers who have traveled a lifetime and ten thousand miles to find each other-with yearning and gladness and thanksgiving and joy; with breathless awe and trembling disbelief.

“I can’t,” gasped Mirabella.

“Why not?” His mouth hovered a suspenseful whisper above hers.

“I can’t do this-I can’t,” she breathed, moving her head back and forth just slightly, as if fighting a hypnotist’s powers. “It won’t work. I’m much too old for you. It’s not-”

“Hush.” With one word and a gentle shake of her head he silenced her. Then he pulled back, but only far enough so she could see his eyes. And there was no gentleness in them now; they were brooding and dark, with a fire in their depths she’d seen once before. When he spoke, the tone of his voice was familiar to her, too-the same firm, unyielding voice she’d clung to through a long, dark night, and that had calmed her fears and brought her safely through the birth of her child.

“I’m gonna ask you one question, and I want you to answer me truthfully, and then we’re gonna be done with this, you understand? I want you tell me-in all that time we spent together in my truck, did it even once enter your mind to think about how old or how young either one of us was?”

“But that was-”

His mouth stopped her there. Then once again he drew back to gaze down at her, the fire in his eyes banked to a tender glow. “Marybell, I do enjoy arguing with you, and I expect we’re gonna be doin’ a lot of it, about a lot of things. But this ain’t one of ’em. We’re done with this now, y’hear?”

She was conscious only of mild astonishment as she heard herself answer meekly, “Yes, sir.”

Overriding every other thought and feeling was the most intense hunger she’d ever known. She watched his mouth descend to hers as though it were the only drop of water, the last crumb of bread, the only blade of grass in a barren and thirsty world, feeling as though she would die if she couldn’t taste it again-just once more. She actually felt a sharp pain when he suddenly halted, still a tantalizing, tormenting hairsbreadth away.

“Oh-” she cried, a sound somewhere between a laugh and a whimper. On her chest Amy was stirring and making impatient snuffling noises.

“Looks like she’s wakin’ up,” said Jimmy Joe, one hand dropping, lightly as a falling leaf, to the baby’s bobbing head. He looked at Mirabella and his eyebrows rose. “May I?”

“Oh-of course.”

She watched, breath suspended, an aching knot of warmth growing inside her as she recalled the last time those strong, sensitive hands had cradled her daughter’s tiny body-slippery wet with gunk and warm from her own body, attached to her still by a pulsing cord, kicking, punching and squalling with outrage at the shock of cold on her skin and the intrusion of air in her brand-new lungs. How gently he’d held her, then placed her on Mirabella’s belly and guided her frantically searching hands to take the place of his.

“She sure has grown,” he said huskily. In response to his voice, Amy’s head turned slowly from side to side like a radar scanner as she searched for the face that went with it. Homing in and locking on, she studied it with infant intensity, her mouth pursing and stretching as she ran through her entire repertoire of facial expressions for this new and fascinated audience.

“Red hair?” He touched it with a fingertip and smiled. “She looks just like you.”

And suddenly as if in response to his words, Amy’s eyes crinkled up and her mouth popped open and then stretched wide, and the corners tilted upward. “She’s smilin’,” he said, looking up at her mama, all but thunderstruck. He felt as if his heart was going to burst.

“She sure is,” Mirabella murmured, moving closer so she could see it, too. “That’s a first.” She looked oddly misty to him, like a flower in the rain.

“That’s no gas pain, either. Look at her-she just won’t quit.” He thought he could have drowned in that smile. Then he felt like maybe he was drowning, the way his chest hurt and it was so hard to breathe.

“Okay, now she’s got her priorities straight,” Mirabella said with a tender snort, as one of the baby’s waving fists found its way to her mouth and she began to suck avidly on it.

Jimmy Joe chuckled. “Looks like she’s hungry.”

“She’s always hungry. Which is another way she’s just like her mother. Yeah…funny, isn’t it?” Her smile was blurred and soft as she gazed down at her daughter and tickled her cheek with a finger. Mirabella’s eyes flicked up at him and her smile grew wry. “If you want to make God laugh, just make a plan-isn’t that what you told me? All I can say is, He must really be holding his sides right now. I mean, here I had it all planned, picked out the perfect set of genes. I was going to have a tall, slim, blond little boy with a sweet, beautiful smile and…” Her voice caught, and she looked quickly back down at her baby with her face so full of adoration, watching her was like looking into the sun. “Look what I got-a round, roly-poly redhead with an appetite like Pac-Man…”

“And just as pretty as a little wild rose,” said Jimmy Joe, in a voice so fierce and raspy he felt as if he might have swallowed a whole bush’s worth of those rose thorns himself. “And I wouldn’t mind…”

His breath ran dry, and he stared at her, realizing he was on the verge of blurting it all out, everything he’d come to say to her-that he not only wanted her and Amy to come and live with him and share the rest of his life with him, but that he would be tickled to death to have several more just like her, eventually, Lord willing. Just like that, without any warning or leading up to it, without telling her all the reasons he thought he could make her happy, without presenting any of the arguments he’d thought up to answer the doubts she was sure to have. Just clobber her with it, before he’d even had a chance to woo her-Lord, he hadn’t even given her the flowers yet! And then if she said no, then what?

He was staring down at her, with the baby held between them like a vow and his heart hammering in his throat, feeling as scared and helpless as he had the night Amy was born, and Mirabella was staring back at him, looking so beautiful he wondered if maybe he ought to chuck his whole game plan and just kiss her again, and go on kissing her until she didn’t have any breath left to say no.

He was about to embark on that new strategy when a voice behind him sang out, “Oops, home too soon!”

He turned, heart pounding like a guilty teenager’s, while Mirabella said, “Hi, Mom…Pop.” in a breathy, little-girt voice he didn’t recognize.

“Pete,” her mama was scolding as she bustled up the walk with her hands full of plastic grocery bags and a plastic rain-bonnet on her head, “I told you we should have eaten lunch first.”

“The hell with that,” growled the barrel-chested man beside her, waving around the umbrella he was holding so it wasn’t doing much to keep the rain off anybody. “I told you I want to meet the man-shake his hand. And that’s what I’m gonna do.”

He heaved himself up the steps, furling the umbrella as he came, his chin jutting out ahead of him in a way that reminded Jimmy Joe so much of Mirabella, he almost forgot his manners completely. He had to fight hard to contain his smile when he saw the traces of rust mixed in with the thick, straight, irongray hair.

Mirabella gamely murmured introductions, which her father mostly drowned out with his crisp and authoritative, “G‘momin’, son. I sure am glad to meet you…glad to meet the man that brought my granddaughter into the world. Come on in here, now. No sense in lettin’ all the warm air out.” He dragged Jimmy Joe into the house, pumping his hand.

Behind her husband’s back, Ginger caught Jimmy Joe’s eye and winked. “Ohh, look-roses!” she cried, spotting the bouquet he’d left on the table. “Aren’t they gorgeous? They need to go in some water. I’ll just take these groceries into the kitchen-”

“Let me carry those for you, ma’am.”

“Now, let me see, how’s my little ol’ baby girl?”

“She just woke up, Dad. She needs her diaper changed. She’s hungry again, too. I was just going to-I better go feed her…”

“You do that, honey. Son, you’re plannin’ on stayin’ and havin’ lunch with us, aren’t you?”

“Well, sir, ah…” With his hands already full of grocery bags, there wasn’t much Jimmy Joe could do but follow Mirabella with his eyes as she fled down the hallway with Amy in her arms.

In the kitchen with her parents, he had an attack of claustrophobia. The cheery room seemed too crowded with just the three of them in it, and yet he felt Mirabella’s absence so profoundly, it almost bordered on panic. He couldn’t shake the feeling he was losing her, that he was about to let everything he’d hoped for slip through his fingers, just when he’d had it in his grasp. Because he knew her. He knew exactly what she was doing right now, in there alone with her baby and her thoughts. Right now her rational, reasonable planner’s mind was telling her all the reasons why things wouldn’t ever work out between them; and in another minute, her stubborn, muleheaded, opinionated mind was going to set it all in concrete. And he knew that once Mirabella had made up her mind, there wasn’t anything on earth, short of a force of nature, that was going to change it. So if he was ever going to try to do it, he had better do it now.

He set the bags of groceries on the kitchen table as gently as he could, and with a muttered, “‘Scuse me, sir…ma’am,” dived through the doorway and headed off down the hall in the direction Mirabella had taken.

He found her in a back bedroom-the guest room, by the look of it, since he didn’t think Pete Waskowitz would have tolerated all those flowers, or the white priscilla curtains at the windows. There were a few of Mirabella’s clothes and lots of baby things lying around, a white bassinet beside the bed, and a baby blanket spread out on the comforter. The room smelled of baby powder and a just-changed diaper, which brought back all kinds of memories for him.

She was sitting in a chair near the windows, so engrossed in the baby at her breast, she didn’t notice him for a minute or two. He watched her-watched the play of rain shadows in her hair, the creamy-soft curve of her cheek as she bent over her child, the gentle smile no one else would ever see-and knew that he’d been right, and that he would love this woman and this child until he drew his last breath…and beyond that, until the end of time. It strengthened his resolve for what he had to do.

She gave a gasp of outraged modesty when she saw him, and yelped, “Jimmy Joe-go away!”

But he ignored her, and instead went to sit on the edge of the bed right opposite her, and leaned forward to watch her somberly with his hands clasped between his knees. Her eyes followed him, darkening with wariness, at first. But once she knew he wasn’t going to run blushing at the sight of her naked breast, she relaxed and accepted his presence, it seemed to him, with a kind of quiet pride. They sat like that in silence for a while, listening to Amy’s squeaky gulps and the whisper of the rain on the windowpane.

Then she shook her head, just slightly, and he saw her eyes fill with tears. “Jimmy Joe,” she said in a broken whisper, “what are you doing here?”

He’d had a thousand miles to prepare for this. He’d probably thought of a thousand different ways to say what he wanted to say-clever. intelligent ways. Every one of them went right out the window. With his heart in his throat and in his eyes, he finally looked at her and said it: “Marybell, I’ve come to take you home with me.”