One Christmas Knight

Chapter 2

“Westbound, what’s it look like back your way?” “Eastbound your front door’s lookin‘ dry and dusty all way back to the Texas line. Hammer day-yown. ”

1-40-New Mexico

As she pulled out of the travel-stop parking lot and back onto 1-40, Mirabella’s thoughts didn’t dwell on the cute blond trucker with the heart-stopping dimples. She was thinking about what lay ahead of her, and feeling not nearly as confident about it as she would have liked.

Not about the weather or the road conditions in Texas-the way she figured it, people must drive around in snowstorms all the time; otherwise, life would pretty much come to a screeching halt for half the year in the northern half of the country. Besides, she had more than enough confidence in her Lexus and in her own driving skills, and if worse came to worst, she could always pull into another truck stop and pick up a set of tire chains. No way was she going to let a little old blizzard keep her from getting to Pensacola in time for Pop’s Christmas.

No, what was worrying Mirabella was something a. lot smaller than a blizzard and probably a lot more common, too. Although she never liked to admit to being afraid of anything, lately she’d begun to notice a queasy feeling in her stomach whenever she thought-really thought-about this business of having a baby.

She’d had no doubts about it before. None at all. After all, she’d planned this pregnancy down to the last detail, and it wasn’t in her nature to second-guess herself. Besides, it had been fun, at first. There’d been the exhilaration of knowing she’d succeeded-not that she was accustomed to settling for anything less, or had ever really doubted for a minute that she would; but still, she’d been warned that it could take as many as ten or twelve tries, and she’d managed it in only three.

For a while after that, she’d kept it her own delicious secret. Never much of a reader, she’d devoured every baby magazine in the doctor’s-office waiting room, then had gone out and bought every book she could find on pregnancy and child care. Mirabella never did anything by halves. Thus informed and prepared, she’d been fascinated rather than dismayed by the sequence of changes taking place in her body, for once not minding when her breasts suddenly grew three cup sizes. Hey, this was great-suddenly it was okay to gain weight!

The night she first felt movement, she’d called up Charly and they’d gone out for frozen-yogurt sundaes at two in the morning to celebrate.

She’d really loved putting her talent and training as an architectural interior designer to work turning her guest room into a nursery and redesigning the rest of the house to make it absolutely babyproof. She’d delighted in having an excuse to dress for comfort, which she preferred anyway. She’d enthusiastically enrolled in natural childbirth classes, having coerced a somewhat less-than-enthusiastic Charly into being her coach. After that, she’d felt confident and ready for whatever came next.

Nothing to it, she remembered thinking. This was going to be a breeze.

But lately, in the past week or so, things had begun to…well, change. Radiantly healthy up to now, she’d suddenly become extremely uncomfortable. That was because the baby had “dropped,” the doctor told her. Nothing to worry about; perfectly normal, she’d insisted. But to Mirabella it had an ominous sound. Plus, the pressure pains in her groin really did hurt. She wasn’t sleeping well at night. And in the past couple of days she’d noticed, to her horror, that she’d developed a tendency to waddle.

It was very hard, she’d discovered, to maintain your dignity when you were shaped like a Weeble.

And dignity was important to Mirabella, which was something few people seemed able to understand. For most of her adult life, people-her female friends and sisters, mostly-had been telling her how beautiful she was, and, they were sure to add, how much more appealing she would be to men if she would only let her guard down and lighten up more. But they’d never understood about the dignity thing. How could they? Eve, Mirabella’s younger sister, had been blessed with the face and body of Princess Grace, so who cared if she had all the dignity of Soupy Sales? And Sommer, the oldest, designed more along the lines of Princess Di, seemed to have been born with a shy and coltish awkwardness that somehow made the whole concept of dignity irrelevant.

How could they ever understand Mirabella, who had had the misfortune to be born short, stocky, red-haired, freckle-faced and nearsighted, or know that there had been times when she was sure pride and dignity were all that had kept her from dying of humiliation?

It was just beginning to occur to her that giving birth might be a difficult thing to accomplish with one’s dignity intact.

It had also occurred to her recently that it wasn’t something she cared to go through alone. But Charly was…well, she was a dear and loyal friend, but she just wasn’t… For some reason she just didn’t have what Mirabella needed right now. Neither did her sisters, preoccupied as they were with their own busy lives. So when her mom had announced plans to fly out for Christmas and stay until after the baby was born to help out for the first weeks and get acquainted with her new grandchild, she’d been profoundly and unexpectedly relieved.

But then Pop had had his heart attack.

“Of course, you can’t leave him.” Mirabella had been astonished her mother would even think of it. And with characteristic decisiveness had promptly added, “I’ll go there instead.”

It was only later that she’d acknowledged the squeezing sensation in her chest that had prompted her to say it, and to recognize it for what it was: pure panic.

And it was only now that she could admit to herself that the real reason she was so anxious to get to Pensacola had nothing to do with Christmas, or even her father’s heart attack. She was having a baby, dammit. And like countless women before her, she wanted someone wise and nurturing to guide her through the experience. In short, she wanted her mother.

Jimmy Joe wasn’t dwelling on the problems ahead, the blizzard in Texas, or even a little boy in Georgia sulking about missing his daddy. Although it didn’t make him happy to have to admit it, he couldn’t seem to get the uppity red-haired pregnant woman from California out of his mind.

She had to be crazy, that’s what it was. Plumb crazy to think she could drive that pretty silver car of hers through a Panhandle blizzard all alone. And in her condition! What was she tryin’ to do?

He thought then about that little boy waiting for him to come home, and he thought about the sweet little daughter he’d never even gotten a chance to know; and in the depths of his easygoing soul he felt the stirrings of unaccustomed anger.

What in the name of heaven is she thinking of? he wondered as he pointed his big blue Kenworth down the I-40 on-ramp, pumping his way methodically through the gears. Didn’t she know how precious a gift she was carrying?

He tried hard to be fair, figuring she must have thought she had good reason to be doing what she was doing. But he could have told her it wasn’t worth it. As far as he was concerned, no reason was good enough to risk a child’s life. He wished he had told her when he had the chance. Now it was too late.

Once he was rolling along with the asphalt ribbon unfolding nice and smooth in front of him, Jimmy Joe picked up his mike, thumbed the button and said in his growly CB drawl, “Westbound, what’s it look like back your way? What’sa story on that Texas blizzard? Come on.”

He listened to static for a moment or two before he got an answer. It sure wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Uh…looks like they gonna be closin’ ’er down, here, pretty soon.”

Somebody else broke in with a groan. “Ah, hell, don’t tell me that.”

“That’s what they’re sayin’. Shuttin’ ‘er down at Tucumcari. Ain’t lettin’ nobody through.”

“Oh, man…”

“What I hear, ain’t nobody comin’ through the Panhandle.”

“I just come up twenty-five,” somebody else said. “Dry and dusty down that way.”

“Hell, that don’t do me good. I gotta get to Nashville!”

“That’s just a crime, you know it? Shuttin’ down a whole damn interstate for a little bit a’ snow.”

“Shoot, Texas don’t even know what a snowplow is.”

“Ain’t that the truth?”

The chatter went on, but Jimmy Joe didn’t join in. He hung up his mike and listened to all the bitching and complaining, which he mostly agreed with. But he was still thinking about that redhead in the Lexus, wishing he had some way to warn her. Wishing she had a CB so he could talk to her, at least let her know what she was driving into.

Mirabella couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. She’d rolled right through Albuquerque without any problems, if you didn’t count a couple of idiots in pickup trucks driving like kamikazis, and some bewildering lane changes in a construction zone. She did see a little bit of snow going through the mountains on the other side of the city-just a light dusting on the junipers, not even enough to look pretty. And she did feel a twinge of indecision as she came up on the turnoff to 1-25 south. Last chance. The thought flashed through her mind. Last chance to change your mind, Bella.

But the road was dry and the skies were clear, and she was moving along normally, which is to say well over the speed limit-Mirabella preferred to think of speed limits as “guidelines,” anyway. So she sailed on past the turnoff, set her cruise control at seventy-five, and popped her favorite chambermusic tape into the deck. As part of her campaign to imprint her unborn child with a taste for good music, she turned the volume up high and settled back for the long haul.

At this rate, she told herself smugly, she would easily make it as far as Amarillo tonight-maybe farther. After that it was only another thousand miles or so to Pensacola. Okay, that did sound like a lot, but hey, she had two days. She could still make it by Christmas night. She would make it. She’d made up her mind. And when Mirabella made up her mind to do something, she did it.

Not long after that, everything came to a halt.

Now what? thought Mirabella. According to the last mile marker she’d paid any attention to, she was still at least a hundred miles from Texas, and, it looked to her, a lot farther than that from the nearest snowflake.

Right about now she should be approaching the town of Santa Rosa-barely a speck on the road atlas that lay open on the seat beside her-where she’d planned to make a quick potty-stop. Her back was aching and her legs had developed an alarming tendency to go numb, but she’d figured on pushing ahead another fifty miles to Tucumcari before taking a real break. Which she was never going to make if it kept going like this. What, she wondered irritably, was the holdup, anyway? It had to be an accident of some kind. Dammit, just her luck.

Then she noticed that trucks were beginning to pull over and park along the shoulder of the interstate, in a long, grumbling line that stretched back toward Arizona as far as she could see in her rearview mirrors. That struck her as a very bad sign.

The traffic lanes were moving, though, still creeping slowly but steadily along. And now up ahead she could see flashing lights, and state troopers waving lighted batons like semaphores. It appeared the two lanes of traffic were being merged into one, then directed toward the nearest exit ramp. Mirabella didn’t see any signs at all of an accident. She began to get a queasy feeling in her stomach.

When she got to the first state trooper she stopped and rolled down her window. Raising her voice above the oboe solo in Albinoni’s Adagio, which was issuing full blast from her tape deck, she said in an imperious tone, “Excuse me, officer, what’s the problem? Why is the highway closed?”

The young Native American trooper first gave her an impatient look, then did a double take and came ambling over. He leaned down to the window, started to speak, then interrupted himself and instead said loudly, “Ma‘am, could you turn that down, please?” Mirabella turned off the tape player. “Thank you. Ma’am, since you haven’t been listening to your radio, I guess you probably don’t know. The interstate’s closed at the Texas state line. They got blowing snow, icy roads and zero visibility through the Texas Panhandle.”

“But that’s a hundred miles from here,” Mirabella protested. She couldn’t believe he was serious. Snow? Impossible. It was so nice here.

But the trooper was straightening with an air of finality and a shrug. “Got to close it somewhere, ma‘am-preferably somewhere people got a place to stay. Tucumcari’s full up. Santa Rosa’s the next stop down the line. Unless you have business between here and the line, I’m gonna have to ask you to exit here, ma’am. Move along, now…thank you. Exit to your right, please.” He pointed toward the off-ramp and waved her on with his lighted baton.

Mirabella did as she was told, which was something she never enjoyed, especially when she had no other choice.

At the stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp she was faced with two choices: she could turn left onto what appeared to be the town’s main drag, where at the moment there was a traffic snarl that resembled an Orange County shopping-mall parking lot the day before Christmas. Or, she could turn right, onto a two-lane numbered highway that curved past a truck stop and disappeared into the dry hills and arroyos to the south.

South. Mirabella was chewing on her lip and thinking about that when somebody behind her gave an impatient blast on his car horn. Being a seasoned L.A. driver, she flipped him an appropriate response, then put on her blinker and turned in a deliberate and leisurely fashion to the right.

The truck stop’s huge truck parking lot was already filled to overflowing with idling eighteen-wheelers. More trucks were pulling in along all the side and frontage roads on both sides of the interstate. Fortunately, there seemed to be relatively fewer passenger cars entering the truck-oops, travel-stop’s passenger-car parking lot, and she was able to find a spot not too far from the entrance.

She was engaged in the clumsy process of extricating her bulky body and numb legs from her car when a wickedly cold wind came skirling around the open door, whistled down her collar and blew freshly up her pant legs. As she got her jacket from the back seat, she found herself remembering early mornings on the California deserts of her childhood, waiting with her sisters for the school bus, stamping the ground and blowing on her fingers to keep warm; remembering a certain smell in the air, brought on the wind from the distant Sierra Nevadas.

For the first time, snow began to seem like a real possibility.

The travel-stop store was stuffy by comparison, overheated and jam-packed with stranded motorists and ticked-off truckers all milling around grumbling and griping about the situation they were in. After making her mandatory stop in the ladies’ room, Mirabella pushed her way through the crowd around the fuel desk.

“Excuse me,” she said to the girl behind the counter, who was busy with a customer, “could I just ask you a question?”

The cashier-young, Native American and obviously unflappable-nodded and went on with what she was doing, which was ringing up someone’s assortment of snack foods.

“That road out there,” Mirabella persisted, “the one right in front-eighty-four, I think it was-does it, by any chance, go to Texas?”

Again the cashier nodded. Mirabella was encouraged by that and about to ask for further details, such as how far was it to Texas, and were there any places to stop along the way, when one of the men waiting in line broke in with a snort and said, “Not today, it don’t.”

There was a general rumble of agreement. Somebody else said, “Ain’t nothin’ goin’ to Texas today. They got the whole damn state shut down.”

Another voice piped up, “I heard it was even snowin’ in Dallas.”

The first man who’d spoken reached past her to put his purchases-a paperback mystery, a package of Twinkies and a bottle of Rolaids-on the counter. As he did he gave her a look-down, then back up again-and said in a more kindly tone, “If I‘z you, I’d get myself a motel room, ma’am, before it’s too late. Might as well be comfortable. You ain’t goin’ any further tonight.”

She stood very still and didn’t reply. She was, quite simply, dumbstruck.

To Mirabella, “No” had always been a challenge; the word “impossible” a spur to action, and “You can’t,” a gauntlet, a dare. It was her belief that there was a way around almost any obstacle, if a person looked hard enough. Right now her mind was racing in high gear trying to find a way around this one, only it just kept coming back to where she was. “You ain’t goin‘ any further tonight.”

She couldn’t believe it. It simply didn’t compute.

But she was. She was stuck. In Santa Rosa, New Mexico, for God’s sake, for who-knows-how-long. And no matter what, she wasn’t going to get to Pensacola in time to spend Christmas with her parents. Instead she was going to spend Christmas somewhere on the road, alone, among strangers. She was suddenly struck by a horrifying urge to cry.

Except that Mirabella never cried. She took a deep breath, murmured, “Thanks,” to no one in particular, and pushed her way back through the crowd. At the entrance to the. dining room she paused, knowing she ought to eat something, at least. But she wasn’t hungry. What she was, she realized suddenly, was exhausted. The trucker was right; she should get a motel room. Then at least she could lie down.

After the overheated store, the cold outside took her breath away. Mirabella tried to hurry across the windy parking lot, but the best she could manage was a slow, ungainly, roundabout kind of pace, which she thought must be like trying to walk with a basketball pressed between her thighs. Reaching her car at last, she unlocked it, heaved herself inside and sat, breathing hard and shivering, while she waited for the heater to warm up. She’d never felt so frustrated in her life.

“I don’t believe this,” she kept muttering furiously to herself. “I don’t believe this.”

Half an hour later she was still saying it as she drove slowly down the town’s main drag, passing motel after motel, No Vacancy sign after No Vacancy sign. Other stranded motorists, equally frustrated, were zipping in and out of motel parking lots, tires squealing, engines roaring, as they raced each other in a frantic search for the last available rooms. Too late, some people shouted and banged their fists on countertops. Mirabella had banged on a few herself, and even played unabashedly on her “condition,” hoping the sympathy factor might melt some adamant desk clerk’s heart. But to no avail. There simply wasn’t a vacant room left in town.

“No room at the inn,” thought Mirabella whimsically. And then felt vaguely blasphemous, even though she’d never considered herself a particularly religious person.

In the restaurant at the 76 Travel Stop, Jimmy Joe was trying his best to have a phone conversation with his son, J.J. It wasn’t easy, being as how the decibel level in the dining room was about the same as the first turn at Indy at the start of the 500. He’d turned his back to the room and stuck his finger in the ear that wasn’t pressed up against the receiver, but it wasn’t doing much good, and he kept having to yell, “What?” every other sentence.

“I said, you don’t have to shout, Dad, I can hear you fine,” J.J. was saying.

“Well, you better shout then, ’cause I can’t hear you worth beans,” Jimmy Joe hollered back. “This place is a zoo.”

“How come it’s so noisy?”

“Ah, it’s crowded, is all. Everybody’s pretty much stuck here in New Mexico for a while, I guess.” He took a deep breath and broke the news. “They up and closed the road-because of that snowstorm you told me about? Looks like they’re not lettin’ anybody through the Panhandle right now.”

“Told you,” J.J. said in a know-it-all tone of voice. But his father knew him pretty well, and heard the quiver in it anyway.

For J.J.’s sake he tried to make the best of it. “Hey, don’t worry, okay? They can’t keep a whole interstate shut down for too long, can they? Soon as they open up the road, I’m on my way.” And he would drive right on through, if he had to. The way he had it figured, it wasn’t likely the weigh stations were going to be open on the holiday, so unless he got pulled over by the DOT, there wasn’t going to be anybody checking his logbook. It wasn’t something he would chance, ordinarily, but this was Christmas. And he’d promised J.J.

“It looks really bad, Dad. There’s trucks and cars turned over and everything. I saw it on TV.”

“You watch too much TV,” said Jimmy Joe, “you know that? How come you’re not outdoors playin’ or somethin’?”

“’Cause we got rain. I gotta do something, Dad. I’m on restriction, so no computer, remember?”

Jimmy Joe chuckled. “Yeah, so how are you and Sammi June gettin’ along? You two kiss and make up yet?” At that, J.J. muttered something his father couldn’t quite catch. He hunched himself over the phone and yelled, “What?”

Just then there was one of those little lulls that come over a noisy crowd sometimes, kind of like everybody in the room stopped to take a breath at the same moment. But whatever it was his son was telling him, Jimmy Joe missed it anyway, because in that quiet moment he heard a soft voice, practically at his elbow, say, “Excuse me…”

He jerked around, thinking it was the waitress finally come to take his order. But it wasn’t It was about the last person he’d expected to see-none other than the redheaded pregnant woman he’d last seen a couple of hundred miles back, getting into a gray Lexus. And although she was trying her best to maintain that uppity lift of her chin, it was easy to see that it was costing her plenty to do it.

For a moment or two he just stared at her. Then he figured he must have made some kind of sound, because he heard J.J. say, “Dad? What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

That snapped him out of it. He mumbled, “Hang on a minute, J.J.,” then managed to gasp, “Ma’am?” as, being a well-brought-up Southern boy, he almost killed himself trying to mind his manners and stand in the confines of that booth.

She quickly put out her hand, motioning him to stay put, and said in a not-too-steady voice, “Please-don’t get up. I was just wondering-I’m sorry to bother you, but would you mind if I shared this booth with you? There doesn’t seem to be anyplace else…”

It occurred to Jimmy Joe while she was saying it that the way she looked, if she didn’t sit down right soon, she was going to fall down. To put it mildly, she looked dead on her feet. Her face was so pale you could darn near see through it. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and although she kept wanting to smile, what she looked like to him was somebody trying real hard not to cry. And-he hadn’t noticed it before, but those eyes of hers were enormous. Dark blue-gray, like the ocean when it rained. Looking into them, he began to feel a little bit dizzy, as if he was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down…

“Dad?”

“Oh-sure! By all means…” His natural, ingrained reflex was to get up and help the lady to her seat. But before he could get himself untangled and out of the booth, she’d already slipped in across from him with a sigh and a whispered, “Thank you.”

“Dad? Who’s that you’re talkin’ to?”

“Uh…listen, J.J., I’m gonna have to call you back after a while, okay?”

“Oh, please,” the woman inserted hastily, “don’t-not on my account. I didn’t want to intrude.”

“That’s okay, I was about done anyway,” Jimmy Joe assured her as he was hanging up on J.J.’s wounded-sounding, “Da-ad…” Then for a minute or two he had a bad case of the fidgets, while he tried to adjust to her being there and at the same time figure out how he felt about that.

One thing he felt was nervous, which was understandable; he never had been real comfortable around beautiful women. Pretty, okay. He liked flirting with a pretty woman as much as the next guy. But knock-your-eyes-out, movie-star gorgeous? Uh-uh. Women like that made him feel like he’d forgotten how to breathe. With that dark red hair and pale-as-milk skin of hers, what she reminded him of more than anything was paintings he’d seen of the Madonna. Except the thoughts he’d been having about her… Well, he would have been ashamed to think them in church-put it that way.

On the other hand, beautiful or not, she was damn well ticking him off by the way she was acting, driving across the country all by herself, taking chances with that baby she was carrying. Which was also understandable; having lost one child because of a woman’s pure selfishness and irresponsibility, he had a low tolerance level for that sort of behavior.

What had him confused, though, was that now that she was sitting right there across the table from him, and he could see in her eyes how tired and scared she was, it was real hard for him to stay mad at her. Although he did mean to try. For one thing, it made it a whole lot easier for him to overlook how beautiful she was.

“Hi,” she said as she settled herself, in a kind of breathless and sheepish way that for some reason made her seem more likable than she had up to now. Then she stuck her hand out and, in a more forward and businesslike way than most of the Southern women he was used to, added, “I’m Mirabella Waskowitz.”

And he decided he liked that, too.

“Jimmy Joe,” he said, as he took the hand she offered.