“You went to childbirth classes?” He heard the surprise in her voice along with the soft grunts and scuffles she made as she settled herself back in the sleeper. “Really?”
“Sure did. Went with my wife when we were expectin’ J.J. It was a while ago, though-don’t know how much of it I remember.” Traffic having stopped for the moment, he twisted around to look at her and then had to laugh out loud at the pure disbelief on her face. “Why, what’s that for?”
“What’s what?”
“That look. What‘sa matter? You don’t think I’ve been to childbirthin’ class?”
“Well…it’s kind of hard to imagine.”
“Yeah?” His eyes were bright, teasing. As uncomfortable as she was with the way the conversation had turned, Mirabella was glad to see his smile again. “Why’s that?”
“Oh…well, uh…” she faltered, realizing that as usual she’d put her foot in her mouth, and there wasn’t going to be any way she could answer that without it sounding like a putdown. And the galling thing was, she had the feeling he knew it, and didn’t mind.
“Doesn’t fit my image, huh?”
“I guess it just seems like a Yupppie thing,” Mirabella hedged lamely. Not a truck-driver thing. How awful it was, to discover that she was a snob.
“What, you don’t think we got Yuppies in Georgia?” His eyes were attentive, his smile gentle and off-center.
“Oh, I’m sure.” Shame made her snappish. “But you’re not.”
“Now, how do you know what I am?”
The two things Mirabella hated most were, number one, being teased, and number two, being bested in a verbal battle. The first of those usually brought on an urge to stamp her foot and scream. Fortunately, determination not to succumb to the second almost always gave her a strong enough incentive to resist that urge and hold on to her temper.
“I’m from L.A.,” she said dryly. “If there’s anything I know, it’s Yuppies, and believe me, you’re not one. Anyway-” She broke it off, suddenly both furious and panicstricken, because she’d just discovered that the last thing she wanted to do was try to define Jimmy Joe-even to herself, much less to his face. “I didn’t mean anything by what I said. It’s just-I never would have thought Southern men were into that kind of stuff, that’s all.”
“Now, there you go,” Jimmy Joe said, overdoing the vexation just enough so she knew he was kidding. “Where do you get your ideas about Southern men? I bet every single thing you know about us Southerners you got from redneck jokes and country music.”
“I don’t listen to country music,” she said stiffly; she considered the very term an oxymoron. “And I think redneck jokes are…” His sudden laughter and her own latent sense of good manners stopped her.
“Hey-not all of us Southern men are rednecks.”
“I never thought you were!” But she could feel her face warming. There it was-the R-word, the one she’d been trying to shut completely out of her mind. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she’d ever thought of him that way. But she had, at first-okay, sure, cute as the dickens, but a redneck nonetheless. And now she felt ashamed of that.
“Now, what do you think a redneck is?” he persisted, his eyes bright and teasing, his drawl exaggerated. “Pert‘ near anybody that talks with a Southern accent, right?” He shook his head, making a “Shame on you” sound with his mouth. “That’s prejudice, you know that? You Northerners think anybody talks with a Southern accent has got to be ignorant, otherwise we’d a’ learned to talk ‘right.’”
“I do not,” said Mirabella stiffly. But she’d already begun to perk up, stimulated by the promise of a good argument, by which was about anything that didn’t touch her on a personal level.
“Sure you do. Take ‘ain’t.’ You Northerners think sayin’ ’ain‘t’ is bad grammar, but I’ll tell you somethin’ I bet you didn’t know. ’Ain‘t’ was considered perfectly fine grammar in Shakespeare’s time. That’s right. That’s the thing about Southern grammar-you Northeners might think it’s bad grammar, but that’s not necessarily true, see? What it is, it’s just Southern, is all.”
Mirabella could never, but never pass up a chance to be right. So she couldn’t resist reminding him, “You don’t say ain’t.”
Jimmy Joe let her see his grin before he shifted gears and turned to face the front again. “Yeah, but that’s because my mama was a schoolteacher. She’d skin me alive if I ever did.”
“Aha!”
“Aha, nothin’. She never did let me take the Lord’s name in vain, either, and lots of educated folks do that-includin’ Northerners.”
“Including me,” she had to admit.
Jimmy Joe was plainly on a roll. “You want to know what’s ignorant?” he said, smacking the steering wheel with an open palm. “I’ll tell you what, you get these people tryin’ to talk like Southerners, sayin’ ‘y’all’ when they’re only talkin’ to one person-now that’s ignorant.”
Mirabella suddenly realized that she was smiling. And that she wasn’t afraid anymore. And that she no longer knew whether this discussion had a point to be made, or cared whether she won or lost it. It was just…fun. Fun to be with him. Fun to listen to him. Arguing with him was less a matter of winning than stoking a fire, just so she could bask in the stimulating warmth of his voice. It was a totally new experience for her, and one that for the moment, at least, seemed to have taken her mind completely off the other new experience she was caught up in.
“Hey-I’ll tell you what a redneck is, if you want me to.” Jimmy Joe’s accent was suddenly thick as molasses. He.looked back at her and she saw that although his face was perfectly straight, his eyes were liquid with laughter. She held her breath, keeping back her own.
“Now, you know, what rednecks enjoy doin’ more’n anything in this world is to lay around in the woods amongst a bunch a’ hounddawgs, old washin’ machines and cars that don’t run, and drink Red Dog beer and shoot at things… occasionally one another.”
Mirabella let out a snort of laughter. Jimmy Joe held up a finger, paused as if to give it some thought, then continued in a nasal singsong. “Then, one step up from there you got yer good ol’ boys. Now a good ol’ boy reveres his dogs. In his esteem, his dog ranks above his wife and kids, but probably somewheres below a good huntin’ rifle and his pickup truck, which he likes to decorate with replicas of the Confederate battle flag. Don’t laugh-” Mirabella, who was trying not to wet herself more than she already was, made a strangled sound. “Miss Marybell, I swear to you-” he solemnly made a crisscross on his chest and held up his right hand in a “Scout’s honor” sign “-I am not a redneck. Never in my life have I used an old tire for a planter or called anybody ’bubba’-oh, well, except for Bubba Johnson back in junior high school, but you can’t hardly count that, bein’s how Bubba was his given name.”
I know what he’s doing, she thought. Somehow, in spite of her desperate snorts and giggles, he must know about the quivery, achy, tear-filled reservoir inside her that was ready to overflow without warning. And obviously he was no more eager than she was to have that happen-although whether it was a matter of gallantry on his part, or whether like most men he was simply chickenhearted when it came to a woman’s tears, she couldn’t decide.
Either way, she was grateful to him. Grateful for the arguing and the laughter, grateful for the distraction, for the opportunity to recover some of the dignity she’d left back in that snowdrift. Grateful for the chance to forget, for a little while at least, what lay ahead of her, and how grave her situation was. It wasn’t easy to do under the circumstances, but since he seemed to be trying so hard to help her, she did her best.
“Speaking of given names,” she said after the laughter had run its course, making a poor job of smothering a yawn as she curled on her side on the sleeper’s wide bed and snuggled the quilt around her-discovering that through the curtain of her lashes the back of his head and neck looked surprisingly mature, the spread of his shoulders broad and powerful. �
��Jimmy Joe-is that really yours? Or is it a nickname, like…short for James Joseph?”
His chuckle seemed to stroke her auditory nerves, soothing as a caress. “Just Jimmy Joe-that’s it.”
“Huh. Nobody ever calls you Jim?”
“Jim was my daddy’s name. His daddy was James, and I think the Joseph came from another granddaddy-that’d be Joe Doyle. To avoid confusion, I got Jimmy Joe. Does beat the heck out of Junior. Hey,” he said with another of those caressing chuckles, “it was good enough for the president of the United States.”
She murmured, “Jimmy just seems-” Right. That came to her balanced on the edge of sleep, and she felt an odd little flare of surprise. And then a flutter near her heart.
“Hey, you know, you can call me anything you want to.” For some reason his voice had grown husky. “Shoot, call me Jim if you want to.”
She smiled and murmured, “Too late-I’ve gotten used to Jimmy Joe, now.” She would have a hard time calling him anything else. Jimmy Joe. What a sweet, gentle sound…
“How ’bout Mirabella? How’d you ever get a name like that? Especially with a last name like-”
“Waskowitz? Yeah, I know-awful, isn’t it? My dad’s family was Polish-I think they shortened the name somewhere along the line. My mom-she was a teacher, too, by the way-she’s just kind of this unique person-part English, part Irish, but I think she picked our names based on whatever her kick happened to be at the time. My sisters are Sommer and Eve. Don’t ask me how I got Mirabella.” She yawned unbashedly. “I looked it up one time. It means-”
The word evaporated in a puff of air that blew every last vestige of sleep fog from her brain and left her senses blasted and cringing. The nagging ache in her back, which up to now she’d been able to ignore, sort of like a radio turned down low, had suddenly intensified as if someone had given the volume knob marked Pain a wrenching twist to the right.
“Mirabella…that’s a mouthful. Everybody always call you that? Your family… friends?”
When he didn’t get an answer, the first thing Jimmy Joe thought was maybe she’d finally dozed off. He wasn’t sure what made him look back, but when he did he could see that even though she had her eyes shut, she definitely wasn’t sleeping.
“Focus,” he barked, which was the first thing that popped into his head as his heart gave another one of those bad leaps, banging against the wall of his chest. “Breathe.”
Damnation, he thought. Damn. He could hear her begin to whimper, making a sound like a hurt puppy that had to be about the worst thing he’d ever heard in his life.
He just did remember to check his watch. “Nine minutes,” he yelled. Was that a good thing? He wasn’t sure, but he thought it must be good, because didn’t the pains have to be a whole lot closer together before things really got serious? Maybe they had more time than he’d thought. Maybe the road would improve. What he ought to do was get back on the radio again and find out what was going on up ahead. Maybe they would make it to Amarillo, after all.
But then, he thought, what if they didn’t? It was almost dark now. At the rate they were going, it was still a good many hours to Amarillo. And then, what if somebody jackknifed and blocked the road? Meanwhile, Mirabella was back there all by herself, having those pains, which were only going to get worse. She needed somebody to be with her; somebody to make her do those breathing things she was supposed to do. Dammit, he couldn’t very well help her and drive at the same time!
What should he do? If he was going to help her, he was going to have to pull off somewhere. But if he did that… Everything inside him went cold and quiet. Because he knew that if he did get off, he wasn’t going to get back on again. He would be committed. Unless by some miracle help did arrive in time, whatever happened, it was going to be just him and Mirabella. Him, Mirabella, and a baby that was bound and determined to show up four weeks ahead of schedule.
Oh, Lord, help me, he thought. What should I do?
It was right then that his headlights picked up the sign for a rest area that was coming up, next exit, just one mile ahead. A rest stop-that was a whole lot better than one of the crossroads, with their overpasses and uphill off-ramps, where he would stand a good chance of jackknifing his rig. And there would be a rest room, water, maybe even a phone. He let out a breath that was almost relief, figuring if that wasn’t a sign of some kind, he didn’t know what was. Almost as if the decision had been taken out of his hands.
“Bella…” It came from the sleeper on a soft cushion of air, much like a sigh.
Jimmy Joe, who was busy changing radio channels, glanced back and said, “I beg your pardon?”
She was sitting up straight, rocking back and forth slightly. Her face was pale, her eyes dark and calm. She gathered her hair away from her face with one hand and took a quick breath, then smiled. “Bella. That’s what my family calls me. And most of my friends. You want to hear a joke? It means-”
Channel 19 came crackling in, drowning out the rest. He unhooked the mike and held it while he waited for a lull in the chatter, but when one came he didn’t hit the Talk button right away. Instead he looked back at Mirabella and got her eyes for just a moment, and he said softly, “Means ‘beautiful’ -I know that much Italian. And I never heard a more fittin’ name.”
He grinned at the stunned silence he got in reply as he thumbed on the mike and intoned, “Breaker, one-nine… This is Big Blue Starr. I’m gon’ try an’ get off here at this rest stop east of Adrian. Uh… I got a lady havin’ a baby here, so if any a’ you drivers happen to run across any help out there, I’d ‘preciate it if you’d send it my way. I’m gon’ be listenin’ to channel 9 for a while… Anybody knows anything about delivering babies, I’d sure like to hear from you over there… Ten-four.’
He hung up the mike and got the channel changed just as the rest-stop exit sign was picking up the glow of his headlights. He flashed his running lights and switched on his turn signals and sent up a prayer.
“Hang on,” he muttered to Mirabella as he turned the Kenworth’s nose onto the snow-and ice-choked ramp.
Chapter 8
“Gotta make a change here. Got a’ alligator in the road.”
I-40-Texas
While the big truck churned slowly along the exit ramp, carving its own tracks in the frozen, unblemished white, Mirabella focused on its driver’s hands. They looked so strong and sure, so steady on the wheel. And she thought, We’ll be okay in those hands, my baby and I… Everything will be all right.
The truck came to a lumbering stop. There was an explosive hiss of air through the brake lines and then, except for the quiet grumble of the idling diesel engine, silence. Jimmy Joe set the brakes and flipped switches, then turned in his seat to grin at her. “Well,” he said with a little half-shrug, “here we are.”
She arranged her own lips into a smile for his benefit, although there was still a hollow feeling in her chest, and asked, “Where, exactly, are we?” It looked pretty much like nowhere to her-eerie in its emptiness, without so much as a light showing in the distance.
“We’re at a rest stop.” He let out a breath and stood, leaning across the passenger seat to peer out the side window into the darkness. “Not much of one-pretty much just picnic tables and potties. I expect the rest rooms’re gonna be a mite chilly-”
“Rest rooms! Seriously?” That right there was enough to pick up her morale. “Oh, God-where?”
He gave her a doubtful look. “You sure you want to go out there? I was thinkinv maybe I could rig up somethin’…you know…” He paused, coloring a little. “Portable, or somethin’.”
“Over my dead body,” said Mirabella through her teeth. At some point, modesty was probably going to become optional, even for her. But not yet. Not yet. “I can walk. Let me out of here-now. Open the door.”
He made an exasperated noise as she looked ready to bowl right over him, but he managed to get a good firm grip on both of her arms. “Okay, now hold on, wait a minute,” he said as he steered
her backward into the sleeper. “At least put a coat on first, okay? One of mine-that one a’yours isn’t worth a darn…” As he spoke he was opening a door, at the same time taking the precaution of maintaining a hold on one of her elbows as if he expected her to make a break for it as soon as he let go. “Here,” he said, pulling out a Levi’s jacket lined with sheepskin, “this oughta do it-put this on.”
“It’s my bottom half that’s wet,” she told him as he held the jacket for her and guided her hands into the sleeves as if she were a three-year-old.
And suddenly hearing herself, she thought, I can’t believe I told him that. A man and a stranger, and I told him as easily as if we were best friends and I’d known him forever.
It just didn’t seem real to her. None of this did. The world she lived in-her carefully planned, controllable universe-had vanished. Everything was different. All the rules had changed.
“What’s the matter?” Jimmy Joe’s body had gone tense and still. “You havin’ another one?”
She shook her head rapidly and tried to explain. “I just…don’t believe this is happening. It’s not… Nothing’s the way I planned…”
“Hey.”
He turned her toward him, his brow furrowing as he watched his hands tug the two halves of the jacket together just below her chin, slip inside the collar and under her hair and carefully lift it free, then return to fuss unnecessarily with the lay of the collar and lapels. Only when he had them smoothed to his satisfaction did his eyes finally move upward to her face, while his fingers, left on their own, slipped back into the warm places along the sides of her neck as if they belonged there.
The warmth, the feel of them there, made her want to close her eyes, but he cradled her head as if it was something precious and tilted it slightly so that she had nowhere to look except into his eyes.
“Now, you listen,” he said, his voice gone soft and growly. “Everything’s gonna be okay, you hear?”
One Christmas Knight Page 11