Two days after Christmas, at four o’clock in the morning, Jimmy Joe’s mama came downstairs and found him sitting in her living room in his daddy’s old favorite chair, watching television in the dark. She stood in the doorway with her glass of antacid fizzing in her hand and watched with him for a while, then said, “Son, you’re gonna wear out that remote.”
He looked over at her. “H’lo, Mama, sorry I woke you up.”
She shrugged and waved the glass. “Oh, I was up anyway. Always eat too much of that rich food over the holidays, then I have to take a few days and get my stomach straightened out.” She came and sat on the couch and put her feet, which were clad in slippers that looked like a pair of pink lapdogs, up on the coffee table. “How long ago’d you get in? I didn’t hear your rig.”
“It’s down at my place. I parked it and drove the car over. Didn’t want to rouse everybody.” He spoke absently, his eyes following the images on the screen. Images of a mother with burgundy hair with her newborn baby. The baby was dressed up in a Christmas stocking like a little bitty elf.
“Which one is that?” his mother asked, then answered herself. “Oh-The Today Show. I think CNN’s after that one.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ve already been through ’em once.” Actually, he was on his third go-round, but he didn’t tell her that. Or that he hadn’t been able to bring himself to turn the tape off. Or what a shock it had been to him to see Mirabella’s face, hear her voice again, and how turning it off had seemed worse than leaving her all over again, and how lonely he’d felt in the silent darkness of that cozy and familiar living room.
“Son,” his mama said quietly, “are you in love with this woman?”
A laugh burst from him. “Trust you, Mama.” But he knew from long experience she wasn’t going to leave it alone, so he tried to joke her out of it, which was a tactic that never had worked with her very well. “Do you know how ridiculous that is? Now, how in the world am I gonna fall in love, huh? I got a child to raise, a trucking company to build, a house to take care of-”
His mother interrupted him with a sigh. “Yeah… sometimes I forget you’re not my oldest child. Son, you’re not even thirty, and you’re older than any of them, you know that? I don’t think you ever were a kid-you’ve been saddled with so many responsibilities all your life. There you were, taking on the responsibility for Patti when you were just in high school, then your daddy dying and you taking over the business, and trying to raise J.J. all alone. Tell me something-are you ever gonna think about yourself sometime in your life? Do what makes you happy?”
Jimmy Joe pressed the Pause button, freezing Mirabella’s face just as she was looking down at the baby in her arms. Pain punched him in the gut. “I am happy, Mama.”
“Yeah,” Betty Starr said with a snort. “A happy man sits all alone in the dark watching a tape of a beautiful woman over and over.”
His thumb moved on the remote and the image sprang to radiant life. His heart lifted. “Yeah,” he breathed. “She is beautiful, isn’t she?”
His mother chuckled softly. “So, I’ll ask you again. Are you in love with her?”
He sighed and scrunched down farther on his tailbone. “I don’t know. Sometimes I think I am, and sometimes I’m sure, and then other times…I’m sure I’m crazy.”
“Well, good, you’re confused. That’s a good sign you are in love.”
Jimmy Joe snorted. “I’m not confused, Mama. I know right well when a woman is out of my league.”
The lapdog slippers hit the floor and the empty glass hit the top of the coffee table. “Now, you just stop that right there. I know I raised you to be humble, but I sure never raised you to be ashamed of who and what you are.”
He sat up straight and raised a calming hand; grown-up or not, all of Betty Starr’s kids knew to steer clear of her temper. “Now, simmer down, Mama. It’s not a case of being ashamed of who I am. You know me better’n that. It’s a case of knowin’ who she is. We’re from two different worlds. We’re just-” he took a deep breath to ease the ache in his chest “-too different.”
“Well, now,” said his mother thoughtfully, “you know that’s not necessarily a bad thing.”
With one savage gesture Jimmy Joe shut off the VCR and slapped the remote down, then got up to pace in the restrictive area in front of the coffee table. He felt restless and jangled, overloaded with feelings he didn’t know what to do with, and like any overloaded child needing to blow off some steam, he knew he was safe with his mama. “I’m not just talking likes and dislikes,” he said with controlled fury. “Different politics and opinions, things like that-that’s nothin’. What I mean is, we don’t even think alike. We don’t believe in the same things.”
“You know this for a fact?” his mother said mildly. “That’s an awful lot to know about somebody in just two days.”
“She’s a Californian, Mama, through and through.” He paused to put up a hand, holding off what he knew she was going to say next. “I’m not judging-I’m not. But I’ve been around those people out there enough to know they don’t think like anybody else in this world.” He shook his head and blew out air in a breathy whistle. “She’s got some strange ideas.” You don’t know the half of it, Mama. She’s a virgin at thirty-eight-a virgin! And she’s just had a baby-a baby she made herself from a damn test tube. What kind of woman does that?
Betty Starr watched him for a moment, then settled back on the sofa cushions, once more installing the lapdogs in comfort on the coffee table. “I don’t know. I saw her on that interview, and she sounds like a real nice woman to me.”
“Well-” he lifted his arms and blew out another exasperated gust of air “-sure, she’s nice. She’s intelligent and funny and fiesty and opinionated, and she can be a real pain in the butt sometimes.” And a whole lot of fun to argue with. He looked sideways at his mama and grinned. A lot like somebody else I know who’s near and dear to my heart. He leaned over to kiss her.
She patted his cheek and smiled at him. “Well, then?”
He pulled away, exasperated again. “Okay. So, say I do love her. Say I love her enough to get past all the differences-what about her? What’s a woman like that gonna do out here? She’s a city girl. She’s got a career, friends, family…”
“If I heard right, she said her parents live in Pensacola.”
“Yeah, yeah, they do, but she’s got a couple sisters, some friends out there in L.A. The point is, she’s got a life there. You think somebody like that’s ever going to be happy living in a place like this, a hick Georgia town-”
With a sly smile, she finished it for him. “With a bunch of Crackers and rednecks?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
They both laughed, and his mama sighed and said, “Oh. Jimmy Joe…”
After a forgiving silence, she said gently, “Let me ask you this, son. Who do you think you are to make that decision for her? Did you even ask her how she feels about it?”
He went back to his daddy’s old chair, sat in it, and leaning earnestly forward with his elbows on his knees, began to shape pictures for her with his hands, the way he sometimes did when he had something complicated to explain.
“It’s like this,” he said patiently, ignoring his mother’s broad smile. “There’s ducks, and then there’s chickens. Ducks live in the water, and chickens live on dry land, and there’s no way they’re ever gonna find a way to live happily together. Now you take the chicken-that’s me-and throw him in the water-that’s the big city-and he’s just gonna sink like a stone. The duck, on the other hand, she can go and live in the chicken yard, all right, but is she gonna be happy there?” He sat back with a fat sense of satisfaction, figuring he’d made his point about as well as anybody could make one. “Now, I ask you, can you think of anything in this world sadder than a duck who’s never going to see a pond again?” He couldn’t understand why his mama was just sitting there laughing.
“Oh, Jimmy Joe-” she chuckled, reaching over to pat him on
the knee “-you know, I think you read too much.” She paused to wipe her eyes, then gave a deep, amused sigh. “Son, I don’t know how to tell you this, but people aren’t chickens or ducks. People can live anywhere, adapt to anything, if they want to. Depends on their priorities, what they want out of life, what’s important to them.” She paused again, this time to let the seriousness in her voice settle in around them, and then continued, “And the only way you’re ever going to find that out about a person is to ask.”
Jimmy Joe stared at the floor and said nothing. He was suddenly aware of how tired he was. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his mother’s lapdog slippers slide off the coffee table as she stood and gathered up her antacid glass. He felt a lump settle into his throat as she leaned down to kiss him.
“I’m just so glad you’re home safe and sound, son,” she said huskily. She gave his shoulder a squeeze and shuffled off toward the kitchen. In the doorway she paused and turned. “You know,” she said. And he thought, Uh-oh. He knew that sly tone of voice. “J.J.’s still got a week’s vacation left. Why don’t the two of you go on down to Florida, spend some time together? I’ll bet Pensacola Beach’d be pretty nice this time of year.”
He cleared his throat and waved his hand and tried his best not to sound like he was making excuses. “Ah, well…you know I sorta promised J.J. I’d take him to Six Flags. It’s open just for the holidays. And then I got to service my truck…get ready to make another run out to California…”
“Son,” his mama said sternly, “I never raised you to be a coward.”
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 t
ire 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.”
One Christmas Knight Page 21