“Bad one?” he asked awkwardly, fully aware of the fact that no matter how she answered him, he would never really understand. Nothing like childbirth to make a man feel totally useless, he thought. Probably why in ages past at times like this the womenfolk were always sending the men out to chop wood or boil water or hunt buffalo, just to make em feel like they were good for something.

“Not so bad.” She said it with a relieved chuckle, like a kid finding out that the punishment he’d been dreading wasn’t so terrible after all. “If they don’t get any worse than that, I can handle it.”

“How often you havin’ ’em?”

“I don’t know.” She shifted restlessly. “I guess we’d better start keeping track.”

“Okay, say we start-” he pulled back the sleeve of his sweatshirt and got a good look at his watch, adding a couple of minutes for the time they’d been talking “-now. Okay, now, you tell me the minute you feel the next one comin’ on, y’hear? And right now before it does, you best get on back there and lie down.” He jerked his head in the direction of the sleeper. “Get some rest.”

Then he caught a replay of himself. He shook his head and made a sound that was full of all the self-disgust and helplessness he felt. “I beg your pardon-don’t mean to be givin’ out orders. I just do it so I’ll feel like I’m doin’ somethin’.” He gave her about half a grin, which was the best he could muster.

“That’s okay.” After a moment she gave a soft laugh and added dryly, “You probably ought to get in some practice while you can. Looks like you’re going to be my childbirth coach.”

With that she got up and eased herself between the seats. The quilt got hung up on the gearshift and he reached automatically to unhook it for her, taking more time than he needed, fussing with the dragging end like a bridesmaid with a bridal train while he tried to get some spit flowing in his mouth again. He’d never known his mouth to be so dry. Fear. That’s what it was.

But he couldn’t let Mirabella know. That was why he scraped up a little laughter and kind of a confident, know-it-all tilt to his head and drawled, “Childbirth coach… Oh, yeah, I sure do remember that. Those classes, now… I reckon that’s what they’re for, don’t you? Make the father feel like he’s actually doing something worthwhile, even if all it is is propping his wife up and yelling at her to do what she’s already doing anyway.”

“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.