“No, ma’am, I’m not. I guess you could say I’m a friend.” He saw right away that wasn’t going to get him anywhere, so he shuffled around and cleared his throat some more, and then jumped back in with, “But I know she’ll want to see me. My name’s Jimmy Joe Starr, and, uh,… Well, see, I was with her when she bad her baby. In fact, she, uh, had it in my truck. And…well, I promised her I’d come by and see her, soon as I could. Just to say hi, you know, make sure she’s okay…”

Somewhere along in there, it came to him that the people around him had gotten real quiet. In fact, he figured he could have heard a pin drop. He kept lowering his voice and leaning closer to the lady in pink, trying his best to keep his business private, but when he did that, it seemed to him that everyone in the place sort of leaned with him.

Then all of a sudden it was like a dam had burst. The whole roomful of people surged in around him, everybody trying to push everybody else out of the way, people shoving microphones and video cameras in his face and shouting questions at him, all talking at once.

“Mr. Starr-Mr. Starr!”

“Over here-”

“How did it feet-”

“Are you the trucker-”

“What do you think about being called a Good Samaritan?”

“When did you know you were going to-”

“Had you ever delivered a baby before, Mr. Starr?”

“Mr. Starr-Mr. Starr!”

“How does it feel to be a hero, Mr. Starr?”

Oh, man. Once when he was a kid, Jimmy Joe remembered, he and his oldest brother Troy had hooked a hornets’ nest while they were fishing. That was pretty much the way he felt right now, like he wanted to cover his head and make for deep water.

But they had him cornered, and it looked like there wasn’t much hope he was going to be able to make a run for it. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted the lady in pink making her escape; all he could hope was that maybe she’d gone for reinforcements.

In the meantime, he had to try and make the best of it. And one thing he wasn’t going to try to do was outshout everybody. Neither was he going to shuffle his feet and look like some dumb Cracker-his mama had taught him better than that. In fact, it was his mama’s methods he called on, particularly the one she used to always use to get the attention of a classroom-or a kitchen-full of kids all squabbling and hollering at once. He raised one hand, bowed his head, closed his eyes, and then…just waited. He waited until everybody got quiet again, which didn’t take as long as a person might think. When he wasn’t hearing anything except some rustling around and nervous coughing, he opened his eyes. And it seemed like everybody drew in a big breath and held it.

He pointed to a woman standing right in front of him, with sleek dark hair pulled back in a French twist and a familiar look about her, although he couldn’t place her. He took a breath, hesitated a moment, then let it out in a rush and said, “Who are you people?”

Then everybody laughed, and it seemed like he’d made a whole roomful of new friends.

The woman he’d pointed to waved her microphone but this time remembered her manners and didn’t poke it in his face. She said, “I guess you’ve been a little out of touch, Mr. Starr. This is a great story-Good Samaritan trucker delivering a baby on a snowbound interstate, on Christmas Day. It’s a wonderful story. The whole country’s been following it, ever since word started coming in last night. It seems you’ve become quite a hero. What do you think of that?”

Jimmy Joe looked at. all those microphones and video cameras pointed at him-at a respectful distance, now-and for a few moments he didn’t say anything. He was thinking about Mirabella. Remembering…so many things. Like the images in a kaleidoscope, fragmented and rearranged into images of unimaginable beauty.

Terrified eyes, shivering voice… “I think I’m having my baby…”

“I’m sorry…I’m sorry…”

“Can’t…make a mess!”

Furiously… “Can’t you understand English?”

“I ca-an’t!”

The imprint of her fingers on his arm… the feel of her mouth.

“Too many mountains… more mountains…”

“If you say that one more time, I’ll kill you!”

“Amy… her name is Amy.”

“I’ve never made love before…”

“Please…come with me!”

“Don’t leave me…”

He had to cough, clear his throat and take a couple of deep breaths before he could speak, and when he did his voice was still so raspy it didn’t even sound like him.

“Well, first off, I’m no Good Samaritan, and, uh…I’m sure not a hero. What I did wasn’t any more’n any other person I know of woulda done, under the same circumstances. The only hero here is that lady lying up there in that hospital bed. She‘s-” And then he had to stop and cough some more. “Well, she’s just about the bravest person I ever saw, is all. And, uh…well, that’s all I’ve got to say. Now, if y’all will excuse me…”

He turned blindly, thinking he knew how a trapped wolf felt just before he started gnawing his leg off, and there was a big burly fellow in a rent-a-cop uniform reaching out to him and saying in that quiet, no-argument cop way, “Sir, you want to come with me, please? Right this way.”

Beyond the security guard Jimmy Joe could see the lady in the pink pinafore hovering, holding open a door marked, Hospital Personnel Only. From the pink in her cheeks and the smile on her lips, it looked like she might have warmed toward him quite a bit since she’d spoken to him last.

The security guard touched Jimmy Joe’s elbow and raised his voice and said, “Okay, folks, that’s all. You want to step aside and let us through, please?” He ushered Jimmy Joe through the door and the pink-pinafore lady closed it smartly after them. Jimmy Joe could just imagine her glaring in frosty triumph at the thwarted reporters left on the other side.

Left alone with the security guard, he didn’t know exactly what to expect-whether he was about to be hustled out the nearest exit, or what. It sure wasn’t to have the guy clap him on the shoulder and say, “Son, I’d sure like to shake your hand. That was a wonderful thing you did. God bless ya.”

Feeling too dazed and confused to argue, Jimmy Joe muttered some sort of thank-you and shook the guy’s hand, which was about the size and texture of an old fielder’s mitt. For some reason that made him think of his dad, and that brought a lump into his throat.

Maybe it’s just being in a hospital again, he thought as the guard whisked him past offices and through storerooms and up an echoing concrete stairway, through clanging steel doors and then down polished corridors that smelled the way hospitals always do. Like most normal healthy people who don’t actually work in one, Jimmy Joe wasn’t fond of hospitals. Which wasn’t surprising, considering that with one exception, his associations with them, starting with having his tonsils taken out when he was seven, were all pretty bad. The arm he’d broken playing football hadn’t been serious enough to get him past the emergency room, but then there had been his dad’s first heart attack, and then the last one. He remembered the long night in the waiting room, he and his brothers and sisters sprawled and draped over every available piece of furniture, and at dawn, the doctors coming with headshakes and expressionless faces. And the worst shock of all had been watching his mama’s face turn old before his eyes.

Not very long after that, there had been Amy-the first Amy. And then, for a while, regular visits to a different kind of hospital, where patients shuffled aimlessly through the corridors or sat and looked out the windows with blank faces and empty eyes. Then there had been the exception-JJ.’s birth. But even that hadn’t exactly been a happy time in his life. That had been almost eight years ago, and he’d done his best to avoid hospitals ever since.

“She’s been askin’ for ya,” the security guard told him as they turned down a corridor painted in cheery shades of rose pink and aqua green. Jimmy Joe could hear trays clanking and people laughing. And mixed in with the regular old hospital smell was a new one, one he remembered well-diapers. “We’ve been tryin’ to keep that horde downstairs away from her until she’s had a chance to rest up a bit. Here ya go-you can go on in.”

And suddenly there he was, standing outside a closed door that he knew Mirabella was on the other side of, and he didn’t have a single idea in the world what he was going to say to her once he opened it. He felt like it had been days, maybe even years, since he’d seen her, instead of just a few hours. In his truck, it had seemed as if they were the only two people in the whole world, and that somehow the two of them and Amy Jo and everything they’d been through together had gotten woven into one whole cloth, like a beautiful tapestry, or one of those Navajo rugs he’d brought back from his trips. For some reason he’d thought they would be that way forever.

But from the instant that helicopter had set down in the rest-stop parking lot, he’d known it hadn’t been real, and that the world didn’t belong to just the three of them, after all. This was somebody else’s world, and he, for one, didn’t feel real comfortable in it. In this world, Mirabella and her baby girl were a media event, and everybody was trying to make him out to be some kind of hero. Well, he sure didn’t feel like a hero. What he felt like was a man who’d just lost something precious to him-something so rare and beautiful he was afraid he wasn’t ever going to come across it in his life again.

The security guard waved to him and moseyed off down the corridor, nodding to a couple of nurses along the way. A nurse bustling by did a sort of double take when she saw Jimmy Joe, and smiled, her face lighting up like a Christmas tree.