Mirabella laughed. “Oh, I’m taking it easy. Obviously.”

She said her goodbyes, punched the Off button and returned the handset to its cradle on the wall next to the booth, then took a deep breath and picked up a triangle of her club sandwich. At last the baby had settled down. Maybe she could actually eat in peace.

She did notice that the young trucker across the way had picked up the phone again and was no longer paying any attention to her, thank God, but just looking out the window, watching the big trucks roll in off the interstate, one after another…


Jimmy Joe Starr was finally getting through to his mama’s house in Georgia. He listened patiently to the rings, and on the third one the voice he wanted most in this world to hear said, “This is the Starr residence. How may I help you?”

He just had to chuckle, hearing all that coming out of his eight-year-old son’s mouth. J.J.’s regular greeting up to now had been more along the lines of,“H’lo, who’s this?”

“Gramma been workin’ on you?”

“Dad!”

“Hey, J.J., whatcha up to?”

“Oh, nothin’ much. Where are you? When are you comin’ home?”

Those were J.J.’s two standard questions, and they never failed to wring a twinge of guilt and regret out of Jimmy Joe’s insides. And of course, never more than at this time of year. “I’m in New Mexico,” he said, hoping it sounded cheerful enough. “Got a load to drop in Little Rock tomorrow, and then like I told you, I’ll be headin’ for the barn. I’ll most likely be there when you wake up Christmas morning.”

“Promise?”

“Sure, I promise-long’s the road don’t open up and swallow me.”

“Dad…”

“Come on, J.J., you know I’m gonna be fine.”

“I know, but… you know what? There’s supposed to be a big snowstorm in the Texas panhandle. What if you get stuck?”

“Hey, where’d you hear about this snowstorm, huh? Gramma tell you?” He was going to have to have a little talk with his mama, is what he was going to have to do-remind her what a worrywart J.J. was.

“I saw it on The Weather Channel. They called it the Arc-Arc-tic Express. It sounds really bad.”

Jimmy Joe shook his head. What was he going to do with an eight-year-old kid who watched The Weather Channel? “Hey, what’d I tell you? The Big Blue Starr’ll drive through anything, right? I’ll be there on ol’ Santa’s heels, just like I said I would. Now, quit your woffyin’-you’re startin’ to sound like an ol’ lady, you know that?” He smiled at J.J.’s outraged denial. “So, tell me quick, what you been up to? I gotta get back on the road. Everybody gettin’ ready for Christmas? Who was that had the phone tied up so long? Your Aunt Jess, I reckon. Am I right?”

“I guess. Dad?”

“Yeah, son?”

“When can I go back to school?”

“Back to-what kinda question is that? It’s Christmas vacation!” Just as Jimmy Joe was starting to think his kid had come down with some kind of bug or other, something in the boy’s tone of voice got through to him. He let his breath out and said, “Okay, J.J., what’s up? You in trouble with your grandma again?”

“It wasn’t my fault, Dad, I swear! I mean, what else was I supposed to do? She kissed me!”

“What? Who kissed you? Gramma?”

“No! Sammi June.”

“You don’t mean your cousin Sammi June?”

“Yeah. Right smack on the lips, Dad. Yuck!”

Jimmy Joe was trying his best not to laugh-at least not enough so it would spill over into his voice. With deep seriousness he said, “What on earth do you suppose made her do a thing like that?”

A heartfelt sigh drifted over the wire. “Well, she said it’s on account of the mistletoe.”

“Mistletoe?”

“Yeah, Aunt Jessica went and hung little bunches of it all over the house. Sammi June says if you catch somebody standing underneath one of the bunches, they have to kiss you, it’s a rule. Is that true, Dad?”

Jimmy Joe coughed and said, “Well, I think it’s more like a tradition than an out-and-out rule. So, anyway, she caught you and she kissed you. And then what did you do?”

“I socked her.” He said it like. “Well, of course-what do you think?”

“Oh, Lord. J.J.,” said Jimmy Joe sternly, “what do you know about hittin’ girls? Come on, now, I don’t have to tell you that. You tell me.”

There was another long sigh. “Never, never, never hit a girl. Ever.”

“You got it. And that is a rule. And don’t you forget it. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir…”

“So, what’d your grandma give you for punishment?”

That patented sigh again. “No computer till after Christmas, and I have to do Sammi June’s chores for a week.”

Jimmy Joe snorted. “You got off lucky. Times have sure changed, you know that? I’d have got my butt paddled, but good.”

“I’d rather have a spankin’ than no computer,” J.J. said in a mournful tone. Then instantly he added, in a much perkier voice, “Dad, can we get on-line?”

Oh, Lord, thought Jimmy Joe. “Hey-hey,” he said. “Wait just a darn minute-what brought this on?” Unnamed alarms were already spiking through his insides.

“Can we, Dad? It’d be so coot-there’s all this neat stuff you can do-”

“Absolutely not!”

“But Da-ad…”

“Now, don’t start with me, J.J. You’re way too young to go surfin’ around the Internet, or whatever it is they do, unsupervised. Shoot, there’s stuff on there’d make me blush. I’d sooner let you go to the downtown bus depot by yourself.”

“Dad, you would not There’s creeps and weirdos down there.”

“Yeah, well, there’s creeps and weirdos on the Internet, too. What put this idea in your head, anyway?”

“My friend Rocky just got on-line. He gets E-mail. If I went on-line, we could send each other E-mail.”

“Yeah, and so could anybody else.” What in the world, thought Jimmy Joe, was he going to have to protect his child from next? Television was bad enough, but there at least, he-or anyway, his mama-had some control over what came into the house. “I can’t believe his parents’d let him do something like this, J.J. You sure Rocky isn’t just puttin’ you on?”

“No, Dad, honest. It’s like this, see. His parents are divorced, and his mom works, so she got Rocky on-line so she can keep track of him and help him with his homework from her office. Isn’t that cool? And very ed-ja-cational, too.”

Jimmy Joe couldn’t think of a reply to that, so he muttered something along the lines of, “Yeah, well, we’ll talk about it.” And remembering the mistletoe incident, he pointedly added, “After Christmas.”

This business of being a single parent, he thought, by no means for the first time, was getting harder and harder every day. He had a lot of sympathy for Rocky’s mother, even if he didn’t think much of her idea of a solution to her problem. It made him sad to think about a little kid doing his homework in front of a computer screen, all by himself in a big old empty house, instead of at the table in a nice warm kitchen with his mama cooking dinner a few feet away. That was the way it ought to be. That was the way it had been for him, and the way he tried to make sure it was for J.J. Of course, he had to admit, it did help to have a whole bunch of kinfolk around to help out.

“Hey,” he said, “guess I’d better get back on the road if I’m gonna get there in time for Christmas turkey. You tell your grandma I called, and behave yourself, now, y’hear?”

J.J.’s sigh was resigned. “I will, Dad, I promise. But I wish you were here now.”

“I wish that too, son.”

“I miss you, Dad. And I miss Rocky, too. There’s nothin’ but women around here.”

“Yeah?” Again, it was hard to keep laughter out of his voice. “Well, all I can tell you is, there’s gonna come a time that won’t seem at all a bad thing.”

“Uh-uh, Dad-no way.”

“Well, we’ll see. Okay, you be good now.” And he added the trucker’s sign-off, like he always did when he was on the road: “Ten-four.”

“Ten-four, Dad.”

Jimmy Joe hung up the phone with a hollow belly and a heavy heart, which was about normal after talking to his son.

As he slid out of the booth he figured he could let himself look one more time at the woman across the way. The fact was, it had come as something of a shock to him when he’d realized that the pregnant woman squeezing her belly into that booth was none other than the driver of the silver-gray Lexus with the California plates. No doubt about that auburn hair, though. He decided he liked the way she wore it, shoulderlength and parted on the side, in a way that reminded him of the old 1940s movies Granny Calhoun liked to watch on her VCR. He thought it was kind of sexy, the way it showed her ear on one side, but dipped across her eyebrow and just barely grazed her cheek on the other. Sexy, with attitude; he hadn’t been wrong about that little “So what?” tilt of her chin.

All in all, she was just plain nice to look at. She wasn’t tall, which he thought might make her look further along than she was-not like his sister Jess, for instance, who was tall and big-boned and could hide a pretty good-size baby under a men’s blue work shirt until the last minute if she wanted to. Obviously this lady wasn’t interested in hiding anything, though, because the top she was wearing-a long-sleeved turtleneck in some kind of thick, silky stuff in a deep, dark plum that shimmered in the light-had a tendency to cling. Not in an embarrassing way; like the car she drove, the lady had class. Just enough to give a hint of the way her body might look under normal circumstances-all curves and sweet, giving softnesses, voluptuous as a Southern summer.

He would probably have looked at her a whole lot more, but he figured he’d already embarrassed himself enough, getting caught flat-footed staring at her like some kind of noaccount Cracker without the manners his mama had taught him.