Kathleen Creighton - One Christmas Knight

“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.”

“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.