But the road was dry and the skies were clear, and she was moving along normally, which is to say well over the speed limit-Mirabella preferred to think of speed limits as “guidelines,” anyway. So she sailed on past the turnoff, set her cruise control at seventy-five, and popped her favorite chambermusic tape into the deck. As part of her campaign to imprint her unborn child with a taste for good music, she turned the volume up high and settled back for the long haul.

At this rate, she told herself smugly, she would easily make it as far as Amarillo tonight-maybe farther. After that it was only another thousand miles or so to Pensacola. Okay, that did sound like a lot, but hey, she had two days. She could still make it by Christmas night. She would make it. She’d made up her mind. And when Mirabella made up her mind to do something, she did it.

Not long after that, everything came to a halt.

Now what? thought Mirabella. According to the last mile marker she’d paid any attention to, she was still at least a hundred miles from Texas, and, it looked to her, a lot farther than that from the nearest snowflake.

Right about now she should be approaching the town of Santa Rosa-barely a speck on the road atlas that lay open on the seat beside her-where she’d planned to make a quick potty-stop. Her back was aching and her legs had developed an alarming tendency to go numb, but she’d figured on pushing ahead another fifty miles to Tucumcari before taking a real break. Which she was never going to make if it kept going like this. What, she wondered irritably, was the holdup, anyway? It had to be an accident of some kind. Dammit, just her luck.

Then she noticed that trucks were beginning to pull over and park along the shoulder of the interstate, in a long, grumbling line that stretched back toward Arizona as far as she could see in her rearview mirrors. That struck her as a very bad sign.

The traffic lanes were moving, though, still creeping slowly but steadily along. And now up ahead she could see flashing lights, and state troopers waving lighted batons like semaphores. It appeared the two lanes of traffic were being merged into one, then directed toward the nearest exit ramp. Mirabella didn’t see any signs at all of an accident. She began to get a queasy feeling in her stomach.

When she got to the first state trooper she stopped and rolled down her window. Raising her voice above the oboe solo in Albinoni’s Adagio, which was issuing full blast from her tape deck, she said in an imperious tone, “Excuse me, officer, what’s the problem? Why is the highway closed?”

The young Native American trooper first gave her an impatient look, then did a double take and came ambling over. He leaned down to the window, started to speak, then interrupted himself and instead said loudly, “Ma‘am, could you turn that down, please?” Mirabella turned off the tape player. “Thank you. Ma’am, since you haven’t been listening to your radio, I guess you probably don’t know. The interstate’s closed at the Texas state line. They got blowing snow, icy roads and zero visibility through the Texas Panhandle.”

“But that’s a hundred miles from here,” Mirabella protested. She couldn’t believe he was serious. Snow? Impossible. It was so nice here.

But the trooper was straightening with an air of finality and a shrug. “Got to close it somewhere, ma‘am-preferably somewhere people got a place to stay. Tucumcari’s full up. Santa Rosa’s the next stop down the line. Unless you have business between here and the line, I’m gonna have to ask you to exit here, ma’am. Move along, now…thank you. Exit to your right, please.” He pointed toward the off-ramp and waved her on with his lighted baton.

Mirabella did as she was told, which was something she never enjoyed, especially when she had no other choice.

At the stop sign at the bottom of the exit ramp she was faced with two choices: she could turn left onto what appeared to be the town’s main drag, where at the moment there was a traffic snarl that resembled an Orange County shopping-mall parking lot the day before Christmas. Or, she could turn right, onto a two-lane numbered highway that curved past a truck stop and disappeared into the dry hills and arroyos to the south.

South. Mirabella was chewing on her lip and thinking about that when somebody behind her gave an impatient blast on his car horn. Being a seasoned L.A. driver, she flipped him an appropriate response, then put on her blinker and turned in a deliberate and leisurely fashion to the right.

The truck stop’s huge truck parking lot was already filled to overflowing with idling eighteen-wheelers. More trucks were pulling in along all the side and frontage roads on both sides of the interstate. Fortunately, there seemed to be relatively fewer passenger cars entering the truck-oops, travel-stop’s passenger-car parking lot, and she was able to find a spot not too far from the entrance.

She was engaged in the clumsy process of extricating her bulky body and numb legs from her car when a wickedly cold wind came skirling around the open door, whistled down her collar and blew freshly up her pant legs. As she got her jacket from the back seat, she found herself remembering early mornings on the California deserts of her childhood, waiting with her sisters for the school bus, stamping the ground and blowing on her fingers to keep warm; remembering a certain smell in the air, brought on the wind from the distant Sierra Nevadas.

For the first time, snow began to seem like a real possibility.

The travel-stop store was stuffy by comparison, overheated and jam-packed with stranded motorists and ticked-off truckers all milling around grumbling and griping about the situation they were in. After making her mandatory stop in the ladies’ room, Mirabella pushed her way through the crowd around the fuel desk.

“Excuse me,” she said to the girl behind the counter, who was busy with a customer, “could I just ask you a question?”

The cashier-young, Native American and obviously unflappable-nodded and went on with what she was doing, which was ringing up someone’s assortment of snack foods.

“That road out there,” Mirabella persisted, “the one right in front-eighty-four, I think it was-does it, by any chance, go to Texas?”

Again the cashier nodded. Mirabella was encouraged by that and about to ask for further details, such as how far was it to Texas, and were there any places to stop along the way, when one of the men waiting in line broke in with a snort and said, “Not today, it don’t.”

There was a general rumble of agreement. Somebody else said, “Ain’t nothin’ goin’ to Texas today. They got the whole damn state shut down.”

Another voice piped up, “I heard it was even snowin’ in Dallas.”

The first man who’d spoken reached past her to put his purchases-a paperback mystery, a package of Twinkies and a bottle of Rolaids-on the counter. As he did he gave her a look-down, then back up again-and said in a more kindly tone, “If I‘z you, I’d get myself a motel room, ma’am, before it’s too late. Might as well be comfortable. You ain’t goin’ any further tonight.”

She stood very still and didn’t reply. She was, quite simply, dumbstruck.

To Mirabella, “No” had always been a challenge; the word “impossible” a spur to action, and “You can’t,” a gauntlet, a dare. It was her belief that there was a way around almost any obstacle, if a person looked hard enough. Right now her mind was racing in high gear trying to find a way around this one, only it just kept coming back to where she was. “You ain’t goin‘ any further tonight.”

She couldn’t believe it. It simply didn’t compute.

But she was. She was stuck. In Santa Rosa, New Mexico, for God’s sake, for who-knows-how-long. And no matter what, she wasn’t going to get to Pensacola in time to spend Christmas with her parents. Instead she was going to spend Christmas somewhere on the road, alone, among strangers. She was suddenly struck by a horrifying urge to cry.

Except that Mirabella never cried. She took a deep breath, murmured, “Thanks,” to no one in particular, and pushed her way back through the crowd. At the entrance to the. dining room she paused, knowing she ought to eat something, at least. But she wasn’t hungry. What she was, she realized suddenly, was exhausted. The trucker was right; she should get a motel room. Then at least she could lie down.

After the overheated store, the cold outside took her breath away. Mirabella tried to hurry across the windy parking lot, but the best she could manage was a slow, ungainly, roundabout kind of pace, which she thought must be like trying to walk with a basketball pressed between her thighs. Reaching her car at last, she unlocked it, heaved herself inside and sat, breathing hard and shivering, while she waited for the heater to warm up. She’d never felt so frustrated in her life.

“I don’t believe this,” she kept muttering furiously to herself. “I don’t believe this.”

Half an hour later she was still saying it as she drove slowly down the town’s main drag, passing motel after motel, No Vacancy sign after No Vacancy sign. Other stranded motorists, equally frustrated, were zipping in and out of motel parking lots, tires squealing, engines roaring, as they raced each other in a frantic search for the last available rooms. Too late, some people shouted and banged their fists on countertops. Mirabella had banged on a few herself, and even played unabashedly on her “condition,” hoping the sympathy factor might melt some adamant desk clerk’s heart. But to no avail. There simply wasn’t a vacant room left in town.

“No room at the inn,” thought Mirabella whimsically. And then felt vaguely blasphemous, even though she’d never considered herself a particularly religious person.