In the restaurant at the 76 Travel Stop, Jimmy Joe was trying his best to have a phone conversation with his son, J.J. It wasn’t easy, being as how the decibel level in the dining room was about the same as the first turn at Indy at the start of the 500. He’d turned his back to the room and stuck his finger in the ear that wasn’t pressed up against the receiver, but it wasn’t doing much good, and he kept having to yell, “What?” every other sentence.

“I said, you don’t have to shout, Dad, I can hear you fine,” J.J. was saying.

“Well, you better shout then, ’cause I can’t hear you worth beans,” Jimmy Joe hollered back. “This place is a zoo.”

“How come it’s so noisy?”

“Ah, it’s crowded, is all. Everybody’s pretty much stuck here in New Mexico for a while, I guess.” He took a deep breath and broke the news. “They up and closed the road-because of that snowstorm you told me about? Looks like they’re not lettin’ anybody through the Panhandle right now.”

“Told you,” J.J. said in a know-it-all tone of voice. But his father knew him pretty well, and heard the quiver in it anyway.

For J.J.’s sake he tried to make the best of it. “Hey, don’t worry, okay? They can’t keep a whole interstate shut down for too long, can they? Soon as they open up the road, I’m on my way.” And he would drive right on through, if he had to. The way he had it figured, it wasn’t likely the weigh stations were going to be open on the holiday, so unless he got pulled over by the DOT, there wasn’t going to be anybody checking his logbook. It wasn’t something he would chance, ordinarily, but this was Christmas. And he’d promised J.J.

“It looks really bad, Dad. There’s trucks and cars turned over and everything. I saw it on TV.”

“You watch too much TV,” said Jimmy Joe, “you know that? How come you’re not outdoors playin’ or somethin’?”

“’Cause we got rain. I gotta do something, Dad. I’m on restriction, so no computer, remember?”

Jimmy Joe chuckled. “Yeah, so how are you and Sammi June gettin’ along? You two kiss and make up yet?” At that, J.J. muttered something his father couldn’t quite catch. He hunched himself over the phone and yelled, “What?”

Just then there was one of those little lulls that come over a noisy crowd sometimes, kind of like everybody in the room stopped to take a breath at the same moment. But whatever it was his son was telling him, Jimmy Joe missed it anyway, because in that quiet moment he heard a soft voice, practically at his elbow, say, “Excuse me…”

He jerked around, thinking it was the waitress finally come to take his order. But it wasn’t It was about the last person he’d expected to see-none other than the redheaded pregnant woman he’d last seen a couple of hundred miles back, getting into a gray Lexus. And although she was trying her best to maintain that uppity lift of her chin, it was easy to see that it was costing her plenty to do it.

For a moment or two he just stared at her. Then he figured he must have made some kind of sound, because he heard J.J. say, “Dad? What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

That snapped him out of it. He mumbled, “Hang on a minute, J.J.,” then managed to gasp, “Ma’am?” as, being a well-brought-up Southern boy, he almost killed himself trying to mind his manners and stand in the confines of that booth.

She quickly put out her hand, motioning him to stay put, and said in a not-too-steady voice, “Please-don’t get up. I was just wondering-I’m sorry to bother you, but would you mind if I shared this booth with you? There doesn’t seem to be anyplace else…”

It occurred to Jimmy Joe while she was saying it that the way she looked, if she didn’t sit down right soon, she was going to fall down. To put it mildly, she looked dead on her feet. Her face was so pale you could darn near see through it. There were dark smudges under her eyes, and although she kept wanting to smile, what she looked like to him was somebody trying real hard not to cry. And-he hadn’t noticed it before, but those eyes of hers were enormous. Dark blue-gray, like the ocean when it rained. Looking into them, he began to feel a little bit dizzy, as if he was standing on the edge of a cliff, looking down…

“Dad?”

“Oh-sure! By all means…” His natural, ingrained reflex was to get up and help the lady to her seat. But before he could get himself untangled and out of the booth, she’d already slipped in across from him with a sigh and a whispered, “Thank you.”

“Dad? Who’s that you’re talkin’ to?”

“Uh…listen, J.J., I’m gonna have to call you back after a while, okay?”

“Oh, please,” the woman inserted hastily, “don’t-not on my account. I didn’t want to intrude.”

“That’s okay, I was about done anyway,” Jimmy Joe assured her as he was hanging up on J.J.’s wounded-sounding, “Da-ad…” Then for a minute or two he had a bad case of the fidgets, while he tried to adjust to her being there and at the same time figure out how he felt about that.

One thing he felt was nervous, which was understandable; he never had been real comfortable around beautiful women. Pretty, okay. He liked flirting with a pretty woman as much as the next guy. But knock-your-eyes-out, movie-star gorgeous? Uh-uh. Women like that made him feel like he’d forgotten how to breathe. With that dark red hair and pale-as-milk skin of hers, what she reminded him of more than anything was paintings he’d seen of the Madonna. Except the thoughts he’d been having about her… Well, he would have been ashamed to think them in church-put it that way.

On the other hand, beautiful or not, she was damn well ticking him off by the way she was acting, driving across the country all by herself, taking chances with that baby she was carrying. Which was also understandable; having lost one child because of a woman’s pure selfishness and irresponsibility, he had a low tolerance level for that sort of behavior.

What had him confused, though, was that now that she was sitting right there across the table from him, and he could see in her eyes how tired and scared she was, it was real hard for him to stay mad at her. Although he did mean to try. For one thing, it made it a whole lot easier for him to overlook how beautiful she was.

“Hi,” she said as she settled herself, in a kind of breathless and sheepish way that for some reason made her seem more likable than she had up to now. Then she stuck her hand out and, in a more forward and businesslike way than most of the Southern women he was used to, added, “I’m Mirabella Waskowitz.”

And he decided he liked that, too.

“Jimmy Joe,” he said, as he took the hand she offered.

Chapter 3

“Boy, I got heartburn so bad I’d give five dollars for one Rolaid.”


1-40-New Mexico

His hand felt nice. Firm and warm and strong. Just the kind of hand you hoped would be there to reach for if you really needed one.

Which was precisely why Mirabella let go of it as quickly as she possibly could without being rude about it. She didn’t want a hand from anybody, especially a man. She was doing just fine without one, thank you.

But he was just so damned adorable. That Southern accent, that Robert Redford hair and smile, and that name…Jimmy Joe? Really, it was almost too cute.

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said, her relief so overwhelming she was unable to hold back a sigh. At least, tank God, she hadn’t burst into tears. But it had been close. Too close.

He mumbled, “No problem…my pleasure.”

Polite, thought Mirabella approvingly. Kind of distant, too, which she also happened to like; she despised men who presumed they’d earned the right to instant familiarity the minute they told you their names. Still, she found herself wondering about it; wondering if Jimmy Joe really was shy, or if this was an example of that Southern reserve she’d heard about, or if maybe the coolness she’d detected in his eyes was only the natural wariness of someone who wasn’t about to get involved with the problems of a total stranger.

Which was fine with her and just as well, because after all, here she was just four weeks away from becoming a middleaged, unmarried mother, and she ought to be ashamed of herself for even having such thoughts about a kid who probably couldn’t even buy beer without getting carded.

It was just awkward, that’s all. It was hard to get past the fact that she was sitting across from a man who was the walking-around-in-the-flesh spitting image of her unborn child.

And impossible to deny the secret delight she felt when she thought about the prospect of having a little towheaded toddler version of Jimmy Joe running around her house sometime soon-a version, of course, that would be possessed of both athletic and musical talent and an IQ in the “gifted” range. She was absolutely confident of that-those qualities having been even higher on her list of priorities than a tall, lean body and olive-toned skin. When Mirabella planned something, she left as little as possible to chance.

“You want somethin’ to eat?” Jimmy Joe asked, stretching around to look for a waitress. “Let me see if I can get somebody-”

“No, that’s okay,” said Mirabella. “I’m not really hungry. I just needed…to sit down for a while.” The miniature-genius version of Jimmy Joe in her belly chose that moment to execute an athletic maneuver closely resembling that of a frolicking dolphin, causing her to lean sharply backward in her seat and suck in air in an audible hiss.

“You okay, ma’am?”

Since she had her eyes closed, she couldn’t be sure whether it was alarm or compassion she heard in Jimmy Joe’s voice, although she thought it was probably a little of both.

She waited until the worst of the pains had gone shooting off down her legs, then nodded and let out along, slow breath. “Oh, yeah, it’s just too much sitting, I guess.” If I could just lie down, she thought. God, please…just let me lie down.