“What?” said Charly drolly, “no sushi?”

“Mock if you must, but the rest rooms are clean. Oh-and Charly, you’d love the gift shop. What an eclectic mix. They have some lovely signed Acoma Indian pottery sitting right next to key chains made out of honest-to-God rattlesnake heads and license-plate holders that say Honk If You’re Horny. Oh-and my personal favorite-there’s this little bald fat-guy doll, and when you squeeze a bulb he drops his pants and moons you. I think you’re supposed to put him in the back window of your car. I’m thinking of getting one for my Lexus.”

Charly, who was originally from Alabama, laughed and said, “Get used to it. You know the place you’re heading for is the world capital of tacky.”

“I thought that was Venice Beach.”

“No, no, no, darlin’-Florida! Birthplace of the pink plastic lawn flamingo. Need I say more?”

A gasp cut short Mirabella’s chuckle of appreciation. She added, “Ouch…damn,” and as she leaned abruptly back in the booth, her gaze collided with that of a young man, obviously a trucker, who was sitting in a booth identical to hers, just catercorner across the dining room. He was on the phone, too, but not talking, and as he listened, for some reason he seemed to be frowning right at Mirabella.

“What’s the matter?” Charly demanded. “The little tyke giving you problems?”

Hearing the alarm in her friend’s voice and knowing Charly wasn’t above doing something rash, like putting in a call to the highway patrol, Mirabella hastened to reassure her. And while she was at it, she put a dazzling smile on her face for the benefit of the nosy trucker across the way.

“Oh, you know,” she said through the smile, “it’s just these darn pressure pains. Seems like they’ve been getting worse the last couple of days.” She lost the smile, though, as she shifted to find a comfortable position for her legs while a lump the size of a small grapefruit was slowly blossoming on the right side of her abdomen. She rested one hand on the lump and rubbed it with a gentle circling motion as she said through held breath and clenched teeth, “Right now it feels like the little rascal’s doing push-ups on the nerves in my groin. I get these shooting pains that go all the way down to my toes. There wasn’t anything about this in the books, I can tell you that.”

“Bella, you’re crazy to be doing this-you know that, don’t you?”

“Hey, I’m fine.” The young trucker had finished his phone call and was now drinking coffee and watching her intently through its steam.

Cute guy, said a voice way in the back of her mind. And then, My God, he’s young.

It was a purely objective observation; Mirabella considered hrself something of a connoisseur when it came to masculine physical attributes, having recently done some extensive research on that subject. This one was tall, lean, tan and blond-some of her very favorite flavors. In fact, if she could pick-

She gasped, gulped cold decaf and nearly choked on it.

“Bella?” said Charly’s voice in her ear. “You okay?”

“Fine-I’m fine.” Mirabella mopped her bulging front with her napkin. “Spilled my coffee, dammit. Look, of course I’d rather have flown-and I don’t see why they make such a fuss about it, for God’s sake, my due date’s still four weeks off, and anyway you’d think nobody’d ever had a baby in a plane before-but on top of that, it’s the holidays, and there just wasn’t anything available. It’s not like I had much choice.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

“Charly…”

The sigh that drifted across the wire was suddenly contrite. “I know, I know. I’m sorry. How’s your dad doing, by the way? Have you talked to your mom?”

“I talked to her this morning. He’s doing better, actually.” She took a deep breath to calm the fear that always rippled through her when she thought about her father, and about the utterly unthinkable possibility of his dying. Pop, die? No. Not for-oh, at least twenty or thirty years, yet.

Pop, you’d better get well, and stay that way. I need you, dammit! Because, aside from the fact that she couldn’t even begin to imagine a world without her dad in it, she just hadn’t counted on raising this child without Pop Waskowitz for a grandpa.

Especially, she thought with a twinge of guilt she tried to ignore, if he couldn’t have a dad of his own.

And with some mysterious homing instinct, like birds returning to a favorite nesting place, her eyes found the long, slender form of the young trucker in the booth across the way. Incredible, she thought. Uncanny.

“They’re calling this heart attack a warning,” she said to Charly in a tone bright with false optimism. “Mom said it looks like they’ll let him go home for Christmas, but then after the holidays they’re going to want to run tests. You know how it goes-see if he’s going to need surgery.”

“He’ll be okay, Bella. Bypass surgery’s not even a big deal nowadays.”

“Yeah,” said Mirabella on an exhalation, not in the least convinced. “I know.”

“He know you’re coming?”

“He doesn’t know I’m driving. Mom didn’t want to tell him. She’s sure he’d only have another heart attack worrying about me.”

“So, you’re gonna be his Christmas present.”

“Let’s hope,” said Mirabella. “So far I’ve only made it as far as New Mexico.”

“New Mexico! Is that all? My God, it’s been two days.”

“I can’t help it. The problem,” said Mirabella defensively, “is that I keep having to stop all the time to go to the bathroom.”

“And you’re still going to make it by Christmas?”

“Uh…Christmas Day, yeah, hopefully. I should be able to.” But she had to shut out the little voices of self-doubt that were starting to kick up a fuss in the back of her mind, and her natural bent toward honesty made her add, “If I can make it as far as Texas by tonight. Which reminds me, if I’m going to do that, I’d better say goodbye and get on my way. What about it, Charly, shall I get you a souvenir? That Acoma pottery’s nice.”

“You sure you’ve got room? If I know you, that Lexus is probably packed to the roof with presents already.”

“Just the trunk,” said Mirabella with a guilty smile. “I did try to behave myself this year.”

“Well, if you insist,” said Charly, “I’d rather have the license-plate holder. Listen, you take it easy now, okay? Your mom and dad want you to get there in one piece. And I do mean one.”

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.”