Miracle on I-40 (7 page)

And this entire trip was not going to work, she thought, having a sinking moment. The situation wasn’t fair to the children, nor to Cooper. She did not think she could remain all sweetness and light for the remainder of the trip, not to mention coming back.  “Finish your milk,” she said to both children.

After a minute, Anna said, “But how does Santa get to the all people in all the countries? I just don’t see...”

“The time difference,” Jon put in.

“Jon, don’t bolt your food. We have time to eat.” Lacey wasn’t about to have her son choke just to please Solitary-Man-Cooper.

“You see,” Jon continued, his voice taking on the quality it did when he was gearing up for a long-winded explanation, which he made as he continued to shovel food into his mouth, “it’s the time difference. When it is Christmas day here, it has already been Christmas day over in France, so Santa’s already been there. See, the world turns this way…” he illustrated the turning with his glass of milk, “and Santa’s going this way, which gives him three days to complete his job.”

Anna stared at him. “It’s gonna take us three days to get to our grandma’s. Will Santa miss us?”

“No,” said Jon with impatient. “Santa don...doesn’t miss anybody. He’s got electronic devices that tell him everything. And we’re goin’ by truck, but Santa has this super, high-velocity sled, and then there are stations all over, where he stops for the presents and to refuel…you know, like the space station. And Santa moves sort of like the speed of light, like those stealth airplanes, so fast that you can only see him once in a while when he slows down at a house.” Jon was getting into this very much.

“The weather man sees him on radar.”

“Yeah, radar can see him…but only sometimes.”

“But what about when he stops at houses to put the stuff under the tree and eat his cookies?” Anna’s eyebrows came together.

“Some people see him then, but he’s still pretty fast.”

Lacey saw Cooper rising from his stool. He glanced over at them.

“Come on, children.”

Jon saw Cooper leaving and hurried after him, tossing over his shoulder to Lacey, “I’ll go see if I can help him with anything.”

Digging into her purse for a tip for the waitress, Lacey started to call him back, but then shut her mouth. Her son needed an outlet for his boundless energy, which was just going to grow as the day went along.

“Mama, why is Cooper so grumpy?” Anna asked.

Lacey, buttoning her daughter’s coat, stopped and looked into her deep brown eyes. “I’m not certain, honey. A lot of times a person gets like that from sad things that have happened in their life.”

“Maybe he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus because Santa doesn’t bring him anything—because he’s too grumpy all the time.”

“Oh, sweetie, Santa brings everyone presents. Even grumpy people. He loves everyone...but maybe Cooper can’t see the presents, so he doesn’t accept them.” She took Anna’s hand.

“That’s one of those things I’ll understand when I’m older, right?” Anna said very seriously.

* * * *

They had traveled thirty minutes down the road and the children were taking a nap, when Lacey finally worked up enough courage to tell Cooper that she intended for her and the children to make the return trip by bus. She would borrow the money from Beth. She could even borrow from her father, providing her father was speaking to them. She would do something, anything, but she could not ride back with him. She even toyed with the idea of having him let them off in Oklahoma City at the bus station. But this presented the problem of finding the bus station, and besides, she did not have any money for tickets.

She had expected the announcement to give him relief, but he did not seem relieved.

“Pate said the trip was both ways.” He was scowling.

“I know, but Pate didn’t tell you about the children. I think us returning by bus will work out better.”

H said, “Suit yourself,” and pushed the cigarette lighter in with a hard thump.

It was nice to see that he was not happy about it.

The seconds of silence that was louder even than it had been before ticked past. Lacey began to feel like a foolish child. Now she was so embarrassed, she really would have to get them back home on the bus. She had dug her own hole.

* * * *

The miles rolled along beneath the massive Kenworth wheels, and they pushed on across the miles of open Texas panhandle. Anna had just required her second rest stop in less than two hours, and Lacey was handing each of the children a juice drink she’d purchased from a machine when Cooper grab one of the cans right out of her hand, set it on the floor and got the other, too.

“If we continue to make every rest stop between here and North Carolina, we won’t get there till Easter,” he said, definitely in a harsh tone.

“When are we goin’ to get some lunch?” Jon asked. “I’m hungry.”

“We don’t get lunch,” Cooper said. “We’ll eat dinner tonight when we stop.”

Lacey retrieved the cans from the floor. “If you’re not plannin’ to stop for lunch, these children need something to drink.”

She fixed her eyes on him and silently dared him to argue. He didn’t.

Reminded ten minutes later by Jon about a growing boy’s hunger, Lacey produced homemade cookies from her tote bag. As she passed the sweets back to the children, she considered offering some to Cooper. But
he
was the one who’d refused to stop for lunch, she thought smartly. Let him smell the cookies and drool. Minutes later she was shamed by her own six-year-old daughter.

“Mr. Cooper, would you like a cookie?” Anna asked in a hesitant voice, her hand extending a cookie as far toward Cooper as she dared.

Cooper’s eyes came round, glancing at Lacey and then quickly at Anna. “Thank you,” he said and took the cookie. His eyes went to the mirror, looking back at Anna. He almost smiled, Lacey was sure of it.

When he’d finished the cookie, Lacey offered him a slice of the pecan pie. “It’s one of Gerald’s.”

“You got that in that bag?” he asked with surprise.”

Uh-huh. I cut it and wrapped each slice.” She was digging it out of the bag. She unwrapped it, set it on a paper towel and handed it across to him. He took it, a distinctly sheepish expression on his face.

He liked sweets, Lacey thought. Highly pleased with the knowledge, she turned her face out the window. She had something to work with now. Call it a bribe, but she thought it more a way to build a bridge.

Traveling Companions

As Cooper had heard predicted, grey clouds closed in as the afternoon wore on. Reports came in from fellow truckers that north of them a storm was wreaking havoc, covering everything with a thick layer of ice and dumping snow in the mountains. It appeared the storm would stay to the north. Cooper hoped so.

Though she sat up front in the cab, Lacey said little, and she didn’t have that friendly air she normally had. He guessed he couldn’t blame her. He hadn’t been exactly polite.

But he didn’t think she’d had reason to say that she and the kids would return to Albuquerque by bus. If she thought that he was going to feel like the bad guy, she was mistaken. He was relieved. He was. But he was annoyed, too. He had put himself out for her, and he didn’t see that she had to go changing the plan.

All of a sudden he came out with,“Watchin’ t.v.?”

“What?”

“The kids...they’re watchin’ t.v.?” He felt around for his pack of cigarettes and kept his gaze steadily on the road.

“Yes. I think they’ll nap,” she replied. That was it, and keeping her gaze out the passenger window.

Fine. He liked quiet. He glanced down at his cigarettes and then over at her. He put the pack back into his pocket and reached for a bottle of water instead.

The next instant, he said. “You goin’ to see your folks in North Carolina for Christmas?” Damn. It was like there was some sort of short circuit to his mouth.

“Yes.” She nodded and hardly seemed to be looking at him.

Okay. He was not going to keep making an effort at conversation. He wasn’t any good at it anyway.

Then she said, “The children have never met my parents. It’ sort of a homecoming. I haven’t been home since before Jon was born.”

He glanced over to see a shy expression on her face. Her eyes met his for an instant, before they each looked away. Her eyes were very green, like rye grass in spring.

“Ah...”

And now inability to speak struck him. And he had the oddest sensation of being aware of her breasts gently moving as she breathed.

“Cooper?”

“Yeah?” Hey, okay, here she was talking to him.

“Is Cooper your first name, your last, or what?”

He felt a smile coming up and out. “You been wonderin’ about that, have you?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Barry B. Cooper is the name.”

He sent her a lazy glance. Her green eyes met his.

“Nice to meet you, Barry.”

“Call me Cooper. I hate Barry.”

Their eyes met again, and then each looked away out the windshield.

* * * *

“You like George Strait?”

“Yes...I’d better at Gerald’s.”

He chuckled, his grin a flash of bright, even teeth beneath his dark mustache. He slipped a compact disc into the player. They had made an unspoken truce and fallen into actual conversation. With George Strait’s voice in the background, they exchanged casual facts of their lives: Lacey had been divorced over five years—“Oh, yes, married only once,” and Cooper the same. “Once was enough.” Lacey came from North Carolina and had ended up out in New Mexico because of her ex; Cooper actually and surprisingly had been born in eastern Tennessee, but had left there as a kid and lived all over the West.

They talked of Gerald’s restaurant, and Cooper said he’d been stopping there somewhere around ten years; he had begun driving a truck twenty years before, at the age of eighteen. He’d known Pate almost that long.

“Pate came along, picked me up, dusted me off, and set me on my feet.”

There was a quality in his voice that again drew Lacey’s curiosity about the entire story, but he didn’t elaborate, and she wasn’t about to ask—at least she stopped herself before doing so. Her mind, however, was putting pieces together based on her own experiences and on all the stories that she heard as a waitress in a busy truck stop. Listening to Cooper, she had a glimpse of a very lonely man, and she saw a reflection of her own well-deep loneliness. She guessed neither of them were rare cases.

The tires hummed along the highway, a second George Strait disk played, and they talked of baseball (a fondness they both shared), thick or thin pizzas, and dog breeds (as children, each had possessed beloved dogs). Lacey looked at Cooper’s profile. She watched his capable hands caress and maneuver the steering wheel—and imagined what those hands would feel like on her body.

In a flash of sudden awareness, she realized she had not thought of a man in such a way since well before Shawn had left.

Then she was looking into his dark eyes, and she had the embarrassing inkling that he knew exactly what she’d been thinking. That perhaps he had been thinking along the same lines himself.

George Strait sang out about eyes that can see.

Lacey turned to look out the side window.

* * * *

They were one third of the way across Oklahoma when they stopped for dinner.

“I’m gonna check out the truck...you go on ahead,” Cooper told her.

She herded the children, running and jumping in euphoria to be free, on into the restaurant. At the door, she looked back, wondering if he again would sit separately from them. She didn’t suppose it mattered.

In the ladies room, she combed her hair and put on fresh lipstick. Then she looked down to see Anna gazing up at her with large, dark, speculative eyes.

When they came out of the ladies room, Cooper and Jon were waiting, side by side.

“It sure takes women a long time in the bathroom,” Jon said.

To this Cooper drawled in a low voice, “Well, bud, they’re a mite different, in case you didn’t know that.”

Jon rolled his eyes, and Lacey hid a smile.

They took a booth, Cooper and Jon sitting on one side, Anna and Lacey on the other. Cooper appeared only mildly ill-at-ease, bouncing his knees and holding on to his napkin, then dropping it and picking it up again. Jon’s natural conversational ability took over, though, and soon the two were carrying on a conversation about cars and trucks and engines and racing, while Lacey and Anna were content to simply listen. Lacey was made aware of what her son missed by not having a man in his life. Very often Pate took them out to eat, yet, for whatever reason, Jon did not seem to relate to him in the avid manner that he related to Cooper.

Things seemed to be going great for the first time since they’d started out—until Anna spilled her cola down the back of a man in the adjoining booth.

They were preparing to leave, and Anna had been trying to move across the seat on her knees while carrying her glass. She bumped her elbow, sloshing the crushed ice and cold liquid, which came up in a perfect arc through the air and went neatly down the big man’s collar.

The man let out a resounding holler. “What the hell...”

Lacey’s waitressing instincts set her to grabbing napkins from the stubborn dispenser, which insisted on hanging on to them.

“Oh, I’m
so
sorry...so sorry.” She began dabbing his neck and shirt, even as he moved out of the booth.

But then she looked into his face.
Oh, dear
.

She extended the wad of napkins and took a step backward.

Ignoring the napkins, the man rose from the booth, seeming to unfold into an enormous, red-headed giant, who was shaking the back of his shirt and sending little bits of ice clicking on the floor. Then he began bellowing words fit only for ships at sea.

Anna cowered behind Lacey’s leg, sobbing. Lacey was about to fly at the man, when a hand pressed her aside.

Cooper stepped in front of her. “That’s enough.” His command cut the air. “It was an
ac
cident. And you owe these ladies an apology.”

The man, who had shut his mouth, peered at Cooper and then around him at Lacey and down at Anna. Then he glanced around the restaurant. Lacey looked, too.