Miracle on I-40

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  “He won’t care,” Anna said, her voice cracking.

  “Let’s just let the speculation drop and deal with what happens when,” Lacey said, as she sat to remove her shoes and massage her feet. “You two need to get your baths and get to bed. Come on...”

  She set Jon to packing his things, while she got Anna bathed. After Jon had gotten his bath, too, she had hot chocolate and decorated sugar cookies waiting for them. As they all sat around the faded green Formica table, she explained about the change in transportation plans.

  Anna played her cookie around in her cup of chocolate, but Lacey felt Jon’s careful attention.

  “So...is Cooper his first or last name?” Jon asked. “Do we call him Cooper like we call Pate, Pate, or are we supposed to say Mr.?”

  “Just say Mr. Cooper,” Lacey told him.

  * * * *

  “Jon…music off.” She switched off his boom-box, kissed his head and turned out the lamp beside his bed.

  “Mama, what will we do with the puppy Santa brings,” Anna asked as she crawled into bed in the next bedroom. “Will Mis-ter Cooper let us bring him home in his truck?”

  “Blow,” Lacey instructed, holding a tissue to Anna’s tiny nose. Anna puffed up and blew hard, took the tissue in her own tiny fingers and wiped her nose, then handed the tissue to Lacey and looked expectant, waiting for an answer.

  Lacey stroked the fine brown hair from her daughter’s forehead. “Anna, I told you that your puppy will have to come later, even if we were ridin’ with Pate. A puppy is a delicate thing for Santa Claus to haul around, especially from the cold North Pole. Why, I can’t think of anyone who ever got a puppy for Christmas.”

  “Tammy Henderson did. She said so today.” Anna’s big brown eyes dominated her face.

  “Well, we see,” Lacey said, regretting the words as soon as she said them because she’d always hated to hear that as a child. “Now, you have to get to sleep, sugar. I’m goin’ to have to get you up very early.”

  She tucked her daughter down in the bed and whispered I love you in her ear just as she had every day since Anna had been born. She pulled the bedroom door to, leaving a crack for comfort, probably more for herself than for Anna. She stood there a moment, squeezing her eyes closed against tears. So often she felt inadequate in her role of mother.

  Blinking hard, she pushed herself down the short hall and into the kitchen, where she poured a cup of coffee, carried the phone to the table and called Information for the number of the Santa Fe hospital. Her heart jumped when she heard Pate’s voice, sounding perfectly normal, boom across the line. He had such a big voice.

  “Well, hi ya’, Suzie-Q.” He often called her or any other female Suzie-Q. He was obviously surprised and touched to hear from her and kept repeating that he was fine. His son, Bob, was coming with his entire family, and they were due in the following morning. His voice echoed with the excitement of it.

  “I never imagined that he’d come all the way out here,” he said. “He’s pretty busy with his law practice...and you know how things have been between us since his mama passed on. But soon as he heard the situation, he said he was comin’, no two ways about it. We’re gonna have us a grand old time after all, by golly.”

  “I am so glad for you, Pate. I really am.” She realized she sounded a little wistful and tried to pick her tone up.

  “Lacey, hon, all things work for the good, just like the Good Book says. I’m tellin’ you that this is all gonna work out for your good, too—better than you imagine.”

  “I hope so.” Then, more positively, “I’m countin’ on it.”

  “Well, I know Cooper can be a mite disagreeable, and this is all an upset to your plans. But I know, too, that Cooper will see you and the children safely to Pine Grove. Don’t you worry. I’ve known Cooper for nigh on to twenty years now, since his first years drivin’. He’s a good reliable driver. A good man.”

  “I know you wouldn’t have asked him to drive us, if you didn’t believe he’d take care of us.”

  “No, I wouldn’t have. Now, honey, you need to see your folks and get things all patched up there, and well, Cooper needs your company on this trip. Holidays are a mighty lonesome time for him.”

  Lacey thought that Cooper didn’t seem like the type of man to want, much less need, anyone, but she said, “We’ll all be just fine, Pate. And I’ll telephone you just as soon as we get back.”

  They wished each other Merry Christmas and hung up.

  Then, standing there with her hand still on the receiver, Lacey realized she had missed the chance to ask Cooper’s full name.

  * * * *

  Their duplex apartment dated from the fifties, and the years could be counted by the thick layers of paint. There was a living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms, and in order for her children to each have their own, Lacey slept on the pull-out sofa bed in the living room.

  She pulled the bed out in the dimly lit room and placed the traveling bags on it, throwing a few things in them that she’d bought that evening. One hand on her hip and the other raking through her hair, she looked at the worn bags, the worn quilt, the shadows on the worn walls. Not at all like the warm, graceful home where she had grown up.

  Her parents’ house was two-story brick, with a small rounded entry porch. A banker’s house, Lacey and her sister Beth used to joke. Their father had been a banker; a loan officer. On more than one occasion his refusal of a loan request had proven embarrassing for his daughters, who received the punishing resentment from the children of the parents who had been denied. Lacey and Beth heard the rumors about their father as being a hard man, an ‘old miser’ and an ‘old skinflint’.

  Funny, Lacy thought now in remembering, how much the criticism had overshadowed in her mind the good parts of her father, who had also been well respected. He had been who the school board called when the budget was in crisis, as well as various crises experienced by many of the extended family of aunts and uncles, even neighbors.

  But in her impressionable teen years her father and the house they lived in had been too stuffy for Lacey, and very often the look of prosperity had embarrassed her. As a teenager, something within her had not allowed her to fit in with either those who lived as she did, and because of the way she lived, she did not fit in with those who had less, either. She never had felt she fit in anywhere, and she had blamed her parents.

  With the passage of years, she saw her life with clarity. And her heart longed for both her family and the old house, especially as her mother would decorate for the holidays—the shiny green leaves and red berries of holly gleaming from the mantel and polished tabletops, and the pungent smell of pine wafting through the house from the great, glittering tree in the foyer.

  Her father had always seemed to mellow at Christmastime. He encouraged holiday festivities and parties, inviting in family and neighbors, even some he preferred to ignore for the rest of the year. He would take Lacey and Beth out to a friend’s land and be uncharacteristically patient while they tramped for acres, searching for just the right tree. Then he’d chop it down and haul it back to the house atop their big gleaming Chevy station wagon. It had been their father who had always set the angel atop the tree.

  “He couldn’t straighten enough to get the angel on top this year,” Beth had said. “He’s getting old.”

  “Has he said my name?”

  “No…but he will, if you come home.”

  With a sigh, Lacey sank down on the edge of the pull-out bed. After a moment, she picked up the picture album she had assembled as her parent’s gift: a photo album chronicling the young lives of their grandchild. The years the grandparents had missed, and which Lacey hoped could be made up, with time and forgiveness.

  Slowly, in the yellow glow of the table lamp she turned the album pages. The first pictures were of Jon when he’d been only weeks old.

  She touched her fingertips to the glossy photograph, and her mind sped back in time.

  * * * *

  She ha
d been barely eighteen.

  “You have to tell them.”

  “I know.”

  Leaving Beth to listen from the stairway, Lacey entered the living room. “Mom...Dad?”

  Her parents sat opposite each other in front of the fireplace. Her mother looked up from studying a cookbook, and her father said, “Hmmm?” without putting down his newspaper.

  “I have something to tell you...I’m pregnant.”

  Her mother had been shocked and confused. “How could you...when did you...I’ve told you what can happen.” She reached her arms out toward Lacey, but did not move from her chair. She was too inhibited by her husband, who was on his feet and in a rage.

  “Well who is it? Do you know?”

  His accusation had cut to the bone. “Of course I know, Daddy. It’s Shawn.” Seeing the fury in her father’s face, she could not speak further.

  Her father had never liked Shawn, because he didn’t go to college.

  “What will people say?” said her mother, her eyes wet with tears and shame. “How will we show our faces in church now?”

  So old-fashioned. Their town was small, provincial, and their world was like this, too.

  Her father said, “Girl, you know better. You know what sin is. You’ve put this family down.”

  She could not believe the scorn and anger he shot toward her.

  Her parents insisted she give the baby up for adoption.

  She refused. “I love my baby.” She pressed a hand to her belly. “I’m going to have your grandchild,” she told them.

  But her mother, who kept crying, said, “What future will you have?”

  And her father said, “You give the baby up for adoption, or you get out.” He kept to this stance for the next two days, even when her mother and Beth pleaded with him.

  Finally Lacey left, screaming over her should at him: “You are a mean, hateful man, and I don’t want my baby around you. I’ll never come back.”

  There had been nowhere to go, of course, but to Shawn, who, to his credit, agreed without a grumble to marry her. The ceremony took place in the justice’s office at the courthouse, after Lacey had taken care of all the necessary details, even to pointing out the places for Shawn to sign on each of the forms.

  She stood before the justice holding flowers that she had purchased herself, while Shawn stood beside her in a borrowed suit that was much too large. Their two witnesses were her sister Beth and Shawn’s best friend, Lloyd, who wore a worn leather biker jacket. They started out like a million other young couples in the world—broke, and with a family on the way.

  Shawn displayed promise when he immediately enlisted, somehow managing to get himself into the air force as a mechanic, which gave him not only a good steady job but also a bit of schooling, and enabled Lacey to have medical care for her pregnancy.

  Almost a month overdue, alone on a base far from home because Shawn was off with the air force, she produced Jon, a big bouncing boy.

  Holding her new son in her arms, she telephoned home.

  “Lacey?” There was some warmth in her mother’s voice.

  “I wanted to tell you that I had a boy. I’ve named him Jon.”

  “A boy...oh, my Lacey, honey...”

  They talked a little bit, and her mother cried. She promised to speak with Lacey’s father.

  But while their conversation gave Lacey some hope of reconciliation, the connection left unsatisfactory feelings of doubt and disappointment in that her mother did not immediately get on a bus to come help with the baby.

  And when the days and nights passed in which Lacey walked the floor with her new infant all alone, without a mother’s guiding hand, and without any further word from either parent, disappointment solidified into resentment.

  “Mom just can’t,” said Beth, who called a number of times. “She can’t help it, Lacey. It just isn’t in her to go against Daddy. You can’t blame her for not being what we want her to be.”

  Beth, the oldest, came to the understanding far earlier than Lacey, who would in the passing years come to comprehension, but would have difficulty getting over the hurt of the betrayal. She threw herself into being the best most perfect mother possible to her son, and then to her daughter. She vowed to never betray them in abandonment, the way she felt her parents had betrayed her. She sought to heal her own heartache by giving her children the nurturing love that she herself craved.

  Shawn, however, did not so readily take up with being a father. His early display of promise turned out to be the only bit he would show toward family responsibility. He often went absent from home, and without explanation, and on several occasions he went absent from the air force, too. After two years, the air force gave up on him, but Lacey didn’t know anything else to do but to keep holding on.

  One day six months after Anna had been born, she came home to find Shawn packing.

  “I just can’t do it anymore, Lacey. I’m sorry.”

  She thought but did not say, “You never did do it,” and then set about helping him to pack. She had been alone, really, since leaving her parents, thus she was not afraid of being alone physically.

  After Shawn left, Lacey had sat on the front stoop, and feeling relieved that taking care of him was over. She was alone, again, but not lonely or afraid. Holding Anna and watching Jon play in the yard, she began to realize that leaving home and everything she had dealt with since had given her something--it had given her some unexplainable faith in God, and this brought faith in herself. She would manage. She would get through.

  Coming slowly back to the present, Lacey found herself gazing at the picture of Anna, on her most recent birthday. She smiled sadly, thinking of Shawn and all that he missed by not being able to give of himself. She thought of her parents’, too, and all they had missed by not being able to give of themselves.

  She couldn’t help Shawn, but she could help her parents, and herself and the children. She could give her parents a chance.

  Closing the photo album, she went once more to the phone on the wall in the kitchen and dialed Beth’s number.

  “I just need to touch base...there’s been a change in plans.” She gripped the receiver as she told her sister about the switch in circumstances. “You’re sure you shouldn’t tell Daddy about us? I just hate to have the kids experience him turnin’ us away.”

  “He won’t turn you away...not when he sees you standin’ there.” Then, “Come home, Lacey. I miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. We’ll be there.”

  * * * *

  She brought out the wrapping paper and ribbon, poured another cup of coffee and turned on the little portable radio. It took a bit of adjusting the knob to get a station in without too much static—country music interspersed with carols.

  Humming along, she wrapped the photo album and the last few presents on the kitchen table. The very last of these was one she’d bought Cooper—she gazed at the burnished metal buckle nested in its small box. It was cast with images of trucking: a smoking tractor-trailer rig, exaggerated tires and highway signs.

  Perhaps he would think it a cheap gift, which it was. It had been cut to half price. And giving such a personal gift to a man whose full name she didn’t even know seemed awfully silly. No doubt she would feel odd when she gave it, and he would feel odd taking it.

  But it was a token of appreciation. She needed to express that, she thought emphatically, as she cut the elf-paper to wrap it and decorated it with her own brand of ribbon magic, until it looked like some sort of wild, colorful explosion.

  While she worked, she thought that though she treasured the presents she received—two nonsensical things made by childish but dear hands, she sometimes longed for a special present from a man in her life.

  * * * *

  She found herself pulling everything out of her drawers and closet, despairing over the lack of suitable outfits. All her clothes seemed so worn and out of date. And suddenly looking her best, not only when she arrived on her parent’s doorstep
but during the trip, was very important.

  She did have one pair of fairly new blue jeans—designer ones bought on sale—and there was the mauve sweater that brought out her skin tones. They would do for the first day. And it wasn’t too much trouble to roll her hair after washing it. That would hold up for two days. Possibly painted nails would last well all the way there. Her mother had always said a little color on the nails made a woman’s hands look more feminine. Her mother would be pleased if Lacey turned up looking her best.

  It was after one o’clock before she got to sleep, and she didn’t sleep much, tossing and turning, the rollers poking into her scalp no matter what position she tried.

  But the next morning her hair looked great. And she was so keyed up, her face appeared vibrant instead of worn out. She decided she looked pretty good in her jeans, too, and her efforts served to make her feel confident about the trip ahead.

  As she applied a bit of lipstick, she thought that maybe yesterday had been simply a bad one for Cooper, making him abnormally grumpy. Maybe today he would welcome them, even be glad to have their company.

  “It’s a thought,” she murmured to the skeptical looking image in the mirror

  Surprise

  Lacey parked out of the way at Gerald’s lot and tucked the key beneath the mat—not that anyone was likely to steal the car—and that way Jolene could start it a few times to keep the battery up and everything lubricated. Lacey was afraid that if left to sit for ten whole days, the car may never start again.

  “Middle of the damn…darn night,” Jon grumbled.

  Lacey silently agreed as she settled the children in a front booth where she could watch for Cooper’s arrival through the big front window. With the night’s blackness broken only by the building’s silvery outside lights, the window reflected her family’s faces.

  Her own image startled her. When had she become a full woman? A mother? And was that really her with the nice curly hair? Was that woman’s figure—shapely and feminine—really hers?