Miracle on I-40

by Curtiss Ann Matlock

  When he switched off the radio in the middle of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Lacey figured she had the answer to the question of whether he was a morning person or not.

  And when he snapped at her to please stop that noise, calling attention to the fact she was now unconsciously humming Santa Claus is Coming to Town, she called herself a saint for buying a died-in-the-wool Scrooge a sweet roll.

  She gave him the roll, however, with every ounce of pleasantry she possessed. He scowled—but he took it. Heaven knew he needed all the sweetness he could ingest.

  And it was true that every time she looked at his eye, which, although less swollen, remained the color of thunderheads, she told herself she could not forget what he had suffered on their account. What he was still suffering.

  * * * *

  Cooper stopped a bit early for breakfast and varied his schedule to stop for lunch, too. He didn’t know much about kids, but he knew enough about people to tell when two young ones were restless enough to explode. He was experiencing something similar himself. The feelings were unfamiliar and quite annoying. Never had he felt so keenly that he wanted to be anywhere but in the truck, stuck in one position behind the wheel.

  He blamed it on not sleeping well. His face and various bruised parts of his body had throbbed too much. And he’d kept thinking about Lacey.

  She was causing him no end of discomfort. Her green eyes were warm and full to bursting with life. Her scent drew him like a magnet. He couldn’t seem to quit sneaking peeks at her body—at her sleek thighs hugged by blue denim, her breasts full and round beneath her soft sweater, her creamy neck and chin. Last night he had imagined in great detail what she looked like in the shower, just on the other side of his wall. He had not been able to stifle the very odd urge to knock on the wall. He had not done something so foolish in a very long time. Part of him had a sense of euphoria at his daring play, but the larger part was embarrassed. She must think him some kind of a nutcase. He thought himself some kind of nut case.

  Her knock in return had been immensely gratifying, and still was, but at the same time it was threatening. He did not want her to get ideas about him. He did not intend to encourage any sort of relationship between them at all.

  “I’m going to go ahead and see about fuel,” he told Lacey, leaving the steak-burger he’d ordered only half finished. “I’ll meet you and the kids at the truck.”

  They were falling further and further behind schedule. Several rest stops this morning, now lunch. Good grief! They would be lucky to get to North Carolina before the new year.

  He was stuffing bills into his wallet after paying for the fuel, when he looked through the station window into the small gift shop beyond. The kid, Jon, stood there examining something on a shelf—when he was supposed to have his butt out at the truck.

  Cooper strode around the pumps and entered the store. “Come on, kid. This isn’t a sight-seein’ tour, you know.”

  Something in the boy’s expression stopped him. Stepping forward, Cooper saw the object of the boy’s interest on the shelf: a woman’s fancy brush-and-comb set. He looked at the boy.

  “I was thinkin’ of getting it for Mom,” the boy said. “For Christmas.”

  “Well, get it and let’s go.”

  The kid shuffled toward the door. “I’m goin’.”

  “Hey, you can take a minute to get this if you want.”

  The kid scuffed his feet. “Naw. I’m a bit short, and she probably wouldn’t like it anyway.”

  “Here.” Cooper pulled a wad of bills from his pocket and peeled off a twenty. “I’ll advance you this, if you make certain my windshield’s clean at every stop and be my general gopher, handling whatever I tell you.”

  The boy eyed the money, then cast Cooper a suspicious look. “Whatever you tell me?”

  “Do you want the money or not?”

  Jon hesitated another moment, then said, “You bet,” and snatched the bill with one hand, reaching for the comb and brush set with the other. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  There was no pretense in the boy, Cooper thought, taking in how the boy had lit up like fireworks on the Fourth of July. And an unusual glow spread within Cooper, as well.

  “What is it?” Lacey asked when he reached the truck.

  Only then did Cooper realize he was smiling. “Oh, nothin’.” He looked at her for several long seconds, and she looked back. Then slowly that special smile of hers broke across her face, and Cooper recognized the one thing that made Lacey Bryant unique. She could smile and laugh over nothing at all.

  Lacey knew something had transpired between Cooper and Jon. Jon returned to the truck with a secret grin for Cooper and a bag he immediately hid. Her Christmas present, she guessed. But where did Cooper fit into it? And why was he suddenly smiling, too?

  Hearts Revealed

  Lacey decided whatever had transpired between Jon and Cooper was definitely welcome. It had served to bring about a mellow atmosphere in the truck cab. Cooper no longer turned off the Christmas carols when they came on the radio, and he didn’t even scowl when Jon and Anna began singing along with Jingle Bells. Lacey dared to join in, and lo and behold, Cooper shot them all what could have passed for a grin—at least for him.

  The next song was Joy to the World, and they sang that, too, then listened attentively to the weather report. A winter storm was pushing down from the north. Although the weather forecasters did not think it would make it far into Arkansas and Tennessee, there was a chance.

  “We’ll get to Grandpa’s and Grandma’s by Christmas Eve, won’t we?” asked Anna, who poked forward from the sleeper. “I have to be there to get the puppy Santa is bringin’ me,” she said, directing her words at Cooper.

  “We’ll get there for Christmas Eve, honey,” Lacey said quickly.

  “Santa’s bringin’ me a puppy,” Anna told Cooper. When he didn’t reply, she leaned toward him and peered at his face. “Cooper, didn’t Santa bring you presents when you were a kid?”

  Lacey sucked in a breath. He glanced quickly at Anna by way of his rearview mirror, then focused on the road.

  “I guess he did...I can’t remember.”

  “You said you didn’t believe in him,” Anna said.

  Cooper looked at a loss—and quite annoyed. “I guess I don’t.”

  “Maybe that’s why you never got anything,” Anna said.

  Lacey unsnapped her seatbelt. “Anna, honey, let’s get in the back and take a nap. I’m really tired.”

  * * * *

  Lacey awoke and carefully extricated herself from the bed and the two sleeping children, and moved up front to the passenger seat. She may have imagined it, but she thought Cooper’s expression a welcoming one. He instantly put out his cigarette, and the next moment he said, “I’ve got some coffee left, if you want some. There’s a clean cup in there.”

  “Oh, thank you.” She poured them each coffee, then pulled the last of the pecan pie from the tote bag and passed the piece to him.

  “I don’t want to take the last piece,” he said.

  “Go ahead. The kids have had plenty of sugar.”

  “Thanks.” His expression was uncharacteristically and amusingly boyish.

  Turning from this, she gazed out the window and watched the scenery roll past, taking note of the darkening skies. She felt tired all of a sudden, in the way one often did in the middle of some great expectation— the great expectation being for a special Christmas with her family, but now added to it was this trip with Cooper. She had not expected any of this with him and had not had enough time to sort or even give name to her myriad of contradictory feelings.

  She was sorting through a few of them, or trying to, at that moment, when Cooper said, “Guess your parents are anxious about you comin’.”

  “Oh...” She was a little startled by the fact that he had actually said something of a conversational nature. Startled, and a little thrilled. “They don’t know we’re coming. It’s a surprise—a ploy really. My father a
nd I haven’t spoken in eleven years.”

  He cast her a glance, and, still carried by the delight that he had indicated a desire to converse, she went on to tell, in a low voice, the short story of being unwed and pregnant, and of her father’s fury and her own resentment. “I’d always been the problem child. My getting pregnant was simply the last straw, so to speak.”

  His expression was curiously sharp. “The man’s held his peace for eleven years. What if he doesn’t bend now? Where will you stay?” That he appeared to grasp the implications of everything rather surprised her. That he would care enough to ask the question was something of an amazement.

  “We can stay with my sister and her family. We’ll be okay,” she added, as much for herself as for his seeming concern.

  “And what about the kids? How do you think they’ll feel if their own grandpa turns them away?” He fired the questions at her.

  “I admit, I’m takin’ a chance.” The odd need to defend herself brought annoyance. “But I really think my father will not only bend but melt when he sees his grandchildren. Grandchildren have a way of doin’ that to grandparents.”

  “Maybe for some,” he said, in a somewhat sarcastic tone. In a brisk fashion, he shook a cigarette out of the pack and put it between his lips, then cut his eyes to her. His manner made her tense up and feel that she needed to find a positive response.

  Before she could do so, he said, “My mother left me with my grandparents. They didn’t want to be saddled with a six-year-old boy. I ended up bouncin’ around in foster homes. Finally, at fifteen, I went back to see my grandpa. By then both my mother and grandma were dead, and my grandpa was alone. He was still just a mean old man who told me that he didn’t have room for no bastard kid of a slut hangin’ around.”

  “That’s terrible,” she managed to say, quite uncertain as to an appropriate response to such a sad tale.

  “I survived.”

  She turned her gaze out the windshield. The skies and landscape seemed all shades of grey. Her thoughts went to her father and how he had looked the last time she had seen him. Hard and unrelenting. Desperate was a more accurate word.

  “My father and I fought,” she said. “A lot. But at least I know now that he loved me, in his way. He just didn’t know how to show it.”

  Cooper’s response was a grunt, which was proof that he had been listening, at least enough to know when she had finished her statement. However, a grunt fell somewhat short of satisfactory. She wanted him to respond. To talk with her. She had things to say. She did not want his sad and dismal attitude to hang over her.

  “Not everyone in your life could have been like your mother and grandparents.”

  “I didn’t say that they were. But we were talkin’ about grandparents. I knew a number of nice people as a kid, and still do—like Pate. There are a lot of good people in the world, but that doesn’t make me blind to the fact that some people are just mean and don’t ever change, like that guy back there yesterday with your girl. You forget that, you expect otherwise, and you’re just askin’ for a world of hurt.”

  Just then Santa Claus is Coming to Town came out from the radio.

  Cooper said, “You know, there’s a lot of kids wonderin’ why they have just about no gifts under their scrawny tree, and mom and dad in the kitchen drinkin’ themselves into a stupor in celebrating, while stores all over—owned and run by really good people—are all caught up in makin’ their entire profit for the year.”

  She had wanted him to talk, she thought.

  “You can focus on all of that,” she said. “It’s all true, but you can also look at the other side. People go so crazy with spending and decorating and giving gifts—with all the hype—because they need to do it. Christmas is the only time that such behavior is acceptable. Christmas at its heart is a time when everyone, even the most hardened criminal, can express the love that’s in their hearts without feeling embarrassed or threatened.”

  “You ought to take off those rose-colored glasses,” Cooper said with scorn. “What people call love is just lumps of fears and selfish motives in disguise.”

  “You are determined to see the dark side. You don’t believe in Santa Claus, you don’t believe in Christmas, and you don’t believe in love. What do you believe in, Barry Cooper?” She was embarrassed to find her tone as sarcastic as his. How had they begun arguing? she thought with remorse.

  “Myself,” he said flatly. “And don’t call me Barry.”

  The reply and tone pretty well squelched her remorse and caused her to prickle all over. She felt sorry for him, and angry because she felt sorry for him. She did not want to have pity for him. She wanted to admire him, and because she could not admire such a negative stance, she was angry.

  Then came the clear thought: the devil of it was that underneath, just like Jolene and Pate had said, Cooper had a soft spot crying out to love and be loved.

  And didn’t everyone, even herself? She did not need him dragging on her own insecurities.

  Cooper cast a glance at her. Her hands lay loosely in her lap in contrast to the vibrations he sensed, yet did not want to sense. He stamped out his cigarette when it was only half smoked.

  She was angry with him. Well, he didn’t care. He’d just been being truthful. And he thought how she really did believe in all those pretty fantasies. He hoped she didn’t get to Pine Grove and suffer a rude awakening. He hoped doubly so for the kids.

  Suddenly he felt an overwhelming sense of protectiveness. He’d punch the old man, old or not, if the guy didn’t do right by Lacey and those kids.

  When he realized his thoughts, he almost stopped breathing. What business was it of his? It wasn’t any of his business at all.

  * * * *

  Traffic thickened the closer they came to Nashville, and it seemed a goodly number of fools were trying to kill themselves by pulling over in front of the Kenworth.

  Again Cooper had the sense of trouble with the brakes, and this sense was confirmed when they locked on him for several seconds. Ten miles farther down the road, he pulled off the interstate to a familiar truck-stop-and-motel complex on the outskirts of the city.

  He was out and around to Lacey’s side of the truck, checking tires as he went, before she made it out of her seat. When her door swung open, it seemed the natural thing to raise his arms and help her down.

  His hands slipped up beneath her short coat and closed around her waist. It was warm. She pressed her hands to his shoulders for balance, and Cooper lowered her slowly. A sweet fragrance floated from her hair. Then her thighs were brushing his, and he was looking into her eyes.

  “Thank you,” she said softly.

  “Sure.”

  A movement from above caught his attention, reminding him that he remained with his hands at Lacey’s waist. He let her go and looked up to find the boy Jon staring down at him with a curious and guarded expression. Cooper had the uncomfortable feeling the kid had read his mind.

  “I’ll follow you in a few minutes,” he told Lacey. “I want to see if a mechanic here can take a look at the brakes.”

  “There’s a problem?”

  He glanced over to see her keeping silken strands of hair from blowing into her eyes.

  “Just a small one. Nothin’ to worry about.” He felt her gaze on him as he walked quickly away.

  * * * *

  Though the mechanic corrected the problem with the brakes in short order, Cooper elected to stay in the nearby motel. It was a neat, clean place, yet very inexpensive, which he knew would be a help to Lacey. Ordinarily on a haul like this, Cooper would have spent the night in his truck.

  “What about the storm?” she asked him over their coffee. “Several people here have said it isn’t lookin’ good.”

  Cooper said, “Driver over at the garage said up north some highways are being closed. But it hasn’t turned south yet, and it may not. No sense worryin’ about it beforehand. I’ll keep a watch, and if the storm looks like it has turned this way, I’ll get
you and the kids, and we’ll head on.”

  Her eyes were on his, and he didn’t think she was thinking so much about the weather. He averted his gaze, not wanting her to read his mind.

  More Surprises

  With the heavy holiday traffic, they were lucky to get rooms—four doors apart.

  Cooper’s room was immaculate and modernly stark—bed, dresser, small portable television. He tossed his coat onto the bed, then turned on the television. Absently he watched a black and white rerun of The Beverly Hillbillies and smoked a cigarette. He stamped it out before he finished, the boy Jon’s comments echoing in his mind. He really needed to give the things up.

  He took the pack from his shirt pocket, saw it had two cigarettes left, then crushed it all and tossed it into the trash can.

  When he looked up, it was at his image in the mirror on the wall. Something caught his attention. He leaned closer, examining his face.

  His bruised eye looked quite a bit better. It didn’t hurt so much anyway. Lacey must have gotten used to it, because around lunchtime she had quit getting that expression of guilt every time she looked at him.

  Then he stared at his full face as if at a stranger. It was a man scowling. The cheeks were long and drawn. Tired, he thought. Tense from driving in the rig with passengers, kids, and knowing their lives were his responsibility.

  He rubbed his cheek, and then he knew what he saw in his image—his grandfather.

  He didn’t want to believe it, but now that he had noticed, the resemblance seemed to shout at him.

  This idea so unnerved him that he turned quickly, snatched his coat off the bed, and headed out the door, letting it slam behind him.

  He strode along the edge of the road, hands deep in his pockets and collar turned up against the wind, heading toward the shopping center that was just across the highway overpass. Even with the cold, damp wind and cars whizzing past, slinging water on his pants leg, it felt good to be out in the open. The cold and wind helped to clear his mind of the memories that had been swirling around him ever since he had talked with Lacey about his past.