“Do you?”
“Well, I-”
“Did you see how
“Yes, but don’t you think it could just be…you know, the injury, the neck brace…”
Mirabella said derisively, “Oh yeah, right-if I couldn’t exercise, couldn’t do anything except lay around all day and eat, I’d certainly lose weight, wouldn’t you? No-something‘s not right. I can feel it. She does not look like a woman in love-at least not with…” Her voice trailed off as a new and appalling thought crossed her mind. She pushed it aside.
“She doesn’t have that… that
Summer threw her a look, as a beautiful, rosy flush spread over her cheeks.
“You know, actually,” said Summer, “I haven’t seen Evie at all, for quite a while. Have you?”
Mirabella made a wry face. “And you won’t. It’s cleanup time. Eve always was a magician when it came to doing the disappearing act when there was work to be done, remember?”
Summer smiled. “That’s right. That always used to bug you so bad. Still-” she cast a futile look around her “-I wonder where in the world she is. She’s not in there with the guys. Do you suppose she could be upstairs with Charly, taking a nap?”
“Who? Your sister?” Jess, Jimmy Joe’s sister, had come to the sink with a load of serving platters in time to hear the last question. “She was in here just a little while ago, dishing up a plate.”
“Dishing up…?” Summer and Bella looked at each other.
“Yeah, you know-like she was fixin’ to carry it to somebody? Heaped it high. Covered it all up with aluminum foil… Oh-and she took along a couple bottles of Corona, too. Last I saw of her, she was headin’ across the lawn. I figured she was taking it out to the limo driver, or something.”
Summer’s eyes widened and a pleat of distress formed between her eyes. Mirabella could see that they shared the same thought-a mental image of their sister tiptoeing across the church garden in her wedding gown with a bottle of vino and two crystal glasses in her hands.
Eve stood contemplating the row of behemoths in the grassy field behind her sister’s house. When she’d come up with the brilliant idea for Jake to meet her in Jimmy Joe’s eighteen-wheeler, which she knew would be parked, as it always was when he was at home, in the field next to the house, it hadn’t occurred to her that there’d be more than one. Much less a whole fleet. Who knew that sweet brother-in-law of hers would make sure every last one of his drivers was home for the holiday? Because here, arrayed before her like a congregation of huge, curious beasts, were not one, but six tractor-trailer rigs, plus another two extra reefer trailers besides.
So, what next? Which one was the right one? Mirabella had once confided to Eve that Jimmy Joe didn’t always lock up his truck when it was parked in his own yard. Eve had passed that information on to Jake, who had assured her a locked door wouldn’t present a problem anyway. So, the bottom line was, he could be in any one of these royal-blue monsters. What was she supposed to do, go down the line trying every door? Carrying a couple of cold ones and a plateful of turkey and trimmings?
Oddly, Eve found the little problem almost comforting. It was an annoying inconvenience, a small obstacle to overcome. And there was something about the mental exercise that seemed to help calm her jitters and steady her rapidly beating heart. Even so, as she approached the trucks she noticed that her legs felt weak and her insides wired and shivery, as if she’d been plugged into a low-voltage electrical current.
Suddenly she saw the truck on the end of the row, the one farthest from the house, flash its headlights-once on and off, then once more. Her head went light with relief, and at the same time, confusingly, apprehension made a shivery star-burst in her belly. She moved quickly to the far truck and around to the passenger side, and was contemplating the step up to the cab, debating the best way to tackle it, when the door swung open and a hand reached down to her.
“Come on, give me that,” said a familiar masculine growl, and Eve’s heart gave a leap of pure, unadulterated joy.
“Which do you want?” she asked mildly, squinting up at him against the reflected glare of a late-afternoon sun. “The plate or the bottles?”
Jake grunted as he relieved her of both. “Hurry up-get in here. You want somebody to see us? What
“I brought you some dinner. Happy Thanksgiving.”
She was already hauling herself awkwardly up the steps and into the cab when Jake transferred the plate and bottles to the driver’s seat and reached down to help her. His hands, one warm and dry, the other cold and wet from the condensation on the beer bottles, grasped one of hers and enfolded it, and she felt a lurch in her middle.
“You sure nobody saw you?” Jake asked in his grave and gravelly voice once they were inside the truck and the door shut firmly behind them.
Eve rolled her eyes. “I can’t guarantee nobody saw me leave the house, but I know for sure nobody followed me out here. The guys are all sacked out in front of the TV set-”
“Cisneros?” He looked as if he found that hard to believe.
“Oh, yeah.” Her smile was off center. “He’s very busy being ‘one of the boys.’ Anyway, the women are, of course, cleaning up in the kitchen, Charly and the babies are napping upstairs, and the bigger kids have some sort of tag game going on the lawn, clear on the other side of the house.” She stopped, out of breath, to sweep her hair back from her face with both hands. It helped to quell her jitters somehow. “So-I’m pretty sure we’re in the clear. How ‘bout you? Have any trouble finding the place? Was the truck unlocked?”
“No problems…” Jake’s mumble was distracted as he scowled through the windshield, as intently as if he expected hostiles to pop up any minute out of the landscape of grassy hummocks and fire ant mounds.
“Where’s your backup?”
“Parked on a logging road on the other side of that stand of pines.” He threw her a look as he moved back between the seats. “If necessary, they can be here in three minutes.”
“Three?” Eve murmured, her tone faintly mocking. Had he timed it? she wondered. And she thought that a lot could happen in three minutes…
“We can talk in here,” Jake said tersely. He was poised in the entrance to the sleeper compartment, one knee on the bunk, one hand on the sliding curtain. “Doors are locked. If we pull this curtain, no one’ll ever be able to tell anyone’s inside.”
Eve scooped up the plate and bottles from the driver’s seat, then paused. “Oh, look,” she said, “this must be Jimmy Joe’s truck.” Clipped to the dashboard were two photographs-a school portrait of Jimmy Joe’s son, J.J., and a snapshot of Mirabella holding her baby, Amy Jo.
“Come on, hurry up.” Jake was gesturing urgently.
She nodded and eased herself between the seats to join him in the sleeper, at the same time looking around her, overcome by an unexpected sense of awe. She was thinking that this must be the very same truck, the very same sleeper in which Mirabella had given birth, with Jimmy Joe’s help, to a beautiful baby girl on a snowbound Texas interstate. On Christmas Day, that had been-almost two years ago.
Jake, watching her, asked as he pulled the curtain across the opening, “Never been in one of these before?”
“Nope,” she murmured, scooting herself backward onto the bed and pulling her legs up under her, Indian-style, “it’s a first.” She wanted to tell him about Mirabella’s Christmas miracle; it was part of her family’s folklore, a tale told and retold around dinner tables and at family gatherings. But for some reason it seemed too intimate a thing to share in these circumstances, the two of them closed in together in this tiny, womblike space. Instead, she said casually, “Nice digs. Are we bugged?” It had come to seem almost natural to her.
