The truck stop’s huge truck parking lot was already filled to overflowing with idling eighteen-wheelers. More trucks were pulling in along all the side and frontage roads on both sides of the interstate. Fortunately, there seemed to be relatively fewer passenger cars entering the truck-oops, travel-stop’s passenger-car parking lot, and she was able to find a spot not too far from the entrance.
She was engaged in the clumsy process of extricating her bulky body and numb legs from her car when a wickedly cold wind came skirling around the open door, whistled down her collar and blew freshly up her pant legs. As she got her jacket from the back seat, she found herself remembering early mornings on the California deserts of her childhood, waiting with her sisters for the school bus, stamping the ground and blowing on her fingers to keep warm; remembering a certain smell in the air, brought on the wind from the distant Sierra Nevadas.
For the first time, snow began to seem like a real possibility.
The travel-stop store was stuffy by comparison, overheated and jam-packed with stranded motorists and ticked-off truckers all milling around grumbling and griping about the situation they were in. After making her mandatory stop in the ladies’ room, Mirabella pushed her way through the crowd around the fuel desk.
“Excuse me,” she said to the girl behind the counter, who was busy with a customer, “could I just ask you a question?”
The cashier-young, Native American and obviously unflappable-nodded and went on with what she was doing, which was ringing up someone’s assortment of snack foods.
“That road out there,” Mirabella persisted, “the one right in front-eighty-four, I think it was-does it, by any chance, go to Texas?”
Again the cashier nodded. Mirabella was encouraged by that and about to ask for further details, such as how far was it to Texas, and were there any places to stop along the way, when one of the men waiting in line broke in with a snort and said, “Not today, it don’t.”
There was a general rumble of agreement. Somebody else said, “Ain’t nothin’ goin’ to Texas today. They got the whole damn state shut down.”
Another voice piped up, “I heard it was even snowin’ in Dallas.”
The first man who’d spoken reached past her to put his purchases-a paperback mystery, a package of Twinkies and a bottle of Rolaids-on the counter. As he did he gave her a look-down, then back up again-and said in a more kindly tone, “If I‘z you, I’d get myself a motel room, ma’am, before it’s too late. Might as well be comfortable. You ain’t goin’ any further tonight.”
She stood very still and didn’t reply. She was, quite simply, dumbstruck.
To Mirabella, “No” had always been a challenge; the word “impossible” a spur to action, and “You can’t,” a gauntlet, a dare. It was her belief that there was a way around almost any obstacle, if a person looked hard enough. Right now her mind was racing in high gear trying to find a way around this one, only it just kept coming back to where she was. “You ain’t goin‘ any further tonight.”
She couldn’t believe it. It simply didn’t compute.
But she was. She was stuck. In Santa Rosa, New Mexico, for God’s sake, for who-knows-how-long. And no matter what, she wasn’t going to get to Pensacola in time to spend Christmas with her parents. Instead she was going to spend Christmas somewhere on the road, alone, among strangers. She was suddenly struck by a horrifying urge to cry.
Except that Mirabella never cried. She took a deep breath, murmured, “Thanks,” to no one in particular, and pushed her way back through the crowd. At the entrance to the. dining room she paused, knowing she ought to eat something, at least. But she wasn’t hungry. What she was, she realized suddenly, was exhausted. The trucker was right; she should get a motel room. Then at least she could lie down.
After the overheated store, the cold outside took her breath away. Mirabella tried to hurry across the windy parking lot, but the best she could manage was a slow, ungainly, roundabout kind of pace, which she thought must be like trying to walk with a basketball pressed between her thighs. Reaching her car at last, she unlocked it, heaved herself inside and sat, breathing hard and shivering, while she waited for the heater to warm up. She’d never felt so frustrated in her life.
“I don’t believe this,” she kept muttering furiously to herself. “I don’t believe this.”
Half an hour later she was still saying it as she drove slowly down the town’s main drag, passing motel after motel, No Vacancy sign after No Vacancy sign. Other stranded motorists, equally frustrated, were zipping in and out of motel parking lots, tires squealing, engines roaring, as they raced each other in a frantic search for the last available rooms. Too late, some people shouted and banged their fists on countertops. Mirabella had banged on a few herself, and even played unabashedly on her “condition,” hoping the sympathy factor might melt some adamant desk clerk’s heart. But to no avail. There simply wasn’t a vacant room left in town.
“No room at the inn,” thought Mirabella whimsically. And then felt vaguely blasphemous, even though she’d never considered herself a particularly religious person.
In the restaurant at the 76 Travel Stop, Jimmy Joe was trying his best to have a phone conversation with his son, J.J. It wasn’t easy, being as how the decibel level in the dining room was about the same as the first turn at Indy at the start of the 500. He’d turned his back to the room and stuck his finger in the ear that wasn’t pressed up against the receiver, but it wasn’t doing much good, and he kept having to yell, “What?” every other sentence.
“I said, you don’t have to shout, Dad, I can hear you fine,” J.J. was saying.
“Well, you better shout then, ’cause I can’t hear you worth beans,” Jimmy Joe hollered back. “This place is a zoo.”
“How come it’s so noisy?”
“Ah, it’s crowded, is all. Everybody’s pretty much stuck here in New Mexico for a while, I guess.” He took a deep breath and broke the news. “They up and closed the road-because of that snowstorm you told me about? Looks like they’re not lettin’ anybody through the Panhandle right now.”
“Told you,” J.J. said in a know-it-all tone of voice. But his father knew him pretty well, and heard the quiver in it anyway.
For J.J.’s sake he tried to make the best of it. “Hey, don’t worry, okay? They can’t keep a whole interstate shut down for too long, can they? Soon as they open up the road, I’m on my way.” And he would drive right on through, if he had to. The way he had it figured, it wasn’t likely the weigh stations were going to be open on the holiday, so unless he got pulled over by the DOT, there wasn’t going to be anybody checking his logbook. It wasn’t something he would chance, ordinarily, but this was Christmas. And he’d promised J.J.
“It looks really bad, Dad. There’s trucks and cars turned over and everything. I saw it on TV.”
“You watch too much TV,” said Jimmy Joe, “you know that? How come you’re not outdoors playin’ or somethin’?”
“’Cause we got rain. I gotta do something, Dad. I’m on restriction, so no computer, remember?”
Jimmy Joe chuckled. “Yeah, so how are you and Sammi June gettin’ along? You two kiss and make up yet?” At that, J.J. muttered something his father couldn’t quite catch. He hunched himself over the phone and yelled, “What?”
Just then there was one of those little lulls that come over a noisy crowd sometimes, kind of like everybody in the room stopped to take a breath at the same moment. But whatever it was his son was telling him, Jimmy Joe missed it anyway, because in that quiet moment he heard a soft voice, practically at his elbow, say, “Excuse me…”