He sure didn’t need to be thinking about whether or not it was normal for a beautiful pregnant woman from California to have dark circles underneath her eyes, a little wrinkle of a frown in her forehead and a white look around her mouth even when she smiled.
“Hi,” she said sort of shy and sheepishly, reminding him of J.J. when he was little and used to come pit-patting down the stairs on some excuse or other after he’d been all tucked in snug for the night.
Jimmy Joe put the phone up quickly-he hoped before anybody had picked it up on the other end, because he didn’t want to have to hang up on his son twice in one evening. “Hey,” he sang out, “how you doin’? Everything all right? Somethin’ you need?”
She shook her head and mumbled, “Gouldn’t sleep,” as she eased in across from him, moving like she was made of blown glass. She put her elbows on the tabletop and pushed her hair back from the sides of her face with both hands, then left them there and used them for props. “I had to come in to use the rest room anyway. Thought I might as well see if you wanted to take the bed. No sense in it going to waste.”
It was a true mystery to Jimmy Joe why she couldn’t sleep, because she looked and sounded to him like she was in danger of dozing off where she sat. A terrible thought occurred to him. Trying not to sound as worried as he felt, he said, “Ma‘am, if you don’t mind my askin’, when’s that baby of yours due?”
She made a vague waving motion with one hand and in the midst of a great big yawn, mumbled, “Oh, not for a month yet.” Then she kind of straightened herself, making a real effort to lift up her chin. “No, I’m okay, really. It’s just hard to get comfortable, you know? I get these pressure pains in my legs…”
Jimmy Joe nodded in sympathy. J.J.’s mama had had those pains, both times. He could remember times when she’d shot up out of bed like she’d been hit with a cattle prod, cussin’ like nobody’s mama should. He said with relief, “Maybe you ought to eat something. Might make you feel better.”
She finished up another yawn, then shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
“You got other reasons to eat besides feelin’ hungry,” said Jimmy Joe sternly, nodding toward the part of her that was pushing up against the edge of the table. “Got to keep your strength up.” He was fed up with the way she kept ignoring the needs of that baby of hers, so he didn’t wait to see if she agreed with him, but just started looking around for a waitress.
Things having settled down some by that time, he was able to spot one right away. She came ambling on over and brought the coffeepot with her, probably assuming he was wanting a refill. The waitress was one he didn’t know-a skinny woman with frizzy gray hair and deep lines on her face from smoking-but she looked cheerful and sort of motherly, so he checked the name tag pinned to her uniform blouse and turned on the charm.
“Hey, Dottie, what kind of soup you got today?”
Dottie looked up at the ceiling like she expected to see the menu written up there and gave it some thought. “Let’s see. Tonight we got…I b’lieve it’s cream of broccoli and chicken noodle.”
“Well, okay. You can bring the lady a bowl of that chicken noodle, if you would. And a big glass a’ milk.” He grinned, flirting just a little bit, and added, “And I’ll take some of that coffee, since you brought it.”
Looking pleased, Dottie sang out, “Chicken noodle, comin’ right up.” She splashed coffee into his mug and went on her way.
Jimmy Joe sat back in his seat prepared for an argument, but he could see right away he wasn’t going to get one. He was glad to see the woman wasn’t stubborn to the point of being plain stupid, and at least had the sense to recognize a lost fight when she saw it.
But…now what was she doing? She had her big pocketbook open on the seat beside her and was digging through it and dragging out bottle after bottle of some kind of pills.
He put his hands on the table and laced his fingers together and watched her, watched the slick, shiny red curtain of her hair swing back and forth across her face, catching the light, and tried to think whether he’d ever seen anything in his life before that was exactly that color.
Finally he cleared his throat, shifted around in his seat, and came out with, “I know it’s none of my business, but…”
Her eyes flicked at him like a dog after a fly. “Vitamins,” she explained shortly, and went back to rummaging.
“Ah,” said Jimmy Joe, nodding. He felt unreasonably pleased. And at the same time, bothered by the notion that it did seem to matter to him whether or not this woman he wasn’t ever going to see again after tonight did or did not care about her baby’s well-being. It gave him a case of the restless fidgets, and after watching a moment or two longer, he reached out and snagged one of the bottles. “Vitamin K,” he read off the label. “That’s one I never heard of. What’s it supposed to do?”
“That’s for blood clotting,” she said without looking up from what she was doing, which was making a neat little pile of the pills on the table in front of her. “That’s to prevent excessive bleeding during childbirth.”
Jimmy Joe put the bottle down in a hurry. He hadn’t been present during the actual births of either of his children, through no fault of his own, and there were some images associated with the whole process he preferred not to dwell on.
“How ’bout these?” he asked, poking at some brown pills that looked big enough to choke a goat.
“Those? That’s brewer’s yeast. B vitamins and protein.”
“Uh-huh…and this one here?”
“Let’s see. That’s the antioxidant combo, I think. C, E and-what else? Shoot, I can’t remember-”
“What in blue blazes are anti-what did you call ’em?”
She looked shocked. “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of antioxidants.”
Well, as a matter of fact he had, but he couldn’t recall exactly what it was he’d read or heard about the blamed things, and it seemed as good a topic of conversation as anything he could think of right off the bat. So he shrugged and told her half a lie. “No, ma’am, can’t say’s I have.”
“Okay,” said Mirabella, taking a breath and squaring her shoulders as if it had just become her sacred duty to educate him on the subject. Then she launched herself into a detailed explanation of what antioxidants did, which as far as he could tell involved keeping her cells’ neurons from flying off to look for mates somewhere else. “In other words, oxidizing,” she concluded.
“Oxidizing… Well, now I know what that is,” said Jimmy Joe humbly. “I reckon that’s pretty much the same as rusting, isn’t it?”
To his great surprise and extreme pleasure, she burst out laughing. “Doesn’t seem to be working too well in my case,” she remarked, fingering a strand of hair that had fallen across her face and having to make her eyes go crossed in order to focus on it.
“Well, now, ma‘am, I wouldn’t say that,” Jimmy Joe murmured, studying her somberly. “Looks to me like it’s workin’ just fine.”
He was thinking about what a powerful difference a little thing like laughter could make in the way one person looked at another. For such a beautiful woman to make fun of herself like that, even crossing her eyes… Well for one thing it made him ashamed of himself. Here, just because she had a face that would tie Don Juan up in knots and happened to drive a fancy new car, he’d been judging her to be just another spoiled rich airhead from La-la Land. And hadn’t his mama taught him better than to judge people by their looks? Now he was beginning to see that there might be a lot more to this Mirabella than met the eye. That for starters, she wasn’t just pretty; it was turning out that she was also intelligent, funny and, doggone it, nice.