to pull in well up along the on-ramp, the last available spot big enough to wedge an eighteen-wheeler into. Once he’d got the Kenworth buttoned down to his satisfaction, he put on his slicker and jogged back up the sloping drive to the buildings.
It looked to him as if the rain was letting up some, though that could have been because he wasn’t on the interstate, where the truck spray always made things seem worse than they were. A chilly wind had sprung up and was blowing what rain there was in nasty gusts under the roofed shelter areas, so with the exception of a couple of women trying to use a cell phone, most people had taken to staying in their vehicles.
C.J. meant to do the same himself, once he’d made use of the rest room and vending machines. He planned on getting himself an assortment of junk goodies to help pass the time, which was something truckers did a lot of and was one of the reasons why some of them got so big-bellied and heavy, or so he’d been warned by his brother, Jimmy Joe, who was also his boss.
C.J. had noticed, though, that after near twenty years driving big trucks, Jimmy Joe himself was as lean and lanky as ever, leading C.J. to conclude that leanness pretty much ran in the Starr family, along with chocolate-brown eyes and dimples.
He wasn’t worried much about health and fitness as he fed coins and dollar bills into the vending machines and filled up the pockets of his slicker with tortilla chips and Little Debbie’s. What concerned him more was making it back to Georgia in time to take the exam he had scheduled for three days from now. After that one there was just the final and then he was through with law school after ten long years; that is, if you counted college and before that the time it had taken him to pass his high school equivalencies, since he’d had the bad sense to drop out of school a month into his senior year.
Not a single minute of it had been easy. A whole lot of folks were bound to be surprised he’d made it this far, C.J. included.
Juggling a soda can and a package of cheese puffs, he stuffed the leftover change into the pocket of his jeans, hunched his shoulders inside his slicker and headed back to his truck. A little farther along the breezeway he had to pass by the two women who were still trying to get through to somebody on a cell phone—without much luck, it seemed evident to him.
The one with the phone looked about fourteen. Tall but slender and small-boned, she was wearing jeans and a hooded sweatshirt with the hood pushed back, and she had short blond hair cut in that spiky, messed-up way younger women seem to favor. She had her finger stuck in her unoccupied ear and kept turning this way and that, looking up into the mist or down at her feet, the way people do when they’re trying to get something besides static on a wireless phone. The other woman was older—maybe early thirties—but pretty, with reddish brown hair worn long, thick and curly, what C.J.’s sister Jess would call “big hair.” She seemed edgy, the big-haired woman did. She kept hugging herself as she watched the girl with the phone, throwing glances over her shoulder into the rainy dusk.
And now C.J. could see a third person there, snugged up against the older woman’s legs. A child, a little bit of a girl with dark hair cut to chin length and straight across her forehead, and the biggest, blackest eyes he’d ever seen. Since those eyes were gazing straight at C.J., he did what came naturally to him. He smiled. The eyes kept on staring at him, not blinking, just kind of shimmering, like deep, dark pools.
C.J.’s heart gave a peculiar quiver, and all at once it seemed like the most important thing in the world to him to see that child smile. So he smiled even bigger, showing those famous Starr dimples, and said, “Hey, hon’, how’re you doin’?” Since it struck him that the eyes had kind of a hungry look, and that it might have been seeing him tucking those goodies away that was making her stare at him that way, he held out the bag of cheese puffs and added, “Here you go, darlin’—you want some of these?”
C.J. would have been the first to admit there was a lot he didn’t know about kids, but even so it set him back some when the child cringed away from him and tried to hide behind her momma’s legs, as if there’d been a dead rat in that cellophane package instead of cheese puffs. It wasn’t the reaction C. J. Starr was used to getting from people when he turned on that smile—put it that way.
He transferred the smile to the child’s mother and ruefully explained, “Sorry, ma’am, I sure didn’t mean to scare her.”
The woman gave him a tight little smile in return and muttered something politely vague, along the lines of, “That’s okay, but we’re fine.”
Not friendly types, these people. With a mental shrug, C.J. was about to go on his way when for some reason he glanced over at the girl with the cell phone, and it happened to be just as she pivoted and looked right at him. His heart gave another one of those odd little shivers. She wasn’t as young as he’d thought; young enough, but definitely not a kid. Her eyes were searching, soul-piercing sharp, and…it might have been something about the artificial lighting in that rest stop, but he’d have sworn they were silver.
He didn’t know what it was about her, but whatever flirty comment he’d planned on making went right out of his head. Instead he gave her a polite nod and a mumbled, “Ma’am…” and added on the trucker’s benediction: “Y’all have a safe trip, now,” as he hunched inside his slicker and plunged out into the mist. A few steps farther on he broke into a jog.
Back in his truck, he put the two women and the little girl out of his head while he stashed his goodies in the usual places and popped open the can of soda. Then he turned on the cab lights and reached for the pile of law books he kept handy on the passenger seat beside him. The way he saw it, with that exam coming up and his entire future riding on the outcome, every little minute he could squeeze in some studying was a plus.
The roaring of the wind brought C.J. out of his doze. Damn, he thought, that storm must be moving back in again.
No, wait—that wasn’t wind. Trucks. It came to him that what he’d been listening to for a while now was the sound of big diesel engines and a whole lot of tires churning past him down the on-ramp, one after the other. The rest stop was clearing out fast. A check of his mirrors showed him an empty parking lot, but for one nondescript gray late-model four-wheeler in the back row, over by the doggy-john. Somebody else having a nap forgot to leave a wakeup call, he thought.
He had himself a stretch to get rid of the kinks and cobwebs, then gathered up his junk-food wrappers and soda can and climbed out of his truck—one last stop at the rest room, he told himself, and he’d be headin’ back out on the road himself.
The air was warm and soupy, but he was a Southern boy, and to him warm and soupy was the way it was supposed to be in the springtime. Wet dogwood petals dotted the grass and sidewalks and the roof and hood of the parked car, and the air smelled of crushed leaves and mud, with a sweetness from some sort of plant he couldn’t identify, and maybe a hint of something rotting off in the woods somewhere. Smelled just right to him. Like spring.
Spring wasn’t C.J.’s favorite season of the year, though. “Spring can break your heart,” was the way his momma, Betty Starr, put it, stoic after a late freeze had wiped out her saucer magnolias and flowering crab apple trees for the umpteenth time. C.J. preferred fall, with sky so blue it made your eyes ache, and that indefinable touch of melancholy in the air.
Then he had to laugh at himself like any Southern-raised boy would at such thoughts—even though he knew the momma who’d raised him wouldn’t have laughed. Betty Starr was a schoolteacher who’d brought up her three daughters and four sons to enjoy books and reading as much as they did hunting and cars, and to have an appreciation for the softer aspects of nature that was at least on a par with a fine deer rifle or the inner workings of a gasoline engine.
In spite
