Read Online Miracle on I-40 by Curtiss Ann Matlock - Free Book Online Page B

enough.” Lacey came from North Carolina and had ended up out in New Mexico because of her ex; Cooper actually and surprisingly had been born in eastern Tennessee, but had left there as a kid and lived all over the West.
    They talked of Gerald’s restaurant, and Cooper said he’d been stopping there somewhere around ten years; he had begun driving a truck twenty years before, at the age of eighteen. He’d known Pate almost that long.
    “Pate came along, picked me up, dusted me off, and set me on my feet.”
    There was a quality in his voice that again drew Lacey’s curiosity about the entire story, but he didn’t elaborate, and she wasn’t about to ask—at least she stopped herself before doing so. Her mind, however, was putting pieces together based on her own experiences and on all the stories that she heard as a waitress in a busy truck stop. Listening to Cooper, she had a glimpse of a very lonely man, and she saw a reflection of her own well-deep loneliness. She guessed neither of them were rare cases.
    The tires hummed along the highway, a second George Strait disk played, and they talked of baseball (a fondness they both shared), thick or thin pizzas, and dog breeds (as children, each had possessed beloved dogs). Lacey looked at Cooper’s profile. She watched his capable hands caress and maneuver the steering wheel—and imagined what those hands would feel like on her body.
    In a flash of sudden awareness, she realized she had not thought of a man in such a way since well before Shawn had left.
    Then she was looking into his dark eyes, and she had the embarrassing inkling that he knew exactly what she’d been thinking. That perhaps he had been thinking along the same lines himself.
    George Strait sang out about eyes that can see.
    Lacey turned to look out the side window.
    * * * *
    They were one third of the way across Oklahoma when they stopped for dinner.
    “I’m gonna check out the truck...you go on ahead,” Cooper told her.
    She herded the children, running and jumping in euphoria to be free, on into the restaurant. At the door, she looked back, wondering if he again would sit separately from them. She didn’t suppose it mattered.
    In the ladies room, she combed her hair and put on fresh lipstick. Then she looked down to see Anna gazing up at her with large, dark, speculative eyes.
    When they came out of the ladies room, Cooper and Jon were waiting, side by side.
    “It sure takes women a long time in the bathroom,” Jon said.
    To this Cooper drawled in a low voice, “Well, bud, they’re a mite different, in case you didn’t know that.”
    Jon rolled his eyes, and Lacey hid a smile.
    They took a booth, Cooper and Jon sitting on one side, Anna and Lacey on the other. Cooper appeared only mildly ill-at-ease, bouncing his knees and holding on to his napkin, then dropping it and picking it up again. Jon’s natural conversational ability took over, though, and soon the two were carrying on a conversation about cars and trucks and engines and racing, while Lacey and Anna were content to simply listen. Lacey was made aware of what her son missed by not having a man in his life. Very often Pate took them out to eat, yet, for whatever reason, Jon did not seem to relate to him in the avid manner that he related to Cooper.
    Things seemed to be going great for the first time since they’d started out—until Anna spilled her cola down the back of a man in the adjoining booth.
    They were preparing to leave, and Anna had been trying to move across the seat on her knees while carrying her glass. She bumped her elbow, sloshing the crushed ice and cold liquid, which came up in a perfect arc through the air and went neatly down the big man’s collar.
    The man let out a resounding holler. “What the hell...”
    Lacey’s waitressing instincts set her to grabbing napkins from the stubborn dispenser, which insisted on hanging on to them.
    “Oh, I’m so sorry...so sorry.” She began dabbing his neck and shirt,