Enjoy Your Stay (30 page)

I waddle my way inside to use the bathroom he just exited. I spend a good five minutes leaning against the grimy wall and trying not to throw up. I do anyway, and after a moment or two, I feel better. Though, when I think about my conversation with Cooper, better flies right out the window, and my guilt slaps me upside the head. It’s ironic, really, but if I’d just listened to Jackson all that time ago when he said Cooper wouldn’t make me happy, maybe we could have all avoided the hurt. Or at least, lessened it some.

I’m washing my hands in the sink when I feel something inside me shift, and then a popping sensation, and I let out an ear-splitting shriek as fluid gushes out of me and a contraction grips my stomach. It hurts like a motherfucker. Who knew your uterus could be such a vicious bitch as it tries to expel the spawn from your body? Not me, or I might have driven myself to a hospital two days earlier and demanded a caesarean.

A second later there’s a bang on the door, and a gruff, “You alright in there, love?”

“Uh-huh, just having a baby is all,” I call back.

After a beat and a loud proclamation of, “Shit!” the door is being kicked in. It takes him a few tries—if I didn’t have a baby tearing his way through my vagina I might’ve been able just to unlock the door—but the trucker I’d passed earlier comes hulking into the room.

“Please don’t hurt me?” I beg as another contraction hits.

“I’m not here to hurt you, love. I’m here to help. I reckon you might need an ambulance.”

“No. No ambulances. I have to get home.”

“How far from home are you, sweetheart?”

“Too far.” I gasp.
Fuck. What the hell am I doing?
I’m still two hours from home, and a trucker wearing a Bundy rum shirt and whose name I don’t even know is about to get real acquainted with my snatch if this kid doesn’t stop trying to push his way out.

“You got a husband I can call?”

“Nope,” I say, as I squeeze his hand like a vice, and ride out the agony. Shit. I don’t think I can do this. Are they supposed to come this close together?
Please God, Buddha, Vishnu, Jesus, Mary and fucking Joseph, please don’t let my baby be born in a truck-stop bathroom.
It’d be all over the news: ‘Sugartown woman gives birth to a baby in toilet in an insane effort to return home to her family, instead of going to the hospital.’

“I am never gonna live this down,” I groan, and then say, “No husband, just a pain in the arse ex-lover that I’m killing myself to get back to.”

“Sorry, love, but I don’t think you’re going back to anyone in your condition,” he says, and leads me out of the bathroom. The petrol-station attendant is standing outside complaining about his busted door, I do feel kinda bad about that, but the trucker starts yelling at the guy to call an ambulance. And I begin yelling at him.

“I don’t need an ambulance, I’m fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine—” Another contraction seizes me, and this one is so strong it almost brings me to my knees.

“You need a hospital, love.”

“I don’t need a fucking hospital,” I whisper through clenched teeth, and I bear down on his arm. His face contorts into a grimace. “I need Jack, I just need Jackson. Please? I just have to get home to him.”

The trucker shakes his head, and says, “Sweetheart, I gotta be in Sydney with this shipment in another eight hours.”

I clutch at his arm and sob. “Please? I can’t do this without him.”

For a moment he’s wide-eyed, and staring at me like I’m a crazy person. He glances between me, and the attendant, who seems just as dumbfounded. The trucker lets out a resigned sigh, and says, “Alright, love, we’ll get ya where you need to go.”

He leads me over to his truck and helps me up while he goes inside to pay for his fuel. I’m half delirious with relief that I don’t have to think about driving, and then it hits me that I’m eight-months pregnant, I’m in labour, and I’m sitting in a stranger’s Mack truck.
I have to get out of here.
This guy could be a serial killer, or one of those organ thieves, or a baby-snatcher.
That’s what he does, isn’t it?
He lurks around truck-stop bathrooms, and waits for single pregnant women to go in, and then he snatches babies away from idiots that climb into his truck.

The door opens. The trucker throws a whole bunch of snacks on the cooler beside us.
Oh my God, please tell me there aren’t organs in there
, I think, and begin hyperventilating. He climbs on in. He doesn’t look like a serial killer. In fact, he has the same kind of salt-and-pepper hair and beard as Bob, and he sort of has this ruggedly-sexy old-dude vibe going. Also kinda like Bob, only less intimidating. He’s like Santa Claus, only scruffier. And a little hotter.

He opens the cooler, and I throw my hands up over my eyes and peek from behind splayed fingers. A can of coke, and a half eaten sandwich.
Okay, so no organs in the cooler. Good to know.

“You alright there, love?” he asks and I start yanking at the seatbelt, trying to get it unclasped and failing miserably.

I’m going to die. This guy is going to carve me up, take my baby, and dump my body at one of those shitty nature reserve rest-stops, and all because I couldn’t get my seatbelt undone.

“I have to go. I can’t let you drive me home. I don’t even know you. You don’t know where you’re going. And I don’t even know your naaaaaaaaaaaaame,” I cry out as another contraction hits. These are definitely coming closer together.

“Relax. My friends call me Pep.” He flips down the visor in front of my face, and pulls out a picture of what I assume is his family. “That’s my wife with our two little boys, Zack and Zane, and our eight-month-old, Lucy.”

I nod my head, and fall back against the seat. “I’m Holly.”

“Always liked that name. Reminds me of Christmas,” Pep says, and reaches in front of me. I flinch, but he holds up his hands in a placating gesture, and then indicates he’s going to open the glove box.

“Here,” he says, as he fishes out a mobile phone and hands it to me along with the wallet from his pocket. “You hold onto those for a bit. Should make you feel a bit more comfortable, I reckon.”

He starts the engine, and even though I’m still weirded out that I’m in a truck with a complete stranger, I’m also kind of glad he’s the stranger I’m stuck with. I might still be a tad bit wary, but really, I couldn’t have asked for a better random stranger to pick me up at a petrol station and drive me two hours out of his way. You know, unless of course he looked like Brad Pitt.

I lean back against the headrest, my phone perched on my lap, along with Pep’s. I’m exhausted from driving all night. My eyelids grow heavy. But before I allow them to close completely, I thumb the screen of my phone and find Jack’s picture.

“This is my Jackarse,” I say, shoving the phone in Pep’s direction. He takes his eyes from the road for a moment, and smiles at the picture of Jack kissing my face.

“And where do we find your Jackarse, Holly?”

“Sugartown,” I say and close my eyes, because it hurts to keep them open any longer. “You heard of it?”

“Yeah, tiny little town with the mill, right?”

“Yep, that’s home.”

“I stopped there once. Broke down there, actually. Had the best pie I’ve ever tasted, too. Never liked the stuff before then. I’ve been trying to find one like it ever since.”

“You get me to my Jackarse safe and sound, and I’ll send you a pie every week.” I smile and then I drift off, lulled by the exhaustion and the heavy thrum of the truck underneath me.

I don’t know how much later it is, but I wake up screaming as my belly cramps down on itself. The driver’s side is empty, and it appears we’re on the road just outside Sugartown. It’s raining hard, and the truck’s lights cut through the fog of a grey morning. I can see Pep arguing with a police officer in the rain. I go to open my door, and another contraction hits. I scream, and then Pep’s jumping up beside me in the truck’s cab. “You okay?”

“I would be if this baby would take five minutes to chill the fuck out, and stop trying to push his way out of me,” I snap. “What’s going on?”

“Town’s flooded. Officer says there’s no way through.”

“I’m having a fucking baby here. Tell him to make a way through!”

The officer isn’t one from Sugartown, that much I know, because he steps up to the truck, and glares at me with his little squinched up face, and in a totally bored tone of voice says, “Ma’am you can’t go through the waters.”

“Fine then. Get in, because I’m about to have a baby in this truck, and you’re gonna deliver the damn thing.” The police officer pales. I cry out, you know, just to mess with him a little more, and he glances between us and the floodwater.

“Alright, I’ll escort you through,” he says, and high-tails it out of there quicker than I’ve ever seen a man move.

Pep shuts the door and says, “Nice work.”

“Oh, please. I’m the queen of pretend,” I say, and my heart pangs as I think of how much time I spent trying to convince myself, and everyone around me, that I wasn’t in love with Jackson.

“You doin’ okay there?”

“Yeah.” I lie back against the seat, and wipe away the tears pricking my eyes.

The paddy-wagon escorts us through the floodwater. It’s pouring rain, and the sky is beginning to lighten, but it’s still impossible to see much more than the road directly in front of us. All of the cane fields up the Sugartown straight are flooded, and the water on the road has to be up to my knees, at least. The truck and the police car manage it easily, but the further we drive, the deeper the murky water gets.

It isn’t long before the officer pulls over, and waves us forward. Pep brings the truck to a stop alongside him.

“I can’t go any further, water’s too deep, and the whole rest of the town is cut off,” he yells. I can barely hear him over the sound of the rain hitting the roof. “You should know before you go through, there’s no coming out until the flood water recedes.”

Pep looks at me for conformation.

“I can’t ask you to do this.” I reach for the door handle, but Pep grabs my arm to stop me.

“Don’t have to ask me, love, I’m already here.”

“What about your job? Your family?”

“She’ll be right.” He nods, and then waves to the officer, as he drives us through the worst of the floodwater. “I’ll call them when we get there.”

I must have done something right in my life somewhere along the way, because my sexy Santa Claus trucker is the best damn guardian angel out there.

We drive slowly through Sugartown. We’ve come through the deepest water already, and from here it seems as though it’s really only ankle-deep. It so barren, it looks like a ghost town. All the shops are boarded up, and there are sand bags piled high in front to protect against water damage.

As we approach Belle’s Pies, I ask Pep to slow the truck to a stop. The diner has been completely rebuilt. I knew this, of course—I mean, they’d begun before I moved, and it’s not like I left town and didn’t keep in contact with Ana. I talk to her at least twice a week, but even though I knew, I still have a hard time believing they’ve done it so damn quickly. I’m blown away by how beautiful it looks. Ana’s taken our crummy, run-down home diner, and turned it into a work of art. The outside is painted in a pretty robin’s egg blue, the fixtures are all chrome, and Belle’s Pies actually has a sign now: a beautiful, old-Hollywood-style script emblazoned across the front of the building. I shake my head, and wonder how she managed to do it all. It’s exactly what her mum always wanted. It’s the picture-postcard from New York that her mum kept taped to the till.

I wipe the tears from my eyes—always with the fucking crying—I’m so proud of my best friend right now I can barely breathe. I know she didn’t choose the life she got handed. She didn’t choose the diner, or Sammy, or even a shit of a dad like Bob, but goddamn does she know how to make a life out of a bad situation. If I were any more proud of her, I’d burst.

I nod to Pep to keep driving. With a groan the truck rolls forward but then the sign next door to Belle’s Pies catches my eye. I throw my arm across the space between us, and smack him in the chest in an effort to get him to stop. He lets out a grunt and the truck squeals to a halt. The store beside the diner, the one that had burnt to the ground alongside Belle’s Pies and that had remained empty for over half my life, has been restored to its former glory, only now, instead of dust and cobwebs adorning the windows, an array of beautiful handmade furniture stares back at me. Above the shop is a hand-carved sign that reads, “Rowe’s Wood”. I laugh out loud, clasp my hand over my mouth and shake my head. It’s nice to see that no matter what he’s been through in the time that we’ve been separated, Jackson hasn’t lost his sense of humour.

I nod for Pep to keep going, and tell him the house is on the outskirts of town. I just hope we can get through the floodwater waiting on the other side, because if not, Pep’s about to have one helluva clean-up on his hands. As we’re driving through the back end of town I have two more god-awful contractions, both just minutes apart.

I’m trying hard to ignore the fact that this baby is coming out now, whether I like it or not, as Pep pulls the truck up to the side of the road before the house I direct him to. “Why are you stopping?”

“Because the truck’s not gonna make it up a hill like that, love.”