He lifted his big head.

A few seconds later Ginny’s old Nissan skidded to a stop in front of my truck. She and her three-month-old infant, Belle, occupied the other side of my shabby duplex. Just barely eighteen, unmarried and alone, Ginny worked two jobs and took business classes part-time at the local community college, and still found time to help me with my bookkeeping. A few months earlier she had saved my tiny trucking company, and me. As usual, she was on a mission, always late and moving fast.

She hopped out of her car while I wondered what in the hell could be so important she would race across town to intercept me. Her spiked red-and-purple hair was even more spiked than usual. I rolled down my window and asked her what was up. She ignored me and pulled the infant seat out of the passenger side. I’m rarely the smartest guy in the room unless I’m alone, which fortunately for me was usually the case. No one needed to draw a diagram for me to guess what her intentions were.

I flung my door open. “No!”

Ginny ignored me. She approached with the infant carrier dangling from one hand and a large pink bag in the other. She was still dressed in her black flannel pajamas decorated with Day-Glo white skulls. Under the lights of the truck stop the skulls danced on her arms and legs. Random flashes glinted off the silver rings in her nose, lower lip, and eyebrow.

I climbed down from the cab and put my arms up to wave her away. “I can’t.”

Ginny made quick use of my arms. She hung the pink baby bag on my left arm and threaded the handle of the infant seat over my right.

“You have to,” she said.

For the first time in our friendship I swore at her. “Goddammit, Ginny. I can’t take a baby out on 117! I won’t. Not in this weather.” I nodded toward the open door of the cab.

I started to object again and thought better of it, at least for the moment, as every man does or should before arguing with a woman, especially someone as important to him as Ginny was to me. We were friends, and only friends, and that meant something special to me, as perhaps it does to any orphan. But friends didn’t begin to cover it.

In a few short months Ginny had become my family, though there were always dirty little minds that worked overtime suggesting a different kind of relationship. When I heard such talk, usually punctuated with a sly wink or worse, my fuse got lit, though more for her than for me.

In her own way, Ginny was an orphan herself. You had to know her mother, Nadine, to know why. I’d dated Nadine for a brief time maybe ten years earlier. Ginny was only a little girl then. My time with Nadine was not brief enough and I was half-relieved early one morning to catch her and a UPS driver in the cab of my truck. Considering the cramped quarters, what they were managing to do belonged in a pornographic circus or Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

Then, by accident, my path crossed with Ginny’s in the dead of night where she was working the nightshift at the twenty-four-hour Walmart in Price. That had been May. She was seventeen, seven months pregnant, and living in her car.