“I haven’t checked into my hotel yet. And I’d better let you get back to work.” He kissed the top of her head, not moving any farther just yet. “Sorry for stomping in like this. It’s been a long three weeks.”
“Don’t apologize.” Her arms squeezed around his waist.
He cupped her face in his hands and drank in the sight of her blue eyes, like deep, refreshing pools. “I’ll go get checked in and cleaned up,” he said. “Can I pick you up here at five?”
She nodded.
Jake stepped out the door of the store, hearing the jingle of its bells, feeling the fresh slap of the mountain air. It might be colder here than in Scranton, he realized. The weeks he’d been gone had brought a marked shift in temperature up here. This might be Southern California, but it felt downright wintry.
He climbed into the truck—not the same one he’d rented last time, but close enough—and drove the two-and-a-half minutes to the same hotel. As Phyllis checked him in, he couldn’t tell if she was happy to see him again or not, but he’d worry about that tomorrow.
The last two hours before the store closed dragged by, in spite of the sales of several of the fall items, a pinecone necklace and a reindeer cookie jar.
From time to time Mandy glanced under the counter where the two framed clippings waited, safely enclosed in their shopping bags. She could hang them now, and there’d be less chance of losing her resolve.
But she still felt two inches off the ground just from being back in Jake’s arms. What could one more night hurt?
At four-thirty, a couple came in with an adorable little boy somewhere around six years old. Mandy smiled at the mother as she guided her son cautiously past the shiny glass bric-a-brac. Definitely weekend visitors. It was Saturday, and they were in no hurry. Murphy’s Law. You could always count on last-minute customers when you were hoping to get out of the store early. Mandy knew she wouldn’t get a head start on closing the register tonight.
Mandy stayed at her post behind the counter and listened to the soft hum of chatter as the family drifted from one shelf to another. By the time they brought their son to the register with a Christmas stocking, it was nearly five.
The bells on the door jingled, and Jake walked in.
Mandy smiled past her customers at him, then rang up the stocking. She looked down at the little boy. “Are you going to hang this up over the fireplace this year?”
He nodded, his wide dark eyes adorably serious under straight black bangs.
Mandy bagged the purchase and handed it to Dad as he put his wallet away. He passed the bag to his son, who looked up at him questioningly.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Ask her.”
A frosty thrill crept down the back of Mandy’s neck. She knew exactly where this was headed. She met the little boy’s eyes and waited.
“Are you the lady who saw Santa Claus?” His voice was low and shy.
Mandy’s eyes darted from the boy to Jake, who glanced up from the pumpkins at the fall display.
She’d never turned a child away in her life.
“That’s me.” Mandy came around the counter and did what she’d always done. Resting her hands on her knees, she brought herself closer to the boy’s level, meeting those wide dark eyes. “Want me to tell you how it happened?”
A somber nod. Mandy’s mouth felt dry. She was aware of the boy’s parents, aware of Jake in the background, but when this moment came there was only one audience that mattered. As she started to speak, the words flowed out of her.
“Well, it was the night before Christmas, and I was eight years old,” she began. “I stayed up late, and I was in my living room all by myself. Not a creature was stirring. Not even a mouse. . . .”
Jake stood a few feet away and watched Mandy weave magic.
It was time for the store to close, but he knew she wouldn’t have told the family that for love or money. She spoke to the little boy in earnest, hushed tones—the perfect storytelling voice—and Jake heard every word. Even from where he stood, it was easy to forget that he was standing in the middle of a store on a late afternoon in October.
Her account built to a dazzling finish, with Santa vanishing up the chimney in a flash of light. For a moment everyone was silent.
“Did your mommy and daddy believe you?” the boy asked.
Something flickered in Mandy’s eyes. “My mommy did,” she said. “My daddy wasn’t home.”
“Were there reindeer on the roof?”
Mandy appeared to consider. “I didn’t hear any prancing and pawing,” she said. “But I think flying reindeer might be very quiet.”
When no other questions came, Mandy straightened slowly and reached into the bowl on the counter. “Would you like a candy cane?” she offered. She smiled at the parents. “For after dinner, that is.”
The three of them nodded. Mandy bent again to hand the boy the wrapped candy cane. “Merry Christmas,” she said softly.
The little boy’s eyes shone, and Jake felt like the witness to a timeless ritual. He watched the family file out, accompanied by the light jingling of the sleigh bells on the door. He turned to Mandy, whose gaze followed her visitors as they passed the store windows outside.
He was afraid to say anything that might break the spell, but Mandy beat him to it. As soon as the family was out of sight, she crossed to the front of the shop, turned the “Closed” sign around and locked the door.
“I’ll need to close the register before we leave,” she said. “It’ll take a little extra time. Sorry.”
Her tone was bright, almost brisk, as she pulled the drawer out of the cash register and slipped into the back room.
As Jake walked her outside the store, the cold air had a particularly sharp bite to it, and Mandy let herself huddle closer against his arm. She hadn’t met his eyes since the family left. She knew he’d been listening, and she knew what was coming next.
She’d put off facing this for too long already, and she didn’t think she was going to get the one-more-night she’d been promising herself.
When Jake climbed into the driver’s seat, he turned to her before he started the car. “That was the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard.”
She met his eyes and saw a faint echo of what she saw in the faces of the kids when she told them her story. He almost got it, she thought. If he could just be different from everyone else . . .
The trouble was, he was twenty years too old.
Mandy bit her lip. This was it. Before they’d even had dinner. If she didn’t say it now, she never would, and he’d hear it from someone else.
“It isn’t just a story,” she said.
She waited, breathing slowly, for the look on his face she’d never wanted to see.
Jake’s reaction was just what she’d always imagined.
She watched his smile fade as his expression shifted from a hesitant, You’re-kidding-right? to a shell-shocked, Oh-my-God-you’re-serious.
Her stomach clenched.
“Wait a minute,” Jake said. “You don’t really mean . . .”
“I saw Santa Claus,” she said, summoning up her last shred of calm.
“You mean—like a dream, right? You said you fell asleep on the couch. . . .”
“No. I pinched myself. Hard. I still had a red mark the next day.”
For the first time since grade school, she was actually trying to get someone to believe her. She’d given up arguing long ago. At least Jake wasn’t making fun of her.
This was worse.
He closed his eyes, as if trying to concentrate. “Okay. Let’s break this down.”
No. No. No. She didn’t need the practical, logical Jake. She needed the playful, monster-movie-loving Jake.
Why should he be different from anyone else?
Because I need him to be.
He looked at her as if he’d just come up with an original argument. “If it was really Santa Claus, why didn’t he give you a present?”
“It’s not like that.” Her hear
t was going like a jackhammer. Discussion and logic had never done any good before, but for Jake, she’d try. “I’m not saying he goes around from house to house, handing out presents to everyone. It’s like what my mother told me once: Santa Claus is the spirit of Christmas. I don’t understand all of it, or why it doesn’t happen to more people. I think maybe sometimes if someone really believes in him—or really needs to see him—”
“You needed to see him.” Jake nodded vigorously. “That’s it. Don’t you see? It was a rough year for you and your mom. It was the year your dad left. You waited on the couch to watch for Santa Claus, and you were probably half asleep—”
Mandy shook her head. Not vigorously. Slowly, with conviction. It was all she really had.
“You really believe it,” he said.
Her shake of the head turned into a nod.
“I know what I saw,” she said.
Jake studied her, his eyes quiet and serious. He lifted a hand to her cheek, and Mandy held perfectly still. She didn’t know what she was hoping for. But the affection in Jake’s eyes looked so honest, so undisguised—
He said, “I guess if it’s gotten you through, it can’t be all bad.”
Not what she needed to hear. Mandy’s heart fell with a thud.
Before she knew what she was doing, she was out of the truck, back in the cold air. Her eyes burned, and her mind had room for only two words.
Get away. Get away.
Of course it couldn’t be that easy.
In an instant Jake was on the sidewalk in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. He looked blurry, because God forbid, she felt her eyes brimming with tears.
Get away. Don’t let him see you like this.
She tried to pull back, to escape back into the shop, but firm hands held her in place. His voice cut through. She didn’t know if he’d spoken before or not.
“Mandy, wait.”
Her heart was past pounding now. She was sure it was going to burst out and land on the sidewalk between them. She swallowed hard, twice, remembering that she’d heard somewhere that it could keep you from crying. And suddenly, she had words again. They rushed out of her mouth.
“Jake, I’ve been through this since I was a kid. People humor me. I get it. But they’re people I’ve known all my life. They know me, even if they think I’m a nut. ‘Nice girl. Too bad she’s a fruitcake.’ If you’ll pardon the expression. But you—”
Out of air, she sucked in a deep breath. She tried to turn away again, but Jake held on.
“Okay,” he said. “I said the wrong thing. But you caught me off guard. Can you cut me a little slack? I never saw this coming. You’re not giving me any time to process this.”
Jake’s mind struggled to catch up. This morning he’d been in Pennsylvania. Half an hour ago he’d been ecstatic just to be here. Now everything felt unreal, as if someone had told him the sun was going to set in the east tonight instead of the west. Except it felt like it might not have to set at all. The late afternoon was prematurely gray, bitter cold and devoid of color, except for Mandy’s bright red jacket and deep blue eyes, glistening with tears she wouldn’t let fall.
He wanted to hold her, to backtrack just ten or fifteen minutes, to put everything on pause until he could figure out how to fix this.
Mandy was waiting for him, and he was scrabbling for words that would turn this around instead of digging him deeper. He had nothing.
Mandy stepped back, her shoulders slipping from his grasp.
“Jake, I can take it from everyone else. ‘Mandy Claus.’ I’ve been hearing it since I was nine. I can live with it because I know what I saw. But from you . . .”
Her breath came out in clouds in front of her, as if she were winded.
“I hoped . . . I hoped you’d be different.”
Her words died away, and the tears brimmed huge. “But that’s crazy.” Her voice was a ragged whisper as she turned away.
The words wrenched his heart. Jake caught her by the elbow.
“Wait,” he said. That futile, useless word again. “Where are you going?”
“Home. My car is parked in back.” She kept her face turned away.
He flailed for time. “It’s cold. At least let me take you to it.”
“I can cut through the store.”
Her arm slipped again from his grasp, and she walked away, unlocking the store. Jake tried to think of a way to stop her, but every word he’d said so far had only made things worse. He couldn’t come up with anything new. The word that kept coming back to him, uselessly, was wait.
But he didn’t know what came after that. He needed to think, to sort this out, to regroup.
As Mandy closed the shop door behind her, Jake climbed back into the truck. He rounded the block to the exit of the alley in time to see Mandy’s little red car back out safely and head toward the side street up into the hills that would take her home.
He wanted to follow her, to make sure she got there all right. But that probably bordered on creepy stalker behavior. In her current state of mind, he didn’t think she’d appreciate it.
So, Jake turned up the heat in the truck and drove off through the premature gray.
Chapter 13
When she got home, Mandy gave in and cried like the child she’d once been.
She didn’t cry often, unless you counted movies. It felt as if she’d been saving this one up ever since she met Jake. She’d spent so much time wondering what would happen when this moment finally came. She thought she’d prepared herself for the worst. But deep down, all along, she’d hoped for better.
So she curled in a ball at the far end of the sofa and sobbed into a handy red cushion, wishing she’d remembered to grab a box of tissues first.
After ten or fifteen minutes, the cry-fest lost some of its steam. She slumped against the corner of the couch, weak and played out. As she raised her head, the cushion wadded up in her arms, her eyes went to the spot in front of the fireplace where all this had started sixteen years ago. Night was falling, and the only light came from the lamp on the table beside the couch, so the half-lit room didn’t look too different from the way it had looked that Christmas Eve.
Tonight, that moment was hard to picture.
It had been a fact of life for so long, and she’d told the story so many times, maybe it was the story she remembered more than the event.
Tears threatened again. Mandy bit her lip.
Is it worth it?
Sixteen years of believing in a man in a crimson suit when everyone else thought she’d imagined it. Sixteen years of trying to hold on to the magic. Maybe by now, it was more stubbornness than belief. Maybe it had been for a long time.
Maybe it was time to let it go.
She remembered another night when she’d felt this way. Mandy shoved the thought aside. She was depressed enough already.
She pushed herself off the couch. No more thinking tonight. She headed to the kitchen for something to eat or drink.
Feeling like the world’s biggest cliché, she dug a carton of ice cream out of the freezer and carried it back to the living room, preparing to pick out a movie from the top shelf of her cabinet.
If this were a Humphrey Bogart film, Jake thought, he would have been sitting at a bar, knocking back shots of whiskey.
Instead, he sat huddled at a table in the Pine ’n’ Dine, his hands clutched around a cup of coffee. His mind swirled.
My girlfriend is Joan of Arc. Only with Santa Claus.
Jake took another swig of coffee and wished the world made sense again. On the one hand, Mandy’s revelation explained a lot of things. The secretive behavior. The weird conversation about ghosts in the kitchen.
He should be saying, Is that all?
As secrets went, it could be so much worse. She didn’t have a husband lurking around, or a baby he didn’t know about. She could have been a felon. Or there were people who thought they’d been abducted by aliens.
She just believed in Santa Claus.
In a way, it made sense. It fit Mandy, with her air of innocence, her love for Christmas, her sweet disposition. But it might suggest a pretty shaky grip on reality.
And he was sitting here because she didn’t want to talk to him.
“I haven’t seen you in a while.”
The red-haired waitress named Sherry stood in front of him, order pad in hand, an unspoken question on her face. Maybe she just wanted to know his order, but he didn’t think so.
He’d driven around for over an hour, hoping in vain for everything to come clear for him. He supposed it was no accident he’d ended up at this particular restaurant. It was Sherry who’d first popped off with the nickname “Mandy Claus.” Sherry must know all about this.
Jake flipped open his menu as if it held the answer to some trick question. “Uh—ham and cheese on rye.”
Sherry sidled away.
Jake looked at his watch. Seven-thirty here, ten-thirty on the East Coast. He should be hungry, but he wasn’t. He shouldn’t be exhausted, but he was.
He’d only taken one semester of psychology, but he kept searching for explanations, and the amateur Freud in him whispered insistently about abandonment issues. The fact that her father had left that same year just seemed too significant. Maybe Santa Claus represented the ultimate father figure—kind, all-knowing, and with one heck of a good excuse for being gone all the time.
Before Jake could stretch his lame attempt at a theory any further, Sherry brought his sandwich, with a big side order of curiosity visible on her face. Maybe he could indulge her curiosity and get some answers in the bargain. The restaurant was busy, but judging from her expression, Jake had a feeling she’d make time for a few questions.
He cut to the chase. “So,” he said, “you know about Mandy and Santa Claus?”
Her eyes flickered. “Do you?”
Give me a break. “You’re the one who called her Mandy Claus.”
“A lot of people do. It’s just a nickname.”
Do You Believe in Santa? Page 12