Father Christmas

by Judith Arnold

  A strange impulse possessed John. He was always honest, always straight, yet something—his obsessive thoughts about Molly, perhaps, her dimpled smile, her bright eyes—shook the devil awake inside him. “I’m one of those winos, ma’am,” he lied.

  The woman fell back a step and clutched her hand to the silk scarf knotted at her throat. “Oh, I—I didn’t mean—well, you look so clean.”

  “Yes, ma’am. They hosed me down before they put me out here.”

  She blushed, obviously mortified by her tactlessness. Her companion passed some of her packages over to the first woman. “Let me give you something, young man,” she all but pleaded, pulling a bill from a leather wallet and shoving it into John’s gloved hand. “That’s just for you, for having the strength to redeem yourself. Merry Christmas!” With that, she hustled her friend away.

  Chuckling, John smoothed out the bill. Fifty bucks. “Just for you,” she’d said instead of stuffing it into the kettle. John could think of plenty of ways to spend fifty bucks. He could buy a fleet of toy airplanes for Mike for Christmas, or a new pair of sneakers for the kid. He could buy lot of cookies, a lot of beer.

  His dishonesty had its limits, and they fell somewhere in the vicinity of pretending to be a wino in the presence of two snooty matrons. He folded the bill in half and slid it through the slot in the kettle’s lid.

  Lifting his gaze, he saw Molly.

  She was emerging from a luncheonette, carrying a paper bag. Once again, she wasn’t wearing a hat, and he thought of her ears turning pink from the cold, as pink as the tip of her nose.

  He wondered what she was doing in this part of town, so far from the preschool. But when she smiled at him, he stopped wondering. He didn’t care.

  “Was that a bribe?” she asked, angling her gaze from his hand to the kettle where he’d stashed the woman’s donation.

  Her smile was contagious—or maybe he was just happy to see her, because he found himself smiling, too. “I think it was more of a pay-off.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A bribe is before the fact. You give a cop a bribe if you want him to do something for you. A pay-off is after the fact, after he’s done something for you.”

  “I see. And what did you do for those two ladies?”

  “I refrained from calling them idiots. And I didn’t keep the pay-off, either. Everything in the kettle goes to Higgins House.”

  “Such integrity.” Molly hugged the bulging bag to her. In her thick down parka she looked shapeless. But he’d seen her out of her jacket. He knew where she had curves, where she was slim. “I’m getting an education. Yesterday I got to see you catch a pick-pocket, and today I got to see you do the right thing with a bribe. I mean, a pay-off.” Her smile shimmered.

  He caught a whiff of a peppery aroma rising from her bag. “Lunch?” he asked.

  “Clam chowder. Cara said this place—” she waved toward the deli “—has the best clam chowder in Arlington. I volunteered to buy some for the staff. I’ve got two quarts. I hope it’s enough.”

  “It’s going to get cold,” he noted, then gave himself a mental kick. Reminding her it could get cold was as good as inviting her to leave.

  Fortunately, she didn’t accept the invitation. “I was planning to zap it in the microwave when we’re ready to eat it. Lunch time isn’t for another hour.”

  He considered the evidence with a small degree of professional detachment. Molly had driven all the way across town to buy two quarts of clam chowder that wasn’t going to be consumed for an hour. The director of a preschool was running a lame-brained errand—and that story about the deli’s having the best clam chowder didn’t wash, either. The best clam chowder in Arlington came from Moise’s Fish House on the West Side. Everybody knew that.

  Molly had come to the shopping district for some other reason. He was curious, but he couldn’t question her. He wasn’t in an interrogation room down at headquarters; she hadn’t been charged with anything.

  “How’s Mike?” he asked.

  “He’s having a good day.”

  “No tears?”

  “No problems.” She angled her head, studying John intently. “What does he say at home, John? Does he talk about school? I know this is only his second week at the Children’s Garden, and he doesn’t seem upset about being there, but at home...is he stressed out? Does he tell you about his day?”

  “He seems happy,” John said.

  “He doesn’t mention any problems? Anyone he doesn’t like?”

  “No.” But now she had his suspicions revved up. “Who doesn’t he like?”

  “No one in particular that Amy and I have noticed. I wanted to know if you were seeing anything at home that we aren’t seeing at school.”

  John thought for a minute. If he told her he wasn’t seeing anything at home, she might think he was ignoring his son. “I think he’d be happier if you let the kids eat cookies.”

  She grinned. He practically heard the whoosh of heat flaring inside him as the pilot light ignited. Her smile was warm enough to melt the universe.

  He didn’t want this. Not now. Not with her.

  “I’d better get back to work,” he said, giving his bell a perfunctory swing.

  “I’d better get back, too. I’ll see you later,” she said, still wearing that radiant grin, still glowing warm enough to thaw the polar ice-caps. Cripes. He didn’t want to want her warmth and her smile, he didn’t want to be able to visualize her shape inside her parka, and imagine how she would feel.

  If it were only sex he wanted, he knew enough places to find it, and those places were not the Children’s Garden Preschool. But when he looked at Molly, smiling at him even as she backed away toward Bank Street, he understood that sex wasn’t all he wanted. And that scared the hell out of him.

  ***

  BY FRIDAY, HE’D FIGURED OUT that it wasn’t a coincidence. She was following him.

  Well, not exactly following him, but finding him in his various Santa posts around the city. By the end of Monday, he’d stopped an attempted mugging and nabbed a drug dealer doing a brisk retail trade in loose joints in the alley between a stationery store and a sporting goods place, and with those two collars he had pretty much doomed himself to more Santa duty on the streets of Arlington. He got a day off from the red suit and fake beard on Tuesday, when he had to testify in court on an attempted homicide. It turned out to be not much of a reprieve, though. The defense attorney was a sharp-witted woman in a gray suit, with a machine-gun mouth and blond hair and, oddly enough, the same last name as Molly. She’d looked a little like Molly, too, except for the fair coloring. She’d done her damnedest to slash John’s testimony to ribbons.

  John was used to being flayed alive by defense attorneys. Nothing the Saunders attorney did to him rattled him much. He just recited his testimony and tried to guess whether such a sharp-shooting lawyer could be related to the woman who had held his son on her lap when he’d been crying.

  He would have asked her Tuesday evening when he’d gone to the school to pick up Mike, except that she wasn’t there. One of the other teachers was standing guard by the front door, dismissing the kids. John hadn’t met her before—she was in charge of the Tiny Tots group, she told him—and she’d made him show her two pieces of identification. “One of the children in the Pre-K class is the object of a difficult custody battle,” she’d explained once John had shown her his police badge and driver’s license. “I’m sure as an officer of the law, you know how messy those can be. The non-custodial parent has made some threats, so we have to be very careful whom we release the children to.”

  If John had had more energy, he would have told her she ought to be more careful whom she talked to about the students’ personal business. But he’d been wiped out from his long day on the witness stand, and vaguely disappointed that Molly wasn’t behind the front desk when he’d arrived at the preschool to get Mike, and irritated to think that the following day he was going to have to put on the San
ta outfit and stake out Arlington’s busy streets once more.

  Despite the warnings of Erin Murphy, the seven-year-old accessory to bank robbery, Santa probably wouldn’t mind John’s impersonation. The saint of Christmas would likely be very happy with the crimes John was shutting down on the busy winter streets of Arlington. In four days of undercover Santa work, he’d accumulated a handful of collars—drug deals, shoplifting, muggings, one misdemeanor assault and an attempted car theft.

  But he was bored. He was grossly under-utilized, and under-challenged, and if Coffey didn’t let him get back to his real work soon, he was going to be a lot closer to snapping than he’d ever been before.

  The only thing was, Molly kept showing up. No matter which end of Hauser Boulevard he was on, whether he was in the shopping district or the banking district, she found him. Central Avenue, Newcombe... She found him.

  By Friday, he realized that it wasn’t just coincidence. She was actually looking for him.

  “Hi,” she said, emerging from an office supply store with a carton of printer paper. “How’s the Santa business today?”

  “Same as yesterday,” he said with a smile. The truth was, he’d been looking for her, waiting for her to show up, wondering what excuse she’d have for him today. He’d spent the morning searching the crowds for crooks and punks, but also for a petite, hatless woman with luminous eyes and a smile that never failed to turn on the furnace inside him. He’d been waiting for the rush of heat, and the instant he saw her, it came.

  “Well, now I can refill my printer,” she said, gesturing with the cartridge. “We’re down to colored construction paper, and—”

  “Are you stalking me?” he asked. It was a rude question, a crude one. But he had to know. He was tired of trying to guess what she was up to, and until he knew for sure, he wasn’t going to be able to figure out how to control his reaction to her. This much heat was a dangerous thing. John didn’t know how to deal with it. Maybe she could explain it for him, the way her teachers at the Children’s Garden explained the alphabet or the rules of sharing to their students.

  “Stalking you?” She hesitated, then tossed back her head and laughed. “Yes, I think I am.”

  He closed his eyes. For a moment, he couldn’t feel the blustery air, the frizz of his fake beard, the weight of his wig at the nape of his neck. All he felt was her, the gutsy, joyful force of her.

  “You aren’t going to arrest me, are you?” she asked, then laughed again.

  “No.” The word came out low, almost choked, and he coughed to cover. He wasn’t used to a woman pursuing him—at least not a woman like Molly. Sherry had pursued him, true, but she’d been different. She’d been the kind of woman who went after what she wanted when she wanted it and then, if she discovered it was no longer what she wanted, she discarded it. She’d pursued John until she had him, and then she’d left him to pursue someone else, even though leaving him meant leaving Mike, as well.

  Molly might cut a man down, but he couldn’t imagine her abandoning a child.

  “It’s just that you look so funny in your Santa Claus outfit,” she explained. “I know if I see you in it, it’ll have me smiling for the rest of the day. And there’s always some errand that has to be run at the school, so...” Her smile faltered slightly. Her eyes grew more intense, the brown darker, the gold speckles brighter. “Maybe you aren’t going to arrest me. You’re going to have me committed.”

  “You’re not crazy,” he said, unsure what to add. He was sort of insulted—she thought he looked funny in his Santa disguise?—but mostly he was flattered. He’d never before been accused of making someone smile all day.

  “I’m being a pest,” she murmured. “I’m sorry.”

  He caught her chin before she could lower it, and tilted her face up so he could gaze into her eyes. He wished he wasn’t wearing gloves and he could place his fingers against the smooth skin of her jaw. It would feel like velvet, he was sure. “Don’t apologize.”

  She didn’t speak. Neither did he. He couldn’t imagine how she could stare at him in his goof-ball camouflage without smiling right now—if not erupting in hoots and guffaws. She was right: dressed up as Santa, he looked like a dweeb.

  She looked...she looked like the most honest, natural woman he’d ever met.

  “Will I see you tomorrow?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

  Tomorrow? She’d see him tonight when he stopped by the school to pick up Mike, if she stuck around the school late enough. Tomorrow wasn’t a school day, though. It was Saturday.

  “The Daddy School,” she reminded him.

  If she’d been asking him for a date tomorrow, he’d have had to say no. Only because he knew dating her would be a mistake. He wasn’t right for a woman like her. He wasn’t warm the way she was. He wasn’t open and affectionate. He was a man who occasionally started his day with a murder-suicide, and when he was done scrubbing the blood off his psyche, he didn’t have much left to give a woman.

  But she wasn’t asking him for a date. She was asking him to come to her school and learn how to develop Mike’s sharing skills.

  Maybe he was standing too close to her. Maybe the curve of her cheek against his gloved hand, and the dazzling faith that shone deep in her eyes, sapped him of the ability to think clearly. Because even as he cautioned himself that he shouldn’t let her warmth reach too deep inside him, even as he comprehended that he had to keep his distance from her in every way he could, he heard himself say, “Sure, I’ll be there.”

  Chapter Six

  “IN A WORD,” Gail said, “you’re crazy.”

  “Thanks for the unsolicited advice,” Molly shot back. “And you obviously can’t count. That was two words.”

  Gail shoved a limp lock of wheat-colored hair from her forehead and slumped in her chair. She and Molly were seated at the table in the small eat-in kitchen of Molly’s condominium. Molly had invited Gail over for dinner so they could discuss what to send their parents for Christmas. But a long time ago, they’d stopped debating whether their parents would prefer a year of weekly house-cleaning service—Gail’s suggestion—or a flat-screen television set—Molly’s idea. Over a supper of broiled salmon steaks and salad, they’d somehow drifted from the subject of Christmas gifts to the subject of police officers. One police officer in particular.

  “I’m telling you, the man was like ice on the witness stand. I can’t believe you could be blushing over him. He was cold enough to give a polar bear frostbite.”

  “Well, that’s his job, isn’t it?” Molly pointed out, not daring to voice her fear that her sister could be right, and John Russo could actually be as cold as Gail claimed. He wasn’t effusive. He didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. But she had sensed heat inside him. She’d seen flickers of flame in his eyes, glimmers of warmth in his too-rare smile.

  Gail’s antipathy toward John had nothing to do with him in particular. She hated all cops. That he had been a prosecution witness, testifying against her client, only made her resentment specific to the occasion. “Did you break him?” Molly asked, not sure what answer she hoped for. “Did you destroy him on the stand?”

  Gail pursed her lips and shook her head. “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” she muttered. “I’m still going to get my guy off. A lot of their evidence is circumstantial. The fact that your boy Russo didn’t crack under pressure doesn’t mean I didn’t make headway.”

  Molly suppressed a smile. She was glad John hadn’t cracked—and she felt disloyal for being glad.

  “So, what exactly is going on with you and Detective Russo?” Gail asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Gail took a sip of chardonnay, lowered her glass and shook her head again, this time in disbelief. “Every time you think about him, your face turns red.”

  “It does not,” Molly argued. Her cheeks instantly betrayed her, growing warm with a blush. “Anyway, I can’t help it if he’s gorgeous. You saw him yourself. Tell me you didn’t think he was gorgeous.”<
br />
  Gail snorted. “He’s a cop. Enough said.”

  “Absolutely. Enough said. Let’s talk about that high-def TV for Mom and Dad.”

  Gail refused to take the hint. “Let me tell you about cops, Molly. Forget about the homicide case I’m defending, where your buddy testified for the prosecution. Let me tell you what happened with a case I took on today. A kid is walking down Center Street after school, okay? He’s drinking a beer. A cop yanks him aside and asks to see some proof that he’s legally old enough to drink. The kid is only seventeen, so of course he can’t show any proof of age. So the cop, without a warrant, reaches into the kid’s pocket and discovers that the kid is carrying a piece. And now they’re trying to lock the kid up on a weapons charge.”

  “Forgive me if I say this client of yours doesn’t exactly sound like a candidate for ‘Most Likely to Succeed.’”

  “That’s irrelevant. In my opinion, the boy can succeed. He’s got to clean up his act, get some counseling, and stop the underage drinking.”

  “And his gun?”

  “I don’t like guns any more than you do,” Gail noted. “But the cop had no right to search for it. He didn’t have a warrant. Instead of helping the kid to work out a drinking problem, the cop is trying to put the kid in jail.”

  “I’m sorry,” Molly said, “but I’d rather see that kid in jail than shooting some innocent person.”

  “The point,” Gail lectured, “is that cops think they’re above the law. They have the power of the badge, and they think that exempts them from the Bill of Rights. You know it’s true, Molly. It happens all the time. And your pal Russo is no better or worse than the rest of them.”

  “Not all cops are bad,” Molly argued, amazed to hear herself defend police officers to her sister. “I saw John Russo stop a pick-pocket from stealing an elderly gentleman’s wallet. And he straightened out some kids, too. Seven-year-old bank robbers.”

  “Seven years old?” That shut Gail up.

  “And he didn’t send them to jail.”