She held the stroller steady while John snapped the belt shut. Michael was out of breath from resisting his father and wailing, but John appeared unfazed, although his right fingers twitched from the strain. “I hate you!” Michael bellowed. “Bad, bad Daddy! I hate you!”
John’s expression grew stony. Avoiding Molly’s gaze, he eased the stroller’s handle from her and pushed it into the crowds, heading toward the food court.
Just as she’d wanted to help him during his tussle with Michael, she wanted to help him now, reassuring him that his son didn’t really hate him, that young children had limited vocabularies with which to express their anger. But John clearly wasn’t in the mood to be reassured. He propelled the stroller through the crowds, as grim as a Marine on the Bataan Death March, ignoring the glittery decorations and the cloying Christmas music being piped through the atrium.
By the time they reached the food court, Michael had subsided. He slouched in the canvas seat of the stroller, his cheeks tear-stained and his lower lip curled in a magnificent pout. John steered the stroller to an empty table and set the brake. He flexed his fingers gingerly, then massaged the back of his right hand with his left. “What do you want to eat?” he asked Molly, his tone dry and measured.
She shrugged. Observing the war of wills between father and son had made her lose her appetite. Even though she knew Michael’s behavior was perfectly normal for his age, she hurt for John—and hurt even more because he was so obviously determined not to accept any sympathy.
She surveyed the eateries surrounding the food court: sandwiches, salads, burritos, gourmet cookies, stir-fry, bagels, frozen yogurt, hot-dogs, burgers and pizza. “A bagel, I guess. And a diet cola.”
He nodded, hunkered down next to Michael and asked the same question. “A cookie,” Michael said in a tear-choked voice. “I wanna cookie. Choc-chip.”
“A hamburger and a cookie.”
“No hamburger! No! I don’t want it!” Michael revved up to wail again. “No hamburger! Daddy, no!”
Ignoring him, John straightened up. “I’ll be right back,” he promised, as if he thought Molly expected him to disappear forever, leaving her with the tantrum-throwing child. Pivoting, he vanished into the milling crowds.
She lowered herself onto a bright green wooden chair beside Michael’s stroller and stared at him until he stopped bellowing. It took him a good few minutes to compose himself. “Feeling better?” she asked pleasantly.
He sulked. He had probably forgotten what had upset him. Molly diagnosed his mood as pre-nap fretfulness. Most toddlers behaved terribly when they were tired.
“I want a cookie,” he grumbled.
“You said you were hungry. A cookie won’t satisfy your hunger as well as something nutritious would. But look—there’s your daddy. He got you a cookie.”
Michael perked up. Apparently, all was forgiven. “A cookie? A big cookie?”
“Enormous,” Molly observed, rising to take the overloaded tray John was trying to balance between his left hand and the bandaged back of his right wrist. She lowered it to the table, then watched as John unwrapped a small hamburger and handed it to Michael.
Without a peep, he wolfed down the burger, guzzled his milk and pounced on his cookie. At the table, John and Molly ate their lunches more decorously. John seemed fatigued, either from battling Michael or pushing himself physically so soon after his stabbing. Most likely from both.
If anything, Michael was even more fatigued. His chewing slowed until he was just sucking on the cookie and struggling to keep his eyes open “He’s going to be asleep in five minutes,” Molly predicted.
John glanced at the stroller. A smile flickered across his lips as he reached down, pulled the half-consumed cookie from his son’s senseless fingers, and used a napkin to wipe a smear of chocolate from the boy’s lip. “Less than five minutes,” he said as Michael began to snore.
John wrapped the remaining half of the cookie in a napkin and tucked it into the tote hanging from the back of the stroller. Then he leaned back in his chair and took a sip of his soda. His gaze settled on Molly, his lids slightly lowered as he observed her over the rim of his paper cup.
Despite the hundreds of shoppers swirling around them, munching on snacks and lugging bags of merchandise, Molly felt as if she and John were all alone in the mall. Despite the constant drone of voices and the syrupy Christmas music, she could practically hear him swallow, hear him breathe. She almost resented Michael for conking out and leaving her all alone with a man who seemed far too capable of holding her imagination hostage, infiltrating her senses and making her forget everything she ought to be remembering.
She scrambled for something safe to talk about. “Are you going to see any of your sisters and brothers for the holiday?” It was a nosy question, but at least it distracted her from the sexual undertow she felt in his presence.
“Probably not. We got together for Thanksgiving.”
“You mentioned that one of your brothers is disabled.”
John nodded.
One thing she’d learned was that he never volunteered information. If she wanted to know something, she would have to ask. “What kind of disability does he have?”
“He’s mentally retarded.”
“Ah.” Her professional curiosity was whetted. Last year she’d had a girl with Down Syndrome at the school, and she’d really enjoyed working with her. “How is he doing? Can he live independently? Is he educable?”
“He lives in a supervised group home about a mile from my parents. He bags groceries at a supermarket. He’s okay. He’s a good kid.” John laughed and shook his head. “He’s three years older than me. I just always think of him as a kid brother.”
“I’ll bet you were very protective of him when you were growing up,” she said.
John considered, then shrugged. “Nobody dared to give him a hard time when I was around, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s exactly what I mean.” John’s habit of taking responsibility for everyone must have developed when he was quite young. In his huge family, she assumed that he would have been the one most sensitive to his brother’s needs. He would have made sure his brother was all right before he went off to play ball or hang out with his friends. That was the way John was, and she adored him for it.
She didn’t want to adore him. But she’d never met a man like him before, a man so willing to do the right thing. She didn’t care what Gail said about cops, their craving for power and their abuse of it. What power John had came not from his gun and his badge but from his ethics. He had earned that power, and she...
Well, adored was all she’d admit to.
“How about the rest of your siblings?” she asked, longing to know more about him, as much as he would tell her.
He smiled crookedly. “How about them?”
“What are they like? Are any of them cops like you?”
“No.” He drained his soda and relaxed in his chair, patiently allowing her to finish her bagel. “Sarah’s a singer and voice teacher in Boston. Jimmy was a high school baseball star. He coaches at a high school in New Jersey. Danny works at the supermarket in Pawtucket, Linda’s a realtor in Connecticut, and then there’s me, and then Nina, who’s got four kids and doesn’t have time for much else. And then Bobby.”
Molly was practically giddy from this unexpected outpouring of information. “What does Bobby do?”
John smiled wistfully. “He works for the postal service and tries to stay clean. He’s had some problems.”
“Drugs?”
“Yeah. When he was younger.”
“I’ll bet you took care of him, too.”
John dismissed her guess with another shrug. “I kept him out of jail, got him into a program. He did the rest.”
His modesty only made her adore him more. She could picture him exhorting his brother into treatment, dragging him there, forcing him to stay until he was clean and cheering him on every step of the way. She could just as easily p
icture him taking on any bully who dared to taunt his brother Danny.
Her own family was tiny compared to John’s. And the one time her sister had needed protection, Molly hadn’t been able to do anything for her. Afterward, she’d listened to Gail and comforted her, and promised not to tell their parents what had happened. But she hadn’t been able to protect her sister, or save her.
If John had been Gail’s brother, he would have protected her. Molly was certain of it.
“I don’t think my parents could have handled seven children,” she said, deciding she adored John’s parents, too.
“I can barely handle one,” he admitted with a grin.
She crumpled her napkin and gestured toward the one child John thought he could barely handle. Michael seemed quite manageable at the moment, snoozing contentedly in his stroller, dreaming, no doubt, of cookies and Christmas trees. “We’d better do some shopping while he’s asleep,” she suggested.
With a nod, John gathered their trash onto the tray and carried it to the nearest waste bin. By the time he returned, Molly had released the brake on the stroller. “Where to first?” she asked. “Christmas tree ornaments?”
“A bath toy,” John answered. “Santa’s going to bring Mike one this year.”
“Well, I know you’re Santa. I’ve seen you,” she joked, recalling him in his undercover costume. Just because he was clad in regular clothes, just because his hair was dark and his angular jaw wasn’t hidden by a fluffy white beard, didn’t mean he didn’t still have a bit of Santa Claus in him.
His tenuous smile as they joined the swarms of frenzied shoppers informed her that maybe he wouldn’t mind too much if she thought of him as Santa Claus.
***
BY SIX O’CLOCK, a one-hundred-percent healthy person would have been ready to dive into bed and sleep for a year, and John was functioning at only about sixty-five percent. But somehow, Molly’s presence had managed to invigorate him enough to keep him going all afternoon, getting done what had to be done to make this holiday come out right for Mike.
John couldn’t have done it without her. Her brisk efficiency and knowledge had enabled him to buy a Santa-sized sackful of Christmas gifts for Mike and get them locked into the trunk of his car before Mike woke up. Under her guidance, John had purchased a plastic tug boat and barge for the tub; a zippered sweater—”He’s too young for buttons, but he can handle a zipper all by himself,” she had pointed out; several pads of blank white paper and a bucket of crayons; a couple of Dr. Seuss books; a set of waffle-blocks; a dog hand-puppet; a lightweight foam ball and a flexible basketball hoop that could be hooked over the back of a chair or a door; and, instead of a plain toy airplane, a kit of interlocking plastic pieces that could be built into the shape of a plane, or a robot, or a truck.
Once the gifts were stashed and Mike began to emerge from his nap, they’d retraced their steps through the mall, this time shopping for items John didn’t have to sneak past the kid: strands of tiny silver-white lights, garlands of tinsel, non-breakable tree ornaments with satiny finishes and, at Molly’s insistence, a large package of multi-colored pipe-cleaners. “Michael can make some ornaments of his own with these,” she’d said, tossing the package into John’s shopping cart.
John had asked Molly to come back to his house—to help Mike with the pipe-cleaners, he’d said, though that wasn’t his main reason for inviting her. Whether or not she’d sensed that he was inviting her as much for himself as for Mike, she had accepted. And sure enough, they’d spent what remained of the afternoon doing things for the tree he and Bud had set up by the fireplace in the living room—stringing lights, draping tinsel and hanging the satin bulbs.
By late afternoon, exhaustion had threatened to claim him. Rather than leave, Molly had ordered him to relax in the den, and then she and Mike had worked with the pipe-cleaners, bending green ones into wreath shapes, and red ones into bows, and yellow ones into bells. Actually, the ones Mike made were unrecognizable, but he identified them for John so he’d know that the lumpy red and white twist was a pipe-cleaner candy cane and the blue wad of fuzz-coated wire was supposed to be an M&M candy.
It didn’t really matter what they were supposed to be. Hung from the spiky green branches of the tree, they looked great.
John wasn’t used to feeling sentimental about the holiday. In his childhood, Christmas always meant his mother did a lot of baking, special cookies and cakes she made at no other time of the year. But the tree the Russos used was artificial, and gifts were kept to a minimum—and were invariably chosen for practicality’s sake, because the family was always on a tight budget. When John and his siblings got older, they each gave one present to one sibling, determined by lot. One year Jimmy gave John a pack of baseball cards. Another year, he’d gotten a pot holder from his younger sister Nina. He’d always wanted to be picked by Danny, because his mother had helped Danny to choose a nice gift for whoever he’d drawn. No one ever got a pot holder from Danny.
As best John could remember, his favorite thing about the holiday was having a week off from school and playing in the snow, on those rare occasions when Pawtucket was blessed with a White Christmas. But Mike would have a different memory of the holiday.
All because of Molly.
He stood across the living room from her and Mike, pretending to admire the tree but in fact watching her. Mike was squeezing one of his pipe-cleaner ornaments so tightly that whatever shape it used to be, it was a different shape now. “I put it here,” he announced, tugging at one of the few branches he could reach, a couple of feet off the floor. “I put this one here. A tiger, see, Daddy? Yellow and black.”
It looked more like a bumblebee to John, but he nodded solemnly. “That’s a fine tiger.”
“It’s scary. It roars so loud! Roarrrrr!”
Molly glanced his way. Her hair had gotten mussed, a few locks straying across the part to the other side, and her cheeks were as rosy now as they’d been outdoors in the cold afternoon. Something tightened in his gut when he caught her smile. “What do you think?” she asked. “A pretty cool tree, isn’t it?”
It was a splendid tree. It was the most beautiful tree John had ever seen, especially with Mike and Molly standing beside it. It was so magnificent, he didn’t know what to say.
Molly didn’t seem to notice. “Well,” she said, checking her watch, “it’s getting late, so—”
“I have some chicken,” he told her, then swore silently at his ineptitude. Her quizzical expression forced him to clarify himself. “Leftovers from last night. I was going to heat it up. Would you like to stay?”
Her smile returned, not as bright as before but sweeter, somehow. “Leftovers. How appetizing.”
That sounded more like a no than a yes to him. Not that he blamed her. He’d taken over her entire afternoon, left her to watch Mike while he nursed his aching body for an hour in the den, and then offered as a reward a supper of reheated leftovers. Of course she wouldn’t like to stay.
He covered his disappointment with a nod. “I’ll take you home, then.”
“I love chicken,” she said, her cheeks growing rosier. She studied the tree for a moment, but John could tell the tree wasn’t on her mind. She looked as awkward as he felt.
This shouldn’t be awkward. They were both adults. The way John felt about Molly right now—the way he’d been feeling about her for some time—was extremely adult. Why were they dancing around a discussion of leftovers? If it weren’t for Mike, and for John’s battered condition, he would gladly take her out for dinner someplace nice, and then to a movie, or a rock club where they could dance till two a.m. Then he would take her home—her place or his—and make love to her.
But his arm was only semi-functional and Mike was in the picture, and it had been a long day. And the only thing Molly had indicated any love for was chicken.
Still, she hadn’t said no. He’d take what he could get, even if it was only her company for an hour longer. In the grand scheme of things, an hour
spent in Molly’s company was worth more than all the Christmas gifts John had ever hoped for.
“This is another tiger,” Mike boasted, perching another yellow and black blob on a low branch of the tree. “I’m hungry. Let’s eat now. Okay, Daddy?”
Why not? Any tree with two pipe-cleaner tigers on it qualified as done in John’s mind. Without waiting for a more definitive acceptance from Molly, he scruffed his fingers through Mike’s hair and then strode into the kitchen.
By the time they took their seats around the kitchen table, John had yielded to Molly’s superiority in food preparation. She microwaved three potatoes, then cut them open, sprinkled onion flakes and parsley on the softened white pulp and microwaved them again. While they were cooking, she warmed the chicken in the oven, then tore some greens into a salad bowl. John was reduced to keeping Mike out of her way and setting the table, two tasks he performed measurably better than cooking. Ever since Sherry had left, he and Mike hadn’t had too many hot meals. The only reason they happened to have half of a cooked chicken in the fridge was because Bud Schaefer had insisted on buying one of those rotisserie birds for them at the supermarket on the way home from buying the tree yesterday.
John wondered whether his feelings for Molly had anything to do with her willingness to cook for him and watch his kid. He wasn’t looking for a wife, not after his debacle with Sherry. He didn’t want to be hurt again, and he sure as hell didn’t want to hurt a woman. Given his performance as a husband the first time around, he didn’t see himself getting married and inflicting damage on another woman any time soon.
Maybe if Molly didn’t act so domestic around him, he would be able to think of her strictly as a potential sex partner. Which seemed like an awfully piggish way to think about a woman, but it was safer than the other way.
He didn’t talk much during dinner. His silence was a result of his irksome thoughts about Molly. His yearning for her—as a wife-substitute, as a lover, as something else, something more, something he couldn’t begin to understand—was a puzzle he wanted to solve before he did something he might regret. But Molly and Mike didn’t seem to mind that he said little. They spent most of the meal engrossed in a vigorous analysis of Burt and Ernie’s co-dependent relationship on Sesame Street, discussed in language Mike could understand. “He’s so silly,” Mike critiqued Ernie. “He always bothers Burt ’cause he’s so silly. Burt’s grouchy.”
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