Breakfast With Santa

by Pamela Browning

  “We had a good time at the zoo. He can make a face like a monkey.” Mitchell made no secret of his admiration for this ability.

  “That’s nice,” Beth said with a sigh.

  “You never let me ride my scooter,” Mitchell pointed out.

  “I’ve had a lot of things going on at work.”

  “I hate work. Why do you have to do it?”

  They’d been through this before. “So I can earn money to buy food and pay for our house.”

  “Oh. That’s right. Why doesn’t Tom have to work?”

  “He does, honey, every day at Mr. Holcomb’s ranch.”

  “Riding around on horses sounds more like fun,” Mitchell observed.

  Laughter bubbled up in Beth’s throat. “Maybe Tom will show you more about his job when you have your first riding lesson.”

  “I hope so! I can’t wait. When is it?”

  “On your birthday, remember?”

  “When’s that?”

  “In five more days.”

  Mitchell held up his fingers and folded them down one by one. “One, two, three, four, five,” he recited.

  “That’s right.” She shot him a cheerful glance. “Your birthday will be here before you know it.”

  “It seems like a long time,” Mitchell said.

  Not nearly as long as it seems since I saw Tom, Beth told herself. Since her revelatory conversation with Chloe about Tom’s past, she had deliberately maintained her aloofness in preparation for the discussion she planned to have when he returned. She was dreading it, but she agreed with Chloe that Tom deserved a chance to explain before she decided whether to keep him in her life.

  “Oh, neat, Ryan’s got a hat just like mine!” Mitchell exclaimed as they stopped in front of Nancy’s house.

  Nancy, dressed for work, waved from the front door. “I have a surprise to show you,” she called to Beth. “Wait just a minute. I’ll come out to the car.”

  Beth got out to help Ryan into the back seat.

  “Hey, cowboy,” Mitchell said to Ryan.

  “Hey, cowboy yourself,” Ryan said back.

  Nancy hurried down the path to the car.

  “This is my Christmas present,” she said, extending her hand to display her new engagement ring.

  It was unexpected, though Nancy and Dennis had been dating for over a year. “Wow,” Beth said. “Double wow. That’s beautiful, Nancy.”

  “Thanks,” said Nancy. “This makes it official.”

  Beth hugged Nancy and told her that she was happy for her. Which she was, but as she drove away, she realized that she was more depressed than ever.

  TOM WAS IN AN EXPANSIVE MOOD when he arrived at Beth’s house after stopping for a few minutes at his own place to freshen up. After returning from Amarillo, he’d called her from there, chatted with her briefly and learned that Mitchell wasn’t home yet from day care. This meant that he and Beth would have a few quiet moments before Nancy dropped him off.

  He couldn’t wait to tell Beth how much he’d missed her. After the fiasco with Dorinda on Sunday night, the scene had gone from bad to worse. The next day, he’d found out that some of the equipment he wanted had been mistakenly sold to someone else, and he had ended up driving all over town to find replacements. On top of that, when he checked out of the motel, the inexperienced but officious desk clerk tried to overcharge him. All in all, he was glad to leave Amarillo behind.

  He almost ran up the path to Beth’s front door, hoping she would throw it open and envelop him in a big hug. Instead, she sidestepped him when he entered, and he realized immediately that something major was going on.

  “Beth?” he said, following her into the living room. “Is everything okay?”

  Before she could answer, a car door slammed outside. He glanced out the window and saw Nancy’s small sedan in the driveway. Footsteps ran toward the house, and the front door burst open. Mitchell, attired in jacket and cap, entered and slammed the door shut behind him.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said. He ripped off his cap and rushed over to greet Tom.

  “Hi, Tom,” he said, clearly expecting a similar welcome from his idol. “Are you here to take me to ride Captain?”

  Tom patted Mitchell awkwardly on the shoulder, trying not to show how disappointed he was that he and Beth weren’t going to have time alone. “Not today, cowboy. On your birthday, remember?” His false heartiness didn’t fool even him.

  “Oh,” Mitchell said. “That’s pretty soon. Only four days.”

  “Right. I’m glad you’re keeping count.”

  Mitchell grinned at him before handing a heavily crayoned picture to his mother. “I made this in school. Can we put it on the refrigerator? We were supposed to draw pictures of our Christmas presents, and I drew my scooter.”

  “Sure, honey. Let me help you with your jacket first.”

  “I’d better go,” Tom said gruffly. “You’re both busy.”

  “You’re welcome to stay. I—well, I didn’t expect Mitchell home so early.”

  Once divested of his jacket, Mitchell headed for the kitchen. “Can I have something to eat? I’m hungry.”

  “Wait a minute,” Beth called. “I’ll be right there.” And to Tom she said, “I’ll get you a beer.”

  Since Mitchell was out of sight, he pecked her on the cheek. “I missed you, Beth.”

  “I missed you, too,” she said.

  Her slight hesitation made him wonder—why wasn’t she friendlier? She seemed wound up and radiated tension.

  Mitchell appeared and skidded to a stop in the hall. “Is Tom going to stay for dinner?” he asked his mother.

  Tom answered for her. “Not tonight,” he said, and started for the door.

  “It’s okay if you stay,” Beth said, but her reserved tone implied that maybe it would be better if he didn’t.

  “I’ve already made plans,” he said. He was sure she’d assume that he was going to Leanne’s.

  She attempted a smile, and he left. He hated to do it, but there was no point in sticking around when they couldn’t talk privately.

  When he was almost to his pickup, Mitchell opened the door and yelled after him. “I’m glad you’re home, Tom.”

  He knew he wasn’t mistaking the forlorn undertone to those few words, and he turned and gave Mitchell a halfhearted wave.

  As he was backing out of the driveway, he spotted Beth through the sidelight beside the door. She didn’t wave, only let the curtain fall in front of the glass. Some homecoming, he thought. For a moment he considered turning around and barging back into the house, demanding to be told how he’d transgressed. But this wasn’t the time to raise that topic, so he drove slowly home.

  “MOMMY, are you going to marry Tom?”

  Beth almost dropped the plates she was carrying to the kitchen table. “Why would you ask that?”

  Mitchell started to swing on the kitchen door. “Ryan’s mom is getting married.”

  Beth still hadn’t shaken the sense of sadness that had settled in after Nancy shared her good news. Not to be overjoyed at her friend’s good fortune made her feel guilty. And yet, and yet…She was happy for Nancy. She was.

  “Ryan’s mom says they’re going to go live in Kettersburg with his new dad. Ryan won’t be at my day care after they move.”

  “You have lots of other friends there, and you and Ryan can play when he comes to visit his father in Farish.”

  “Ryan’s going to have two dads, one he lives with and one he visits. You know, maybe you should marry Tom, Mommy.”

  “Just because Ryan’s mom is getting married doesn’t mean I should.” She busied herself mixing spaghetti and sauce together.

  “I don’t think Tom likes us anymore,” Mitchell observed. He stopped swinging on the door.

  Keeping her back to Mitchell, she said, “Tom likes us just fine.” She knew she’d managed to communicate to Tom that they had a problem, and she didn’t feel comfortable about the way they’d left it hanging. She certainly didn’t want to
give Mitchell hints that anything was amiss.

  Mitchell hitched himself up on the chair. “Tom looked funny when he left here today.”

  “Mitchell, get some napkins from the cabinet, please.”

  “What’s for dinner?” He went to do her bidding, which would have encouraged her at any other time. Right now, though, she didn’t care.

  “Spaghetti and meatballs,” she said, taking them to the table.

  Mitchell’s eyes lit up. “Oh, boy! Meatballs! That’s exactly the kind of spaghetti I love!” His enthusiasm bubbled over as he climbed back onto his chair and eyed the food.

  Beth felt a rush of love for her son. Even though she was tired and worried about her relationship with Tom, and even though the last thing she wanted to do at the moment was prepare dinner, this was what parenthood was all about. It wasn’t all Kodak moments, bright and shining faces upturned in the sun. It was soothing painful earaches in the middle of the night, and struggling to keep a clean house when you’d rather take time for yourself, and being flat-out exhausted so that you couldn’t get together with your friends as often as you liked.

  But—and she didn’t want to forget this—it was also being grateful that for your own particular kid, you were the one who endured those difficulties and inconveniences. And you persevered, no matter what, because you loved him.

  She knelt beside Mitchell, who was clumsily spooning spaghetti out of the bowl and getting as much on the table as he was on the plate. “I love you, Mitchell,” she whispered, hugging him so tightly that she felt his ribs beneath his shirt.

  Mitchell, surprised, dropped a huge glob of spaghetti on the floor. “I love you, too, Mom,” he said with a beatific smile, swiveling so that he could place his own cheek against hers.

  Except for the spaghetti under the table, it might have qualified for a Kodak moment. She almost laughed, but instead, she kept hugging Mitchell for a long time, and then she went to get a paper towel to clean up the mess.

  BETH WAS SURPRISED AND GLAD when Tom called later, and she carried the phone into her room, where she’d be able to talk to him more privately. Mitchell was in the living room, watching TV. She intended to broach the subject of Nikki over the phone; it might be easier to have the discussion if she and Tom weren’t face-to-face.

  “I was thinking,” Tom said in that drawl of his, which always put her in mind of long lazy mornings in bed, of breakfast eaten in a leisurely fashion amid sheets tumbled after a night of love-making. “I’d like to cook dinner for you some night at my house.”

  That might be a good idea. At his place, she and Tom would be able to talk uninterrupted, and after a relaxed evening of good conversation and a few glasses of wine, asking him about his past wouldn’t seem so confrontational.

  She hesitated, and Tom said, “Well? How about it?”

  Mitchell wandered in from the living room. “Is that Tom?” he asked, although he’d been instructed repeatedly not to interrupt her when she was talking on the phone.

  “Yes,” she said, waving him away.

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Excuse me,” she said to Tom, and to Mitchell, “You’ll get your turn later.”

  “Now, Mommy. I want to ask him something.”

  Tom couldn’t help but hear this, and as if to prove it, he said, “Beth?”

  But she needed to deal with Mitchell, who had crossed his arms and stuck out his lower lip—a sure danger sign.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said to Tom.

  “Let’s at least set a time for dinner,” he said doggedly.

  Mitchell stood there, immovable.

  “Tomorrow’s not good,” she said, remembering her promise to stop by Zelma’s house on her way home from Kettersburg. “I’ll call you in a while and we’ll decide on a night, okay?”

  “Mom? Tom doesn’t want to talk to me, does he?”

  “Mitchell, hush.”

  “Beth, if you don’t feel like coming for dinner—”

  “Mommy,” Mitchell said, almost wailing.

  Beth knew she had to put an end to this. “Tom, I’ll call you back. Would you prefer your cell or your home phone?”

  “I don’t want to talk to that dumb old Tom, anyway,” Mitchell yelled, and he ran out of her room, slamming the door behind him.

  “Oh, hell, don’t bother calling either phone,” Tom said, clearly put out by what was going on at her end.

  “Tom?”

  He had hung up.

  This time Beth was really angry with Mitchell. She opened the door and marched straight to Mitchell’s room, where he was standing in the middle of the floor, arms crossed, still pouting. He glared at her.

  “You’re going to bed, young man,” she said firmly. “And no story tonight. When I ask you to do something, you’re supposed to mind, and it’s my job to make sure that you do. It’s not good manners to keep talking to me when I’m on the phone. As for the yelling, it had better not happen again.”

  “I wanted to talk to Tom.”

  “I told you you’d have your turn later.”

  “Tom doesn’t talk to me anymore,” Mitchell said, his lower lip quivering. “I knew he didn’t like us. I said.”

  “Of course Tom likes you,” she reassured him. “Didn’t he take you to the zoo? Aren’t you going to learn to ride Captain?”

  “If he likes me, he wouldn’t of hung up.”

  She wondered how to explain to a five-year-old that his own actions had been responsible for making Tom want to terminate the conversation.

  She went to the dresser and found his pajamas in the drawer. “Put these on, please,” she said wearily. “And brush your teeth.”

  But Mitchell was having none of it, and Beth sensed a tantrum coming on. She turned down his bedspread, hoping she could get him into bed before he erupted. Leanne, experienced at such things, had advised distracting Mitchell when he gave signs of being tired, stubborn and on the brink of losing his cool. Of course, Leanne hadn’t suggested what to do if she, Beth, started to lose her cool.

  “There you are,” Beth said with forced cheeriness. “All ready for you to jump in between the covers.”

  “I don’t want to go to bed.”

  “Mitchell—”

  And then Mitchell lost control. He kicked the nightstand and threw himself on the floor.

  “I hate Tom!” he cried. “I hate him, Mommy.” His heels pounded the wood floor.

  Beth decided not to deal with this irrational outburst; experience had taught her that paying attention to Mitchell’s tantrums never made them any shorter or less disturbing. “Please don’t say that. Tom doesn’t deserve it. Put on the pj’s, and I’ll be back to tuck you in after a few minutes.”

  At one time she would have wasted words trying to reason with Mitchell when he was in this kind of mood, but she had learned a better approach. She left her son without a backward glance, ignoring the crying and kicking. Back in her own room, pretending to be deaf to the sounds in the other room, she washed her face, slipped into the T-shirt she wore for bed, and by the time she had done so, realized that the tantrum had ended. She breathed a sigh of relief and decided to give Mitchell a few minutes before going to tuck him in.

  She was turning back her own bedcovers, when she heard terrible noises coming from the living room. They sounded like splintering glass, and pounding, and a couple of crashes that she would rather not identify.

  She ran into the living room to find Mitchell standing amid a shambles of broken glass and ceramics. He stared angrily up at her, but at least he dropped the toy hammer with which he had wrought such mayhem.

  “What have you done?” she cried.

  Mitchell only burst into tears.

  DURING THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT that followed Mitchell’s destruction of much of her precious heart collection, Beth kept thinking about another thing Leanne had once told her: “Whenever you add or subtract a family member, it changes the dynamics. None of us relates to each other in quite the same way.” At the time,
Leanne had been reflecting on how life at the Novak house changed when Eddie was traveling or Maddy was babysitting Gretchen’s kids for a whole weekend. But the observation could certainly apply to the situation with Tom, as well.

  Beth had modified her family of two by including Tom, and it didn’t matter that he wasn’t really a member. By virtue of being part of her life, Tom had upset the equilibrium in her household. No wonder Mitchell was acting out. Being a sensitive kid, he had picked up on her uncertainty about Tom, on her sadness at the possibility of ending the relationship, and he was feeling angry. He was almost certainly upset with her for minimizing his contact with the man he had grown to idolize.

  To make things even worse, Tom didn’t call the next day or the next. Sick at heart, Beth gave up the idea of a warm, intimate dinner at Tom’s house. He was probably out of the notion by this time.

  Besides, she had enough to handle within her own four walls. By the next morning when he woke up, a chastened Mitchell had been contrite over the damage he’d done to her heart collection and even drew her a picture of a lopsided heart to atone for his bad behavior. Beth tacked it to the refrigerator next to the one he’d drawn of his scooter, but she also meted out a punishment: Mitchell was not to be allowed to go over to Jeremiah’s to play over the weekend or during the week ahead. He was crushed at the prospect but accepted her pronouncement stoically. He clearly understood that he’d done wrong, and he was remorseful.

  “Can—can Jeremiah come over here?” Mitchell asked, haltingly exploring the limits of his restriction.

  “No, not until Friday of next week,” Beth told him, circling the date on the calendar so he’d be able to keep track of how many days it was. She hated the way her son’s face fell at the prospect of no playdates until then, but she was determined to stick to her guns. The damage to her beloved collection rankled, and it would be a long time before she got over it, even though she knew that, for her own good and Mitchell’s, she needed to put the incident behind them and move on.

  “I can still learn to ride Captain, can’t I?”

  Beth wasn’t quite sure what to say to that, since Tom had not called back.

  “Can’t I, Mommy?”

  “I’ll talk to Tom about it soon,” she promised.