Breakfast With Santa

by Pamela Browning

  “What do I take?”

  “Just put a few shirts and jeans in the duffel. Oh, and some underwear.”

  “I can do that.” He stood watching her where she leaned against the door frame of his room. “Is something wrong, Mommy?”

  “I—no. I’ve been very busy getting ready to go. Just—just—put your things in your duffel like I told you.”

  She went into her bedroom and began to rummage through her drawers. She missed Tom and wished he could be there to comfort her, but realized right away that it was a futile hope. An overwhelming sense of loss enveloped her as she tossed clothes into her overnight bag, and she debated whether to call Tom on his cell phone. When she reminded herself that her name would pop up on the call screen and he had the option of not answering, she decided against it.

  At least she would have the visit with Allen and Corinne to distract her. Perhaps, like Tom earlier, she needed some time apart.

  AFTER HIS RIDE IN THE HILLS, Tom simmered down to the point where he regretted having walked out on Beth that morning. He’d triggered at the thought of her listening to gossip about him, because that was precisely why he hadn’t returned to Farish for years and years. He hadn’t been able to stomach the idea that people were talking, Nikki was saying nothing to stop their rumors, and he’d been the bad guy.

  That was only the public perception of him, however. The real story was something that only Divver knew. Even Patty, Divver’s wife, hadn’t been told the truth.

  Now, Tom realized grimly, Beth should be informed about what really happened with Nikki. If Beth didn’t believe him, they didn’t have enough trust to proceed with a permanent relationship. This would be a test.

  He drove over to Beth’s house that evening, realizing that it was too early for Mitchell to be asleep. It didn’t matter. After this morning, he knew that Beth would put Mitchell to bed as soon as it was practical and that she’d want to hear what he had to say.

  He stood hat in hand on her doorstep and rang the bell repeatedly. He’d offer an abject apology, and if he was lucky, she’d accept it. He was counting on Mitchell to smooth over any awkward moments.

  But no one came to the door. Even though it was almost dark, the only light inside was the small night-light that Beth kept in the foyer.

  Then he recalled Beth and Mitchell were going to spend tonight with Richie’s parents, and he cursed himself for being so forgetful.

  For a moment he lingered uncertainly, considered leaving her a note and decided against it. He would come back when she was here, and he’d talk to her then. That would give him more time to frame his story in suitable words, to develop some eloquence in the telling of it.

  She would understand when she heard what he had to say. He knew she would.

  TOM’S TRUCK WAS PARKED OUTSIDE her house when Beth and Mitchell returned on Sunday afternoon from their visit to Stickneyville.

  “Tom’s here!” Mitchell exclaimed in delight as she pulled up, and at that moment Tom rounded the corner of the house with a wide smile on his face.

  “Tom, I’m glad you came,” Mitchell called, running to him immediately.

  “Hello there, cowboy,” he said, ruffling Mitchell’s bangs, but his eyes remained on Beth as she got out of the minivan.

  She advanced toward him, unsure of herself.

  “Can I ride my scooter, Mom?”

  “Sure, Mitchell. It’s such a nice day that Tom and I can sit out here under the grape arbor and watch you.”

  Mitchell ran toward the garage, and Beth and Tom followed.

  “I forgot you went to Mitchell’s grandparents’, and I stopped by last night. I wanted to apologize.”

  Beth kept her eyes on Mitchell’s blond head. She didn’t reply.

  “I’m sorry, Beth. I shouldn’t have left in such a hurry. I want to explain now, if you’ll listen.”

  Beth unlocked the garage door with her key. Before she could lift it, Tom did, and Mitchell went immediately to his scooter.

  “You don’t have to help me,” Mitchell objected when Beth picked up his helmet and handed it to him. “I can do everything, Mom.”

  “Be careful. Don’t go too fast.”

  “She always says that,” Mitchell told Tom. “That’s because she’s a mom.”

  “That’s what moms are for,” Tom agreed.

  They watched while Mitchell headed up the driveway past the pickup and the minivan, his hair fluttering out from under his helmet, then Beth gestured toward the grape arbor.

  “This will be a comfortable place to sit,” she said.

  Tom sat on the bench and stretched out his legs. “It’s time to tell you about Nikki and me,” he said.

  “Go ahead.” She clasped her hands around her knees and focused on Mitchell in the driveway. “I’m listening.”

  He blinked up at the sky, at the bare tree branches overhead, and began the story.

  BACK WHEN NIKKI had been Tom’s girlfriend, he’d been eager to become a rodeo star. At first his friends were as keen on rodeo life as he was, but before long, Divver fell in love with Patty, who hated everything about the rodeo and convinced him to quit, and Johnny sustained a leg injury that kept him out of competition for almost a year.

  Even though Tom missed his buddies while traveling the circuit, he didn’t mind going it alone. He made new friends, and he won enough bronc-riding and calf-roping contests to make a name for himself. He envisioned becoming a media star in the up-and-coming sport of rodeo, copping some lucrative endorsement contracts and making a decent living. Someday, he and Nikki would get married.

  Nikki had been supportive of his career, but from the beginning, she was impatient with the time frame. “You expect me to wait a couple of years? While you travel around getting famous?” She wasn’t happy, to say the least.

  Tom had always dealt with Nikki’s pouts by coddling her and making things as pleasant as he could. Nikki didn’t have much of a home life. She lived with her father and her sister in a small rundown mobile home on the ranch where her father worked. One day when Nikki was twelve, her mother had ridden a bus out of town, taking all of her husband’s money and nothing else, not even pictures of her two daughters. Her family never saw her again.

  “We’ll be married as soon as we can,” Tom told Nikki whenever she got in one of her moods. He’d built a sizable bank account, and his savings would provide the down payment for a house.

  “I hate living with my family,” Nikki said.

  “In less than a year, you’ll be my wife,” he promised. “You’ll be the most beautiful bride Farish has ever seen.”

  “I’m going to have eight bridesmaids and a dress with a long train,” Nikki told him. “Everyone in Farish will be there.”

  Tom went along with her fantasy. “When you walk down the aisle in that white dress, baby, I’ll be the happiest man alive.” He meant it, too.

  Competing in rodeos required that he was almost always out of town on weekends, and although Nikki joined him sometimes, often he was too far away for her to make the trip. He justified his absences by saying that his rodeo winnings were important to both of them and to their future. When out of town, Tom was scrupulously faithful to Nikki. To take advantage of his growing prestige on the circuit by hooking up with any of the pretty girls who were available never occurred to him.

  Nikki wasn’t the type to sit home alone. Sometimes Divver and Patty invited her out with them to a roadhouse or a party, and occasionally Johnny, who didn’t have a regular girlfriend, squired Nikki around town. Tom didn’t mind. He was happy that Nikki was having fun.

  Then, one night after he’d been traveling in Utah and Colorado for a month, when he and Nikki were parked at the local lovers’ lane, she tearfully told him that she was pregnant. He was stunned. “But—but I always took precautions,” he stammered in bewilderment. He’d never wanted to jeopardize their future by taking chances, and she knew it.

  Even in his shock, he recognized something cagey about the glances she was
giving him. Something calculated and shrewd—characteristics that he didn’t associate with Nikki.

  “Maybe I wanted to get pregnant,” she said. “Maybe I’m tired of waiting to get married.”

  “Nikki, I—”

  At that point, she threw her arms around his neck and started to cry. “Oh, please, Tom, let’s just run away. Then we’ll always be together.”

  The false note that he had detected earlier had become even more apparent with these histrionics. When he hesitated, in a turmoil about becoming a father, Nikki got hysterical and accused him of not loving her. Nothing could have been further from the truth, so, sick at heart, he calmed her the best he could, and by the time they drove up to her house, she wasn’t crying anymore.

  “Can you come over tomorrow?” she asked as he walked her to her door.

  “I’ll call you first thing.”

  “If we got married now, we could live in an apartment over my uncle’s gas station,” Nikki said. “It’s vacant.”

  Tom knew the place, and it was a dump. “Let me sleep on this,” he told her. “I’m still in shock.”

  “Want me to pack a suitcase? It’s so romantic to elope.”

  She seemed so pathetically eager that he didn’t want to ask what had happened to the goal of the big wedding and the white dress, so he only kissed her good-night and left. He hadn’t felt like going home after Nikki’s unsettling news. Feeling in need of male companionship, he drove to Dolan’s, the roadhouse where he was sure he’d find Johnny and maybe Divver.

  Divver wasn’t around, Johnny said, because he and Patty were attending some family function. Johnny, with his arm around one girl and another hanging all over him, had been drinking heavily. Tom recoiled when he realized how drunk Johnny was, and he pried his friend away from the two women, thinking that he’d better pocket Johnny’s car keys so that he couldn’t drive home. As the two of them finished their beer, Tom talked Johnny into going outside to the parking lot for fresh air.

  “Hey, bro, where’s Nikki tonight?” Johnny asked while lighting a cigarette. The flame from the match flared, illuminating his handsome features.

  Tom hesitated. “I dropped her off at her place a while ago,” he said finally.

  Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Nikki doesn’t like to go home early.” Everyone knew that she spent as little time there as possible.

  “Yeah,” Tom replied. He couldn’t stop thinking about Nikki’s news. He’d like to have kids someday, sure, but not now.

  “Tom, is something going on with you two?”

  He should have known better than to confide in Johnny. But at the time, he wanted to get it off his chest and he expected Johnny to console him.

  “She’s pregnant,” he said quietly.

  “She is?”

  Tom nodded. “I was so careful.”

  Johnny seemed to turn this over in his mind; then, showing his agitation, he flicked his half-smoked cigarette onto the pavement. “You might have taken precautions, but not everyone did,” he muttered in a voice so low that Tom almost didn’t hear him.

  Tom froze. Surely he’d mistaken what Johnny had said.

  “No offense, Tom. Don’t get mad. But you’re not the only guy who, um, knows the pleasures of Nikki’s charms. I’ve thought about telling you for a while, but I never had the nerve.”

  “What?” Tom said.

  “Hell, man, she’s been with me, she’s been with guys she picked up somewhere, guys passing through town.”

  “Nikki wouldn’t do that.” A rage began to build inside Tom.

  “Well, if that’s true, how would I know about that little tear-shaped mole way down low?”

  Johnny smirked, and that did it. Tom was well acquainted with that mole, and it was located where no one would find it unless…

  His rage blossomed into a fury, exploded in his brain. For the first time since they became friends back in first grade, he hit Johnny. Punched him smack in the jaw and knocked him cold.

  Leaving others to tend to Johnny, crazed by what his friend had said, Tom jumped into his truck and tore back to the mobile home where Nikki lived, pounded on the door until she appeared and unlocked it. He wrenched the door open, scaring her. He didn’t hurt her. He would never hurt a woman, and he loved Nikki more than anyone. But he yelled and accused and told Nikki what Johnny had said. She confessed tearfully, and when he informed her that the engagement was off, she became angry, too. She drew herself up and taunted him.

  “Oh, you’re hot stuff, Tom Collyer, aren’t you. Well, it’s not yours, do you hear me? It’s not yours! My baby is Johnny’s. You weren’t man enough to get me pregnant, but Johnny was.”

  As much as he didn’t want a baby right now, as disgusted as he was by her cheating, he still loved her and couldn’t believe that she had willfully destroyed their relationship. But he read the truth in her eyes; and worse, her scorn for him and her pity.

  He rushed out the door and embarked on a week-long drunk in the old homestead cabin at the Holcomb Ranch. Divver brought him food and water and kept his presence a secret.

  Divver volunteered to act as intermediary between him and Johnny, but Tom wouldn’t allow it. Making peace with Johnny was his last concern. He was grappling with how he was going to get over Nikki and panicking over what he would do with the rest of his life now that his dreams were shattered.

  He awakened one morning and realized that as long as he stayed in Farish he’d be seeing Nikki around town, growing larger with Johnny’s baby. He considered, when he was finally stone-cold sober, that he might want to marry her anyway and raise the child as his own. Her infidelity, however, was something he couldn’t stomach, and he knew that in his heart he would never trust Nikki again.

  That night, he left Farish, and the next morning, he enlisted. He didn’t go home before he was shipped off to boot camp, didn’t come back for Johnny’s funeral. The sad conclusion of the story was told to him by Divver: When she’d learned that Tom had left, Nikki had confronted Johnny at Dolan’s, where he and Divver were hanging out, informed him she was carrying his child and begged him to marry her, saying that she’d loved him all along. Johnny had laughed in her face. Then, while Divver was trying to calm Nikki, Johnny had stolen somebody’s new Corvette from the parking lot and roared away without fastening his seat belt. Shortly afterward, he’d crashed into a bridge abutment while traveling ninety miles an hour. He was killed instantly.

  Nikki, bitter and embarrassed because Johnny hadn’t wanted her, had done nothing to refute popular opinion that her baby was Tom’s and that he’d left her after finding out that she was pregnant. Divver had begged to spread the true story after Johnny died, but Tom wouldn’t let him.

  In the end, it seemed more honorable to let Nikki say what she would. If what Divver subsequently heard around Farish was true, the father of little Angelica could have been any one of half a dozen guys, as Johnny had said.

  It didn’t matter. By that time, Tom had embarked on a satisfying military career, and when, after years of absence, he finally came back to Farish, it was only for a few days now and then to visit Leanne and her growing family.

  Nikki raised her daughter alone until she married and moved away, which happened years before Tom’s return to his hometown. For a long time, Tom had thought about her every day, and he’d gone on loving her in spite of what she’d done.

  But now, that was over. He’d finally moved on with his life. He’d found Beth, and his future was with her.

  “SO NOW. I’VE TOLD YOU what really happened,” Tom said earnestly, taking Beth’s hand. “Yes, I walked out on the woman I loved, but I didn’t abandon my child. Nikki wasn’t the aggrieved party in that situation—I was. But I chose the high road. I decided to do the gallant thing, even though it ruined my reputation around here.”

  Beth stared at him. “I can’t believe you let people go on thinking it was your baby.”

  Tom shrugged. “I was far away from home. I didn’t care what Nikki said, and I’m no
t sure she passed along a whole lot of information. Because we’d been together for years, people surmised her baby was mine. They talked. I hated them for it, but what if her child wasn’t Johnny’s, either? Should I have exposed Nikki to her friends and family for what she really was? It didn’t seem like the right thing to do to a girl who’d already had a miserable life and was faced with raising a baby on her own.”

  Beth turned his hand over, studied the lines on his palm, then closed her eyes briefly and made herself concentrate on all the things he’d said.

  “Last summer, I quit the marines to come back to Farish because when I heard what Divver planned to do with the kids in the ATTAIN program, I wanted to be part of it. I found that as I grew older, as I had even more ties here with Leanne’s kids, I couldn’t go on letting people in Farish think I was no good. Working with at-risk teenagers seemed like a good way to regain my reputation.”

  “You should tell people the true story, Tom.” Beth concentrated on sitting quietly, her backbone straight, her expression as neutral as she could make it.

  He blew out a long breath. “There’s a young girl named Angelica out there somewhere. Nikki is her mother, and I don’t want Angelica to find out anything bad about her mom. I hope they’re both happy in their family situation. I heard that Nikki had a couple more kids after she got married, and maybe she managed to create the kind of family she always wanted. I don’t want to hurt Nikki, ever.”

  “You sound as if you suspect Angelica might be your child after all,” Beth said, suddenly worried.

  He rushed to set her straight. “I knew Angelica wasn’t mine. I hadn’t even been in town when Nikki got pregnant. Consulting a calendar made me sure of that, and I always took precautions. Eventually, paternity tests proved I wasn’t the father. I insisted on finding out for sure because I gladly would have contributed financial support to any child of mine.” He paused, his eyes searching hers. “You believe me, don’t you, Beth?” He seemed to be holding his breath as he waited for her reply.

  She answered slowly, considering every word. “I never did believe you were the type of guy who could abandon someone who was going to bear your child.”