The Heart of Christmas

by Kathryn Shay

  Conor hesitated before saying, “I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “You didn’t ask me,” she pointed out. “I offered.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “I’m free Saturday morning. My credit card company wants me to race right out and spend a lot of money on Christmas presents, but that can wait until the afternoon. How long does the class run?”

  Another pause, and then Conor said, “You’re an angel.”

  No, I’m not, she almost responded. The label “angel” had already been applied to Conor’s late wife, and it was causing enough trouble in that context. Besides, angels were supposed to be damned near perfect, weren’t they?

  Conor’s wife might have approached perfection. Her death would have cemented her reputation. Eliza, however, was alive and very human—flaws and all.

  Having a serious crush on the father of a student certainly qualified as a flaw. And spending time out of school with that student might turn out to be a mistake. But she’d offered and he’d accepted. Her Saturday morning now belonged to the Malones.

  She only wished she didn’t feel quite so elated about it.

  Chapter Four

  CONOR COULD CALCULATE pretty much to the day the last time he’d been inside a preschool: a late-August morning four years ago, when Amy had been five. He’d taken the morning off from work and gone with Sheila to Amy’s “graduation” ceremony, at which Amy had been handed a helium balloon and a diploma featuring a border of gold stars and red hearts, declaring her the recipient of an ABC Degree. The school had been a bedlam of screeching children, spilled punch and proud parents snapping photos. At one point during the chaos, he’d turned to Sheila and said, “Let’s have another child.”

  “We’ll see,” she’d hedged, clearly not wild about the idea. She’d wanted more time for herself. More time for her painting and her long-distance cycling. She’d started training in earnest once Amy was in kindergarten, and a year later she’d participated in her first 100-mile bike ride to raise money for diabetes research. He’d appreciated her civic-mindedness—to say nothing of the way all that cycling had toned her body—but he would have rather had a second child.

  After another year, he’d persuaded her. And they’d been trying. They’d had a lot of great sex that year, which made her inability to conceive less than a tragedy, although it had been disappointment. Perhaps they should have started sooner. Perhaps all that biking had lowered her percentage of body fat too much. Perhaps one more try and they would have succeeded…if she hadn’t died.

  The Children’s Garden reminded him of the preschool Amy had attended: an interior of bright colors, shelves stacked with books, toys and art supplies, and teeny-tiny furniture. No screeching children, though. He heard the rumble of men’s voices drifting toward the entry as he stood inside the front door, orienting himself and trying to shake his mental image of Eliza from his mind.

  She’d insisted that he call her Eliza when she’d arrived at his house that morning. She’d been wearing jeans and her hair had been pulled back into a ponytail. Small gold hoops had adorned her ears, and the tip of her nose had been pink from the winter air. “Amy can call me Dr. Powell,” she’d said as Conor had greeted her at the front door. “But today I’m your babysitter. I think you should call me Eliza.”

  Using her first name had seemed so personal. Brushing her shoulders with his hands as he’d helped her off with her coat had seemed even more personal. The scent of her shampoo, the vivid darkness of her eyes, the ease of her smile…

  Daddy School, he firmly reminded himself as he gazed at the row of cubbies lining the entry, each one labeled with a name and equipped with a coat hook and a shelf.

  A dark-haired sprite of a woman emerged from an office near the entry and scrutinized him, her smile measured. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m Conor Malone. My friend Dennis Murphy told me about the Daddy School.”

  Her smile relaxed. “Yes—welcome! Dennis mentioned you might be coming.” She gestured down the hall. “Go on in. We’ll be starting in just a few minutes.”

  Conor wandered down the hall, past the cubbies, past a wall display of snowmen composed of cotton balls glued to construction paper, to a vast room broken into small play areas separated by waist-high walls. A group of men were gathered in one of the areas. Some sat on the knee-high tables, some on the floor, and a few managed to perch themselves on tyke-sized chairs. Conor experienced an inexcusable spasm of relief that he didn’t recognize any of them. He wouldn’t want the fathers of Amy’s classmates and friends to know that he needed classes in how to be a dad.

  A couple of the men welcomed him with a nod and a smile. They were probably at the Daddy School because they felt as incompetent and insecure as he did. He smiled and returned the nods, and found a spot to sit on the floor, leaning his back against the half-height wall. No way was he going to fit his six-foot frame onto one of those tot-size chairs.

  The woman who’d greeted him when he’d entered the Children’s Garden Preschool strode down the hall and joined the group. She radiated an odd blend of pep and tranquility, a useful combination for someone who ran a preschool. “Let’s get started,” she said briskly. “I’m Molly Saunders-Russo, and we’ve got a few newcomers today. Class attendance always increases just before the holidays. I wonder why that is.” Her grin implied that she knew damned well why that was.

  One of the men informed her, anyway. “It’s because our kids turn into monsters just before the holidays.”

  “Not mine,” another man said. “It’s the only time of year my two behave well. They’re trying to get on my good side. It’s kind of creepy. Why don’t they behave so well the rest of the year?”

  “Maybe you have to dangle the possibility of presents all year long,” someone else suggested.

  “But that’s bribery,” yet a fourth man said. “Do we really want to program our kids to think that every time they behave well they’ll get rewarded?”

  “Good behavior should be its own reward,” someone else chimed in.

  “In which universe?” the second one shot back. “Not the one I live in.”

  Molly held her hands up to silence the banter. “The holidays bring a ton of baggage with them,” she said. “As George said, we have to deal with the strange way some kids suddenly start engaging in excellent behavior, not for the right reasons but because they want loot. We have to deal with the fact that other children, like Dan’s, get so hyper about the holidays that they turn into monsters. We have to deal with practical questions, like how many presents are too many? How can we keep our kids from eating too many sweets? How do we explain to children who don’t celebrate Christmas that they’re good people, even though they may resent that their friends get trees and presents and they don’t? Or children from families that choose not to exchange material gifts and instead donate to charities or making homemade gifts. Or families where money is tight. How do we maintain a balance that works for us?”

  And how do you tell a nine-year-old that Santa isn’t going to bring her mother back? Conor didn’t voice his question. He wasn’t eager to share his sad story in a gathering of strangers; he didn’t want sympathy. He also didn’t want ridicule about the fact that his daughter, an otherwise intelligent girl who knew the difference between reality and fantasy, insisted on clinging to her belief in Santa. Conor still couldn’t completely blame her for punching that little jerk who’d called her stupid, but he had to admit that by fourth grade, most children understood that Santa wasn’t real.

  The Daddy School, he soon realized, resembled a seminar more than a lecture. Molly didn’t hand down truth from above. Instead, she facilitated a discussion. The fathers talked about establishing boundaries, determining what they considered a good holiday and figuring out how to mesh their hopes for the season with their children’s. They brainstormed tactics. They swapped anecdotes. Every now and then, Molly would mention some obvious truth: “Remember that you are the parent. You’re all
owed to say no, even at Christmas.” And: “This is an especially good time of year to teach your kids about charity and generosity. Every traditional holiday at this time of year has an aspect of giving. Take advantage of that.”

  At the end of the class, Conor didn’t have an explicit strategy for navigating Amy through the pain of discovering that she was not going to receive the one thing she wanted most for Christmas. But he felt a little more confident, a little less apprehensive about steering his daughter toward the truth. Maybe next week’s class would offer more concrete guidance. He would definitely be attending the Daddy School again next week—assuming he could line up a babysitter.

  As he strolled out of the preschool building to his car, his tread-soled shoes crunching on the loose gravel of the parking lot, his thoughts veered to the babysitter he’d lined up for today’s class. He couldn’t imagine paying Eliza Powell as he would have paid one of the neighborhood teenagers, but he owed her big-time. She had to let him compensate her, but how? If not with money, what could he offer in exchange? How about dinner at one of Arlington’s more elegant restaurants?

  That would be for him as much as for her. And he wasn’t really ready to go out to dinner with a woman who wasn’t Sheila, was he?

  Maybe he was.

  He drove home, not sure what he expected to find when he got there. He pulled into the driveway next to Eliza’s compact sedan and steeled himself. Partly this was out of habit; when he used to go out for an evening with Sheila, they sometimes came home to find Amy sleeping peacefully in her bed and the babysitter hunched over a laptop, doing her homework, and other times found mayhem awaiting them—toys strewn across the floor, spatters of chocolate milk on the kitchen table, and a sugar-fueled daughter bouncing off the walls way past her bedtime while the sitter was busy texting with her friends.

  He didn’t think there would be mayhem today, but he still needed to be prepared—for the sight of Eliza. For her serenity and her stability and her mind-boggling beauty. If only she looked like Rosalyn Hoffman, his life would be a whole lot simpler.

  Swinging open the front door, he was greeted by a sweet, buttery fragrance and a bouncy, happy daughter. “Hi, Daddy!” Amy grabbed his hand and dragged him down the hall to the kitchen. “Look what we made!”

  The view from the kitchen doorway staggered him. Not because the room was a mess—it wasn’t—or because the table held several sheets of aluminum foil covered with golden cookies in the shapes of stars, snowflakes and fir trees and topped with red and green sprinkles, but because Eliza, who was bent slightly as she pulled a baking sheet covered with more cookies from the oven, looked so absurdly at home in the room. Her hair had unraveled slightly from its ponytail, her sleeves were rolled up, and her hands were encased in the thick, quilted cooking mitts he so rarely used because most of his meal preparation entailed zapping stuff in the microwave.

  “That’s the last batch,” she said, setting the cooking sheet on the stove top, pulling off the mitts, brushing a stray lock of hair back from her forehead and smiling sheepishly at Conor. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why would I mind?” For a room that had clearly been the site of a lot of activity that morning, the kitchen was surprisingly clean and tidy. And aromatic. Conor never baked. He wondered if it was an activity Amy enjoyed. At the next Daddy School class, maybe he should ask Molly whether fathers ought to bake with their children.

  Or else hire babysitters to bake with them. Software design came easily to him. Baking, not so much.

  “I didn’t know we had Christmas sprinkles,” he said, admiring the festively decorated cookies.

  “I brought those with me,” Eliza admitted. “Just in case.”

  He didn’t want to ask just in case what. He was too enthralled by the charming domestic scene in his kitchen, the tantalizing fragrance of the cookies, the cheerful child. The gorgeous woman.

  “Taste one, Daddy,” Amy ordered him. “I had one. Eliza said it wouldn’t spoil my appetite.”

  So Amy was calling the school psychologist Eliza. Was that a problem? If they weren’t in school, if she wasn’t treating Amy as a patient, if they bonded…if Eliza was destined to be his friend…

  He didn’t want to analyze Amy’s use of Eliza’s first name. What he wanted, he conceded, was to eat a cookie. He lifted one from a cooled batch and took a bite. “Wow,” he managed, his mouth crammed with delicious crumbs.

  “We didn’t know what to store them in,” Eliza went on.

  “We need a cookie jar,” Amy said.

  “Actually, something with an air-tight lid would keep them fresher. Do you have any containers with tight-fitting lids?”

  That sounded like the sort of thing Sheila would have bought. She used to bake cookies, after all. Feeling like an ignoramus for not knowing what his kitchen cabinets held, he rummaged through a few of the higher ones, figuring that if the lower cabinets held the kind of container Eliza had in mind, Amy would have known about it.

  He located a few plastic containers with colorful lids that he vaguely recalled Sheila buying at a neighborhood party a few years ago, and handed them to Eliza. “You know, I think I could have another cookie without spoiling my appetite,” he said, shooting her and Amy a conspiratorial grin as he snagged a tree-shaped cookie for himself and a snowflake one for his daughter. “They’re fantastic. You’ve had some, haven’t you?” he asked Eliza.

  “She only had one,” Amy announced between bites. “Can we get our tree after lunch?”

  Conor glanced at Eliza, but she had her back to him as she transferred the cooled cookies to the containers. If she had any ideas about how he should navigate the tricky terrain of the Christmas tree, she wasn’t sharing them.

  Tricky terrain or no, he was determined to have a Christmas tree for his daughter this year. “Okay.”

  “Eliza can come with us,” Amy said.

  He shot Eliza another glance. She went still for the briefest moment, then resumed arranging the cookies in the containers. She had already spent the morning hard at work with Amy—he suspected that baking cookies with the assistance of an exuberant nine-year-old was more difficult than baking them by oneself. She must have had enough of the Malones for one day.

  “I’m sure Dr. Powell has other things to do today,” he said, reverting to her last name to remind himself that, no matter how well she fit into his kitchen, this was not her home and Amy was not her buddy. “We’ve taken up enough of her time.”

  Eliza turned to look at him then. He couldn’t read her expression. Relief? Disappointment?

  “Of course, we’d love to have you join us if you want,” he added, uncomfortably aware that that “we” referred to him every bit as much as Amy.

  “Actually,” Eliza said quietly, her smile soft and oddly wistful, “I’m free this afternoon.”

  Chapter Five

  SHE SHOULD HAVE gone home. Conor had provided her with a graceful exit; she could have said she had plans for the afternoon, errands to run, emails to read, a hot tub to install on her rear deck—anything to get her away from the Malones. But the idea of shopping for a Christmas tree was so tempting. And the prospect of spending more time with Amy and her father…

  Much too tempting.

  They’d gone to Amy and Conor’s favorite eatery for lunch, an old-fashioned diner across the street from the YMCA, the sort of place where coffee was served in heavy white porcelain mugs and the sandwiches were so overstuffed their fillings leaked onto the plate with every bite. After lunch, they’d driven to a nursery on the western edge of town, where they debated at length about the relative merits of Fraser firs and blue spruce and Amy raced from one nine-foot tree to another, shouting, “This one, Daddy! This one!” Conor ultimately talked her into a densely needled seven-footer, which two sturdy young employees wrapped in mesh and lashed to the roof of Conor’s car. During the drive home, Amy sang “Jingle Bells” very loudly, sparing Eliza the obligation to speak.

  What would she say? She had no pla
ns for the holiday week. She and her brother used to travel to Florida to celebrate Christmas with their mother, but Eliza’s mother was gone now, and Eliza didn’t want to fly all the way to California to spend the holiday with her brother. At one time, she had thought she and Matt would be using the last week in December to finalize their wedding arrangements, but that wasn’t going to happen, either.

  Tree-shopping with Amy and Conor Malone was probably as close as she was going to get to the Christmas spirit this year.

  She assured herself she hadn’t crossed any ethical lines with this outing. Conor had told her that Amy would be returning to Rosalyn Hoffman for counseling. The little girl wasn’t Eliza’s patient. She was a student in the school where Eliza worked, that was all.

  “Can we decorate the tree today?” Amy asked as Eliza helped Conor slide the tree off the car’s roof and onto the driveway.

  “No,” he told Amy. “We have to let it sit for a day so the branches can open up.”

  “They’re open now.”

  Amy’s statement was so patently ridiculous—the tree was still wrapped in plastic meshing, its branches compressed into a tight cylinder—that both Conor and Eliza burst into laughter. “Here’s the plan, kiddo,” Conor told her. “We’ll get the tree into the stand, feed and water it, and let it sit overnight. Then we’ll trim it tomorrow. That’ll give you some time to figure out how you want to decorate it.”

  “Lots of tinsel,” Amy declared. “I want the tree to be all silvery.”

  Getting the tree balanced in its stand took time—and two adults. Eliza couldn’t imagine how Conor would have managed it if she hadn’t been there, holding the trunk steady while he adjusted the stand, tilting it this way and that until it stood perfectly straight. Not that she minded helping out. The day had been a delight for her. She’d been grateful for the opportunity to bake the holiday cookies she and her mother used to make. She wouldn’t have made them just for herself, but Amy had been thrilled when Eliza had suggested that activity, and they’d had a wonderful time together, kneading the dough, rolling it out, cutting it with the cookie cutters they’d found in a drawer and adding the colorful sprinkles Eliza had purchased on her way to the Malone house.