Father Christmas (10 page)

“
Hi,” she said, smiling
shyly.

Something glittered in the
depths of his eyes: curiosity, interest, recognition.
Something
. His lips quirked into a
slightly bigger smile. “Hi.”

The air in the entry got warmer. Had Shannon
accidentally tripped the thermostat switch in the other room? Why
else would Molly suddenly be feeling overheated?

He didn’t move. He simply stood at her desk,
peering down at her until she felt obliged to stand. He still
towered over her, but not by quite as much.

She wished he would say something, but he
didn’t. He only stared at her, that enigmatic smile tweaking his
mouth.

Unable to stand the silence, she spoke
instead. “Did you catch the bank robber?”

“
Yeah.” Instead of looking
pleased, he lost a few degrees of his smile. “Robbers,” he
corrected her. “Three of them.”

“
Three?” A lump of panic
filled her throat and she swallowed it back down. The thought of
John, dressed as Santa, apprehending
three
thieves, all at once... He could have been hurt.
He could have been killed. He could have been forced to use his
gun.

“
A fifteen-year-old
ringleader and seven-year-old twins.”

“
No!” Relief that John
hadn’t faced a formidable opponent blended with dismay that
children so young should be engaging in criminal activity. “A
fifteen-year-old I could believe, but
seven
?”

“
The teenager conned them.
They thought it was a game. They didn’t know they were breaking the
law.” He shrugged, and what was left of his smile faded away.
“Their parents are divorced. I think they got
overlooked.”

“
It happens.” She studied
his face, suspecting that he was comparing those misguided twins to
his own son. “In divorces, the parents need to give their children
extra attention, just so they don’t get lost in the
shuffle.”

“
Sometimes they can’t.” A
muscle fluttered in his jaw. “Sometimes one of the parents
disappears.”

“
Which doubles the burden
on the parent who stays. But the burden is worth it, John. You know
that, don’t you?”

His mouth twitched, as if he wanted to smile
again but couldn’t bring himself to.

“
So, does this mean you’re
all done with your Santa impersonation?”

He shook his head. “My boss wants me to wear
the costume and catch some more pick-pockets. It’s the perfect
stake-out disguise, given the season.”

“
You wear it well,” she
teased.

He permitted himself a brief smile. “The
girl twin warned me that the real Santa wouldn’t like it.”

“
I think she’s mistaken.
The real Santa would very much like you to catch
pick-pockets.”

“
Thanks for the vote of
confidence.” He glanced toward the hallway. “Is Mike back
there?”

Molly sighed. If she told him about
Michael’s day, his humor would be gone for good. But it was her job
to keep parents apprised of their children’s behavior at school.
“Michael had a bit of a rough time today.”

John’s focus narrowed on her. “What
happened?”

“
He...” She took a deep
breath and reminded herself that her primary responsibility was as
a professional. She had to tell him. “He got into a fight with a
classmate over a toy plane. He tried to hit the other boy with the
plane.”

John absorbed this without comment.

“
No one was hurt,” she
went on. “But it wasn’t acceptable behavior. Michael has difficulty
sharing.”

“
He’s an only
child.”

“
That doesn’t mean he’s
exempted from learning how to share. It’s a skill he needs to
know.”

“
I’ll talk to
him.”

“
It takes more than talk,”
she cautioned. “It takes training and practice. This week in the
Daddy School, we’ll be dealing with sharing and possessiveness and
how fathers can help their children to overcome their innate
selfishness.” When John didn’t respond, she pushed her luck. “The
class meets from ten to twelve, Saturday, right here. It would be
great if you could come. You and Michael both.”

“
So he can learn how to
share.”

“
So you can learn how to
help him. He completely lost his composure today, John. He couldn’t
understand why the toy wasn’t all his. When his teacher put him in
time-out, he went on a crying jag.”

John’s jaw flexed but he said nothing.

“
Afterward, he was so
exhausted he fell asleep in my lap.”

“
He was in your
lap?”

“
Well...yes.” Molly knew
the risks of holding children. She’d heard about enough weird law
suits and shocking charges to understand that a teacher had to be
very careful about touching a student. But the Children’s Garden
was a preschool, and her students sometimes needed a hug, and no
threat of a law suit was going to keep her from hugging a child who
needed it. If John, with his police job and his gun, wanted to
arrest her for holding his son on her lap, let him try.

He searched her face, probing, digging
around as if he had a search warrant for her thoughts. “Thank you,”
he finally said, his voice barely above a whisper.

She dared to press her luck. “Will you come
to the Daddy School class this Saturday?”

He raked a hand through his hair, and she
averted her eyes when his jacket moved with his arm, so that if he
did happen to be wearing his gun she wouldn’t accidentally glimpse
it. “Maybe,” he said.

“
I hope you do come. I
think it would be good for Michael.”
And for you,
she wanted to add. It would be good for the tall,
reserved man who didn’t want his son to get lost in the shuffle,
the dark-eyed man who looked so wonderful when he smiled, but who
didn’t smile nearly enough. The quiet, private man who seemed to
need so much, but who refused to ask for it.

***

HE DIDN’T WANT TO GO to a Daddy School class
on Saturday. But then, there were lots of things he did that he
didn’t want to do. Like stand on the corner of Bank Street and
Hauser Boulevard in a red flannel Santa suit, looking for
trouble.

Hauser Boulevard was downtown Arlington’s
major shopping area, and the retailers had dressed the neighborhood
up to put people in the right frame of mind for spending money.
Metal arches wrapped in artificial holly and strung with lights
spanned the street every few yards, and most of the shops had
Christmas trees in their front windows, or tinsel, or short, fat,
Santa-costumed mannequins who looked a hell of a lot jollier than
John felt.

Why shouldn’t they be jollier? Unlike him,
they didn’t have to keep their eyes peeled for muggers, shoplifters
and punks.

Somewhere in Arlington, crimes were being
committed. John ought to be solving them. He was good at sifting
through evidence, even better at noticing details in a crime scene
that other cops overlooked. The trouble was, Coffey also thought
John was good at standing on busy city corners and watching for
minor malfeasance.

In his next lifetime, John
decided, he would
not
be so good
at things. When they were kids, his sister Sarah, the prima donna
of the family, once explained to him: “You know how come Linda and
Nina have to do the laundry and I don’t? Because the last time I
did the laundry I screwed up. I put the fabric softener in the
bleach dispenser, and Mom threw a fit. She said I almost destroyed
the washing machine. So now, when she needs a load done, she asks
Nina or Linda to do it.”

Not a bad strategy, screwing up. The trouble
was, John was too damned responsible to screw up. He couldn’t
always do a good job, but he was incapable of deliberately doing a
bad job. So if Coffey dressed him up like St. Nick and stood him on
a corner, John wound up not just solving an ATM scam but nailing a
pick-pocket. If Coffey needed a figurative load of laundry done,
he’d ask John, confident that John wouldn’t put the fabric softener
in the bleach dispenser.

Last night’s snowfall had left less than an
inch of snow on the ground, and under the heels of boots and the
scrape of snowplows, all that was left along the curbs was a ridge
of gray slush. The overcast sky promised more snow, but promises
were broken all the time. John hadn’t seen a single flake descend
from the clouds, though he’d felt the icy bite of winter through
the red wool-flannel Santa suit and the thermal underwear he was
wearing underneath.

He didn’t want to go to Molly Saunder’s
Daddy School class. Not because he didn’t think Mike would benefit
from it. Not because he didn’t think Mike needed to work on his
sharing skills—and John needed to work on his fathering skills. Not
because he had anything more exciting planned for Saturday
morning.

He didn’t want to go because Molly turned
him on.

He could stand on this cold city corner,
surveying the sidewalks and the storefronts, sizing up suspects
before they’d done anything worthy of suspicion, ringing his bell
and murmuring thanks to all the folks who stuffed money for Higgins
House into his kettle...but thoughts of Molly burned deep inside
him like a pilot light, a flame capable of igniting a furnace if
only he twisted the tap and released some fuel. Yet he couldn’t do
that, couldn’t let the heat thaw him. He couldn’t chance it. He had
too much going on in his life, too many demands on him, too much
emotional stuff. What little he had to give belonged to Mike.

Besides, he’d already learned from his
failed marriage that he lacked whatever secret ingredient it took
to make a woman happy. In bed, he could offer satisfaction. But not
in a relationship.

What if Molly Saunders was interested in
nothing more than satisfaction in bed?

For God’s sake, she was the director of his
son’s preschool. She devoted herself to nurturing little kids. How
could John think of her in sexual terms?

He knew damned well how. Those lips of hers,
the caramel-soft eyes, the sweet curves of her body. Her sassy,
shiny hair. Her smile. Her confidence.

Last night, after he’d gotten Mike to sleep,
he’d popped open a beer, sprawled out on the sofa in the den, and
tried to watch TV. But his mind kept wandering to Molly, to the way
she’d smiled when she’d spotted him in his undercover get-up, to
her pallor when she’d watched him take down the dip, to the way her
gaze had locked onto him, made him want to pull her inside the
oversized red jacket and feel her warmth against him. When he
closed his eyes, he pictured her holding his son on her lap,
letting him lose his temper and cry and fall asleep.

The way a mother would. The way Mike so
badly needed to be held.

It was all mixed up, a tangle of emotions
like razor wire, too sharp to unravel without getting cut to
shreds. He wanted Molly for his son, and he wanted her for himself.
He wanted Mike to get her love. He wanted himself to get her
passion.

He wanted things he had no right wanting.
And if he went to her Daddy School class on Saturday, it would only
make him want her even more.

He exhaled a puff of white vapor through his
fake beard. Two shoppers ambled down the street toward him,
well-dressed, well-coifed middle-aged women laden with red and
green holiday-decorated shopping bags. He remembered to ring his
bell and utter a lackadaisical “Ho, ho, ho.”

The woman with fewer bags rummaged in her
purse as they neared him. “Higgins House,” she said. “That’s where
all those street winos go in the winter, right?”

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.”