Father Christmas (24 page)

“
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.”

“
You think Burt might be
grouchy because he’s bothered by Ernie’s silliness? And maybe
Ernie’s silly because he wants to make Burt loosen up.”

Burt and Ernie could use a visit to the foam
pit, John thought.

When they were done eating, John told Molly
to leave the dishes, but she said she wouldn’t mind putting them in
the dishwasher as long as she had company. Mike volunteered to keep
her company, and no way was John going to leave her alone in his
kitchen to do the chores he ought to be doing.

He felt a twinge of guilt when she demanded
that he sit. “If you want to watch, fine,” she said. “But stay away
from the sink. You shouldn’t get your bandage wet.”

“
I can do things
left-handed,” he argued. “I can put a plastic bag around my right
hand. How do you think I’ve been showering?”

“
I’m glad to hear
you
have
been showering,” she
teased, and then her cheeks blossomed pink again, as if talking
about John’s showering caused her to think about his body. He
realized it wouldn’t be wise to pursue that particular subject,
especially with Mike in the room. So he sat and watched while she
instructed Mike in the proper way to stack the plates in the
dishwasher rack, the safe way to handle silverware, the importance
of scraping food off the plates before he handed them to
her.

John had never let Mike help him with the
dishes before—not even his own unbreakable-plastic plates and cups.
The kid was only two and a half years old. Could he really be
mature enough for this?

Evidently he was. “I do it,” he announced
each time Molly gave him a new instruction. She asked him to bring
the salad bowl over to the sink, and he said, “I do it,” cradled
the bowl in his arms and carried it across the room to her.

She had pushed the sleeves of her shirt up
to her elbows to keep the cuffs from getting wet. John observed the
slender lines of her forearms, her delicate wrists, her small,
star-shaped hands glistening with water as she rinsed each plate.
He wanted to dry her hands, to straighten out her disheveled hair,
to cup her face in his hands and pull her mouth to his. He wanted
to thank her for teaching his son how to clear a table, and he
wanted to get naked with her. He wanted to drag her into the shower
with him, even if it meant getting his damned bandage wet.

She shook the moisture from her fingers,
reached for a paper towel, and sent him a shimmering smile. His
temperature shot up ten degrees. He wanted to kiss her smile, feel
it against his cheek, turn that smile into a gasp of pleasure when
he touched her.

Right. As if a man who’d lost his better
hand to an acre of gauze bandaging could touch a woman with any
sort of skill. As if a man whose arm was held together with
surgical thread could hold a woman as tightly as he wanted to hold
Molly. As if a man with a row of bruised ribs could make love with
any sort of finesse.

As if he should be thinking about Molly in
the context of making love.

“
It’s really getting
late,” she said, eyeing the wall clock and wincing. “If you don’t
feel up to driving me home, John, I can call a cab.”

“
Don’t call a cab,” he
said, aware of a desperate edge in his voice.

Mike began to skip in a circle around the
table, chanting, “I do it! I do the dishwasher! I do it!”