Father Christmas (5 page)

Molly fit reasonably well on one of the
pint-size chairs. She gestured for him to sit on one, too, but
there was no way he could do that without breaking it, or
dislocating half his joints, or both.

“
Sit on the table,” she
suggested. “It can hold your weight.”

Nodding, he lowered himself onto the sturdy
kitchen table, the surface of which was as high off the ground as a
regular chair’s seat would have been. He had no place for his legs,
which bent sharply at the knees as he tried to squeeze them into
the narrow space between the table and Molly’s chair.

She peered up at him, her gaze unflinching.
“I’d like Michael to attend this school,” she said. “I think he
could really benefit from our program.”

He was so relieved, he forgot all about
Shannon’s freeze-dried evaluation of his son’s personality. “Thank
you.”

“
But.” A hint of a smile
traced Molly’s lips and vanished. “I confess to being a little
worried about him.”

“
Why?”

“
Well, for one thing—” her
lips thinned and her chin rose defiantly “—his father brought a gun
into a preschool filled with children. That makes me very
leery.”

John took a deep breath and returned her
steady stare. If she was going to judge Mike because his father
carried a gun, he’d skip this school. He’d make other plans. He’d
beg Harriet Simka to take Mike on, and he’d beg Mike to accept
Harriet. Because, damn it—

“
In order for us to work
successfully with a child, we need to know what’s going on in that
child’s life. It’s not like I want to know your personal business,
Mr. Russo. But as it is, we’d be pushing our enrollment limits to
let Michael in. I’d really like to help you out—and to help him,
too. I think he’d be very happy here. But...your gun makes me
nervous.”

She had guts, he’d give her that. She knew
her mind, and she knew her school. “I know gun safety.”

“
Gun safety doesn’t
include bringing a pistol into a preschool, Mr. Russo. Guns are
weapons. They’re deadly.”

“
I know exactly how deadly
guns are.”

“
Do you?”

“
I’m a cop.”

Her brow creased in a frown. “If you’re a—a
police officer, you ought to know better than to bring a gun into a
day care facility.”

“
I was on my lunch break
yesterday,” he told her. “I had an hour to visit day care
facilities. I kept the gun holstered and hidden. It’s not like I
went into your classrooms and did show-and-tell with
it.”

“
Thank heavens for that,”
she muttered, a hint of her smile returning.

“
Mike doesn’t touch my
gun. I’m not even sure he’s ever seen it. It’s kept unloaded and
locked up when I’m home.”

She held his gaze for a moment, then glanced
past him. He turned but saw nothing in particular going on where
she was looking. When he turned back, she was studying her hands.
They were small, not much bigger than a child’s.

“
I’ve seen what guns can
do,” he remarked. “I know just how dangerous they are.”

“
I’m sure.” She seemed
fascinated by her clear, shiny nail polish.

“
You don’t like cops,” he
guessed.

She glanced up again. Her eyes seemed to
take up half her face, and the thick dark lashes fringing them made
them look even larger. “I never said that, Mr. Russo. And I’m sorry
if you think I’m a busybody. But this is my school, and I’m
concerned about children’s safety. And violence. And weapons.”

“
We have the same
concerns,” he told her. He didn’t like civilians passing judgment
as if they knew more about violence and weapons than cops did. When
it came to children, she was the expert. But safety? That was his
profession, not hers.

Her gaze skittered past him again, and when
she returned it to him her expression was pleasantly neutral. “I
suppose one concern we share is your son. To get his enrollment in
place, I’ll need to have the forms I gave you yesterday, plus a
tuition payment.”

“
I left all that in the
car.” He twisted to view his son hurling himself around in the foam
pit, then eyed her again. “So, he’s in?”

“
Yes.” She smiled
reluctantly. “He’s in.”

John didn’t return her smile. He knew how
Mike was in: with an asterisk next to his name. With a question
mark. With a note from teacher Shannon Hull mentioning his
aggressive tendencies. With a red flag on his file, because his
father was a cop and carried a gun, so he couldn’t possibly be a
good father.

But John already knew that being a cop
knocked him off the Ideal Family Man list. That was why Sherry had
left—because John was too busy being a cop, saving the world, to
notice that the most important part of his own world was falling
apart. Because cops worked late and thought too much about the
abundance of evil in the world, and because it was easier to lock
up a service revolver than to lock up a career’s worth of doubt and
despair at the end of the day. Because sometimes you spent your
shift mopping up after a murder-suicide, and by the time you were
done with that, you didn’t have the energy to fight with your kid
over a bath.

The Children’s Garden Preschool was free to
blame John for all the mistakes he’d ever made, and all the others
he had yet to make. But the school had better not blame Mike. He’d
been through enough, and none of it was his fault, and Molly
Saunders had better not take his father’s sins out on him.

“
HE’S A COP,” Gail
muttered. “I can’t believe you bent the rules for a
cop.”

“
I didn’t bend the rules.
I just...” Molly sighed and reached for her wine glass. “I decided
I could squeeze his son into the Young Toddlers class. That’s
all.”

“
Ahead of the everyone
else on the waiting list.” Gail shook her head and clicked her
tongue. “What do you think, Allison? Does that sound fair to
you?”

Allison Winslow laughed. She and Molly had
been friends forever, and Molly knew she was too smart to intervene
in a squabble between the Saunders sisters, especially on
Thanksgiving Day.

They were seated around the Shaker-style
table in Allison and Jamie’s dining room. The tablecloth was nearly
invisible beneath an overbearing array of food. Molly had eaten
enough to feed the entire Arlington High School football team for a
year—and as the smallest person at the party, or at least the
smallest person able to digest solid foods, she suspected that all
the others at the table had eaten even more. But the turkey platter
held enough meat for another formal dinner, and the bowls of
stuffing, yams and butternut squash were heaped high with
leftovers.

“
I don’t want to talk
about your nursery school,” Allison announced, moving to the head
of the table, where Jamie’s five-month-old daughter Samantha was
finger-painting with a glob of cranberry sauce on the tray of her
high chair. Allison deftly wiped the tray and then Samantha’s
fingers with a couple of paper napkins. “I want to talk about my
wedding.”

“
No! Not again!” Jamie,
the male half of Allison’s impending wedding, held his hands up in
protest. “You promised we were only going to talk about it three
times a day!”

“
Today’s a holiday, which
means I can talk about it as much as I want,” Allison said
placidly. She unstrapped Samantha from the high chair and lifted
her out. Samantha gave a squeal of delight and pawed at Allison’s
face. Once Allison and Jamie were married, Allison was planning to
adopt his daughter. But it looked to Molly as if Samantha already
considered Allison her mother.

Allison resumed her seat, arranging the
little girl on her lap and smiling at her fiancé. “We’ve already
argued about politics, placed our bets on who’s going to win next
year’s Oscars, and decided unanimously that Samantha is the most
magnificent baby in the world. We’ve discussed Gail’s latest law
suit and Grammy’s arthroscopic surgery and Molly’s preschool. So
it’s time to talk about our wedding again.”

Jamie groaned good-naturedly. He sent an
apologetic grin toward Molly, who shrugged. “You’d better put up
with her if you want her to put up with you,” she counseled.

“
Mutual tolerance,”
Allison confirmed. “The key ingredient of a successful
marriage.”

“
I thought the key
ingredient was sex,” Allison’s grandmother spoke up.

“
Thanks,” Jamie murmured,
smiling at Grammy. “That makes two of us.”

Allison ignored their banter. “I think
getting married in February would be stupid. It’s too cold.”

“
If you got married on
Valentine’s Day it would be romantic,” Molly suggested.

“
Blizzards aren’t
romantic. Do you honestly think Jamie’s parents are going to want
to leave their nice, sunny retirement community in Arizona and come
to Connecticut in February?”

Grammy sniffed. “Why not? If I can come in
February, why can’t they?”

“
You live here, Grammy,”
Allison pointed out.

“
They must be wimps, if
they can’t handle a little snow.” Grammy nudged her empty wine
glass toward Jamie. “A proper host never lets his guest’s glass
stay empty for long,” she scolded him.

“
Given your views on
marriage, you can have as much wine as you like.” He refilled her
goblet with Riesling and passed it back to her.

She took a healthy swig, then turned to
Allison. “I think you should save us all a lot of trouble and
elope.”

Once again, Allison didn’t take her
grandmother’s needling seriously. “I want to be a springtime bride.
I want my maid of honor to be able to wear a nice summery dress.
Don’t you want a pretty dress?” she asked Molly. “Something nice
and floral, with lots of lace.”

“
Well, sure,” Jamie
scoffed. “Forget about sex and tolerance. The true meaning of a
marriage is that it’s a fashion statement.”

“
If you don’t watch your
step, McCoy, I just might make you wear a powder-blue tux,” Allison
teased.

“
Yes,” Molly chimed in.
“And a frilly shirt.”

“
An electric bow-tie that
flashes on and off,” Gail suggested.

Jamie tipped his head in
her direction before refilling the other wine glasses. “An electric
bow-tie I could live with. It’s obvious Gail understands the true
guy concept of
haute
couture
.”

Gail snorted. “I understand that guys have
no concept of style at all.”

“
Exactly.” Jamie took a
sip of wine and gazed about the dining room, pretending to be
disgruntled. “There’s nothing quite like being outnumbered by
women, five to one. All that stuff we were giving thanks for—our
health, the baby, being with friends—”

“
Our wedding,” Allison
added with a grin.

“
That, too. But I’ll tell
you, one thing I would have given a lot of thanks for would be if
there’d been another guy at this table. I for one could have used a
little more testosterone here tonight. You should have brought
along your favorite man in blue,” Jamie said to Molly.

She felt a flush of warmth in her
cheeks—from the overabundance of food, she told herself, not from
Jamie’s words. John Russo wasn’t her man in blue, favorite or
otherwise, and he never would be. He was, as Gail had pointed out,
a cop. He was cold and shuttered, and much too tall. And besides,
he had that gun. And those eyes, which seemed just as hard as his
gun, and just as deadly.

Across the table, she could see her sister
bristling. “I still don’t know why you took his son into the
school,” Gail muttered. “Why did you cut him such a break? Did he
threaten you?”

“
Of course not,” Molly
said, not adding that the way Russo had stared at her, aiming at
her heart, as if he could cut her down with a well-placed look as
easily as a well-placed bullet, had been more than a touch
threatening. She knew Gail didn’t trust policemen, and with good
reason. She knew what Gail had gone through, thanks to an officer
of the law; Molly had been the one to put her back together
afterward.

Gail might have honed herself into a
tough-as-nails lawyer as a result of her experience—a lawyer who
went up against the cops every chance she got. But she still saw
cops as a threat. Whatever threat Molly might have sensed in
Russo’s lethal gaze, though, she’d also sensed that he needed
her—or his son did, at least. Observing the boy at the Children’s
Garden over the past few days had only validated her suspicions.
Michael Russo was a bright, affectionate child. But he was
troubled, with deep wells of sadness inside him.

“
You know, Gail,” Jamie
interjected, “Detective Russo’s a good guy. He was terrific when we
were trying to find Samantha’s birth mother.” Jamie turned to study
his daughter, who leaned contentedly against Allison’s bosom and
sucked her thumb. Last summer, Jamie had found the baby on his back
porch, strapped into a car seat, with no clue as to her mother’s
whereabouts, only a note proclaiming that Jamie was the father.
When, at Allison’s urging, he’d gone to the police, John Russo had
taken the case. Jamie had filled Molly in when she’d called him
last week, after accepting Russo’s son into her school. Now Jamie
defended Russo to Molly’s sister: “He got the job done. He was
smart, he was organized, and he considered every angle and every
possibility before he acted. Plus, he put up with me, which
couldn’t have been easy.”