The Secret Life of Mrs. Claus (20 page)

She blinked. “We wanted something new for sweeps week.”

Ha! A non-answer, if ever there was one. I turned to TJ and launched the foam ball at him. “We’ll talk later.”

He caught the ball and squeezed it in his hand, having the good grace to look sheepish, for once.

As I walked toward the bus stop, I felt my throat choke with tears, and I wasn’t exactly sure why. Maybe the sex wasn’t worth the entanglement with TJ. Maybe it was disappointment that he wasn’t taking the initiative to be a father to our son. Or maybe it was the realization that my cheerful, madcap home at
TJ’s Night
no longer existed.

Another family dispersed like dust in the wind.

“M
ice, Mom! They’ve got mice!” Tyler’s eyes openedwide. His voice was breathless, his moves frantic with adrenaline as he hunkered down under the clothes rack and scrambled toward the scampering creature. Hardly surprising to find mice in this windowless room used for storage at Rossman’s, but Tyler didn’t understand that this was not a playground.

“No, wait!” I cried. “There might be some traps set. Tyler, be careful!” I hitched up my Mrs. Claus skirt and dove under the clothing rack after him. “Tyler, come back now, honey!” Heavy raincoats slapped at my face as I crawled after him.

“Aaaw! He got away,” he groaned.

Ducking my head, I moved in the direction of his voice and crawled out from under the hanging clothes to a pair of shiny black boots. Not Tyler’s cute little curled-toe elfin booties, but man-sized boots topped by red velvet pants.

I sat up and smoothed my hair back, expecting to find one of our Santas. But it was Mr. Buchman, dressed in a Santa suit.

“There’s a little mouse in here, brown and gray. I saw him,” Tyler was telling the corporate hatchet man. “I tried to catch him but he got away.”

“Mmm. They’re known to move rather quickly.”

I stood up and dusted off my Mrs. Claus skirt. “Tyler, you can’t just go chasing a mouse like that. Cornered animals tend to lash out. He could have bitten you. And maybe it was a rat.”

“He was tiny, Mom.” He cupped his little hands down to the size of a walnut. “He won’t bite me.”

“Besides, there might be mouse poison on the floor, or traps set.”

“I think not,” Mr. Buchman said, looking like a lean Santa with his hands on his narrow hips. “There was no mention of infestation in the last maintenance report. I’ll get Mr. Chalmers on it immediately.”

“Can I have it?” Tyler asked both of us. “Can I keep the mouse? Please, Mom.”

“Honey, they have to trap it first. And it’s not like the mice in the pet store. It’s a wild mouse.”

“A wild city mouse.” Mr. Buchman squatted down so that he was face-to-face with Tyler. “A sarcastic, jaded mouse. It probably takes to the streets at dusk and spends its night gallivanting on the town.”

I bit my lips to keep from cracking a smile. So Buchman actually had a sense of humor and a certain way with kids.

“I can help you trap it.” Tyler spread his hands out to Buchman, making his pitch. “I can trap it in a safe way. Like…I’ll put a piece of cheese under a box, and the box gets propped up by a stick. And when the mouse goes inside the box, I’ll pull the stick out and the mouse will be trapped in the box.”

Buchman scratched his chin thoughtfully. “A clever design. A humane trap.”

“But you would have to wait here all night until the mouse got to the right spot,” I said.

“Mom…” Tyler moaned. “I don’t care. I can do it.”

My son should have been born during
Little Rascals
times, in the days when kids built wheely carts out of old milk crates instead of sitting catatonic in front of a television to work the joystick of a computer game. He’s so full of inventions, of ways to trap animals so that he can study and love them, of a million uses for the old tires abandoned in alleys or empty cardboard boxes, discarded wooden planks, or the endless Styrofoam packing peanuts that shed tiny electrostatic cling-ons over our carpet, clothes, and skin.

“Young man, I like the way you think,” Buchman was saying. “Would it be possible to take a look at one or two of your designs for this mousetrap?” He swung around to me. “I imagine I can delay notifying maintenance until after we’ve tried a humane approach.”

I winced slightly, imagining the reaction among the sales-clerks when word got out that we were having an infestation.

“Now, Mum…” Mr. Buchman cocked an eyebrow. “You can’t blame the boy for trying to build a better mousetrap.”

“I can do it,” Tyler vowed. “I’ll start working on it right now.”

“Excellent.”

A group of clerks rolled a rack in through the door, and the three of us turned toward them with conspiratorial grins.

“Well, then…” Mr. Buchman straightened his red coat. “Santaland awaits, doesn’t it?”

It was November 25, the day after Thanksgiving. Not only the busiest shopping day of the year, but also the opening of Rossman’s Santaland. Definitely an odd time for the hatchet man from Chicago to be playing Santa.

“Mom, do you have any sticks?” Tyler dropped to the floor to look under the racks again—one last search for the mouse. “What about boxes?”

“We’ll see.” I pulled him up, put my hands on his shoulders, and guided him alongside Buchman toward the door. “I’m surprised to see you suited up, Mr. Buchman, especially on the biggest shopping day of the year. Is this part of the Rossman’s challenge?”

“No, actually, it’s more like triage. When Ms. Hayden informed me that we had two Santas down with the flu, I didn’t see any alternative but to suit up, as you so aptly put it. I do practice what I preach, you know.”

“Well, good luck deciphering the wishes of good boys and girls,” I told him.

He smiled, gesturing for Tyler and me to go on the escalator ahead of him. “Ah, but the bad ones are much more challenging, are they not, Ms. Derringer?” This man was surprisingly fresh. He leaned closer to Tyler and asked, “And what do you want for Christmas this year, young man?”

Tyler turned back, grinned, and answered, “There’s nothing like cash.” Just like Sally Brown in my favorite video.

Tyler’s answer and Buchman’s horrified expression made me laugh out loud. “He’s echoing Sally in the
Peanuts
show. You know,
A Charlie Brown Christmas
?”

“Peanuts?”

“You know…” I helped him out. Maybe they didn’t have
Peanuts
in England. “Snoopy and Charlie Brown?”

“Ah…yes, the rap singers.”

“No, they’re not!” Tyler giggled as he leaped from the top of the escalator to the landing. “They’re cartoon characters.”

“Of course they are. Charlie Brown is the boy who owns Mickey Mouse, is he not?”

Tyler giggled again.

“I have to ask, Mr. Buchman. Are you married?”

“My grandmother would call that a cheeky question, but the answer is no. Not anymore.”

Which meant that he had been married. Always better. Divorced men usually weren’t so idealistic about relationships. “Any children?”

“Not that I know of.” He coughed, then glancing up the escalator at Tyler, pursed his lips together. “Actually, that’s not true. There are none, I’m certain of that.” He coughed again. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that you seem to know how to talk with kids. You seem to have experience.”

“Yes, well, my sisters will be pleased to hear that all the forced exposure to their little buggers has amounted to something.”

Tyler jumped off the escalator at the top and whirled toward us. “I know! I can use one of those cardboard things from toilet paper.”

“Beg pardon?” Buchman squinted.

“The mousetrap, he’s still trying to think of ways to build it.”

“Ah. You need a dowel or a spindle.” Buchman nodded. “So then, we must fetch you some toilet paper.”

A family with grade-school-age kids turned and stared at us, Mr. and Mrs. Claus and an elf, and I realized how odd it must look, this North Pole family with Santa shouting something about toilet paper. I bit my lower lip to keep from smiling, keep from enjoying Mr. Buchman’s sense of humor. If I didn’t watch out, I’d actually have myself believing that he was a nice guy.

O
ver the next few days a festive atmosphere took over Santaland, with Mr. Buchman leading the way, counseling and cajoling children. He thought of ways to move the queue faster when the line grew long. He made arrangements so that each child would receive a free Rossman’s balloon at the end of the line. He ignored overbearing parents but wasn’t beyond acting silly to make their children feel comfortable. Two other Santas also saw children around the other side of the Christmas ice mountain, comforting older men, both with grandchildren of their own, but something about Santa Buchman kept drawing me back to his side of the mountain.

When a little girl brought a long wish list with toys cross-referenced with page numbers from the Neiman Marcus catalog, he squinted at the pages, pretending that the mention of the rival store hurt his eyes.

After she jumped off his lap, I took her aside to talk about the real meaning of Christmas. Not that I had a definitive answer, but I knew that Christmas wasn’t about receiving twenty-eight doll sets and electronic robots, and I hated to see this little girl setting herself up for major disappointment.

“Jenny’s a planner,” her mother said. “You can see she’s got strong sense of organization.”

“That’s a great skill, and I’m sure Santa appreciates the work you put into this,” I said, staring intently at Jenny. “But can you try to picture Christmas morning? What one toy would you like to see under the tree? What toys will you play with, day after day?”

Jenny picked the two dolls at the top of her list. “But I do want them all,” she said. “I really do.”

“She knows what she wants,” her mother said proudly.

Watching them go, I felt a twinge of guilt over the fact that I couldn’t afford to get Tyler the two video games he wanted. Couldn’t afford them but also didn’t want to perpetuate an electronic Christmas that cost more than a hundred dollars for two small disks for a five-year-old. I worried that I was failing my son, that he’d be disappointed on Christmas morning. In years to come, would he look back on this Christmas and talk longingly of the gift that Santa forgot, the toy that didn’t arrive? The real question was, what did a parent need to give her child for Christmas?

Buchman stepped down from his platform, escorting a boy down the stairs. “Can’t save them all, though, it’s a pity,” he said in my ear.

I realized he was right, but there was one Christmas gift my son needed… something that he would remember and cherish in years to come, and if I was going to provide that, I needed to make some arrangements.

I decided to take Tyler out of school and take him right to TJ’s studio—a forced meeting, but even TJ wouldn’t be so coldhearted as to deny a little boy to his face. I wanted a commitment from TJ, a promise to spend one afternoon a week with his son, and a plan for them to do something special at Christmastime, a memory Tyler could hold on to forever.

That night, after we’d changed out of our costumes, I guided Tyler toward the escalators, putting an arm over his shoulders. “I have a surprise for tomorrow. Instead of school, we’re going to go to your dad’s studio. You’ve always liked that, right?”

“Sure,” he said. “But the most important thing…Can we stop and check my mousetrap on the way out? I’m sure there must be something there.”

So far he’d gone four days without a nibble on the dried-out cube of cheddar. “Okay,” I said, mentally calculating that it wouldn’t hurt to catch the next streetcar, since we could sleep a little later tomorrow.

On our way into the storeroom we ran into Buchman, who seemed to be on his way out. “Ah, Master Tyler, it appears your invention has made some progress.”

Tyler’s eyes popped wide. “I got him? Is he there?”

“Not quite yet.” Buchman winced. “But he’s made off with your cheese.”

“He took the bait?”

“Come have a look,” Buchman said, leading Tyler off to the corner, like two naturalists tracking elk through the plains.

As they hunkered over Tyler’s trap and speculated over ways to secure the bait, pondered other types of bait, and tried to track which route the mouse had exited, I considered the dilemma I’d be in if they did catch this mouse. Small dogs were allowed in our building, but I could only imagine the reaction of my landlady to the adoption of a department-store mouse.

Then again, my son had constructed a trap out of cardboard, tape, and string—hardly a solid, mouse-proof trap, despite Tyler’s labors to double-tape everything and surround it all with a circle of Elmer’s glue. Although the trap was flimsy, I was proud of my son’s efforts and ingenuity. This was something TJ needed to experience for himself, to marvel over the enthusiasm and craft of a five-year-old inventor. Once TJ got to know the little person Tyler was becoming, I knew he would fall in love with him, too.

The next day started lazily as thick fog rolled in and seeped onto neighborhood streets, turning the bright purple storefront of a Haight Street store into a milky pink and covering the signs for Cha Cha Cha and the Red Victorian Hotel that Tyler always tried to read through the fog as we passed. As we rode the streetcar to the studio I rehearsed my formal speech for TJ, determined to hit on all the important points as I pleaded Tyler’s case.

In some ways I felt like I was in for the battle of my life, securing a father for my son. But I knew how important it was; I remembered how much I missed having a father. It still hit me at times. A few years ago when I attended a wedding with TJ, the band started playing “Daddy’s Little Girl” and the bride rushed into her father’s arms on the dance floor. I stood alone, watching with a lump in my throat. So corny for everyone to watch as they swayed and talked into each other’s ears, but it took me back to that empty feeling, the nights when I’d stretched out in bed and stared up at the ceiling and imagined my father a prince or at least a wealthy, kind man who would come and whisk me away from the crazy instability that orbited Agate.

I’d shared those fantasies a few times, telling Bree and Jaimie about the scenarios I’d made up of Dad flying us off to a ski resort in the Swiss Alps or a Caribbean island for an exciting vacation. Jaimie was always sympathetic, Bree not so enthused.

“Fatherhood is overrated,” she told me. “My father was around, always home from work at six, regular as a clock. But he’s never taken me skiing or off to any islands. Honestly? I think he finds happiness in garden tools.”

What Bree didn’t understand was that I would have been happy to mow the lawn with my father, thrilled to nip the aphids from his roses. Sometimes it’s not so much what you’re doing as who you’re doing it with.

When we arrived at the studio, it soon became apparent that this was not going to be an easy meeting.

“Where’s Darlene?” I asked the security guard, a man I didn’t recognize, though his nameplate said Kelly. Last name or first name? I wasn’t sure.

He sat back in his chair. “Excuse me? If you’ll tell me Darlene’s last name, I’ll look her up for you.”

I parked Tyler on one of the chairs and bent over the security desk. “Darlene? She’s usually here at the door. I used to work here and we’re friends. Is she on vacation?”

His eyes hardened. “Apparently she’s not here today.”

The man was a wealth of information. “Oh, well.” I pulled the book toward me and started signing in. “Maybe she went back to school. It was something she wanted to do.”

“Hold on there.” He pulled the book away from me, causing a jagged line of ink on the page. “Who are you here to see?”

“TJ Blizzard. We’re old friends.”

“Do you have an appointment with Mr. Blizzard?”

I glanced back at Tyler, relieved that he didn’t seem to notice my rising annoyance over this man’s attitude. “He’ll see us. My name is Cassandra Derringer, and this is his son, Tyler. Call inside, if you want.”

“You’re definitely going to need approval from the producers,” he said. “And before we get any further, I need to see your driver’s license.”

It seemed like the ultimate insult for my son to have to wait outside while a rent-a-cop checked his mother’s ID, and all this to get an audience with his father…

Don’t upset Tyler. He’s only five.

I slid my license out of my wallet and snapped it on the desk.

“Go on and have a seat,” the guard ordered.

I moved back toward Tyler but didn’t interrupt him from his Game Boy.

Don’t let him see you sweat. Just get through the crap.

Ten nervous minutes later, the assistant director came through the door, her face tight with stress. “Oh, it’s you, honey.” Concepcion shook her head at me, as if she’d been expecting a two-headed monster. “I didn’t know what was what. What are you doing here?”

“Tyler is here to see his dad.” He didn’t look up from his game, but I put a soft hand on his shoulder. “This new security is ridiculous. Do we need badges or something?”

“Honey, there’s no reason for you to go in. TJ isn’t here, ’cause it’s not a tape day. Nobody’s here. We’re rerunning a ‘best of’ show tonight.”

My spirit sagged with the frustration of a wasted morning, a futile trip. Tyler had no trouble switching gears, heading back to school, but I was the one who needed a lift, a way to ease my disappointment. We decided to stop for lunch under the giant Christmas tree at Neiman Marcus.

While I’d been working on my Christmas windows I’d been careful to stay away from our competitors to ensure that my designs would be fresh and original, but now I thought it was safe to take Tyler to visit the giant tree in the atrium of Neiman Marcus. I vaguely remembered the furor when I was a teen over the demolition of an old turn-of-the-century store to open this one, but the huge glass-domed ceiling of the Rotunda Restaurant had been saved, and over the Christmases that followed it had become one of my favorite spots. Tyler and I lifted our chins and let our eyes rove up along the towering tree covered with enormous gold, blue, and red balls to the glass ceiling above.

“I see the big ship,” he said without looking down. “And a gold sword. And I see some angels in the waves.”

“Angels, really?” I let my eyes rove the exquisite gold and white glass framed by circles of white lights hung on the rotunda balconies.

“And those long curly papers that old-time men used to write on.”

“Scrolls?”

“And look at the end. It’s a head of a lion. Or a ghost.”

“Ooh, I see that. Or a creepy man.”

“Mom, when you were a little kid, did you always come here with your mom and look up at the ceiling over the tree?” he asked out of the blue, the way children let you know what they’re thinking.

“No, honey. When I was little, my mom didn’t celebrate Christmas.”

“Does she like Christmas now?”

“I don’t know.” Agate had burned through so many phases, from latter-day hippiedom to holistic medicine to iron-body fitness to the practice of Wicca. Perhaps she’d spun from white witch to country minister in the years that we’d been apart.

“Maybe she does,” he said. “Maybe she’d be proud of you for being Mrs. Claus.”

I reached across the table and smoothed down a tuft of his hair. “And you for being an elf.”

“Mom…Are you still sorry that you don’t have a dad?”

I let my finger trace a holly pattern on the tablecloth as I thought about that one. “I don’t think about it much anymore. I guess I’ve moved on.”

He nodded. “I’m not sorry about my dad. I just need
you.”
His coy smile stole my heart until he stuck a long french fry in his mouth.

“But your dad loves you,” I said quickly. “I know he doesn’t spend a lot of time with you, but he’s going to get better. You’ll see.”

Tyler shrugged, his focus on the construction of a ravine in the ketchup heap with the help of french-fry bulldozers. He didn’t seem worried about gaining the acceptance of his father, much to my relief. Better for him to concentrate on building a bridge of fries or a humane mousetrap.

For now, his mom could sweat the big stuff.