To Santa With Love

by Janet Dailey

  “Why did you take this to school, Robbie?” Jacquie eyed him suspiciously.

  He peered at her anxiously through his lashes, his pale golden hair gleaming brightly in the sun. “So I could show them what you looked like. You do look like her.” He hastened to add, “And you’re prettier than any of the other kids’ mothers.”

  “But that’s not a photo of me. And you didn’t actually tell them I was your new mother or anything like that, did you?”

  Robbie looked uncomfortable. “No.”

  Jacquie sensed it was a truthful answer and also that it wasn’t the whole truth. “Do they think I’m your mother?”

  “Well, maybe some of them do,” he conceded.

  “And you didn’t tell them differently?” she said with a sigh. His chin dipped toward his chest. “Robbie, I am not your mother. I’m not even your stepmother. It wasn’t right for you to let any of your classmates even think that I am.”

  “I know,” he mumbled.

  “Tomorrow you’ll have to tell them the truth.”

  Large, luminous brown eyes turned toward her. “I wish you were my mother, though.”

  The yearning innocence in his words dissolved Jacquie’s irritation—and made her feel deeply ashamed that she hadn’t been more tactful. Kneeling beside him, she gazed into his wistful face.

  “You know it’s not possible,” was her gentle reply.

  “Why?” Robbie asked solemnly. “Why couldn’t I pretend that you’re my mom? There wouldn’t be anything wrong with that.”

  “Oh, Robbie,” Jacquie sighed again, wishing she were more immune to his charm.

  “It would be just-pretend between you and me. I wouldn’t tell anybody else,” he persisted as he saw her waver. Choya had told her that Robbie formed intense attachments quickly. He hadn’t been wrong.

  “No. And I mean it.” He looked hurt, but she couldn’t give in. Jacquie shook her head. “I’m not your mom. I came here to help out around the house, so your dad and grandpa don’t have to do everything. That’s all there is to it.”

  He didn’t hide his disappointed frown.

  Jacqiue straightened, trailing a hand over his shoulders. “Come on. Let’s go in the house. After you change clothes, want to help me make brownies? You can have one before dinner.”

  It was an obvious bribe. He looked up at her with troubled eyes, not ready to give up. “No. I don’t want a brownie.”

  She put a palm on his forehead to tease him. “Oh my. You must have a fever.”

  He batted her hand away and pushed ahead of her into the house. “No! I don’t want to be sick for Christmas!”

  Jacquie sighed and followed him.

  Minutes later, Robbie headed out to play in the barn. She closed the front door of the house behind him. It would do him good to work off some steam. Besides, his parting comment had made her think of the upcoming holidays. Whether Choya had decorations and things like that stored somewhere, she didn’t know. He might prefer an artificial tree, she supposed. The thought depressed her. Her parents had always set up a huge, freshly fragrant evergreen and her mother had done the decorating, letting Jacquie help as soon as she was old enough.

  She heard the front door open and close again as Sam returned home and she reached for a magazine, opening it halfway through as though she’d been reading it.

  “Hey there, Jacquie. What are you up to?”

  “Nothing much.” She set the magazine aside. “Sit down.” She rose and turned his favorite chair toward the kitchen table. Sam eased his long body into it a little stiffly.

  “Glad to hear it. Because I had something I wanted to ask you.”

  “Okay.” Jacquie moved to the counter to brew a pot of coffee for both of them. “Ask away.”

  “I’m not sure where to start—”

  “That’s not like you, Sam,” she interrupted him with a smile. They had become good friends fast. Jacquie suspected that the old man thought of her as a daughter—and liked the idea very much.

  “Okay, Choya put me up to it,” he confessed with a twinkle in his eye. “He wanted to know if there’s anything special you like to do around Christmas. We never made much fuss about it out here, but we do celebrate it. I don’t think Robbie broke all the ornaments last year,” he joked. “There might even be a working string of lights left.”

  “I see,” she laughed. “Should we sort through them?”

  “If you could help me git the boxes, we could start to.”

  Several minutes later, they were going through the contents of a couple of large cardboard boxes she’d taken down from the hall closet. Sam handled the ornaments carefully, holding each bauble in a gnarled hand to admire it before setting it on the dishtowel she’d provided to keep them from rolling around on the table.

  “Robbie picked out this striped snowball when he was three. Him and Choya started collecting ornaments every year after that.”

  She peered into the other box, which was filled to the flaps. “How many are there?”

  “Never counted. But you name it—reindeer and Santas and colored balls and glass birds with feather tails—he wanted it. Choya let him buy every trinket and twinkly thing he saw. Robbie loves Christmas.”

  Jacquie understood what Sam didn’t say directly: none of the ornaments had been chosen by Choya’s first wife. She wondered briefly what Choya had done with those. Maybe they were stored away like the album she’d found hidden, in some other closet she hadn’t opened.

  Every Christmas had to have been painful for Choya, but he obviously hid his feelings too. The whimsical ornaments he let Robbie choose year after year was one way he could make sure that Robbie’s memories were happy ones.

  “It’s a good time to buy more,” Jacquie said. “A lot of the Christmas stuff goes on sale around now.”

  “Well, not in the Tombstone shops,” Sam replied. “Mebbe in the malls out around Tucson—and Choya’s been busy. But he’ll get around to it. He always does.”

  Jacquie had reached into the bottom of the box and lifted out a garland of sparkling fake cranberries interspersed with plastic popcorn. “Wow. This has to be twenty feet long. You Barnetts must like big trees.”

  “Yes we do.” Sam grinned with pride. “We use that every year. But the tree has to be the real deal.”

  She smiled, glad to hear that. “This is great,” she said, coiling it on the table. “And it beats real popcorn and real cranberries. I stuck my finger with a needle a million times the year we made our own garlands. Never again.”

  She remembered to serve the coffee as they emptied the boxes and Sam talked about the past to his heart’s content. The mellow mood and his eagerness to reminisce made her think of something that had been on her mind since she’d met Choya.

  “Sam—is that a true story about you finding Choya as a baby in a cholla patch? I heard it the first day I came to Tombstone.”

  “Oh?” He straightened slightly in his chair, studying her a little warily. “From who?”

  Jacquie took a deep breath and forged on. She did want to know. “Brad—you know, the garage mechanic who fixed my car after the accident.”

  “Is that the feller’s name? Haven’t been into that place for a while. But I think I knew his uncle back in the day.”

  She nodded. Sam seemed to be stalling for time by taking a slow sip from his cup, then draining it.

  “Whatever Brad told you—that ain’t the whole story, Jacquie.”

  “But is it true?” she persisted.

  “He was a foundling, yes,” the older man said slowly. “But the how and where of it—that part got a little embellished over time. Cholla isn’t called jumping cactus for nothing. Those spines get under your skin and stay there. No one would leave a baby right smack in the middle of a cholla patch.”

  Her steady gaze was meant to encourage him but it seemed to be making him a trifle nervous. His gnarled hands encircled the warm cup. “Is there more of this or did we drink it all?”

  “No, there’
s more.” Jacquie got up to fix him a refill. “Two sugars?” she asked him.

  “Make it three.”

  Sam stirred his cup vigorously when she set it on the table. “Bring on the half-and-half.”

  She’d put a splash of milk in his first cup. “It’s bad for you,” she remonstrated.

  “Hasn’t killed me yet,” Sam reasoned.

  Jacquie looked in the fridge and picked up a small square container, shaking it. “Almost gone.”

  Sam held out his cup and she dribbled in the last of it.

  “Thanks,” Sam sighed. “Sorry for the fussin’—I needed a little time to think. Where were we?”

  Jacquie was gentle but direct. She was burning with curiosity by this point and Sam’s uneasiness only made it worse. “Did you find Choya out here on the ranch?”

  “It was on Barnett land, but not here. We owned a big section that was close to Tucson,” Sam said with deliberate slowness. “There weren’t all those subdivisions then. It was about as rugged and lonely as this.”

  She hadn’t known they’d owned land near the sprawling desert city. From the way Sam spoke, it seemed safe to assume it had been sold.

  “One track on it ended in a clearing in the desert—there were some chollas around it, sure. I used to drive there at the end of the day just to think, watch the sunset sometimes.”

  He took a sip of the thick sweet coffee, growing thoughtful. “It was right close to Christmas. Just two days before.”

  That was a detail no one had mentioned. Jacquie’s eyes widened but she didn’t interrupt him.

  “It was cold as the dickens, too, what with the sun going down early and a norther on the way. I didn’t plan on sticking around. But then I saw something.

  “No particular color to it. At first I thought it was a boulder, but I didn’t remember one being there. It moved a little and I went over to see what was doing that. It turned out to be a baby carrier—the kind with a big handle and a half-cover.”

  “I know the type you mean,” Jacquie said.

  “And there he was inside of it, bundled up in a fuzzy thing with a hood, eyes open and strong enough to rock himself. I looked around for whoever had left him, but I didn’t see a soul and didn’t hear a sound except the wind blowing.”

  “Who would abandon a baby in a place like that?” Jacquie whispered softly.

  “I thought the same thing myself once I realized that someone had. But I knew he hadn’t been there long. That fuzzy thing he was inside of was warm and so was he, because I put a hand on him right away to make sure. He smiled at me. I couldn’t tell how old he was. Not newborn. Maybe five, six months old.”

  Jacquie sat back, speechless for a moment.

  “I figured it was someone who’d seen me go there often, and she had to know the area well to leave the baby and get away quickly before I saw her.”

  “She? How did you know it was a woman if you didn’t see anyone there?”

  Sam cleared his throat. “The police thought the same thing, because of the way he was wrapped up nice and neat. When I brought him in, one of the lady officers made sure he wasn’t wet before someone went out to get formula and a bottle. There were blankets under the fuzzy thing, fixed just so in layers, the way women know how to do.”

  Jacquie didn’t.

  “A man wouldn’t have done it so particular,” Sam said with conviction. “And I just had a feeling—I couldn’t explain it then and I can’t now—that a woman was watching me while I got him in the car and buckled that carrier thing down. It wasn’t like I could go looking for her or shout out. I was afraid he would cry and it was nearly night and cold as hell. I turned on the engine to get the heat going and looked him and the carrier over real carefully. There wasn’t a note.

  “The lady officer didn’t find one either. But his little clothes were new and clean and his diaper had just been changed. So what I thought at the time was that he hadn’t exactly been abandoned. He’d been left for me to find because she’d seen me coming.” He paused for a beat. “And she saw me go. With her son.”

  Jacquie nodded. The old man spoke freely enough but there was a catch in his voice even now.

  “Why she picked me, I never understood. I was considered the most confirmed bachelor in the county, though I did have the ranch and a respectable income. And the Barnett name stood for something.” He hesitated. “Those were hard times then, like now. A lot of people out of work, houses foreclosed on, no jobs to be found.”

  “Did you try to find her?”

  Sam nodded and put down the cup. “Of course. So did the police. I made discreet inquiries on my own, even hired a private investigator after a while—he was thorough and expensive. He checked hospitals and clinics all over the southwest.”

  “And?”

  “The babies born around summertime of that year—Choya turned out to be about the age I’d thought—well, they all matched up with the records on file, and all were confirmed with their parents or other relatives. The doc who first examined him said it was possible the baby hadn’t been born in a hospital—it happens all the time.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I gave up on the inquiries but I didn’t give up on Choya. I went to family court and asked to be appointed temporary guardian. I’d had him for a while when a family court judge made a final ruling, based on—oh my, a lot of things. Character references and proof of income and residence, and last but not least, filed affidavits from folks who were willing and able to help me with little Choya. The court wasn’t going to hand over a foundling just like that—they ain’t supposed to rubber-stamp adoptions. But I suspected that the judge wasn’t eager to put Choya into the foster care system either.”

  Jacquie raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Help? From who?”

  “Among others, a lady friend I had at the time. Mrs. Chase. From the motel. Only she wasn’t Mrs. Chase then, she was Lulu Williams. She was about your age then, the oldest of nine on a farm and she knew a thing or two about babies. I never coulda done it without her to teach me the basics of diaperin’ and feedin’ and bringin’ up a baby that young.”

  Silently she remembered her feeling that Choya and the motel owner had known each other for a long time. Jacquie nodded, encouraging Sam to continue.

  “Even with her help, I didn’t get much sleep that first year, but then, neither did little Choya,” he said philosophically. “After a year, I applied to adopt him and in another year he was legally my son and had my last name.”

  “And that nickname,” she pointed out.

  Sam shook his head. “It’s not a nickname. That’s his full legal name. I couldn’t call a baby like that just plain Billy or Bo. No, he’s Choya Barnett—it says so right on his adoption papers.” He gave her a wink. “Fits him, don’t it?”

  “Yes. Especially the part about cholla getting under your skin. He’s good at that.”

  Sam grinned. “The way I look at it, then and now, Choya was meant to be a Barnett. His momma picked me out to be his rightful dad even though I never saw her face or found out one thing about her.”

  “What if you had?” Jacquie wondered out loud.

  Sam fell silent. “One time I thought I did.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “I was in a department store in Tucson with Choya when he wasn’t more than five. He’d never been in a big place like that and he was crowing about everything he saw. Then he let go of my hand and disappeared into the displays. By the time I caught up with him, he was in the dress department and surrounded by women, making friends with them all. But one young gal was holding back—and damned if she didn’t look like him, with dark hair and them golden eyes—”

  He stopped short. The door seemed to blow open and a blast of frigid wind came through it, along with Robbie.

  “Well, I guess I’ve gone on long enough,” Sam said in a low voice. He watched his grandson come in and throw his arms around Jacquie.

  “Hi! I’m back from the barn!” Robbie pressed
his cold cheek against hers.

  “I noticed,” she said with a smile, returning his enthusiastic hug and letting him go. “Close the door and hang up your jacket.”

  “Okay!” He went to do both and came back. “Hi, Gramps,” he said, then saw the ornaments and the boxes on the table. “Are we going to get a tree today?” he asked excitedly.

  “Nope,” said his grandfather. “It’s not time yet. Besides, you have homework to do.”

  Robbie looked pleadingly at Jacquie, who began to put the fragile ornaments back in the boxes as carefully as she and Sam had taken them out. “Don’t look at me like that,” she laughed. “You have five minutes to sit down and unzip that backpack you threw on the floor.”

  “But I don’t want to sit down. You said we could make brownies.”

  “Ah, it’s too late for that now.” Truth be told, she wanted to think about all she’d just learned. Her mind was still going over everything Sam had said.

  “Please—I don’t want to do homework.”

  “How about if I read my book next to you while you do?”

  Robbie lifted the cover of her thick novel and riffled through the first pages. “This has too many words. Bet I finish first.”

  She opened the spring catch of an old mason jar to get a couple of chocolate-chip cookies for him and put them on a plate. “Here’s some fuel. Get started.”

  The evening meal could not have been classified as a success. Although Choya had shown her how to operate the stove, Jacquie still had difficulty judging the amount of heat for cooking. Tonight it had been the corn that was scorched.

  Sam, probably out of self-preservation, had offered to take over or even to just help with the meals, but Jacquie had steadfastly refused. Stubbornly she had insisted on cooking everything herself. She was determined to master the stove, even though she knew it was irrational to want to get the better of an inanimate object. But she really did hate the damn thing. Despite her determination, she sometimes wondered if she would ever learn how to cook—she wasn’t sure she would have the patience for it.

  Except for Choya’s comment about a “burnt offering” the first time she’d fixed a meal, he dropped the topic of her substandard cooking ability. Tonight he’d been even more silent than usual, but his tawny gaze had narrowed on her several times. Jacquie simply ignored him. She couldn’t begin to guess the reason for his silence and she wasn’t going to try.