She blinked at him.
“Well?” Tom said.
Beth quickly turned to release Mitchell from his seat belt. “Now, Mitchell, you go with Santa to the men’s room. I’ll be back as soon as I park the car,” she said.
Tom caught a glimpse of the inside of her creamy white thighs as she flounced back around and smoothed her coat over her short skirt. He was totally unprepared for the rush of sexual desire that shot through his nether regions.
“Hurry up, ma’am, other cars are in line behind you.” The guard was growing more impatient.
Mitchell clambered out of the car and nestled his hand inside Tom’s. There was something sweet about the innocence and trust of the boy. Tom was crazy about kids, though he wasn’t so sure about this one. Maybe he’d been prejudiced by that awful blue velvet suit. No red-blooded, rough-and-tumble boy would wear an outfit like that without putting up a fight.
“I’ll make sure Mitchell gets to the men’s room. You go ahead,” he told Beth in a gentler tone.
“Yeah, Mom,” said Mitchell.
After one long sigh of exasperation, Beth sped away toward the parking lot, leaving Tom in charge.
“I really have to go,” Mitchell said imploringly. “Can you take me to the bathroom right now? I can’t wait much longer.”
“Excuse me,” said the security guard, who was standing beside him. “We’ve got an ambulance bringing in some accident victims in a minute. Could you please clear the area?”
“Sure,” Tom said.
“I bet you’ve been a good little boy this year,” the guard said to Mitchell.
“No,” Mitchell said, “and pretty soon I’m going to be a lot badder if I don’t get to the—”
“Hurry up,” Tom said, galvanized into action by the expression on the boy’s face.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Mitchell said. “But if I have an accident, will you still bring me presents?”
“You’re not going to have an accident,” Tom assured him. “As sure as I’m Santa Claus.” Then he realized what he’d said. “As sure as Rudolph has a red nose,” he amended.
“Okay, Santa,” Mitchell said in a surprisingly meek voice. “’Cause I certainly could use a real dad.”
Inwardly, Tom groaned, but he kept pulling Mitchell along after him. When he’d agreed to play Santa, he’d had no idea that the job would be so difficult. In all sorts of ways.
Chapter Two
As they rushed through the double glass doors into the hospital, Tom looked around frantically for the men’s room. A sign indicated that it was located down a hallway to the left.
“This way,” he said, pulling Mitchell along and urging him through the door.
Once inside, Tom regarded the kid with doubt. “You, uh, understand how to do this, right?” he asked.
“Sure, I’m not a baby. I’ll be six in January,” Mitchell said indignantly as he stepped up to the necessary receptacle.
The boy appeared big for a five-year-old, but then, what did Tom know. He moved to one side and studied his aching wrist as Mitchell took care of business. The joint had become so swollen that the bones didn’t show, and the skin had turned blue. He probably should have put some ice on it back at the fire station.
“Okay?” Tom asked brightly as Mitchell readjusted his clothes.
“Yeah,” Mitchell said in that deep voice of his. “Except for the itching.” He tugged at the collar of his suit and made a face.
“Itching?” Tom repeated.
“All around my neck. All over me. I hate this suit, but my mom made me wear it.”
Tom felt a rush of sympathy. “I don’t like my suit much, either,” he said.
“Did your mom make you wear it?”
“No, my sister,” Tom replied.
“Bummer.”
Having established a rapport common to men who did things to appease the women who loved them, Tom ushered Mitchell out of the men’s room.
“Ho-ho-ho, we’d better go find your mother,” Tom said, though as they emerged into the waiting area, Tom couldn’t see Beth. She apparently hadn’t come in from the parking lot.
Mitchell pressed close as they approached the admittance area, and there was something comforting about his presence. As Tom slipped his insurance card out of his wallet, he glanced down at the kid, who—life was full of surprises—gazed up at him with a big smile. The trouble was, that smile was on the wrong face. Tom would have preferred it to be on Beth’s.
The girl at the desk was efficient in the extreme, so that when the printout with his information spooled out of the computer, she was already on her feet. “Be back in a mo,” she said briskly as she disappeared through a nearby door.
“One thing I’ve always wondered, Santa,” Mitchell piped up, tugging at the hem of Tom’s red jacket. “How do you manage to get to everybody’s house on Christmas Eve?”
Tom, who had forgotten for a span of minutes that he was supposed to be Santa Claus, frowned. “Uh, I have really fast reindeer.”
“You mean like the speed of light?”
Tom considered this. “More like a NASCAR racer.”
“My daddy goes to car races. He said he’d take me sometime.”
“I thought you didn’t have a—”
“Sir, you forgot to sign here.” The girl was back, and she handed Tom a pen.
While he was scribbling his name with his injured hand and pondering how to become instantly ambidextrous, Mitchell kept talking.
“Last year I left cookies out for Santa Claus and grass for the reindeer. My dad wasn’t sure what reindeer ate. We decided on grass because that’s what other kinds of deer like, and Starla had a box of real grass on the bar for decoration. She let us use it. Starla’s nice most of the time.”
Through his pain-filled haze, Tom managed to reply. “You told me you wanted me to bring you a dad.”
“Oh, I do. A real dad, I said. My dad’s not a real dad because he doesn’t live with us. He lives in Oklahoma with Starla. They have a new baby. A girl.” Mitchell’s deprecating tone expressed exactly how he felt about his sister.
“I guess that’s pretty exciting, huh?”
Mitchell scuffed one shiny shoe against the floor. “Nope. I’ve only seen the baby once. Her name is Ava. Isn’t that a dumb name? She’s got fat cheeks and lots of brown fuzzy hair. She looks like my friend’s new hamster. My friend is named Jeremiah. He’s six already and he goes to first grade.” Clearly Mitchell held Jeremiah in great esteem and awe because of this fact.
Tom’s nephew, Leanne’s middle son, was named Jeremiah, and he was in first grade. In a small town like Farish, population eight thousand, there was likely only one Jeremiah that age, but before Tom could comment, the clerk handed him a sheaf of forms. “Here you are, Mr. Claus,” she said with a wink. “Right through that door, and you’ll be in the first cubicle on the left.”
Mitchell pulled at his coat again. “I can go, too, right?”
No sign of Beth yet, and Tom wondered what was keeping her. He eyed Mitchell sternly. “Okay, but no funny business,” he warned. “I mean it.”
Mitchell’s eyes were unfathomable pools of blue. “Okay,” he said, surprisingly meek.
At that moment, Beth flew through the door, her hair bouncing around her shoulders and her face alive with concern for Mitchell and maybe even him.
“Everything’s fine,” Tom told her, mustering a grin. “Mitchell managed very well.”
Beth’s expression eased, and she smiled back. “Thanks for what you did. It took me a while to find a parking place—a whole section of the lot was blocked off due to construction.”
“I appreciate the ride,” Tom said. “I’m sorry it was so much trouble.”
“No problem,” Beth said breezily. “Let’s go, Mitchell.”
Mitchell’s eyes widened in dismay, and he clutched Tom’s hand. “Are we gonna leave Santa here? Without a way to get home?”
“His reindeer will be here soon,” Beth s
aid quickly.
“Yeah,” Tom said, figuring he could call his friend Divver to pick him up. “With the sleigh and Rudolph.”
“Sir,” announced a nurse standing in the doorway to the inner sanctum, “the doctor is waiting.”
“What if his sleigh doesn’t get here?” asked Mitchell. “If we don’t help him, he might not bring us presents.”
“Hmm.” Beth smiled fondly at her son. “If it means so much to you, maybe we could wait for Santa.”
“Oh, no,” Tom injected quickly, although the idea of riding in the car with Beth again was certainly appealing. “I couldn’t impose.”
“We’ll wait,” Beth said, heading for the bank of chairs at the back of the room, where a television set alternately blared out commercials and cartoons.
“But—” Tom began, as the nurse nudged him toward the cubicle. His wrist hurt like hell and the smell of antiseptic stung his nose and he couldn’t find the strength or the will to object.
The cubicle was bare and bright, and Tom eyed the young doctor warily. Fortunately, she seemed knowledgeable. “Not broken. Sprained,” she said after he came back from X ray. “It’s a bad one, too. You’ll need to go easy on it for a while.”
Tom sighed and winced as she wrapped his wrist in an Ace bandage and applied a sling. In a matter of minutes he was ready to go home.
“With any luck you’ll be able to guide your reindeer through rain and hail and dark of night on Christmas Eve,” the doctor said.
“You’ve got Santa Claus mixed up with the postal service,” Tom said sourly, and the doctor laughed. Everyone seemed to be getting a kick out of his situation but him.
When he emerged into the waiting room, Beth set aside the dog-eared magazine she was reading, and Mitchell jumped up from the coffee table where he had been lying on his stomach and making swimming motions accompanied by dolphin squeals. Several people in the room with varying degrees of injury were glaring at Mitchell with annoyance, and Tom didn’t blame them. Beth had no control over the kid. But as she stood and slipped on her coat, he noted the way her figure rounded out her elf costume and immediately forgave her laxness with her son.
Mitchell sang verse after verse of “The Little Drummer Boy,” which Tom considered possibly the most annoying Christmas song ever written, at the top of his lungs on the way home. The racket made it almost impossible for Tom, again sitting beside Beth in the front seat, to carry on a conversation with her.
“You’ll have to tell me how to get to your house,” Beth shouted at him over the din from the back seat.
He gazed out at the lamp posts of Farish, now festooned with red-and-white striped candy canes. During his fifteen-year absence, he’d forgotten that they made such a big deal of Christmas here. “Turn right on Home Avenue, left on Lyndale, head toward the bypass till you get to a four-way stop. Turn right again, and it’s the second house on the left. Limestone with dark green shutters,” Tom shouted back.
The pa-rum-pum-pum-pums stopped. “Don’t we have to drop off Santa at the North Pole?” Mitchell asked.
“I’m visiting here in Farish,” Tom stated, earning him a grateful smile from Beth.
“Like me when I go to my father’s house in Oklahoma,” Mitchell said sagely. “Like I’m going to do this week.”
Beth glanced in Tom’s direction. “Mitchell is leaving on the sixteenth to spend Christmas with my ex-husband,” she said.
She sounded overly mournful. Now if he, Tom, had a chance to get rid of this particular kid for a few days or even a few minutes, he’d be happy. No, make that joyful. Perhaps even downright ecstatic, though admittedly Mitchell had improved since the breakfast debacle.
“You’ll miss Mitchell, I guess,” he said, just to keep the conversational ball, if not exactly bouncing, rolling along.
Beth bit her lip—her sensuously curved lower lip—and kept her eyes on the road ahead. “I’ll be all by myself for Christmas. I’m going to clean out the closets, cook a turkey, keep busy the best way I can. That’s how I’ll get through it.”
Maybe she was still in love with the ex-husband. Maybe it wasn’t only her son she’d be missing.
“You’ll be fine,” Tom said reassuringly. “The time will go really fast.”
“I don’t know, since I’m going to close up shop. Well, I don’t exactly have a shop. I work out of my home. But I won’t be doing much because Christmas week is always slow.”
“This Bluebonnet Interiors—it’s your own business?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She deftly executed a right-hand turn onto Wildeboer Road. Farms started whipping by, horses behind crosshatched white fences.
He wanted to say, If you’re lonely, how about calling me and we’ll go out for a beer? Or, I’m new in town, and I might get lonesome over the holidays, too. But he didn’t say either of those things because Mitchell was now kicking the back of Tom’s seat where his elbow rested and was sending darting pains up his arm.
“Would you please stop kicking my seat?” he said to Mitchell with remarkable restraint.
“Santa’s wrist hurts, darling,” Beth said sweetly. She braked in front of his house, a two-story job built in the 1920s.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said to her, scrambling out of the car. “And, um, merry Christmas.”
“Say hello to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for me,” said Mitchell. “Say hello to Mrs. Santa Claus.”
“There isn’t a Mrs. Claus.” Tom wanted Beth to realize this.
Not that it made an impression. “I hope your wrist heals quickly,” she said, and she smiled slightly. Maybe she was only being polite.
“Thanks.”
Beth drove off in a cloud of exhaust, indicating that her minivan was burning too much oil, and he watched as it disappeared around the corner.
Well, so much for that. He turned to go inside, eager to shuck this stupid Santa outfit and settle down in front of the TV with his ice pack and something potent to drink. Just then, a carload of teenagers ripped across the intersection, and one of them leaned out an open window.
“Hey, Santa, you sleigh me,” yelled one of the boys.
Tom bit back a snarl as he stepped through the front door into a sparsely furnished living room that at this moment seemed way too uninhabited.
“Bah humbug,” he snarled as he ripped the beard from his face. “Bah humbug, bah humbug, bah humbug!” Even Scrooge couldn’t have said the words with more feeling.
Leanne and her harebrained ideas. Next time his sister wanted someone to play Santa Claus, Tom planned to be far away. Even if he had to take an unscheduled trip to the North Pole. Even if he had to walk every step of the way in his bare feet. In a snowstorm, and every stuff.
From the Farish Tribune:
Here ’n’ There in Farish
by Muffy Ledbetter
It was a hot time in the old fire station on Saturday morning when the Homemakers’ Club entertained over a hundred boys and girls at their annual pancake breakfast. Leanne Novak, chairperson of the event again this year, says that Breakfast with Santa was a rousing success, despite the fact that the jolly guy had to leave on an urgent trip to the North Pole about halfway through it. Leanne says that the kids who didn’t get to talk with Santa taped their requests. The tape will be mailed to the North Pole right away, so don’t anyone worry about Santa not knowing what to bring.
Helper elves for the occasion were Gretchen Morris, Tammy Turpin, Nancy DeGroot, Peg Marmo, Helen Duhy, Beth McCormick, Julie Gomez, Sandra Bryant, Jane Funderburk and Tiffany Wiggins-Borg.
Photographer elf Artie Pikestaff says for everyone who attended the breakfast to stop by his shop and pick up your photos with Santa. He’ll have them ready before Christmas.
If you have newsworthy tidbits, please call me on my cell phone. You’ll find the number at the end of this column.
Till next time, I’ll be seeing you here ’n’ there in Farish.
Chapter Three
The day after the pancake breakfast, Beth McCormi
ck tackled the chores that needed to be done if her son was going to be ready to go to his father’s by Friday.
Mitchell had been invited to play at his friend Ryan’s house, which gave her plenty of time to wash and iron his clothes and brush up the nap of his blue velvet suit, which she’d made herself. She liked sewing for her son, though she wished he was more appreciative of her efforts.
Now, where was the duffel that Mitchell needed? Her search led her to the depths of the hall closet, much to her annoyance. “If I could only find a flashlight, this wouldn’t be so difficult,” Beth huffed as she bent her trim form nearly in half. Several months ago, she’d set a mousetrap in the far regions of the closet, the better to catch whatever was scrabbling around in there. She was unaware of the trap’s status at the moment, so she proceeded gingerly.
Suddenly, she remembered the duffel’s whereabouts. Leanne had borrowed it when she went to visit her sick mother-in-law a month or so ago.
This meant backing out of the cramped space. As she emerged, Beth spotted the windbreaker that Mitchell had worn to Breakfast with Santa lying on the floor. She started to add the jacket to the laundry in the basket beside the washing machine, but it felt heavy. Wondering what Mitchell was carrying around in his pockets that would weigh them down, she stuck in her hand and pulled out a wallet.
It was a standard man’s billfold, fashioned of dark brown leather. Neither she nor Mitchell owned such a thing. She flipped it open, and Tom Collyer’s driver’s license picture stared up at her. Not that she would have known it was Tom; she had to read his name to learn that. After all, she’d never seen him without the Santa costume.
How had Mitchell—? Well, she supposed, the wallet could have fallen out of Tom’s pocket in the car.
She eased Tom’s driver’s license from its clear plastic case. He was an attractive guy, though his face was more rugged than she would have guessed when it was hidden by Santa’s whiskers. She took in the hank of straight dark hair falling over his wide forehead, the eyebrows that angled sharply over craggy cheekbones, the generous mouth that bowed up at the corners and the fine lines fanning out from the deep-set eyes, which were an indeterminate color in the picture. His haircut was precise. Tom didn’t resemble his sister, Leanne, who was pleasantly plump and had long straight hair.
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