We Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus

by Brenda Novak

  “What are you doing now?” she asked Cole, even though part of her didn’t want to know. He looked successful sitting there in his tailored suit. He’d escaped Feld and landed on his feet. For that she was envious. Especially because she’d just taken a flying leap and landed in the gutter.

  “I build houses.”

  “You’re a contractor?”

  Larry gave a genial laugh. “Not quite. Cole takes a pretty hands-on approach to his job, but he’s not a contractor. He’s a developer. And a damn good one. Haven’t you ever heard of Perrini Homes?”

  Jaclyn shook her head. “I’ve lived here less than a year.”

  “Well, he’s got a subdivision near the golf course. Four-and five-bedroom homes. You should drive by and take a look if you’re ever in the market.”

  Jaclyn doubted she’d be able to afford a home of that size in the next twenty years. She barely managed to pay the rent on the house they lived in now. It was only eight hundred square feet and older than the hills, but she’d rented it for the yard. Accustomed to wide-open spaces, she refused to raise her three children in an apartment.

  “I’ll do that,” she said.

  “I’d like to build a small development a few miles east of here,” Cole said. “In Sparks. That’s why I’m coming, hat in hand, to Larry, here.”

  Larry adjusted his silverware and smiled. “And I’ll probably give you what you need. I’ve financed several of your projects already, haven’t I?”

  Working outdoors with his contractors explained the tan. A meeting with his banker explained the suit. “Sounds like things are going well for you,” Jaclyn said.

  Cole shrugged in a nonchalant manner. “Well enough, I guess.”

  The couple at one of her other tables kept swiveling their heads, looking for her and, no doubt, their check. And the food for table two was probably ready. She needed to get moving. “Would you like something to drink?” she asked Cole.

  “I’ll have an iced tea.”

  “It’ll be just a minute.”

  Jaclyn left, feeling Cole’s gaze trail after her. Who would’ve thought she’d run into him again? Especially here, now, when even pride was a luxury she couldn’t afford.

  She ducked into the kitchen and quickly tallied the tab for table three, but by the time she brought it out, the man was already standing.

  “We’ve been waiting for ten minutes while you were busy flirting with that guy over there,” he said loudly enough for half the restaurant to hear.

  Aware of the attention he was drawing, Jaclyn flushed. “I’m sorry.” She wanted to deny that she’d been flirting with anyone, but she handed him his bill and began to gather up the plates, instead. Sometimes it was smarter to simply apologize. She didn’t want a scene, not with Cole Perrini less than ten feet away. And not while Rudy Morales, her manager, was on duty.

  “I think we deserve a break here—for the wait,” he persisted. “You’ve made us late for a movie.”

  Then, why didn’t he pay his bill and hurry off?

  The woman who’d eaten with him lowered her eyes, a sure sign that he was making a fuss over nothing.

  “I couldn’t have been longer than five minutes,” Jaclyn said. “I just ran into an old friend, that’s all.”

  “Well, maybe you should visit with your friends when you’re on your break.”

  “I’ve apologized,” she said. “If it’ll make you feel better, skip the tip.”

  “I wasn’t planning on leaving a tip.”

  Jaclyn felt anger course through her. This guy was an opportunist, and he was trying to take advantage of her. Her natural instincts prompted her to stand her ground. But the nagging worry of how she’d support her children if she lost her job kept her voice cool and polite. Rudy was already looking for any excuse to write her up.

  “What if I send home a couple of pieces of pie with you? Will that help?” she asked.

  “I don’t want pie. I think you should comp our meals.”

  “For waiting five minutes?” Jaclyn asked. “You never even told me you were in a hurry.”

  “I don’t have to give you my schedule when I sit down to eat. Now, are you going to work with me, here, or do I have to speak to your manager?”

  A knot of unease lodged in Jaclyn’s belly. When she’d first started working at Joanna’s, Rudy had pursued her pretty aggressively. She’d gotten firm with her refusals, and he’d had it in for her ever since. “Fine. I’ll take it out of my tips,” she said. “Why don’t you just go ahead and leave?”

  “That’s more like it,” the man replied, slinging an arm around his companion and starting for the door. “Jeez, what kind of place are you running here, anyway?”

  “It’s a restaurant,” a male voice replied. “In a restaurant, you order, you eat and you pay. Then you tip, generously.”

  Jaclyn looked up to see Cole Perrini towering over them all, and knew her day was about to go from bad to worse. Rudy would hear and…“This is my problem,” she said quickly. “I’ll handle it.”

  “Yeah, let her handle it,” the guy said. “We were just on our way out.”

  Cole smiled and lifted his hands, but he blocked their path, and a certain hardness in his eyes belied his casual stance. “That’s fine. You pay your bill before you go, and we won’t have a problem, right?”

  The man’s face turned scarlet. He sputtered for a moment, looking as though he’d press the issue, but a glance at Cole’s superior size and build seemed to convince him. Throwing a twenty on the table, he grabbed his companion by the arm and stalked out, pulling her along with him.

  Before Jaclyn could say anything, Rudy appeared.

  “What’s goin’ on here, Jaclyn?”

  Jaclyn watched the door close behind the couple, then picked up the money and the bill. “Nothing, why?”

  Rudy glanced doubtfully at Cole, who smiled and shrugged.

  “That guy was an old friend of mine,” he said, then made his way back to his seat.

  WHAT WAS JACKIE RASMUSSEN—Jaclyn Wentworth—doing here, waiting tables?

  Cole went through the motions of eating and tried to make a halfway-decent pitch for the funding to do the Sparks project, but he couldn’t concentrate. Seeing Jaclyn brought back the most painful years of his life—memories that crept in between each sentence he spoke, wove through the whole conversation like an invisible thread. For the first time in eight years, he couldn’t shut out Feld and the stifling, hot trailer he’d lived in there, the cloying smell of illness, his poor mother, pale and dwindling, his hungry brothers and absent father. And Rochelle. God, Rochelle. Just the thought of her made his throat feel as if it were closing up.

  In a quick, desperate gesture, he loosened the knot of his tie and undid the top button of his shirt.

  Larry glanced up at him in surprise. “Somethin’ wrong, Cole?”

  “No.” Cole took a deep breath and a drink of water. He was free. Feld was history. Rochelle was on her own. His mother and father were gone…

  “Would you like dessert?”

  Jackie stood next to him, waiting with her pad. She’d left Feld, too, even though he never dreamed she would. He’d thought she would shackle herself to Terry and live under Burt Wentworth’s thumb forever, or at least until she and Terry inherited his land and his money. All the girls in school had wanted Terry, and the family name and bank account that stood behind him. They’d wanted everything Jackie had just walked away from—for this. Who would have thought it?

  “I’ll just have a cup of coffee,” Larry said.

  “I’ll have the same,” Cole added, and Jackie soon returned with two steaming cups.

  “Will there be anything else?”

  Cole shook his head. He couldn’t look at her anymore. When he saw her face, he saw Feld and the desert, and felt things he didn’t want to feel.

  “It was good to see you again, Cole,” she said, slipping the check onto the table.

  Cole wished he could say the same. “You look great
, Jackie,” he said, searching for some scrap of truth to offer.

  She smiled, but it was only a ghost of the smile he remembered from high school. “Thanks,” she said. “You always did have a way with the ladies.”

  Cole couldn’t tell by the tone of her voice if she meant it as a compliment. But she walked away then, and he was free to pay his bill and go—and pretend he’d never seen her.

  JACLYN WATCHED Cole leave and was glad to have him gone. She needed no reminders that her life had turned out far differently from everyone’s expectations, including her own. She faced that fact every day when she put on her uniform, when she had to leave her children with Holly Smith, a young mother who lived down the street, when she wrote a check and knew it would barely clear her account.

  Why did I have to run into him here? she asked herself, clearing off his table. Joanna’s patrons paid at the cash register, but Jaclyn could see the edge of a crisp bill—her tip—stuck under Cole’s plate. She slid the money out, expecting ten, maybe even twenty dollars, but found fifty, instead.

  She stared at the 5-0 on the bill, amazed and sickened by what it meant. Fifty dollars was pure charity. Cole understood her situation—and he pitied her.

  Damn. She was once the prom queen of Feld High. No one had doubted she’d marry Terry and live happily ever after. But she’d achieved no fairy-tale ending. She was divorced with three children and nearly penniless, her situation pathetic enough to make old friends feel obligated to give her money when they saw her.

  Tears burned behind Jaclyn’s eyes, and she began to wonder if she’d been crazy to try to escape Terry. She could have continued as his wife—but what kind of life would that have been? She had a right to fight for something better, didn’t she? She longed to go back to school and become a nurse or a schoolteacher, something professional, to prove to herself and others that she could pull out of the tailspin of divorce and loss and regret.

  If only she had the time and the money. She had four mouths to feed and bills that couldn’t wait until she graduated from anything. Heck, she had bills that couldn’t wait until payday.

  Jaclyn shoved the money in her apron and finished stacking the dishes. Forget Cole, she told herself. He didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except survival. So what if she felt as if the world were closing in on her and she was trying to run through quicksand to escape. She certainly wasn’t the first woman to feel this way.

  “Jaclyn?”

  Turning at the sound of Rudy’s voice, she found her manager standing at her elbow. At five feet five inches, he was just tall enough to look her straight in the eye.

  “Yeah?”

  He gave her an insincere smile, revealing eyeteeth that stuck out like fangs. It was her first indication of trouble. His words were the second. “I just had a gentleman call me. He claims a friend of yours threatened him with bodily harm when he was here just a few minutes ago. Can I see you in my office?”

  The table next to them stopped eating to watch, but Jaclyn ignored them. Too much fear prickled down her spine to worry about embarrassment now. “That’s not true,” she said.

  Rudy nodded his greasy, dark head toward the kitchen. “In my office,” he said, turning away.

  And Jaclyn had no choice but to follow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I’M AFRAID I’m going to have to let you go.”

  Rudy sat behind his desk, gazing up at her with small eyes that were mere slits in his brown, fleshy face. His belly rested in his lap, and Jaclyn’s personnel file was spread out in front of him.

  Jaclyn stood near the open door, leaning against the wall for support, nearly leveled by shock, and horror, and myriad other emotions evoked by the injustice of his actions. “B-but you can’t,” she stammered.

  He smiled, proving what Jaclyn had suspected all along. He was enjoying this. This was the moment he’d been waiting for ever since the last time she’d rebuffed him when he’d tried to talk her into coming over to his place after work.

  “Actually, I can,” he said, rocking back and steepling his fingers. “I’m the boss, in case you’ve forgotten. And the complaint I just received requires serious action.”

  “Serious action?” Jaclyn echoed weakly. “I’ve been a model employee ever since I started almost a year ago.”

  “A model employee doesn’t threaten patrons.”

  “You know I didn’t threaten anyone. And neither did—”

  He held up a hand for her to stop. “A model employee shows up for all her shifts.”

  “I’ve never left you hanging—”

  “It’s all right here.” He tapped her personnel file. “On August fourth, you didn’t appear for work—”

  “I had strep throat, and I called you—”

  “You weren’t here, that’s what matters, and you received a written warning. On October tenth, you were late for work. A second written warning. On December ninth, your last and final no show—”

  “And my third warning,” Jaclyn finished. “But I couldn’t come in that day. My baby was sick, and I couldn’t get anyone to cover for me.”

  “Because you gave them no notice.”

  “The chicken pox gave me no notice! What did you expect me to do?”

  “There’s always some excuse,” he said with a theatrical sigh. “But I have a restaurant to run here. I need waitresses who are dependable.”

  Jaclyn knew few waitresses were as dependable as she was. She’d missed a few days when Alyssa had the chicken pox, and she’d been late once when the bus had broken down and hadn’t come to pick up Mackenzie and Alex for school. But she never called in sick unless it was a real emergency. She had a stack of customer commendations, and she was just about the only one who took the side work—filling salt and pepper shakers and ketchup bottles, scrubbing down tables and cleaning the kitchen—seriously.

  Drawing an unsteady breath, she clung tenaciously to her temper. Even with Cole’s fifty bucks, she needed the money she’d planned to make this week. She couldn’t let Rudy, and his vindictiveness, cost her that.

  “Come on, Rudy,” she said. “That guy today was just trying to get a free dinner. I didn’t keep him waiting more than five minutes.”

  “It was enough to make him and his wife miss their movie.”

  “So he says. Give me a break. It’s only five-thirty now.”

  “He says he’ll never eat here again!”

  Jaclyn moved closer, but the smell of old sweat pressed her back. Rudy’s office had no windows. It was more of a pantry, really. Small and close, with loaves of bread and other packaged items lining shelves that wouldn’t allow the door to shut, it reeked of him. He was the kind of man with stains under the arms of every shirt.

  “Then Joanna’s is better off for it,” she replied. “I wouldn’t put it past that guy to plant a fly in his food.”

  “If he was so bad, why didn’t you come get me?”

  Because of this, Jaclyn wanted to say. Because I need my job too badly to give you any reason to take it away from me.

  Aware of the cooks barking back and forth, the burgers sizzling on the grill, and the constant tramp of feet just outside, Jaclyn lowered her voice. “You’ve been out to punish me for a long time now, Rudy. This has nothing to do with the quality of my work, does it. What is it you’re trying to prove?”

  He laughed derisively. “That’s pathetic, Jaclyn. I don’t need your tight little ass running around this place. Now get your things and go.”

  For a moment, the kitchen clatter outside faded away, and Jaclyn heard only the beating of her heart. Its quiet tattoo seemed to echo the words: Alex, Mackenzie, Alyssa. As much as she hated to lower her pride any further, especially for a man like Rudy, she thought of all the things her children would need, and knew she had no choice.

  “Please,” she whispered. “You know I have kids who are depending on me. At least let me work out the week.”

  He snapped her file shut and hefted himself to his feet. “I’m afraid I can’t do th
at,” he said. “Now, if you’ll go, I have to get back on the floor.”

  DAMN HIM, Jaclyn thought. She’d run into Cole Perrini for the first time in ten years, and he’d gotten her fired. Just like that.

  Her eyes blurred as she scanned the want ads, and she paused briefly to wipe away two stubborn tears that rolled, one at a time, down her cheeks. As soon as she’d left Joanna’s, she’d stopped by a convenience store to buy a newspaper. The checker had stared at her red, swollen eyes, causing her to chafe under the unwanted scrutiny, but it hadn’t taken long to plunk down a buck seventy-five, grab a newspaper and a cola, and hurry away. Now she sat at her scarred wooden dining table, the sun fading to dusk outside, feeling the emptiness of her small house surrounding her like a shroud, and was both grateful for the privacy and terribly lonely.

  Things’ll get better, she told herself. It’s only been a year. But it was hard to have much faith in finding a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow, when everything she saw in the paper either paid too little or asked too much. Computer experience required. Medical experience required. Bachelor’s degree required. Technical skills a plus…

  Her chair raked the linoleum as she rose to stare into the refrigerator. She hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but with the children gone, there seemed little point in preparing a home-cooked meal. Retrieving a package of instant noodle soup from the cupboard, she set some water on the stove to boil, went to the bathroom to blow her nose, and returned to the kitchen table to resume her job search.

  She’d never get ahead working as a waitress, she thought. She had to find something else, something with a future.

  What about becoming a secretary? Though she was probably a little rusty, she’d taken typing in high school, and she still had some nice clothes left over from her married years. Office hours would be ideal, especially during the winter when the children were in school.