Father Christmas

  FATHER CHRISTMAS

  Book TWO of

  The Daddy School

  Judith Arnold

  ***

  “Judith Arnold writes beautifully and poignantly. Highly recommended!” Romance Readers Anonymous

  Copyright © 1997 by Barbara Keiler

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  To learn more about the author, and to sign up for her newsletter, please visit her website.

  ***

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  About the Daddy School

  ***

  Chapter One

  JOHN RUSSO’S DAY BEGAN with a murder-suicide. After that, it was all downhill.

  He stared out the window in the upper half of the kitchen door. Behind him the room lay in shadow. He’d turned off the light so he could see the night through the panes of glass. A slow, chill rain was falling. The moon looked like a ball of gray lint behind the clouds.

  He took a slug of beer from the bottle he held, counting on it to subdue the throbbing in his temples and muffle the noise from the den. Michael was waging World War III in there, one brave boy against the entire population of a Fisher-Price airport. It sounded as if Mike was going to win the battle, which wasn’t surprising since the Fisher-Price people were two inches tall and unarmed, in every sense of the word.

  John wished he could hear the rain instead of his son’s rebel yells. He wished he could go outside, stand beneath the drizzle and let it wash away a day’s worth of emotional crud. But the back porch thermometer read thirty-eight degrees and the rain was mixed with sleet, tiny pellets of ice ticking like grains of sand against the rear wall of the house. Too cold a storm for a smart man to stand in.

  If he weren’t the sort of person to take responsibility for things, he’d call the day’s disasters a pile-up of bad luck. But he was too smart—or maybe not smart enough—to blame anyone except himself for the fact that the hairline fissures in his life were suddenly expanding into fault lines, causing the earth to shift beneath his feet and the fragile world he’d built to tumble down around him.

  Mike’s shrill voice tore through his brain. The kid whooped and hollered, sounding like a cross between a coyote and a squad-car siren. How could a two-year-old be so loud? John couldn’t recall ever being that loud as a child. Of course, in a family with seven kids, one voice, no matter how loud, wasn’t going to get heard. John had learned not to waste his vocal cords, not to fight his way into the conversation unless he had something worth saying.

  Evidently, Mike believed it was worth saying that airport security in the Russo den stank. “Uh-oh! Uh-oh!” he shrieked gleefully. “It’s a bomb! Boom! All blowed up!”

  John took another pull of beer, closed his eyes and rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window. His conversation with Norma replayed itself in his skull, warning him that he was in deep trouble and he was going to have to do something fast. Damn. He didn’t want to do anything about Norma. He’d been very happy with the way things were. Mike loved Norma. He trusted her. So did John. And she was so convenient.

  But she was leaving, and if John didn’t make other arrangements...

  That wasn’t an option. He had to make other arrangements.

  There wasn’t enough beer in the world to drown out the raucous play of his son, the insistent patter of the rain, the constant murmur of his conscience nagging that everything he’d counted on was more or less gone and he was going to have to deal with it somehow. He was going to have to put his losses behind him and move on. For Mike’s sake, if not for his own.

  Maybe Norma’s news, and then the letter waiting for him in his mailbox, wouldn’t have bothered John so much if he hadn’t started his day at the Balfour home, responding to the anxious call of a neighbor who’d sworn she heard what sounded like gunshots coming from their modest split-level house. The scene hadn’t been particularly gruesome; John had seen worse. When you were a cop, you got used to viewing the horror violence left in its wake. And while from a moral perspective, murder-suicides were tragic, from a cop standpoint, they were easy. The crime came ready-solved, all tied up except for the paperwork. No sleuthing required, no loose ends, no arrests, no trial, no D.A. on his back, no jail.

  But this one was sad enough to break the devil’s heart. Edith Balfour had been wasting away with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and she’d pleaded with her husband to end her misery. He’d responded by putting a bullet between her eyes, and then he’d turned the gun on himself. The note he’d left behind explained it all: he couldn’t bear to watch her suffer, and he couldn’t bear to live without her. They’d been married for forty-eight years.

  The sight of them lying side by side in the bed they must have shared their entire wedded life, their hands clasped and their pillows drenched in blood, had been depressing. John wasn’t crazy enough to envy them, yet he recognized that that kind of love, that kind of dependence on each other, must have been a beautiful thing. He couldn’t imagine loving someone enough to do what Larry Balfour had done to Edith, and then to himself. John couldn’t imagine loving a woman so much he would rather die than go on without her. The idea overwhelmed him.

  Still, he was a professional, and he’d handled the investigation the way it needed to be handled. The most difficult part had been talking to the Balfours’ thirty-six year-old daughter Mary in Ohio. Once he’d found her number in the leather-bound address book by Edith Balfour’s bed, he’d telephoned the local police department in Mary Balfour’s town and asked them to send an officer over, so Mary wouldn’t be alone when she got the news. Even with a patrolman and a neighbor by her side, she’d fallen apart. John had had to listen to her sob, long-distance. “Why?” she’d wailed. “Why?”

  If that had been the worst of it, he would have gotten through the day all right. He wouldn’t be staring out at the sleety November rain, polishing off his second beer of the night and contemplating whether he should put his son to bed before he opened a third.

  Norma was leaving. Talk about not knowing how to survive once someone was gone...

  When he’d stopped at her house down the street to pick up Mike after work, she had been frenetic, her eyes as wide as a speed freak’s, her hair standing on end, her cardigan buttoned crookedly over her plump sixty-year-old body. “Oh, John,” she’d babbled, ignoring Mike as he smashed a towering construction of waffle-blocks across the floor of her finished basement, “Oh, God, what a day. My daughter had her baby, John! It’s almost a month early! The good news is the doctors say the baby’s going to be all right. But I need to fly out to San Jose right away to be with my daughter. I mean, everything’s so unexpected, nothing is ready for the baby. They haven’t even bought a crib yet. I’ve got to be with them. You understand.”

  John understood about things being unexpected, and he understood about not being ready for a baby. He also understood that if Norma went to San Jose to be with her daughter, she would no longer be in Arlington to watch his son while he was at work.

  “I’m leaving this weekend. And I figured, since it’s just one week till Thanksgiving, I’m
going to stay in California through the New Year. I was already planning to go out to San Jose for Christmas, but they need me there now. I’m sorry to leave you in the lurch like this. I made a few calls today—stop that, Michael! Pick the blocks, sweetie!—and my friend Harriet Simka might be able to help out with Michael for tomorrow, at least. I wrote her number down somewhere.... Mike, pick up the blocks now.”

  John didn’t know Harriet Simka. He’d known Norma for years. She lived seven houses away from him, and she’d raised three kids of her own, and Mike adored her. She charged John a reasonable fee for her baby-sitting services, she was flexible when John had to work late, and the arrangement had met everyone’s needs. But one thing, one little snafu, the premature birth of a grandchild—and John’s precarious life collapsed like Mike’s waffle-block tower.

  “Mike, come on, now—your daddy’s here,” Norma had said. Mike had responded by crawling under the couch and giggling.

  What am I going to do? John had thought, swallowing his panic while Norma got down on her knees and peered under the couch, cajoling Mike to come out. John worked full-time as a detective in the Arlington Police Department. Sometimes his cases demanded more than a nine-to-five shift from him. He needed reliable child-care, and until now, Norma had been reliable.

  “I don’t wanna come out,” Michael had shouted. John couldn’t blame him. More often than he’d like to admit, he wished he could crawl into a safe, dark place and not come out.

  Norma had lured Mike out with a cookie, handed John a slip of paper with her friend Harriet’s number on it, and sent John and Mike home. John had pulled the mail from the box before driving into the garage. Mixed in with the advertising circulars and bills was a letter was from Sherry’s lawyer. It wasn’t unexpected, but still... There it was, in his face, the reality of it.

  Just one more reason he wanted to step out into the sleety night, to start walking and not turn back.

  But John took his responsibilities seriously. He would never walk away. Instead, he would do what had to be done, which for the present meant getting Mike ready for bed.

  Sighing, he turned from the soggy evening and set his empty bottle on the counter by the sink. Then he steeled himself and entered the den.

  The carnage was impressive. Bolster cushions from the sofa had been combined with the coffee table to create a fort, the toy airport was upside down on the rug, and plastic toy people beamed their flat smiles at him from outposts all around the room. In the midst of the mayhem, Mike balanced an airplane in both hands and swooped it through the air, humming like a motor. “I’m flying the plane!” he shouted joyfully. “Daddy, look! I fly it!”

  “Time to land it,” John said, sidestepping a misplaced cushion and venturing further into the room. “It’s clean-up time.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” As Mike zoomed the plane past John he reached out and swiped it.

  Mike’s face crumpled into a grimace and he howled. “No, no, no! No clean-up time!”

  “Yes clean-up time.” One of the things that bothered John about being a father was that his verbal skills frequently deteriorated until he was speaking like a toddler. On the job, he talked like a normal adult. But at home, where there were no other adults, he found himself mimicking Mike’s immature language. It made John feel as if a part of his brain shut down when he was with Mike, the part that knew how to construct sentences and paragraphs.

  “No, no, no!” Mike stormed across the room to where a trio of Fisher-Price people lay in ambush behind the CD rack. He swung his foot, sending the brightly colored, stupidly grinning figures in three different directions with one kick. Not bad for a soccer player, but unacceptable for a two-year-old a half hour past his bed time.

  “Clean up now,” John said, his voice dropping in volume. The angrier he got, the quieter he got.

  “No! I want Mommy! I want Mommy!” Mike barreled past John and out of the den, leaving the mess behind like a tornado seeking new trailer parks to destroy.

  Hearing Mike beg for his mother raised John’s anger to such a level that he could not speak at all. He simply stood amid the ruins of Mike’s toy airport and gulped in deep breaths of air.

  So Mike wanted his Mommy. Well, of course he did. What two-year-old kid didn’t?

  But Mike’s Mommy had been gone for six months, and the letter John had received that evening from her lawyer announced that she was gone for good. A person could still get a quickie divorce if she wanted one, and Sherry had wanted one. She’d wanted one so badly she hadn’t given a thought to the innocent son she’d left behind.

  Which was also John’s fault, he told himself, feeling the ache return to his temples, intense little drum-rolls of pain. He gazed about him at the disorderly room, the scattered sofa cushions, the war-torn airport, and decided the mess was his fault, too. Everything, with the possible exception of Norma’s grandchild’s premature arrival, was John’s fault.

  He stalked out of the den in search of his son. Mike had slammed himself inside his bedroom. Evidently he could hear John’s footsteps in the hall, because he shouted through the closed door, “I want Mommy!”

  “Mommy isn’t here,” John shouted back. “How about a bath, and then some milk and cookies.”

  “Mommy gives me a bath.”

  “Mommy isn’t here.” He could say it a million times. He could chant it like a mantra, recite it like liturgy. Mommy isn’t here. Sooner or later, Mike was going to realize it was true, she wasn’t there, and he was stuck with Dad for better or worse, for baths and cookies.

  “Where Mommy go?”

  “To Las Vegas.” As if that was going to mean anything to Mike. “It’s just you and me. Open the door.”

  Mike waited a long time before saying, in a tremulous whimper, “I want cookies.”

  The hell with the bath. John would give him cookies. It was the least a boy needed when he had to confront the fact that Mommy was in Las Vegas and wasn’t coming back. Cookies for two-year-old boys, and beer for thirty-two-year-old boys.

  “Okay,” John called quietly through the door. “No bath. Just cookies.”

  Mike made him sweat it out for a few minutes. Then he opened the door. John could have opened it himself—he’d removed the doorknob lock a long time ago—but honoring a closed door was a way of showing his respect for Mike. Maybe in time, Mike might show some respect for him, too.

  Tearful and wary, Mike slid his tiny hand into John’s and accompanied him down the hall to the kitchen. He kept his gaze on the burgundy carpet—not the shade John would have chosen, but Sherry had decorated the house according to her tastes. In the kitchen, John switched on the light and lifted Mike into his booster seat at the table. “Cookies,” Mike said. It sounded like a warning.

  “Chocolate chip or sandwich creams?”

  “Choco-chip.”

  John pulled the bag of chocolate chip cookies from a cabinet and counted out three cookies. He filled a toddler cup with milk, snapped on the lid, and set it before Mike. Given the kid’s mood, if John had asked him whether he wanted milk, he would have said no. Being two meant saying no a lot.

  While Mike glowered at John and ate his snack, John pulled a cold bottle of beer from the fridge. On the tile counter next to the fridge lay a cream-colored business envelope containing the letter from Sherry’s lawyer. John had read it twice, then refolded it along its creases and tucked it inside. He wished he could seal it and mail it back to the lawyer. But that wouldn’t change anything.

  And really, he didn’t want Sherry in his life, not at this point. It was too late. Too much damage had been done.

  “How are the cookies?” he asked, wrenching the cap off the bottle.

  “Okay.” Mike couldn’t sulk when he was eating cookies. It was physically impossible. He looked as if he was trying to pout, but each nibble of cookie forced his mouth into a smile. Above him, the Tiffany-style lamp—another of Sherry’s decorating choices—sent a cone of amber light down onto the table, teasing reddi
sh highlights out of Mike’s brown hair. A year ago, his hair was a honey-colored reflection of Sherry’s blond tresses, but it was growing progressively darker. In another few years, it might be as black as John’s.

  He took a sip of beer. The sour bubbles nipped at his tongue. Behind him on the counter, the lawyer’s letter nipped at his conscience.

  He waited until Mike had devoured his second cookie before saying, “Michael, I know this is going to make you sad, but Mommy isn’t coming back.”

  Mike fixed his round brown eyes accusingly on John. His eyes were already as dark as John’s, and his jaw already hinted at the angularity of his father’s. In time, once the baby fat melted from his face, he would have the unmistakable face of his father. All traces of Sherry would be gone.

  “She had to go off and do other things,” John explained delicately. “I told you about this when she left. Remember?”

  Even a cookie couldn’t erase Mike’s pout.

  “I got a letter today that says she’s not coming back. I’m sorry, Mike. I don’t know how else to tell you.”

  “Mommy is coming back?”

  “No.”

  “How come?”

  “She...” She was having an affair, remember? She found a man who could give her what I couldn’t, and she fell in love, and they ran away. Remember, Mike? Remember that day I came home from work, and I found a note on the door saying Mommy brought you to Norma’s, and then she’d run away with that guy—the stud from the auto-body shop.

  Maybe it was just as well if Mike didn’t remember. John would remember for both of them.

  “She decided she needed a different kind of life,” he told Mike.

  “When she coming back?”

  “She isn’t.” John heard his voice crack. He wasn’t feeling any grief for himself. Just for Mike. Just for this little boy who couldn’t believe his mother was gone.