Father Christmas Read online

  “Seven years old?” Gail took a hard slug of wine. “Jesus. What’s the world coming to?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know that as a cop, Russo did something good for those kids.”

  “Seven years old,” Gail muttered under her breath. She shook her head. “At seven years old, your biggest crime was stealing my Barbie doll.”

  “I didn’t steal her. I just borrowed her,” Molly said with a smile. “And I forgot to return her for a long time.”

  “Yeah, like years.” Gail leaned back in her chair and sighed. “I will concede that on occasion, a cop might do something right. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes. But there’s something about that uniform that alters most cops, like Superman only in reverse.”

  “Russo doesn’t wear a uniform,” said Molly, trying to will the heat out of her cheeks. “Unless a Santa suit counts as a uniform.”

  Gail chuckled. “A Santa suit? Well, it doesn’t matter what he’s wearing. He’s got a shield and a gun. That’s all he needs. It’s very nice that Russo helped Jamie McCoy gain permanent custody of his daughter and saved an old man from a pick-pocket—and two primary-school kids from jail. But the bottom line is, he’s a cop. He’s one of them.”

  Molly reached across the table and patted Gail’s hand. When they were children, the fact that Gail was three years older than Molly counted for something, but not anymore. They were equals now, and Molly was as likely to comfort her sister and give her advice as to be on the receiving end of the comfort and advice. “I know you’ve got a good reason to hate cops. But that was a long time ago, Gail. Ten years.”

  “Ten and a half,” Gail corrected her with a wry smile. “But it’s not just that.” Her jaw tensed, throwing the tendons in her neck into relief. Shadows darkened her eyes. “I work in the public defender’s office. I see what cops do every day. I see how they abuse their power.”

  “John Russo doesn’t abuse his power.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Molly bit her lip. She didn’t know that. She didn’t know what he did with his gun when she wasn’t around. She didn’t know whether he searched suspects without warrants or, for that matter, whether he took advantage of innocent young college students with broken tail lights. There was so much she didn’t know about him.

  But she knew his eyes were sad. She knew he loved his son. She knew he was trying to cope with a difficult situation, doing his best and worrying that his best wasn’t anywhere near good enough.

  She also knew she was spending too much time thinking about his brooding gaze, and his capacity for love, and a whole bunch of other things about him. Like his height, and the breadth of his shoulders, barely visible inside his Santa tunic, and the length of his legs. And the depth and darkness of his hair. And the way his lips fought against the smiling reflex—and on a few blessed occasions lost the battle.

  “You’re blushing again.” Gail pursed her lips in obvious disapproval. “He hasn’t kissed you or anything, has he?”

  “No. I’m sure he has no interest in me, anyway.” Molly stood and cleared the plates from the table, tired of having to face her sister and her own troubling thoughts. “I’m just the lady who runs the day-care center where he sends his son.” It doesn’t matter that he touched me. It doesn’t matter that he cupped his hand around my cheek and gazed into my eyes and sparked a few unfamiliar fantasies to life. “He probably doesn’t think much of me at all.” He thinks I’m a stalker. “And he didn’t even want to come to the Daddy School tomorrow. He agreed to come only because we’re going to deal with how to help children to become better sharers. His son doesn’t share well.” John Russo thinks I’m a twit, Gail. Don’t worry. Your little sister is safe from the Big Bad Cop.

  “Better that kids learn to be sharers than bank robbers,” Gail murmured, obviously mystified. “Seven years old? It’s hard to believe. Were they armed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder if my office got a call on it. They were probably some poor kids trying to find the money to pay their families’ heating bills.”

  Molly chuckled. “How romantic, two noble little second-graders saving the world by scamming an ATM machine.”

  “An ATM machine?” Gail crossed to the counter beside the sink and lowered the dishwasher door. Molly started rinsing the plates, then handed each plate to Gail to place in the dishwasher rack. They knew each other’s moves perfectly; they had the timing down pat. “Maybe these kids are computer whizzes. Geniuses—or is it genii? Maybe they robbed the bank out of boredom. They need a good gifted-children program.”

  Molly’s chuckle expanded into a full laugh. “Have some more wine, Gail. I like what it does for your imagination.”

  “No more wine for me. I’ve got to drive home. So what are we going to do about Mom and Dad?” she asked, clicking the dishwasher door shut and pivoting to face her sister. “The TV is a nice idea, except they’ll complain about it.”

  “They’ll complain about the house-keeping, too.”

  “But they’ll love it.”

  “Like they’ll love the TV.”

  Gail grinned and gave Molly a hug. “Gotta go. We’ll work this out later.” Her smile waned as she drew back and studied Molly. “Keep your guard up around Russo, okay? I know Clint Eastwood was sexy in all those Dirty Harry movies. But his regard for the Constitution was less than zero.”

  As if Molly was going to lie awake all night, tossing and turning while she thought about the Constitution. As if Molly had ever dreamed about Clint Eastwood the way she was dreaming about John Russo.

  As if she ought to be dreaming about the father of one of her students. As if there was a chance in hell that such a dream could possibly come true.

  ***

  MOLLY SEPARATED THE FATHERS from their children Saturday morning. John watched Mike, the other children, and a teacher vanish up the stairs to the playroom on the second floor of the Children’s Garden. Seven fathers remained downstairs with Molly, searching the partitioned rooms for adult-size chairs.

  She barely smiled at him, which was fine. They’d both taken a chance yesterday, Molly by admitting she’d been searching for him downtown each day and John by touching her. They’d both risked something, and while John couldn’t speak for Molly, he knew he couldn’t afford such risks.

  Half of him believed he was attracted to her only because, six months after Sherry had walked out on him—and more than a year after their marriage really entered its death throes—he was just plain hungry for a woman. But the other half of him kept dwelling on the thought that if all he wanted was a woman, without regard to who the woman was, he could find one easily enough.

  He didn’t want just any woman. He wanted a woman who could comfort and teach his son, a woman who could verbalize her concerns and express her feelings instead of fleeing to Las Vegas and leaving her family behind. He wanted a woman who could warm a room with her smile.

  Molly’s smile that morning was meant for all the fathers, not just for him. Even so, it thawed the permafrost in his soul. It made him feel as if he were taking steps, doing something for his son, moving in the right direction.

  “The tables will hold you,” she assured the seven full-grown men in the room, leading them into the Pre-Kindergarten section and gesturing for them to make themselves comfortable on the small furniture. John wasn’t the only man who looked awkward surrounded by pint-size chairs, knee-high cupboards and low tables. He felt like Gulliver in the land of the Lilliputians, and he bet the other fathers did, too.

  Molly appeared totally at home in the enclosed space. Dressed in a textured beige sweater, blue jeans and loafers, she looked like a college sophomore, young and idealistic and brimming with energy. But she was a woman, someone who’d admitted to following him around town all week. Someone whose eyes danced with light, whose curves did wicked things to his libido.

  “Today’s class is about sharing,” she said, perching herself on one of the tables and surveying the men,
some of whom sat gingerly on a table facing hers while others, like John, took seats on the carpeted floor. Her gaze skidded past him, as if she was afraid to meet his stare. He was disappointed and relieved at the same time. He didn’t know if his face gave anything away, but he sure as hell didn’t want her to pause long enough to read lust in his expression. Or, for that matter, doubt. Or panic.

  “Gordon, I know we talked a bit about this last week,” she said, addressing one of the men balanced precariously on the broad Formica-topped table near John. “You mentioned that ever since your baby was born, Melissa has had a lot of trouble sharing.”

  Gordon nodded. “She has all these toys she hasn’t played with since she was a year old. But the minute her brother reaches for them, she snatches them away and insists that they’re hers and he can’t have them.”

  “Baby toys?” Molly asked.

  He nodded again. “She’s three and a half years old. She outgrew those toys ages ago. Stacking rings, squeaky toys, push-toys—she’s way past those things now. But the instant she sees Justin go for one of them, they’re hers, hers, hers. I just don’t know what to do. They are hers—or at least they were. But she ought to be sharing them.”

  “Ideas?” Molly asked, her gaze circling among the other fathers.

  “I’d say you’ve got to be firm,” suggested a stocky man in a plaid flannel shirt. “Just tell her she hasn’t got a choice.”

  “Yeah, but then it’s forced,” another man argued. “It doesn’t come from inside her. I want my kid to be generous from his heart, you know? You can’t impose generosity on a kid.”

  Molly turned to John, silently inviting him to offer a theory. He didn’t trust himself to come up with any good ideas, though. With a small shrug, he declined her invitation.

  Turning away, Molly addressed the group as a whole. “Here’s what I think is happening. It has nothing to do with the toys, but everything to do with sharing. Melissa is envious of the time and attention her brother is getting. She can’t come right out and admit that she’s jealous of him, so she exercises what little power she has—over her playthings.”

  “In other words, it’s sibling rivalry playing itself out,” Gordon summed up.

  Molly smiled. “One thing children have a great deal of trouble sharing is attention. We notice this quite often during class time: if a teacher is working with one child, another will come over and demand her attention, even if the first child needs the teacher right then and the second child doesn’t.”

  “Okay, so that’s the diagnosis,” Gordon allowed. “But I still don’t know how to get Melissa to let her brother play with her old push-toys.”

  “You have to give Melissa what she’s really asking for: not her push-toys, but parental attention. She’s feeling a little neglected, Gordon. Lots of times, when a child is having trouble sharing, it’s a cry for attention. In fact—” she circled the group again with her gaze “—when children have problems sharing things, it’s nearly always a symptom of something else. They feel overlooked, or they want attention. Sibling rivalry is often an issue.”

  “My son’s an only child,” the stocky man in denim observed. “No sibling rivalry, but he still won’t share.”

  John shifted on the hard floor, interested to hear how Molly would analyze the man’s situation, which reflected his own. “One thing about only children,” she said, “is that they don’t really get into a sharing habit. At school they have to share, but every toy at home belongs to them alone. The adults in their lives aren’t competing for the Legos or the Goodnight, Moon book. Only children should invite playmates to their house as often as possible. This enables the child to develop the sharing habit. We need to teach all our children, whether or not they have siblings, that the ability and willingness to share is a life skill that will make things go better for them. We teach certain values in school, and one of those values is that our own world is a better place if we can make it a better place for others. In a way, generosity is a very selfish practice.” She smiled, and several of the fathers smiled with her.

  “Another issue that leads to sharing problems is control,” she continued, shooting a brief but knowing glance John’s way. “If a child feels he has no control over the major events in his life, he’ll try to control his possessions.” Her gaze returned to John and stayed there.

  “So what do you do?” he heard himself ask. “How do you fix that?”

  He hadn’t meant to participate in the discussion. He was there to listen and learn, not to mouth off about his own problems. That he would expose himself to these men, all of them strangers, puzzled him. What was it about Molly that had prompted him to speak up?

  Her smile. Her eyes. The way she elicited trust.

  “Naturally, you can’t give a child complete control over his life,” she said, her voice gentle to soften the harsh truth. “There are things we can’t control in our lives. Part of growing up means learning to accept that some things are beyond our control. Kids learn every day that they can’t control much of anything in their lives.

  “One thing you can do to give a child a sense of control is to establish that certain things are exclusively his. For instance, his shoes. Children don’t share shoes. Or a special glass that he always gets to drink his milk from. Or curtains for his bedroom. Let your child pick out the curtains. Hang a bulletin board in your child’s room and let that be all his to decorate. Even if he shares a bedroom with a sibling,” she added, including the other fathers, “let him or her have that bulletin board. And a few toys, which are that child’s and no one else’s. Not even visiting friends can play with those very special toys. Not unless the child permits it.

  “Giving your child the chance to control a few things will make him feel less powerless in the grand scheme of things. Having complete ownership over a particular teddy-bear is not going to bring an absent parent back, or earn him respect among his peers, or any of a million other things he might want. But it will give him a modicum of control over his life.”

  She continued, elaborating, offering other ideas, luring other comments from the fathers. John leaned back against the divider wall and absorbed her wisdom. What she said made sense. Even if he’d told her nothing about his life and Mike’s, it would have made sense. He hated to admit that coming to the Daddy School was a good idea, but it was.

  The discussion was still going strong when a toddler stampede down the stairs alerted the Daddy School participants that two hours had passed. Children spilled into the room, charged through the open gate into the Pre-Kindergarten area and leaped into their fathers’ arms, yammering about what they’d done upstairs. There had apparently been a huge pillow fight, with balloons and beach balls and all manner of bulky but harmless weaponry. The children were exhilarated, breathless and giggling.

  “It’s a mess up there,” the teacher said apologetically to Molly. “We got a little of it cleaned up, but the time got away from us.”

  “That’s all right.” Molly stood and smiled at the teacher. “You did a great job, keeping them occupied up there. I’ll finish the clean-up.” She waved and shouted a farewell to several of the fathers as they wrestled their youngsters into thick winter jackets and woolen caps.

  Like the other kids, Mike babbled about the Great Pillow War. “We got big pillows!” he exclaimed. “With stuff like in the foam pit. Everybody hit everybody! It was great!”

  “I’m sure it was,” John murmured, his gaze chasing Molly as she bent to help one child with a zipper, then stood and conferred with a father, then spun around to acknowledge another child, who was tugging on the back of her sweater. “Is it very messy upstairs?”

  “No mess,” Mike swore, which meant it must be a major disaster.

  It wasn’t John’s disaster, of course. But it didn’t seem fair for Molly to get stuck cleaning it up all by herself.

  Damn it—fair had nothing to do with his inclination to help her straighten things out in the aftermath of the pillow fight. The truth was,
he didn’t want to leave the Children’s Garden yet.

  He didn’t want to leave Molly yet.

  He moved against the tide of departing fathers and children, like a fish swimming upstream to spawn. At last he reached Molly, who was waving farewell to the Daddy School students. “Mike and I will help you tidy the upstairs room,” he volunteered.

  She peered up at him, her smile fading slightly. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I didn’t say I had to.” He shrugged, refusing to let her discerning eyes daunt him.

  She studied his face for a long moment, as if reading an involved message in it, a message he would have preferred her not to interpret. Then she lowered her gaze to Mike. “Do you want to help your dad and me clean up?”

  “Yeah!” Mike bellowed, breaking from his father’s clasp and clambering back up the stairs.

  Molly eyed John with amusement. “He doesn’t do that for me,” John muttered. “He never wants to help clean up at home.”

  “Then I’ll take this—” she gestured toward him “—as a personal compliment.” Laughing, she pursued Mike up the stairs.

  John headed after them. At the top of the stairs he assessed the room. It wasn’t too awful, but it needed work. Some furniture was overturned, and soft, squishy balls and balloons were strewn about the center of the room. Tufts and scraps of foam rubber littered the floor.

  “Michael,” Molly instructed him, “what I want you to do is gather up the little pieces of foam and add them to the foam pit, okay? Your father and I will handle the heavier stuff.”

  Mike romped across the room, gathering fistfuls of foam, dropping half of what he picked up en route to the foam pit. He seemed to be having a grand time, which bemused John. The kid never cleaned up his messes at home, not without being nagged and scolded. Even then, John sometimes didn’t have the strength to force the issue. He just couldn’t bear to get into a battle of wills with Mike after a day spent tussling with suspects in the interrogation rooms, or on the streets.

  He wondered how Molly managed to motivate Mike. She’d barely even asked him to pick up the foam, and he was off and running. Maybe, like his father, Mike had developed a soft spot for the teacher.