Chapter 6
The rest of the week flies by in a blur, and before I know it, I’m suiting up to play Mrs. Claus again.
This time, I trade the jingle-bell shoes for something a little less, well, jingly—red platform booties with white faux-fur trim, a remnant from my community-choir phase a few years ago.
My therapist back then swore that joining the Crooney Tunes would alleviate the creeping isolation I felt after leaving the Heralds and being cut off from my family.
So I did. We sang at hospitals, nursing homes (somehow skipping Forest Park), community centers, a minor-league baseball game, and even a corporate holiday party for a company that got busted a year later for money laundering. (Fa-la-la-la-fraud.)
My last great romantic disaster also occurred during that phase.
The guy was funny, sweet, cute… and ghosted me after three weeks and one memorably awkward bedroom encounter.
Cut to me, a year later, spotting him at the premiere of Good Cheer—a movie pitched as Bring It On meets It’s a Wonderful Life (shocker: it wasn’t good).
He was holding hands with his new boyfriend.
I was genuinely happy for him (religious deconstruction buddies forever), but also… wow, okay, universe. After that, I decided to take a “brief” dating hiatus. Five years later, here I am: still in the world’s longest dry spell.
So I did what I always do: buried my feelings six feet under my skin. The trauma lives somewhere between my stomach and small intestine with all the other repressed emotions—causing a little indigestion and IBS—but otherwise I’m coping just fine.
And at least I don’t have to look at it.
I check myself in the full-length mirror. The shoes add a few inches to my height and somehow take a few off the skirt, adding just a touch of sex appeal to my Mrs. Claus look.
Not bad.
When I pull up to Forest Park, Eben’s truck gleams neatly between the lines like nothing ever happened—my Wolverine scratches, gone. As for my car, there are more than a few scrapes that could use a buff out, maybe a little paint. An oil change. A new transmission.
Really, just tow the car and start fresh. But it’s not in the budget for at least another decade.
My heels clack across the tile as I nod at Missy and head toward my fictional husband. The old ladies are already clustered around Eben, and now a few extra senior men have joined the fray. Eben spots me; his eyebrows shoot up. I put on my sparkliest smile and strut over.
“Hello, Mr. Claus,” I purr, attempting my finest transatlantic accent.
At some point, I decided Mrs. Claus should sound like Katharine Hepburn, apparently.
Between the two of us, Ally is the real drama queen (literally—she was always a lead in a school play), but years of reenacting old films in my parents’ basement gave me a talent for atrocious accents.
“No jingle bell shoes today, Mrs. Claus?” he rumbles. His gaze drifts down and lingers ever so briefly on my bare legs. I imagine wrapping them around his hips and—oh. Oh no. Bad brain. Bad brain.
“She’s ho-ho-ho-ing it up for you, Santa!” a white-haired woman cackles from her wheelchair.
“Edna!” her friend bops her knee.
“What?” Edna shrugs, unapologetic. “I would too if I still had legs like that!”
The ladies chortle, and my face goes candy-cane red.
“Give us a spin!” an old man in plaid shouts from a table where he and another old man are hunched over a board playing checkers.
“Cram it, Bob!” Edna fires back. “This isn’t Vegas, and she’s not a stripper!” Then, stage whispering to the ladies: “Not that he could get it up anyway.”
“I heard that!” Bob growls.
I have decided Edna is my favorite.
I catch Eben’s gaze drift up my legs again, and a jolt zips through me.
Of course, the second he realizes I’ve noticed, he looks away.
Was he checking me out? Not that I’m into it—but since the last guy who made a pass at me is pushing ninety and has an subscription for Depends, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just the tiniest bit thrilled.
The moment is cut short by the arrival of the walking cold shower, otherwise known as Missy, armed with a clipboard. You can always tell when Missy means business because that clipboard Houdinis out of thin air whenever there’s a schedule to keep.
“All right, folks! Listen up!” she shouts over the chatter—loud enough for the seventy-five percent who either have hearing aids or forgot to wear them. “You all know what today is.”
Edna leans toward her bestie and whispers at full volume, “Potluck Tuesday?”
I giggle. Around here, food and sex are the only two constants. Whoever said older people lose their joie de vivre clearly has never visited Forest Park.
From the back, someone else shouts, “Potluck Tuesday!” Missy’s smile strains.
Why do I get the feeling Potluck Tuesday is a popular happening around here?
“No, folks, it’s not Potluck Tuesday. Today is Saturday.” A few groans. “It’s actually better than PLT—it’s talent-picking day!” A smattering of polite cheers. Not quite the PLT fervor.
She continues, “Mr. and Mrs. Claus will come around to each table with a clipboard. Write down your own name and talent—no signing up your exes for sword-swallowing.”
She glares at Edna, who snickers; a few of the men scowl at her.
“And nothing profane or suggestive—this is a family event, for God’s sake.”
I swear I hear a few disappointed murmurs.
She presses the worn clipboard into Eben’s hands and bails from the room.
He rakes through his blond hair, exasperated. “This is just a blank sheet of paper.”
As he rules neat columns—Name, Talent, Notes—I’m rudely left to stare at his broad shoulders, the way his Santa suit pulls around his very well-developed biceps, the red velvet straining over strong thighs—wow, okay, stop imagining being pinned underneath him.
He glances up, and my gaze flicks skyward, the portrait of innocence.
“All right, who wants to go first?” Eben asks the room. My eyes drift back down to his hands, which are engulfing the clipboard. I imagine them gripping my waist while he—
“Me!” yelps a short man in plaid pants belted somewhere near his sternum. Bless him for breaking my huge-hands hypnosis.
“I want to make sourdough bread.”
Marilyn, a sassy, boxed-blonde who might be his wife or girlfriend, jumps in. “Roger, you gotta get off Pinterest. Sourdough isn’t a talent! It’s a Depression-era survival skill.”
He looks defiantly at Eben. “Sourdough bread. Put it down.”
“I can supervise in the kitchen,” I offer. Eben shrugs and pencils Roger in for the very “white-woman” talent of making sourdough.
We make the rounds, jotting down talents: tap dancing, crooning, and even baton twirling (which worries me deeply). Finally, we land on my favorite spunky gal pals, Edna and her best friend, Millie.
“I’m going to dance,” Edna says, matter-of-fact, fingers resting on the blanket draped over her knees.
“Okay,” Eben says, smirking as he writes dance next to Edna’s name.
“Dance?” Millie scoffs, eyeing Edna’s wheelchair. “Are you nuts?”
“I sure am!” Edna grins. “What’s your talent, Mill? Touching your knockers to your knees while standing up straight?”
Millie sticks out her tongue as Edna cackles at her own joke.
They remind me of me and Ally. May we still be razzing each other at eighty.
“Any kind of dance in particular?” Eben asks Edna. “Foxtrot, jazz, ballet…?”
Edna is deadpan, but mischief glints in her eyes, “Don’t worry about it.”
Eben jots down “don’t worry about it” next to dance, and then side-eyes me while he adds “knee knockers” by Millie’s name. I let out an involuntary snort-chuckle—a snortle, if you will.
“What’s so funny?” Edna asks, so earnest and innocent that it only makes me laugh harder.
“Mrs. Claus,” Eben elbows me, realizing he may not be as in on the joke as he thinks. “Pull yourself together.”
This ridiculous moniker does nothing to help. I’m doubled over, wiping tears. Edna is playing him like a fiddle, and he has no idea.
“She’s going to do something dirtyyyyy,” I whisper in his ear between giggles, dabbing my eyes with my sleeve.
“Edna? She’s like ninety,” Eben protests.
“And horny as a teenager,” I say. I waggle my brows. “Care to wager?”
We glance back just in time to see Edna’s hand sliding up some old guy’s trouser leg under the table.
He grimaces. “Yeah… I’m not taking that bet.”
We dissolve into laughter. Eben abandons the Santa chortle for his natural laugh—higher-pitched and kind of hiccupy and adorable. His smile is filled with straight, white teeth and slightly pronounced incisors. I imagine them snagging on my lower lip as his tongue slips into my—
GODDAMNIT, ENOUGH.
I shake the thought out of my head, but his eyes have settled on my face—searching, almost soft. My skin flushes.
There’s a tug on Eben’s sleeve.
He turns—and freezes. Tugging on his sleeve is a woman—young for Forest Park, sixties maybe—with blonde hair streaked silver. She gazes up at him with big, uncertain eyes.
“Excuse me, Santa,” she says. “Where am I?”
Something in his expression tilts. He lowers his voice. “You’re at the North Pole. You’re one of my helper elves. Think you could help me collect names for the talent show?”
His voice is tender, warm as cocoa—achingly sweet toward this woman who is clearly here for memory care.
She nods, and he passes her the clipboard and walks with her to the next table, patient and steady, letting her set the pace.
My heart thumps hard against my ribs.
I’m supposed to be breaking down his defenses, showing him the magic of Christmas.
But if he’s the Grinch, why is my heart the one growing three sizes?