Father Christmas (23 page)

In his car seat in back, Michael was
exuberant. “We got a tree!” he declared. “A big, big tree! All the
way to the ceiling. Daddy had to cut it.”

“
You cut your own tree?”
Molly asked John, her amazement laced with disapproval. Going to a
tree farm and chopping down a tree was fun, but not a suitable
activity for a man who three days ago was rushed to a hospital
suffering from knife wounds.

He shook his head. “I trimmed six inches off
the top with a scissors. Bud helped.”

“
I guess that’s all right.
But you really shouldn’t overdo it, John. You’ve got to give your
arm a chance to heal.”

He shot her a rebellious glance, then turned
forward again, working the steering wheel with his left hand. “I’m
healing.”

“
Have you been to the
doctor?”

“
Yeah. He says I’m
healing.”

His tone left no doubt that he wanted her to
drop the subject. Honoring the unspoken request, she twisted in her
seat and asked Michael, “Does your house smell different now?”

“
It smells like a tree,”
he reported. “A big, big tree.”

The parking lot at the mall was packed with
cars. With less than two weeks until Christmas, hordes had
descended upon the place to get their holiday shopping done. John
navigated up and down the rows of cars for five full minutes until
he located an empty space. Before he unstrapped Michael and let him
out of the car, he pulled a foldable stroller from the trunk and
snapped it open, using his right elbow and his knee to spread and
lock the hinges. Molly was impressed by his agility, and by his
foresight in bringing the stroller. Last week, Michael had fallen
asleep right after lunch. If he fell asleep today, the stroller
would come in handy.

“
I wanna push it,” Michael
demanded, grasping the chrome handles and zigzagging madly across
the asphalt.

John raced after him as swiftly as he’d
chased the pick-pocket on Dudley the day Molly had run into him
outside the bank. Even injured, he ran with a purposeful grace, his
movements clean and efficient, his long legs devouring the space
between himself and his runaway son. He was probably a fine
athlete, she thought. So strong and limber, he was probably an
exquisite lover.

Hazardous thought. She hastily brushed it
aside.

John caught up to Michael before he wandered
into the path of a moving car. Instead of commandeering the
stroller, though, he shared it, gripping one side of the handle and
letting Michael push the other side, so they could steer in tandem
toward the mall entrance.

Molly followed in their wake. The cold wind
blew away Michael’s voice before it reached her, but she knew he
was talking to his father. He craned his neck to peer up at John,
and his mouth moved incessantly. His little legs pumped alongside
his father’s, taking twice as many steps to cover the same
distance.

How could a woman have walked out on them?
Molly wondered, touched by the rapport between John and his son. Of
course, John’s wife might have had valid reasons for leaving him.
For all Molly knew, John might have been selfish or brutish as a
husband. Maybe he brought his work to bed with him—and given the
work he did, that couldn’t have been particularly romantic. Or
maybe he and his ex-wife simply fell out of love. Or perhaps the
other man, the one John’s wife had left with, was irresistible.

Or just possibly, the woman had been blind
to what she had: a good man, a loving man, a man who took his
responsibilities almost too seriously. An extraordinary man—and a
son.

Reaching the mall entrance, John pulled
Michael to a halt and waited for Molly to reach them so they could
enter together. “I’m hungry,” Michael announced. “We have lunch
now.”

“
First get in the
stroller,” John said. “Then we’ll get lunch.”

“
No get in the stroller!
No, no, no!”

“
I’m not letting you
walk,” John told him. The mall was mobbed with people. Molly didn’t
blame him for wanting Michael strapped safely into the stroller,
where he wouldn’t be able to wander off.

“
No stroller! I don’t want
the stroller!” Michael threw back his head and howled.

Not bothering to argue, John hoisted Michael
up into his left arm and lowered him into the stroller. When
Michael squirmed and tried to escape, John brought his right hand
into play, pinning Michael in the seat while he strapped the belt
around his belly. Molly saw pain crease John’s brow as he used his
injured hand. She wanted to help, but his forebidding glower held
her at bay. This was between him and his flailing, shrieking son.
She had no business intervening.

She held the stroller steady while John
snapped the belt shut. Michael was out of breath from resisting his
father and wailing, but John appeared unfazed, although his right
fingers twitched from the strain. “I hate you!” Michael bellowed.
“Bad, bad Daddy! I hate you!”

John’s expression grew stony. Avoiding
Molly’s gaze, he eased the stroller’s handle from her and pushed it
into the crowds, heading toward the food court.

Just as she’d wanted to help him during his
tussle with Michael, she wanted to help him now, reassuring him
that his son didn’t really hate him, that young children had
limited vocabularies with which to express their anger. But John
clearly wasn’t in the mood to be reassured. He propelled the
stroller through the crowds, as grim as a Marine on the Bataan
Death March, ignoring the glittery decorations and the cloying
Christmas music being piped through the atrium.

By the time they reached the food court,
Michael had subsided. He slouched in the canvas seat of the
stroller, his cheeks tear-stained and his lower lip curled in a
magnificent pout. John steered the stroller to an empty table and
set the brake. He flexed his fingers gingerly, then massaged the
back of his right hand with his left. “What do you want to eat?” he
asked Molly, his tone dry and measured.

She shrugged. Observing the war of wills
between father and son had made her lose her appetite. Even though
she knew Michael’s behavior was perfectly normal for his age, she
hurt for John—and hurt even more because he was so obviously
determined not to accept any sympathy.

She surveyed the eateries surrounding the
food court: sandwiches, salads, burritos, gourmet cookies,
stir-fry, bagels, frozen yogurt, hot-dogs, burgers and pizza. “A
bagel, I guess. And a diet cola.”

He nodded, hunkered down next to Michael and
asked the same question. “A cookie,” Michael said in a tear-choked
voice. “I wanna cookie. Choc-chip.”

“
A hamburger and a
cookie.”

“
No hamburger! No! I don’t
want it!” Michael revved up to wail again. “No hamburger! Daddy,
no!”

Ignoring him, John straightened up. “I’ll be
right back,” he promised, as if he thought Molly expected him to
disappear forever, leaving her with the tantrum-throwing child.
Pivoting, he vanished into the milling crowds.

She lowered herself onto a bright green
wooden chair beside Michael’s stroller and stared at him until he
stopped bellowing. It took him a good few minutes to compose
himself. “Feeling better?” she asked pleasantly.

He sulked. He had probably forgotten what
had upset him. Molly diagnosed his mood as pre-nap fretfulness.
Most toddlers behaved terribly when they were tired.

“
I want a cookie,” he
grumbled.

“
You said you were hungry.
A cookie won’t satisfy your hunger as well as something nutritious
would. But look—there’s your daddy. He got you a
cookie.”

Michael perked up. Apparently, all was
forgiven. “A cookie? A big cookie?”

“
Enormous,” Molly
observed, rising to take the overloaded tray John was trying to
balance between his left hand and the bandaged back of his right
wrist. She lowered it to the table, then watched as John unwrapped
a small hamburger and handed it to Michael.

Without a peep, he wolfed down the burger,
guzzled his milk and pounced on his cookie. At the table, John and
Molly ate their lunches more decorously. John seemed fatigued,
either from battling Michael or pushing himself physically so soon
after his stabbing. Most likely from both.

If anything, Michael was even more fatigued.
His chewing slowed until he was just sucking on the cookie and
struggling to keep his eyes open “He’s going to be asleep in five
minutes,” Molly predicted.

John glanced at the stroller. A smile
flickered across his lips as he reached down, pulled the
half-consumed cookie from his son’s senseless fingers, and used a
napkin to wipe a smear of chocolate from the boy’s lip. “Less than
five minutes,” he said as Michael began to snore.

John wrapped the remaining half of the
cookie in a napkin and tucked it into the tote hanging from the
back of the stroller. Then he leaned back in his chair and took a
sip of his soda. His gaze settled on Molly, his lids slightly
lowered as he observed her over the rim of his paper cup.

Despite the hundreds of shoppers swirling
around them, munching on snacks and lugging bags of merchandise,
Molly felt as if she and John were all alone in the mall. Despite
the constant drone of voices and the syrupy Christmas music, she
could practically hear him swallow, hear him breathe. She almost
resented Michael for conking out and leaving her all alone with a
man who seemed far too capable of holding her imagination hostage,
infiltrating her senses and making her forget everything she ought
to be remembering.

She scrambled for something safe to talk
about. “Are you going to see any of your sisters and brothers for
the holiday?” It was a nosy question, but at least it distracted
her from the sexual undertow she felt in his presence.

“
Probably not. We got
together for Thanksgiving.”

“
You mentioned that one of
your brothers is disabled.”

John nodded.

One thing she’d learned was that he never
volunteered information. If she wanted to know something, she would
have to ask. “What kind of disability does he have?”

“
He’s mentally
retarded.”

“
Ah.” Her professional
curiosity was whetted. Last year she’d had a girl with Down
Syndrome at the school, and she’d really enjoyed working with her.
“How is he doing? Can he live independently? Is he
educable?”

“
He lives in a supervised
group home about a mile from my parents. He bags groceries at a
supermarket. He’s okay. He’s a good kid.” John laughed and shook
his head. “He’s three years older than me. I just always think of
him as a kid brother.”

“
I’ll bet you were very
protective of him when you were growing up,” she said.

John considered, then shrugged. “Nobody
dared to give him a hard time when I was around, if that’s what you
mean.”

“
That’s exactly what I
mean.” John’s habit of taking responsibility for everyone must have
developed when he was quite young. In his huge family, she assumed
that he would have been the one most sensitive to his brother’s
needs. He would have made sure his brother was all right before he
went off to play ball or hang out with his friends. That was the
way John was, and she adored him for it.

She didn’t want to adore him. But she’d
never met a man like him before, a man so willing to do the right
thing. She didn’t care what Gail said about cops, their craving for
power and their abuse of it. What power John had came not from his
gun and his badge but from his ethics. He had earned that power,
and she...

Well,
adored
was all she’d admit
to.

“
How about the rest of
your siblings?” she asked, longing to know more about him, as much
as he would tell her.

He smiled crookedly. “How about them?”

“
What are they like? Are
any of them cops like you?”

“
No.” He drained his soda
and relaxed in his chair, patiently allowing her to finish her
bagel. “Sarah’s a singer and voice teacher in Boston. Jimmy was a
high school baseball star. He coaches at a high school in New
Jersey. Danny works at the supermarket in Pawtucket, Linda’s a
realtor in Connecticut, and then there’s me, and then Nina, who’s
got four kids and doesn’t have time for much else. And then
Bobby.”

Molly was practically giddy from this
unexpected outpouring of information. “What does Bobby do?”

John smiled wistfully. “He works for the
postal service and tries to stay clean. He’s had some
problems.”

“
Drugs?”

“
Yeah. When he was
younger.”

“
I’ll bet you took care of
him, too.”

John dismissed her guess with another shrug.
“I kept him out of jail, got him into a program. He did the
rest.”

His modesty only made her adore him more.
She could picture him exhorting his brother into treatment,
dragging him there, forcing him to stay until he was clean and
cheering him on every step of the way. She could just as easily
picture him taking on any bully who dared to taunt his brother
Danny.

Her own family was tiny compared to John’s.
And the one time her sister had needed protection, Molly hadn’t
been able to do anything for her. Afterward, she’d listened to Gail
and comforted her, and promised not to tell their parents what had
happened. But she hadn’t been able to protect her sister, or save
her.

If John had been Gail’s brother, he would
have protected her. Molly was certain of it.

“
I don’t think my parents
could have handled seven children,” she said, deciding she adored
John’s parents, too.