Hot Toy (2 page)

“Thank you.” Okay, for some reason this infant was trying to pick her up. Whatever. She had problems, so later for him.

Trudy zeroed in on the boxes that backed up against the MacGuffin shelf. Dolls this time, with big heads and miniskirts and too much eye makeup. Too bad Leroy wasn't a girl; she could have loaded him up with pop-tarts. But no, he had to have a violent, antisocial 'Guffin.

“Men.” She put her shopping bag down again and began to take the dolls off the shelf. Over the tops she could see Nolan restocking
Fantastic Fours.
He shook his head at her, probably disgusted she was flirting with an infant like Reese, and she turned away to see the infant looking at her, confused.

“Men?” he said. “Did I say something wrong?”

“What?” Trudy said, stacking doll boxes on the floor. “Oh, not you. My nephew, Leroy. He's five and he wants a Major MacGuffin doll, and of course, I can't find one.”

“Yeah, you had to shop early for those,” Reese said, sounding sympathetic. “So I guess you haven't seen one here?”

“I would have shopped early if I'd known his father wasn't going to get him one,” Trudy said, exasperated. “But since his father told me he was going to, I didn't.”

“So what are you doing over here?” Reese frowned, looking at the dolls she was taking down.

“I'm looking for a misplaced MacGuffin. This place is pretty sloppy, and I'm hoping there's one stuck at the back of a shelf someplace because if there isn't, I'm screwed.” She took the last box down and faced another empty shelf.

On the other side, Nolan looked serious as he put back the last of the Fantastic Four boxes. He couldn't possibly care that she was talking to Reese. Unless he was one of those guys who didn't want something until somebody else wanted it. He hadn't seemed like that kind of guy.

He'd seemed pretty much perfect: smart, funny, kind, thoughtful …

Ignore him,
she told herself, and started to put the boxes back.
Okay, suppose I was hiding a toy so I could come back and get it later, maybe when I had more money. I found the last MacGuffin, but I didn't have enough to pay for it, so I needed to hide it. The first thing I'd do is go to another row of shelves so nobody who wanted one would trip over it accidentally.

Nolan came around the end of the shelf and started to say something and then saw all the doll boxes on the floor. “Great.”

Trudy ignored him to smile at Reese and then picked up her bag to go look in a different aisle.

“So no MacGuffin,” Reese said. “Really sorry about that.”

“Yep,” Trudy said, and then stopped when she caught another glimpse of the pink confetti-patterned box sticking out of Reese's shopping bag. “What is that?”

He looked down. “This? It's some nail polish doll my niece wanted.”

Nail polish doll?
Trudy reached down and pulled the box out of the bag. “Oh, my God,” she said, looking closer at the Pepto-Bismol pink box that said:
Twinkletoes!
in silver sparkly paint. “This doll is twenty-five years old!”

“I think it's a reissue,” Reese said, sounding confused as he tried to take it back.

“Is the box mint?” Nolan said, and Reese frowned at him and tugged on the box again.

“A reissue.” Trudy held on to the box. Her sister would have a heart attack if she knew they were making these again. She brought the box closer to see through the clear plastic. Yep, it was the same pouting blonde bimbo, Princess Twinkletoes, and there at the bottom next to Twinkletoes' fat little feet was the same pink, plastic manicure set with three heart-shaped bottles of polish—pink, silver, and purple—that had made Courtney's six-year-old heart beat faster, the Hot Toy of 1981. “Where did you get this?”

Reese yanked the box from her hands and nodded to the next row. “Over there,” he said, sliding the box back into his bag. “There are a lot of them.”

Trudy rounded the corner to see the Twinkletoes shelf, crammed full of hot pink boxes. Evidently lightning did not strike twice; Twink was clearly not the Hot Toy of 2006.
You get a little age on you and nobody wants you,
Trudy thought. Well, unless you were Barbie. That bitch lasted forever. Trudy picked up a Twinkletoes box.

Reese came to stand beside her. “Your nephew wants a doll?”

“This is the doll my little sister never got,” Trudy said.
And she could use some payback this Christmas.

“How old's your little sister?”

“Thirty-one.”

“Oh.”

Trudy looked up at the confusion in his voice. “Courtney was supposed to get this the Christmas she was six, but my dad forgot. He told her it fell off Santa's sleigh.”

“Uh huh,” Reese said, probably trying to picture her academic father talking about Santa.

“That was his line for whenever he forgot the Christmas presents,” Trudy said, thinking of Leroy, waiting at home for his MacGuffin. If she didn't find a MacGuffin, would she be reduced to the “fell off the sleigh” line?

Never.

“Did he forget a lot?” Reese said, sympathy in his voice.

“Pretty much every year. You know professors. Absentminded.” Trudy shook her head. “Never mind. I'm rambling. My mind's on my sister and my nephew.”

“Well, hey, it's Christmas. That's where your mind is supposed to be. Family.” Reese smiled at her, gripping his own Twinkletoes box. “Listen, I have to get going, but maybe we can have coffee sometime?”

“Sure.” Trudy smiled back at him automatically, her mind on the Twinkletoes. Would a gift that was a couple of decades late distract Courtney from her divorce?

Hell, it couldn't hurt.

Reese walked away, and she looked closer at the Twinkletoes box in her hands. It had a crumpled corner and she remembered what Nolan had said. The box should be mint. She put her shopping bag down and began to take the Twinkletoes boxes off the shelf. Courtney was going to get a perfect Twinkletoes, pink box and all.

Nolan came around the end of the row and sighed when he saw the boxes on the floor.

“Go away.” Trudy took down the next pink box.

“Listen, is there anything I can do to make you not so mad?”

“Mad? I'm not mad.” Trudy studied the Twinkletoes box. Smudge on the top. She dropped it on Nolan's foot. “Why would I be mad?”

He picked it up. “That's what I asked.”

She pulled another Twinkletoes box off the shelf and shoved it at him. “Okay, here's why I'm mad. I didn't want to go out with you because you were a professor, and I grew up with a professor, and it was no fun because you get forgotten a lot because your dad is thinking about something that happened four millennia ago, so I said no, four times I said no, but you kept at me and I weakened and went out and
I really liked you, you bastard,
and you were smart and you were funny”—she shoved another box at him—“and I thought, gee, maybe this will work out, maybe this is a professor who won't forget, but evidently it was just the thrill of the chase or something because you dropped me”—she threw the next box at him and he caught it, balancing it with the first two—“and I never knew why since you never bothered to tell me; you just fell right off the sleigh—”

“Sleigh?” Nolan said.

“… so
I'm a little upset with you.
”

Nolan sighed. “Look, you changed.”

“Of course I changed,” Trudy snapped. “It's been three months. I've grown. I've matured. I'm in a new and better place now. A place without you. Go away.” She went back to the Twinkletoes shelf, pulling boxes off at random and dropping them on the floor, appalled to realize that she was close to tears. He did not matter to her; the fact that she'd thought he was darling was immaterial; the fact that she'd told her sister he might be The One was immaterial; the fact that her father had said,
Nolan Mitchell, that's a little out of your league, isn't it?
was … Well, her father was a jerk, so that didn't count.

“No, you changed from the library,” Nolan was saying. “You were funny in the library. You talked fast and made weird jokes and surprised me. I liked that. And then I took you out and you, well, you kind of went dull on me.”

Trudy stopped dropping boxes on the floor. “You took me to a faculty party. If I hadn't gone dull on you, you'd have lost points. You'd have been Nolan who brought that weird-ass librarian to the October gin fling. I was
helping you.
”

“Did I ask for help?” Nolan said, exasperated.

“And you took me to dinner at the department head's house. You wanted me weird there?”

“I couldn't get out of that,” Nolan said.

“And then the Chinese film festival.” Trudy dropped another box to the floor. “I thought I was going to see
Crouching Tiger Two,
but it was some horrible depressing thing about people weeping in dark rooms.”

“It was?” Nolan said, confused.

“Not that you'd know, since you
left right after it started,
” Trudy snarled, flinging a box at him. “You got a call and walked out of the theater and I was left with people weeping in Chinese—”

She stopped to stare at the shelf, the next box in her hand, her heart thudding harder than it had when she'd first seen Nolan.

There was a camouflage-colored box at the back.

She dropped the Twinkletoes box and pulled out the camo box and read the label:
Major MacGuffin, the Tough One!
“Oh, my God.” Trudy held on to it with both hands, almost shaking.

The box was not mint—the cellophane was torn over the opening, a corner was squashed in with a black
X
marked on it, and there were white scuff marks on the bottom—but the MacGuffin scowled out at her through the plastic, looking like a homicidal Cabbage Patch doll dressed in camouflage, a grenade in one hand and a gun in the other, violent and disgusting and the only thing Leroy wanted for Christmas.

“I do believe in Santa,” Trudy said as Nolan came closer.

“That's a Major MacGuffin.” He sounded stunned.

“Can you believe it?” Trudy was so amazed she forgot to be mad.

“No,” Nolan said. “I can't. I knew you were an amazing woman, but this puts you in a whole new league.”

“What?” Trudy said.

“I'll give you two hundred bucks for it,” Nolan said.

“No.”
Trudy stepped away from him, holding on to the MacGuffin box.

Nolan smiled at her, radiating sincerity. “I know, your nephew wants a Major MacGuffin, but he doesn't want that one. He wants the Mac Two. The one that spits toxic waste and packs a tac nuke, right?”

Trudy thought of Leroy, waxing rhapsodic about how the 'Guffin spit green stuff when you squeezed him. “Yes.”

“What you have there is a MacGuffin One,” Nolan said, sounding sympathetic and entirely too reasonable. “Last year's model. No toxic waste.”

Trudy looked back at the box. It did look different from the picture Leroy had shown her. “What does this one do?”

“It has a gun. Basically, it shoots the other dolls.”

“And the hand grenade?”

“Just a plastic ball. Doesn't do anything.” He shrugged, unimpressed.

“Damn.” Trudy looked down at the doll's ugly face.

“Two fifty,” Nolan said.

Trudy glared at him. “No. This is for my nephew. And I have to go now. Thanks for putting the boxes back.”

“Trudy,
wait,
” Nolan said, but she picked up a perfect Twinkletoes box, stepped over the rest of the pink boxes, and headed for the checkout counter, her belief in Santa restored if not her belief in the rest of male humanity.

*   *   *

Trudy got in the long line to the register, clutching both the Mac and the Twinkletoes boxes, stepping back as a woman in a red and green bobble hat slid in front of her at the last minute. Then Nolan got in line behind her and said, “Three hundred. It only costs forty-nine fifty new. That's six times—”

Trudy jerked her head up. “
No.
I'll never find another one of these tonight.”

Nolan nodded, not arguing. “Okay. Five hundred.”

“Are you nuts?” Trudy said.

“No, I told you, I'm a collector.” He stepped closer, and she remembered how nice it had been having him step closer on the three lousy dates they'd had.

She stepped away.

Nolan nodded to the Mac. “You are holding a doll that is actually rarer than the Mac Two. They didn't make many Ones.”

“It's not rarer from where I'm standing,” Trudy said. “I actually
have
this one, and there are no Mac Twos in sight.”

“That looks like an original box,” Nolan said. “May I?”

“No,” Trudy said, holding on to it and the Twinkletoes box, trying to put her shopping bag between them to block him, but he'd already opened the top and was reaching in. “Hey.” She elbowed his hand away as he pulled out the instruction sheet.
“Give me that,”
she said, and he opened it so that she could see the drawing of the MacGuffin showing how to detach the silencer from the gun.

“No toxic waste,” Nolan said. “It's a Mac One.”

He slid the instructions back in the box. “Two thousand,” he said, and then Trudy heard somebody say, “I'll be damned,” and turned to see Reese staring at her from the front of the checkout line.

“You found it,” he said.

“Yes.” She turned back to Nolan as he closed the box again. “No. I'm not selling it. This one is Leroy's.” She checked to make sure the MacGuffin was still in the box, complete with hand grenade and gun, and then her cell phone rang.

She fumbled the boxes until she could hold both of them with one arm, looked at the caller ID, clicked the phone on, and said, “Hello, Courtney.”