“C'mon, Mr. Ambition. Let's do this Christmas thing.”
The first deep breath he took outside made Jeremy smile, looking to Mike for something he couldn't quite name. People were starting to stream in, all on foot, the road carefully sanded but still slick in spots. Sandy and Pete wouldn't use salt, but they were pragmatists, too.
Mid-December in Maine was a slippery affair.
“You know,” Mike said casually, but the words set Jeremy's teeth on edge, “this time next year, we could be like them.” He pointed to a couple with a baby in a backpack on the guy's back, every square inch of the child covered in warm clothing, a tiny moon of face poking out from where the head should be in the ski suit.
“Overdressed?”
“Bringing a baby to Santa.”
Jeremy felt gut punched. “First of all, Santa would be you or Pete, so the baby wouldn't need to stand in line during Camp Christmas just for a photo op with Old Mr. Ho Ho Ho. Second, what the hell, Mike? I thought we weren't talking about Lydia being pregnant.”
“Who said we weren't?”
“Your silence on the issue.”
“I wasn't being silent. I just didn't feel like talking about it until now.”
“Until you went all gooey at the sight of someone else's crotch fruit.”
“Crotch fruit?”
“Baby. Child. Human from the loins. You know.”
“Is Crotch the first name or the last name?”
“Quit deflecting. She could be pregnant. We still don't know.”
“Won't know until right around Christmas, based on her cycle.”
“Exactly. If she's pregnant, we're facing an August birth. Mmmm, August in Maine. It's like drinking mosquitoes.” Jeremy grimaced.
“We'd be busy during peak tourist season. Bad timing.”
“I can't believe we're talking about this,” Jeremy muttered as the baby in the backpack made eye contact, opened its mouth, and promptly drooled a long, thick line of liquid onto its daddy's neck.
The dad shivered, reached up behind his head, and laughed, the woman – Mom? –reaching into their diaper bag, finding a cloth, and wiping it up.
“Our future,” Mike whispered.
“You're a terrible ghost. Why don't you turn into the Ghost of Christmas Past and remind me of that year in Budapest at that Eurotech nightclub where we explored fisting to its full spiritual potential?”
“Let's stick to ghosts of Christmas present,” Mike said, instantly grouchy. He pointed. “Speaking of which...”
A Nutcracker stood next to Jack Christmas from the The Nightmare Before Christmas, except the guy wearing the costume was as big and burly as Jack was willowy and slim.
“It's like Paul Bunyan decided to squeeze into a petite,” Mike murmured. “Is that Adam?”
“Yeah. Next to Miles.”
“Where's Dan?”
“Here.” They turned around to find Lydia's other brother – there was always another brother – in an old-fashioned caroler's costume, top hat and all.
Jeremy folded in half, laughing, candy cane hat tip almost touching the snow. “You look like the old man from those Thomas the Train videos.”
“I'm not that fat!”
Lydia patted her brother's stomach. “Getting there, old man.”
“I'm not old!”
“You're older than me,” she said smugly, the two sharing a look that Jeremy didn't quite understand because he'd never had a sibling. It plucked a heartstring in him he didn't know was there.
“Always will be older, sis. And wiser.”
“Hah! The former is true, the latter? Not so much.”
“You look very pious,” Dan said to her, doing his level best to stare his little sister down.
“Thank you.”
“Which means the disguise is complete.”
She bent down in the snow and began forming a snowball.
“Don't start something you can't finish,” Dan announced, mimicking his sister.
That's my line with her, Jeremy thought, but thankfully didn't say aloud. Living in a community setting with her four older brothers meant he and Mike walked a fine line. They were all adults, of course, so he and Mike weren't worried about a literally beat down.
And yet, somewhere in the deep recesses of his primitive brain stem, he was.
Before he could say anything, he watched as Lydia nailed Dan in the gut, and then bam! Jeremy was struck in the cheekbone by a whomp of white fluffy stuff, and it wasn't the kind that came at him in an unfortunately positioned parabola while watching porn.
“HEY!” he and Dan screamed simultaneously, Lydia making three snowballs to his one. Lydia and Dan had the home-field advantage, born and raised here in Maine, while he made snowballs like a sloth.
The two were merciless, and he was thankful they were on opposing sides. If they allied against him and Mike, he’d be buried under seven feet of snowballs within minutes.
Something hit him from behind, which was impossible because Dan, Lydia, and Mike were in front of him. Turning, he found two kids, about seven or eight, giggling madly as they pelted him – the nearest grown-up, if you could call Jeremy a grown up – with an avalanche of snowballs.
Were kids from Maine given a different curriculum in phys-ed classes? Did the schools teach this skill?
“YOU!” he shouted, pointing to each of them, earning two snowballs to the crotch for his hesitation. What they had in speed, he had in height, and soon they were running behind thick trees to take cover.
THWACK!
“SCORE!” Mike shouted as Jeremy's candy cane hat flew off his head, moved by Mike's snowball, the cloth plunking down on a decorated evergreen in a half-barrel planter along the sanded walkway.
“KIDS!” someone shouted. Jeremy ignored them and bent down, heedless of being hit, determined to make an arsenal of balls he could throw.
“KIDS!” The man's baritone grew stronger, but still, he ignored it.
“JEREMY! LYDIA! DAN! MIKE!”
Looking up at his name, Jeremy realized the bellower was Pete.
And the four of them were the “kids.”
Prepared for a dressing down, Jeremy began to grin. He hadn't been yelled at by a parental figure in...
Forever.
Instead, he got a mouthful of snow to the teeth.
If Lydia and Dan were professional snowball machines, it occurred to Jeremy as he ran to one of the thick maples where the little kids were barricaded, Pete was their Olympic coach.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
All four of them were whomped by Pete.
And then it rained white.
Conventional wisdom says that the older we get, the less agile, but Jeremy had learned that in Maine, this simply wasn't true, at least when snow is involved. Old yankees (lower-case Y, not the baseball players) were a grizzled bunch with ancient souls and young bodies. Pete had the reflexes of a twenty-year-old, decades of working with his body, but at his own pace and under no boss's schedule but his own, honing him to a finely-oiled human specimen who was clobbering all the people a generation (or two, as the eight-year-olds joined in) younger.
“KIDS!” a female voice shouted. The little ones turned to look, then resumed the fracas.