“KIDS!!” The woman shouted again, and Jeremy turned to find Mrs. Claus shaking her head at all of them.
“PETE! YOUR BUM KNEE!” she shouted, making everyone halt instantly, Lydia and Dan looking guiltily at their dad, who rolled his eyes.
“I'm fine! Took some ibuprofen, rubbed some of that salve from the hippy co-op on it, and I'm good as new,” Pete groused as his wife walked over, crimson skirt sashaying, white wig and round eye glasses perched carefully for full Christmas effect.
“You are going to blow out that knee again, Peter Charles. Get back in the house and ice it. Mike can't be Santa all day, so every snowball you throw is one that makes it harder for everyone else to make Camp Christmas a magic time for the little ones!”
Hangdog wasn't even close to the word that described Pete's response, but it would have to do.
“Fine, Mrs. Claus,” he muttered as he abandoned his impressive stack of snowballs and slowly walked back to their house, the limp slight but noticeable now that Jeremy thought of it. “Killjoy,” Pete added for good measure.
“I heard that!” she called out, but laughter tinged her voice. “And I'll accept that badge with honor if it means you don't moan in bed and ask me to rub it to make it feel better.”
I won't make a nasty joke. I won't make a nasty joke. I won't make a nasty joke, Jeremy told himself, as all eyes were on him, Dan and Lydia looking at the little kids, then Jeremy, pinging between them.
Sandy reddened as she realized the implications of what she'd just said.
“Hazel! Lewis!” a woman shouted, the little kids tearing off toward two women bundled up in snow gear, hugs punctuating their physical return to their mothers. The names rang a bell as Janelle and Karla, the women who ran the hippy co-op Pete just mentioned, waved vigorously.
Jeremy looked at Hazel and Lewis. Kids in snow gear all looked the same to him.
“That was fun,” Mike said, cheeks bright red, beard being tucked back in place. Lydia dusted herself off and held out her hands in a T-shape, the sign for time-out being universally accepted.
“VICTORY!” Lydia and Dan said simultaneously, earning a cackle from Mike as he watched the kids and their moms wander off toward a cabin with a vendor who sold hand-painted wood ornaments.
“Hah!”
While Lydia and her brother bickered over who was His or Her Royal Highness of Snowballs, Jeremy and Mike headed toward the lodge, Mike making sure he was a proper Santa before being seen. Jeremy split off from him, knowing the guy would soon be bombarded. A bazillion kids begging for a look from Santa wasn't his scene.
When he arrived at the golf cart behind the lodge, he sighed with happiness.
Happiness? Where the hell did that come from?
“Hey,” Adam said, popping open the back door, wheeling out a cart with two large plastic hot chocolate dispensers. As if it weighed nothing, he moved the five-gallon container onto the back of the cart, drink valve pointing out. Two of those, plus a smaller secured box with cups, lids, napkins, mini candy canes, and a shaker container filled with marshmallows, and Jeremy was ready.
The Hot Chocolate Golf Cart was always a draw. Soon, he'd be surrounded by children, but his job was easier than Mike's. He didn't have to deal with tears, or wildly unbelievable hoped-for presents (sorry, kid – no Teslas this year), or sad kids with parents and grandparents who died, were out of work, or disabled.
Those were the hardest. He wondered how Pete did it, year in and year out.
And now Mike was taking on part of that role.
“Jeremy!” Just as he was about to turn on the cart, he saw a flash of red and cream, Lydia rushing to him. Hopping in the passenger's seat – if you could call the twelve remaining inches of the front a “seat” – she panted slightly, then gave him a grin, gripping the stabilizer bar.
“Where to?”
“Cabin five.”
“What's being sold there?” He pressed on the accelerator slowly. No lurching when carrying eighty pounds of creamy chocolate goodness.
“Hand-knit baby wear.”
SLAM!
His foot did it involuntarily, jerking to the brake, hands gripping the steering wheel as his hunched-over posture made him feel more vulnerable than he liked.
“The containers!” she shouted, reaching back. But they stayed in place.
“You really think you're pregnant.” He said it with a finality, with a sense of awe, with less of a question to it than a statement of truth that needed words to have meaning.
“I don't know.” As he watched her from his peripheral vision, his own emotions too powerful to show her with eye contact, he gave a rueful smile. “You hear that women 'just know,' but I don't. I'm not one of those women. The only way we'll know for sure is when a pregnancy test says 'positive.'”
“And you said the soonest we can do that is Christmas Day?”
A small laugh, the kind you push out through your nose as if it's stroking the back of the skull, made him finally look at her. “Yes. Merry Christmas.”
His hand moved to her knee, the coarse red cloth rough against his gloved hand. Her own palm pressed against the back of his hand, and they sat there for a moment, eyes unfocused, staring straight ahead, breathing in concert.
They were present for each other, uncertain whether the seed of a child they'd created together was there, too.
Time felt endless and rushed, all at once.
And then:
“HEY! YOU TWO! QUITCHER MEDITATING! HOT CHOCOLATE WON'T DELIVER ITSELF! WE'VE GOT COLD REVELERS WHO NEED THEIR LIBATIONS!”
Ah, Miles. Always good for a reality check.
A real laugh emerged from both of them as Jeremy eased his foot off the brake and drove carefully to Cabin Five, a ragtag group of older kids fast-walking behind the cart, eyes on the hot chocolate bins.
As he pulled up in front of the cabin's porch, Lydia climbed out gracefully, gave him a curtsy, and said, “Thank ye, kind sir.”
The kids all laughed.
So did Jeremy.
And then they both got down to the hard work of connection, community, and nostalgia.
Which felt more like joy than anything else.
9
Mike
Pete had warned him about the criers. The pants wetters. The over-eager hover moms. The debunkers, eager to tell the other kids Santa wasn't real. The glazed-eye terrified kids who turned nonverbal in the presence of Santa greatness.
But no one had prepared him for Khalil.
The boy couldn't have been more than five, with big brown eyes that looked too pretty to be real, and dark brown hair with a reddish tint, but as his grandmother leaned over, hand on Mike's shoulder, she whispered, “He's autistic. Khalil is ten, and his mother is in the hospital with pneumonia. She has lupus, so it's touch and go.”
Sandy sat next to him, tasked with greeting children, comforting the scared ones, and chatting up family. At the grandmother's words, she froze.
“Harriet? In the hospital? Oh, Ruth, I'm so sorry. What's wrong?”
The older woman's hand went to Sandy now, the two in a half-embrace as Khalil stood there, awkward. Ten? He was ten? Mike marveled at that, the child’s short stature and little-kid features making him wonder how he could seem so young yet have been through ten trips around the sun.