The Thief Who Saved Christmas

Chapter 29

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

RYAN

Well, shit. My face stings from the ripped adhesive.

“You’re not Santa,” the little boy shouts, holding my torn-off beard up in the air and waving it around. “You sit on a throne of lies.”

“Yeah, kid, we’ve all seen Elf .” All of the kids are staring at me, and half of them are pointing and crying. I’m guessing I should do something about that. It took Ada, who is surprisingly good on her feet, about five seconds to get on the scene. But she stopped a few feet away from me. She has her arms crossed over her chest, which I take to mean she’s letting me handle this.

Another test.

Anabelle and Joe are watching too, Anabelle wearing her scared-deer look. I want to pass Ada’s test if only for her. I’m going to feel like a real chump if she sees me blow this opportunity, same as I blew my interview for shoveling horse shit the other day.

The boy who assaulted my fake beard throws it at the crowd, and a little girl screams as if she’s being murdered when it lands on her.

“Santa’s beard is stuck to me. Santa’s beard is stuck to me!”

A middle-aged woman with a high bun runs forward to intercept her, and the other kids look like they’re about to riot. One of them, a little boy, charges forward and rubs his sticky, peppermint-scented palm all over my face. “He has scratchy brown hair on his chin like my dad,” he shouts to the others, backing away with a look of horror. “And he’s only kinda old, not really old like he should be. I think it’s a wig too.”

“It is!” shouts the boy who yanked my beard. “I saw the stitches!”

“I know a future stampede when I see one,” Joe shouts. “Run away from those kids, Ryan! Run while you still can.” He’s backing up, and he bumps into a shelf of baby dolls. One of them drops and starts wailing, and he swears and takes off, leaving Anabelle behind. She’s still standing there, staring at me with those big eyes, when a little girl calls out, “Ryan? Who’s Ryan?”

Shit. This is spiraling quickly. Anabelle’s eyes still on me, she gives me an encouraging nod, and purpose rolls through me.

She believes I can fix this.

Joe clearly doesn’t. I don’t. But Anabelle does.

So I stand up and clear my throat. “Kids, I’m not the real Santa Claus.”

“No shit,” a little boy calls out, and a woman hurries forward to cover his mouth, two seconds too late.

“Because it’s December eleventh,” I continue, “the real Santa is up in the North Pole, busy as hell—”

I cut myself off as the mother whose little kid just swore in public frowns at me, and start again.

“He’s busy, kids. Busy getting your presents ready and checking that list twice. Do you know how many kids there are in the world?”

I have no idea, actually, but I’m not surprised when Anabelle calls out in a small voice, “Approximately 2.4 billion.”

“That’s a lot,” I say dramatically. “So my man Santa is busy. He needs helpers like me to visit with you and find out what you want for Christmas. There are a lot of us.”

One of the kids in the back raises her hand.

“Yeah?” I ask, pointing at her.

“But why couldn’t he find someone with a real beard? There are lots of men with real beards. My daddy has a beard down to his chest, and Momma says she’s going to shave it off when he’s sleeping.”

It’s hard not to laugh at that, especially since there’s a big, sleepy-eyed dude with a long braided beard standing at the back of the group, and he looks like someone just took a boot to his balls.

I clear my throat. “Well, Santa is an equal opportunity employer. He wouldn’t tell me I can’t help him just because I don’t have a beard. That’s not the kind of guy he is.”

“So you really know him?” asks the kid with the sticky hand.

“I do,” I say, nodding emphatically. “And he is one hell of a guy.”

Oops. The woman with the swearing kid gives me a dirty look and tries to hustle her child away from the crowd, but he makes his body go limp. Faced with the choice between bodily carrying him out and pretending she meant to stay, she decides to pretend.

Being a parent is no joke. No wonder Joe is terrified of kids.

“How do we know you’re not lying?” a girl calls out.

“You don’t,” I tell her. “But if you ask me, Christmas is all about the power of belief. I believe in Santa. That’s why I wanted to be one of his helpers. Do you believe in him too?”

The girl crosses her arms over her chest, looking like a little Ada. “Of course I do. But if you really believe in Santa, then why did you pretend to be him?”

“Don’t you ever dress up like people you admire?”

She pauses before nodding. “I was Duo Lipa for Halloween.”

I have no idea who that is, but I give her a knowing nod. “See? Now, who has my beard?”

Someone throws it to me, but it’s covered in dirt and what looks like animal hair, so I shove it into the pocket of my Santa coat. Only I do it too hard and the extra pillow Ada shoved in there, which didn’t get tucked in well enough, tumbles out.

“What else is a lie?” cries out the little boy who snatched my beard.

Damn, might as well put it all out there. So I pull out the other pillow while the kids gape at me. Ada watches with those folded arms and an expression that would do a statue proud, and Anabelle regards me nervously. Then I tug off the wig and stand before them: Ryan, in a Santa suit that now sags. “Any more questions, kids?”

A hand lifts in the air, and I call on the kid whose daddy has a huge-ass beard. “Can we still tell you what we want for Christmas?”

“Yes,” I say, rubbing my hands together. “That’s what I’m here for, kids. Memory like a steel trap.”

Thankfully for me, the kids who’ve already visited with me are long gone, so no one will be able to test me on that.

The little girl lifts her hand again, waving it around more confidently.

“Yes?” I say.

“Can you put the pillow and beard back on? You look kind of scary without it.”

The beard is still gross, but I’m not going to get hired for this poorly paid seasonal job if I don’t do it, so I don’t hesitate. “Sure, kid. Like I said, I like dressing up like my hero too.”

And, I’ll be goddammed, Ada smiles before she walks away. I work for another hour, after which Joe finally comes back with a couple of hot chocolates and an embarrassed expression. Which becomes downright terrified when Ada comes over and tells him there’s no outside food and beverages in the shop.

I’ve never seen a man run to the trash can more quickly.

Despite his humiliation, Joe stays at the store with Anabelle. They’re still there after another half hour. I don’t like that Anabelle’s been standing so long, so I tell the kids that even Santa’s special helpers have to take a leak.

“How long will that take?” one kids asks.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Sounds more like a number two.”

“That’s between me and the toilet,” I tell him, and then I walk up to Anabelle and Joe.

“I’m so sorry, man,” Joe says. He glances at the line of children, many of whom are openly staring at us. “There’s a lot of kids here. They’re all excitable. It felt like a situation that could end poorly.”

“One of them patted candy-cane hands all over my face. Does that count?”

His look of horror is classic, but I look past him at Anabelle.

“You handled that so well,” she says. “I would have frozen, but you did exactly the right thing. I’m so proud of you.”

I beam at her, feeling pretty proud of myself right then too. But she’s still standing—has been for hours—and I don’t like it.

“I need to get a chair for you.”

“Oh, I’m okay. I’m good at standing.” She sighs and shakes her head at herself. “Sometimes I don’t know how stupid something sounds until it comes out of my mouth.”

“You are good at standing,” I say, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, not because it needs to be tucked, but because I want to touch her, and we’re in a room full of children staring at us. “But if you want to stay, I’d feel better if you were sitting.”

I talk to Ada, and she tells me that she has no issue with temporarily donating a couple of inflatable chairs to them so long as they tell everyone who asks how comfortable they are. So Anabelle spends the rest of my shift sitting in a unicorn chair, while Joe is in what could either be a bear or a dog, who knows.

“Why do they get chairs?” one kid asks her dad.

“Because that’s Santa’s girlfriend,” replies a little girl who obviously missed everything that happened earlier. It’s a good thing these kids aren’t on social media yet.

Seeking out Anabelle’s gaze, I say, “That’s right.”

Maybe I’m a dick for wanting to declare it for everyone to hear, but it feels good. Especially when Anabelle blushes and smiles.

The rest of the evening goes pretty smoothly, and by the time Ada comes around and says that Santa needs to leave, the line has already thinned out. Another shout from Ada is enough to clear out the store entirely.

She asks me to stick around for a minute, and Anabelle squeezes my hand and leaves with Joe, who has acquired a candy cane from somewhere.

My nerves are buzzing a bit as I watch them walk out. The evening ended well, but it sure didn’t start out that way, and Ada’s a no-bullshit, no-drama kind of person. She might not appreciate how I handled the situation.

After the door closes behind Anabelle and Joe, she turns to me. “We had some complaints about you swearing.”

“Shit, I’m sorry.”

She gives me a level look, and for half a second, I think she’s going to kick me out on my ass. And then she laughs hoarsely. “You handled those kids’ questions well. You’re hired. Provisionally. Clean up your mouth.”

“I’m hired?” I ask excitedly, because I’d mostly expected this was a one-and-done situation.

“Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Three p.m. until closing.” She pauses, chewing her gum with a thoughtful look on her face. “That kid who pulled off your beard…his mother brought him over before they left.”

“Did you rap his knuckles with a ruler?” I ask, mostly because that was the favorite punishment of one of my foster mothers.

She ignores the question and says, “He let on that some guy came up to him. Gave him twenty bucks to pull off your beard. Maybe it was just one of those schmucks who like to cause trouble for the fun of it, maybe not. I figured you should know, either way.”

“Did he say what the guy looked like?” I ask. One summer, I got it into my head that I wanted to get the honey out of a bee colony I found at the park. But when I knocked it over, hundreds of bees flew up around me. This moment feels a little like that, except the bees are caught inside my skull.

There was someone following us earlier, I’m sure of it.

What if it was Roark, and he’s decided to be a problem after all?

But he wouldn’t have given a kid cash to pull off my beard. He’d have told me to get my head out of my ass and then pushed me into the back of an unmarked car.

So it must be…

Weston.

All the anxiety I had fifteen seconds ago is burned away by rage. Weston has been watching us. I’m guessing he hired someone to do it, because the car that was following us earlier wasn’t his. Anabelle would have recognized it if it had been. Besides, the guy driving it was too good at trailing us.

She lifts a shoulder carelessly and chuckles. “He said it was some blond guy who looked like a pencil.”

Weston himself. That tracks. A private investigator would follow a couple of people, but he wouldn’t give a kid a twenty to pull off a store Santa’s beard.

I’d laugh if I weren’t so pissed off. I’m not going to let Ole Westie get away with this. I’m going to go have a talk with him.

“So…you want the job?” she asks, popping her gum.

“Yes.”

I head for the door, and my hand is on the handle when she asks, “What do you really want to do, kid? We both know this won’t hold you for long.”

“Maybe I don’t want to be held for long,” I lie.

She holds my gaze, her face completely no-nonsense even though there’s a piece of bubble gum on her cheek.

I tap my cheek, showing her where it got stuck, and she shakes her head. “Don’t care much about that. You get to be my age, you don’t worry about your appearance anymore. Not like you, stud. But you’ve got a pretty girlfriend, and it seems to me that you’re a man who’s trying to turn his life around. So what do you want to do?”

I release the door handle, shocked. Why would a stranger care this much about my failure to plan properly?

“I think I might like to work at a restaurant. I like to cook.”

She sniffs. “Restaurant work will cure you of that dream quick enough.”

“Did working here cure you of liking kids?”

“No,” she says with a smile. “I’ll always like the little delinquents. You know, one of my old foster kids runs a restaurant about fifteen, twenty minutes away. I don’t think he needs anyone right now, but I’ll talk to him.”

“Why?”

I didn’t mean for it to sound so raw, but a million different emotions are rolling around inside of me.

“I like you, kid. I sense you could use a break. Everyone needs a break sometimes. But no more swearing. The last thing I need is a parade of parents showing up at dawn. The kids, I like. The parents, I could do without.”

“Thank you, Ada,” I say, feeling choked up. “I’ll be here Friday.”