Father Christmas (4 page)

He should have inspected the outside play
area yesterday. He should have inspected the rest of the school, as
well. But he’d had only an hour for lunch, and he’d wasted half of
the hour visiting another preschool where the kids had been
wandering the halls aimlessly while the teachers huddled in a staff
room drinking coffee and gossiping. John might not be an expert
when it came to preschools, but he knew he’d quit his job and stay
home with Mike, collecting welfare if he had to, rather than send
him to that dive.

He took Mike’s hand and pulled him away from
the fence, ignoring his top-volume protests about wanting to go on
the swings. Around the building, they entered through the front
door. Warmth enveloped him and he loosened his hold on Mike, who
seemed to have forgotten the swings the instant he noticed the
equally exciting enticements inside. Without waiting for
permission, he charged down the entry hall, passing open cubbies
labeled with children’s names printed on construction-paper
teddy-bears. John chased him, then stumbled to a halt when he
reached the room at the end.

It was large, and so glaringly lit he had to
blink. Waist-high dividers broke the room into smaller areas, each
gated and bearing a sign: Young Toddlers, Older Toddlers, Pre-K and
Tiny Tots. John knew the school must serve a reasonable number of
children, yet everything was incredibly clean and neat—the art
supplies, the book shelves, the fabric-covered mats rolled into
cylinders and stacked against the partitions, the cushions, the
construction blocks sorted into bins, the dolls seated in tidy
rows.

John’s house hadn’t been this orderly since
the day Mike was born.

What was even more startling than the
neatness was that the room was empty. Noises filtered down through
the ceiling, though—voices, thumps and laughter. Evidently, all the
action was on the second floor.

Before John could locate the stairs, a door
at the rear swung open and Molly emerged, carrying a tray laden
with bottles of apple juice, paper cups, and a box of whole-wheat
crackers. Seeing John and Mike, she smiled.

God, what a mouth. Her lips were a natural
coral shade, full and wide, designed for smiling. Or kissing. “Oh,
good,” she said. “You came.”

Oh, good.
He’d
come. As if there had ever been any question that he
would.

“
Now I can lock the door.
We’re all upstairs, and it’s so noisy I wasn’t sure I’d hear the
buzzer if you rang. So I took a chance and left the door open. Let
me go lock up.”

As she drew near, John lifted the tray from
her hands. It was heavier than he’d expected. Her smile intensified
once he divested her of her burden.

Mike trailed her down the hall. “You have
cookies?” he asked hopefully.

“
Crackers,” Molly told
him. “I’m Molly. Who are you?”

“
Michael Russo. I wanna
cookie.”

They vanished into the hall, leaving John
holding the tray. Would Molly condemn him as a bad father because
his kid was hooked on cookies? Well, hell, he’d never claimed to be
the perfect father. Cookies had gotten him through a lot of tough
times with his son.

The cookie-addict and Molly reappeared from
the hallway. Mike pranced ahead of her, apparently energized by the
room. “I don’t like Harry,” he announced. “Daddy says I can come
here and no more Harry.”

Still smiling, Molly glanced questioningly
up at John. She made no move to retake the tray, which was a good
thing, because if she had, he would have insisted on carrying it
for her, and nowadays some women considered a display of chivalry
sexist. As a cop, John had learned to be sensitive about the fact
that some people were touchy, taking offense when none was
intended.

“
Harry?” she
asked.

Her eyes were as spectacular as her mouth.
They were brown, but they looked as if someone had sprinkled gold
dust into them. They sparkled like her magic first-aid wand.

“
Harriet,” he explained.
“A baby-sitter. He didn’t like her.” Molly smelled of baby-powder
and something else, something spicy. Ginger, maybe.

“
Well, let’s see how he
does here. Would you like to come upstairs, Michael?” she asked,
abandoning John and the tray and snagging Mike before he figured
out how to unlatch the Pre-K gate. “There are other children
upstairs, and lots of toys to play with.”

When she turned her back to John, taking
Mike’s hand and escorting him to a rear alcove, the room seemed to
grow dimmer. John followed her, as if she were the only source of
light in the world. She bypassed a door opening out into the back
yard, and headed up a flight of stairs. The sounds of children at
play drifted down from above.

Mike scampered up the steps ahead of Molly.
When he got to the top, he let out a whoop and vanished into the
room. John could understand why, as soon as he reached the top of
the stairway. The second-floor room was as well-lit and colorful as
the first-floor room, but it lacked walls, dividers and gates. It
was wide open and beckoning.

One corner held a play kitchen, another a
collection of plastic blocks as large as the children who scampered
around the room. Another area held cartons of dress-up clothing,
another a sand table, another a collection of simple musical
instruments, another a fleet of wheeled toy vehicles. At the
opposite end of the room was an enclosed pen, maybe twelve feet
square, filled with what appeared to be foam-rubber balls and
scraps. Several children were in the enclosure, jumping up and down
and throwing the balls at each other. Standing to one side, a young
woman—a teacher, John surmised—kept an eye on the children in the
pen.

Mike didn’t give a second look to the cars
and trucks, the dress-up corner, the sand table. He raced directly
to the enclosure and wiggled between the ropes that fenced it. In
no time, he was giggling, leaping and flopping among the balls.

“
I guess he feels at home
here,” John murmured.

For the first time since Molly had entered
the room downstairs with her tray, her smile faltered. “Here, let
me take this,” she said, reaching for the tray.

He shook his head. “Just show me where to
put it.”

She gestured toward a side table out of the
flow of activity, and he lowered the tray next to another tray
holding a stack of paper napkins, and plates filled with cubes of
cheese. “We’ll have a chance to talk later,” she promised. “Right
now, I’ve got a Daddy School class to run.”

He surveyed the room, this time observing
not just the toys and his son but the other people present: at
least six adult men, dressed casually and trying to find a way to
fit into the bedlam. A couple of fathers hovered anxiously over
their frolicking offspring. One had taken a shovel and was
attempting to lure his kid toward the sand table. Yet another was
on the floor, pushing a toy fire engine, ignoring all the
children.

It didn’t look like a class to John. More
like a free-for-all, the kids pulling one way and the fathers the
other.

He stationed himself near the snack table,
watching as Molly ventured into the fray. He expected her to call
the group to order, maybe have the men sit in some sort of
formation from which they would be able to hear her as she lectured
on a topic. But there was no order, no formation. She simply walked
over to the man and the child at the sand table and started talking
to them.

When it came to observing, John was a pro.
He remained where he was, mentally recording everything he saw as
if he were searching a crime scene for evidence. He couldn’t hear
Molly’s voice above the din, but he watched as she nodded toward
the father, then bent down to confer with the child, getting on her
knees and urging the father to get on his so he would be at the
child’s eye level. Molly said something to the father, who said
something to the child, and they began to collaborate on the
construction of a sand castle.

Molly rose to her feet and moved on.

John frowned. That was it? A little
father-child match-making? He’d heard about the Daddy School from
James McCoy, the syndicated humor columnist who lived in Arlington
and who’d wound up at John’s desk last summer, when he’d been
trying to track down the woman who’d abandoned a baby on his porch.
McCoy had mentioned then that he was taking a Daddy School class
from a nurse—Allison Winslow, the woman who’d put John in touch
with Molly. From what John had gathered about the nurse’s class, it
had been a more structured program, with students meeting weekly to
discuss issues in child-rearing.

Evidently, Molly Saunders had a very
different idea of what a Daddy School should be. She ambled over to
the father playing with the fire engine, sat on the floor, and
engaged him in such a serious chat that he tossed aside the fire
truck and gave her his full attention. John noted their body
language—the father gesticulating with his hands, frowning, shaking
his head, and Molly leaning toward him, speaking softly, patting
his shoulder.

Some class.

At least Mike seemed to be having a blast.
John sauntered across the room to the ball-filled pen. The young
woman overseeing the children sent him a smile.

“
Is it safe?” he asked,
motioning toward the penned-in area with his head.

“
The foam pit? Sure.” She
turned her gaze to the scrambling children. “They love it in there.
Is your boy going to be attending the Children’s Garden, or are you
just here for the Daddy School?”

John wasn’t sure if Mike would be attending
the preschool, but he certainly wasn’t here for the Daddy School.
“I’m hoping he’ll be a student here.”

The woman extended her right hand. “I’m
Shannon Hull,” she introduced herself. “I teach the Pre-K class.
What’s your boy’s name?”

“
Michael Russo,” John told
her.

“
He’s, what? Around two
years old?”

John nodded.

“
That would put him in the
Young Toddlers group. His teacher will be Amy.” Shannon watched the
children in the pen for a minute. “Your son is a bit aggressive,
isn’t he.”

John studied Mike’s behavior in the foam
pit. Mike repeatedly stood up and hurled himself down onto the soft
balls, shrieking and making exploding noises as he hit. He wasn’t
aiming his body at any of the other children, though. He wasn’t
even throwing the balls at anyone. “No,” John said quietly. “He
isn’t.”

“
Watch the way he moves,”
Shannon suggested, following Mike with her gaze. Mike struggled to
his feet, then let out a roar and catapulted himself back into the
balls. “He isn’t aggressive in the sense of wanting to hurt anyone.
But the way he flings himself out, the way he just pushes himself
through space... He’s letting off a lot of steam.”

John shrugged. Why shouldn’t Mike be letting
off steam?

“
That’s one of the things
we use the foam pit for. The kids think it’s just for fun—which it
is. But when a kid has a lot of tension inside him, we’ll bring him
to the foam pit and let him work it out. This is a safe place to
vent physically without hurting yourself.”

“
You think Mike is
tense?”

“
Just watching him, I’d
say there’s a lot of stress inside that little boy. A lot of anger.
Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong,” she added with a knowing
smile.

John ground his teeth together to prevent
himself from telling her that she had a hell of a nerve critiquing
his son’s emotional state. Two-bit psychology wasn’t what he wanted
out of a preschool. All he wanted was for Mike to be safe and under
supervision while John was at work.

If he weren’t desperate for child care, he’d
haul Mike out of the pit and leave. He’d be damned if he was going
to leave his son to the mercies of some twenty-three-year-old Freud
wannabe who was going to take the kid’s psychic temperature and
report on how much anger Mike had inside him.

She’d invited John to correct her, but he
didn’t. Slowly, gradually, as his rage over her instant diagnosis
waned, he forced himself to admit that she might have a point. Of
course Mike had a lot of anger, of course he was aggressive. What
little kid wouldn’t need to let off steam after having gone through
what Mike had gone through in the past few days, the past few
months?

Rattled by the teacher’s perceptiveness, he
turned and stalked away. He felt her eyes on him for a moment, but
by the time he reached the center of the bustling room, he heard
her addressing the children in the pit. He reined in what was left
of his temper. The teacher had just been showing off, that was
all.

Before he could make it back to the snack
table, Molly emerged from a group of fathers and children in the
music area. With the deftness of a cop seizing a suspect, she
curled her fingers around his forearm and eased him toward the play
kitchen. “Let’s talk,” she murmured.

He caught a whiff of her ginger scent again.
The top of her head barely reached his shoulder, and as he gazed
down he saw the silky thickness of her hair, the tip of her nose,
the gentle swell of her bosom in a cream-colored sweater. Her hand
arched around his forearm, warming him right through the lined
leather of his jacket, the flannel of his shirt.

It wasn’t appropriate for him to feel that
kind of warmth from a teacher, a woman to whom he was entrusting
his son. Frankly, John didn’t want to feel any kind of warmth from
any women right now. Women would only complicate his life and
consume his dwindling reserves of trust. He didn’t need that.

As soon as they reached the kitchen Molly
released him. He flexed his hand, as if restoring sensation to his
arm, and took a safe step back from her. He knew he’d have to spend
the next few minutes with her if he wanted her to accept Mike into
her school. Ordering himself not to think of her scent or her
surprisingly firm grip or her full, soft lips, he surveyed the
miniature kitchen in search of a place to sit.