Page 73 of Small-Town Secrets
I couldn't argue with that. "Are you still sure you don't want them to know about Santa?" I asked instead. "Isn't the truth about Christmas just another secret we're keeping from them?" After all, I was pretty sure the kids could enjoy the holidays even if they didn't believe in a mysterious man who broke into every house all over the world in a single night to leave presents everywhere.
"Not all secrets are bad," Laurence said with one finger on my lips. "Please don't spoil it."
"I won't if you don't want me to."
"Thank you. Now kiss me," he asked, as if he wanted to see just how well I would follow his instructions, and I wasn't going to disappoint him. If Laurence wanted a kiss, a kiss he would get.
And so it happened that I had my tongue in Laurence's mouth when our firstborn walked back into the living room.
Chris stared at us with an unreadable expression while Laurence peeled himself off me and approached him.
"Is something wrong, sweetheart?" he asked as if there was nothing awkward about Chris walking in on us. Maybe there wasn't. What kid hadn't been grossed out by their parents?
Laurence's approach seemed to work too, because Chris moved on from what he'd witnessed to tell his daddy why he'd come. He held up his Gameboy. "It's not turning on."
Laurence took the device from him. "Maybe the batteries are dead." He turned to me. "Do we have batteries?"
"Sure." I stood from the couch, took the Gameboy from Laurence and went into the kitchen to open the junk drawer where I kept my batteries. Chris followed and watched me wordlessly as I replaced the batteries inside his Gameboy. "There you go," I said, handing it back to my son and feeling good about myself for fixing his problem.
Only, I hadn't.
"It still won't turn on," Chris complained.
Laurence made a dismayed face. "It was already half-broken when we got it," he explained to me. "That's why they let him take it in the first place."
"I see." Maybe the Gameboy's time had finally come, but seeing the disappointment in Chris' eyes when he looked at it, I felt like I had to do something anyway.
"You know what? My old Gameboy might still be up in the attic. It's not the exact same model, but it should play your game."
"Really?" Chris looked at me with an expression of cautious hope.
"You wanna go up with me and look?"
"Don't you have to leave for work soon?" Laurence reminded me.
"We'll be quick." The attic wasn't a huge mess, at least. My parents had been very organized about it, and I followed their good example. I tried, at least. I knew there were a few boxes stashed up there with toys my brother and I used to own growing up that my parents had never given away and I was pretty sure that my old Gameboy was in there. "C'mon," I said to Chris. "We're going on a treasure hunt."
* * *
The attic wasn't messy, but itwasdusty. I coughed as I lifted a box off another one and specks of dust danced in the light falling in through the one window behind me.
"That's alotof boxes," Chris commented.
"You're right. We have a lot of stuff." Most of the boxes were labeled, but some were not. Either because their labels had peeled off over time or because someone had thought they would get around to labeling them later but then never did. That someone was most probably me.
"Check this box," I said, handing one to my little helper. It said 'Toys' but nothing more specific than that.
"Okay." Chris opened it and got to work while I grabbed a similar box for myself and came face to face with items I hadn't seen in at least fifteen years. Like the toy bugs my little brother used to try and scare me with until he finally realized that I wasn't scared of bugs even after he dropped them in my cereal.
"I had one just like this," Chris said.
When I turned to him, he was holding a stuffed cow.Lonny. I'd almost forgotten Lonny existed, but I used to fall asleep with him in my arm every night when I was a toddler. "You did?" I asked with a tightening in my chest, realizing once more that I had no idea what my son's toddler years had looked like. "What happened to it?"
Chris shrugged. "We didn't take much."
I could only guess that meant Laurence didn't take many things with him when he fled his ex's house with the twins in tow. I wondered what other things he might have left behind.
"You can have the cow if you want to," I told Chris.
