Page 62 of Small-Town Secrets
"It's Christmas soon so I was thinking we might go to the mall and visit Santa. There was nice one in Lake Forest that I used to take them every year from the time they were two."
"They still believe in Santa?"
"Tyler does. I'm not sure with Chris, but he knows that pretending he believes will get him more gifts, anyway. Besides, I think they would enjoy going somewhere familiar."
"You're probably right about that. Okay. It's not too far away. We could leave right after breakfast and have lunch there."
"Sounds great." I gave Aaron another kiss and breathed in his scent, letting it fill me with a sense of safety and belonging. I wanted my kids to feel this way too. Safe and like they always had a place to come home too. Aaron could provide that.
We only needed to get through these coming days.
28
Aaron
The mall was fairly busythe following day. Apparently, we weren't the only family in the area who wanted to take their kids to see Santa on a Sunday in December.
Thinking about myself, Laurence and the kids in terms of 'family' still felt so weird that the thought tripped me up every time. I'd been single a few weeks ago and suddenly I had a mate and seven-year-old twins. Talk about a lifestyle change. I hadn't been to a mall to visit Santa since my brother had been a little kid.
The twins seemed excited, though.
"Can we have ice cream later?" Chris asked as we got on the escalator, which had colorful holiday lights strung along its sides.
"We'll have lunch first," his daddy told him. "And then maybe you can have ice cream after meeting Santa if you're good."
"What kind of ice cream?" Tyler asked even as he raced up ahead of us, then stopped to hang over the rails of the escalator, looking down. "Look, the Christmas tree!" He pointed at the monster of a fake tree that had been set up in the mall's entrance hall even though we'd only just walked past it.
"Tyler, look ahead," Laurence admonished him because we were almost at the top now.
"Okay." Tyler turned.
"And don't—" Laurence didn't get any further than that before his son sprinted off as soon as his feet hit the upper floor, Laurence groaned in displeasure. "Watch Chris for a second," he told me before chasing after Tyler.
Chris and I glanced at each other. "It's okay. I don't need watching," he said.
"All right," I said, because what else was I supposed to say? "Just stick by my side."
He nodded. Then he looked at me again, eyes slightly narrowed as we got off the escalator. "Aaron?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you think Santa is real?"
Did I think Santa was real? How the hell was I supposed to respond to that? That I'd stopped believing the moment I caught my mom tearing 'Santa's beard off and kissing him just outside the living room when I was six years old? They'd told me not to tell my little brother, and I hadn't. I'd always thought that lying was stupid, though.
But Laurence probably wouldn't want me to tell Chris what I thought about the lies we told each other for Christmas. "What do you think?" I asked the boy by my side who I was just starting to accept was my son.
"I don't know," Chris admitted. "I think if he's real he's mean."
I gave Chris a closer look. That wasn't a theory I'd heard before. "What makes you think that?"
"Because he's not fair, is he? They say if you're good you get presents, right? But that's only if you're rich. Why doesn't he like poor children?" Chris finished with a pout.
Ouch. I hadn't thought about it like that before. "Did Santa not bring you presents last year?" I asked, feeling so sorry for the kid I kind of wanted to drag him into the next store and buy him a new toy. The twins didn't have very many toys, anyway, now that I thought about it. Laurence probably needed all his money to buy them things they could wear and eat rather than things they could play with.
"We got presents from the shelter, but they weren't from Santa. I saw the shelter people wrap them. I got a picture book and Tyler got some play dough."
"Maybe the shelter people were helping Santa," I suggested.
