The Santa Who Came by Sleigh

“I don’t want to embarrass that girl,” he said.

“You won’t be at her party,” I said. “You’ll be on Main Street. In the daylight, on a public road. Waving at whoever’s out.”

“The party’s on Main Street.”

“Then I guess the kids will be close by.”

He laughed. It was the first time I had heard him laugh since the Tuesday in my chair.

Then he put his cards down and got up, slowly, one hand on the table and then on the counter and then on the doorframe, and he went down the hall to his bedroom.

I heard the closet door. I heard the plastic of the dry cleaner bag.

When he came back he had the suit over his arm.

It is red velvet, the deep kind of red, gone soft and a little shiny at the elbows from thirty-one Decembers. The white trim on the cuffs is a little yellow now.

My mother lined the coat in a red satin that has worn through in one spot near the left pocket, and she sewed the big black buttons on with heavy thread doubled four times, because she said Santa does not lose buttons.

Dad laid it across the kitchen table where she had made it. He smoothed it out flat with both hands. They were shaking, and he did it anyway, slow, all the way from the collar to the hem.

“Look here,” he said.

He turned back the front of the coat. On the inside, just below the collar, my mother had stitched a small square of white cloth.

In her small, careful handwriting in red thread, it said: For Leon. Ho ho ho. Love, your Mrs. Claus. 1993.

I had never seen it. In 31 years I had never once seen the inside of that coat.

“She did that the last night,” Dad said. “Sat up after everybody went to bed. I didn’t find it till I put it on at the hall. Had to go stand in the coat closet for a minute before I could go out.”

He touched the stitches with one finger, and the finger shook, and he kept it there. “Every year, Joanie. Every year I read that before I go out.”

I put my hand on his back. I could not say anything at all.

“I guess I’d better read it one more time,” he said.

We got our snow. It started Friday night about nine o’clock, big flakes straight down with no wind, and by morning there were four new inches on the ground and the sky had blown off clear and blue.

I drove into town at seven to look. The plow had been down Main Street once, early, and it had left a packed white layer over the blacktop, smooth as a table. I called Vern from the curb.

“Runners will like that fine,” he said. “Better than fine.”

Brittany’s agenda had Santa’s entrance at two thirty that year, not three, so the photo booth could run a full two hours. I knew it because I still had my copy, with the clip-art tree, folded in my purse.

Vern and I worked it backward. Hitch at one, trailer to town, come onto Main Street at twenty after two, and walk the team the four blocks down to the hall.

I had told Darlene the week before. I had to tell somebody on the committee, and I could not stand to have her think I had just rolled over.