Grace had to stop herself from reaching out to touch him. She looked up and gasped. All the people in line behind the boy—those that had been complaining only moments before, telling Grace to hurry up—all had softened faces. Their auras had gone from murky to clear in a matter of minutes. The young boy had impacted all of those around him without even trying.
Grace set his bags on the counter. “May I ask your name?”
“Brian.”
“I’m glad I met you, Brian,” she told him softly. “You made me realize that I have not been enjoying the holiday season like I should be.” Grace thought about how lucky she was to have her mother.
She noticed some of the heads in line nodding in agreement.
“I’m glad I met you too, Grace.”
Her mouth dropped open. “How did you know my name?”
Brian gave her an impish grin and pointed to her name tag.
Grace laughed.
He paid, told her “Merry Christmas”, and walked out the door, whistling away. Many people turned and watched him leave—some smiling, some wiping away tears.
Happiness could be found in the most unlikely places.
* * *
Julia Crane writes young adult novels of elves, love, and destiny and the struggle between light and dark. She can most often be found at her home in Dubai hunched over her laptop with a two year old clinging upside down to her head.
Find her online at www.juliacraneauthor.com
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O Christmas Cactus, O Christmas Cactus
M. Edward McNally
Jasper had worn a coat, which he put back on before leaving the plane to keep both hands free for the gifts he’d stowed in the overhead. Luckily the flight was half empty, so there’d been plenty of room in the bin.
The coat was heavy, but not much of an issue in the air conditioned innards of what a sign on the wall identified as Phoenix’s Barry M. Goldwater Sky Harbor International Airport. The full name seemed really excessive, and Jasper wondered what the locals called it. He decided they probably called it “the airport,” like every other airport, everywhere.
Jasper had not checked any baggage but the signs indicating the exit led him in that direction. The vast terminal was almost deserted at one o’clock in the local afternoon, as this was not a big day for travel. The Christmas decorations derived from a different ecosystem — wreaths, pine boughs — seemed alien and out of place on the smooth walls painted the color of desert adobe. But the giant candy canes and toy soldiers were at home among the plastic chairs and vinyl flooring.
By the time he made his way down the long escalator to baggage claim, Jasper’s neck was sweating under his coat collar. He moved around the people waiting at the conveyor belts and trying to decipher the electronic hieroglyphics of flight numbers and city names. Jasper passed through the double set of glass doors that trundled open to expel him outside, into a stone and steel canyon between two terminals, with a one-way street in between. He stopped short and looked up, seeing a strip of clean, blue sky for the first time in what felt like months. No clouds. No snow. It was warm here, more so with a bulky winter coat on, and Jasper’s confused body decided to give one shiver.
“Mr. Czarnewzki?” a voice asked nearby, actually pronouncing it correctly, and Jasper turned his head to find a driver waiting attentively at his side. “Driver” was a guess, as the kid wore a suit and one of those short-billed chauffeur hats Jasper would not have thought real chauffeurs actually wore, but there it was. Behind him at the curb was the longest car Jasper had ever seen: A stretch limo of an inky obsidian shade. Just the paint looked expensive.
“Yes, how’d you know?” Jasper asked.
The kid nodded his goateed chin. “The jacket, sir. You flew in from Minneapolis, right?”
He extended his hands to accept the packages Jasper carried, four boxes wrapped rather haphazardly but with enthusiasm in bright paper with Christmas motifs and patterns. In his whole life, Jasper had never correctly folded the corners of wrapping paper, and the bunched excess at each end was concealed beneath stick-on bows. Janet had always wrapped the kids’ gifts.
“Trunk, or just in back with you, Mr. Czarnewski?” the driver asked once he had the gifts in his arms. He was probably in his twenties, but a dark tan and the mustache-goatee combo, plus the fact that he was sporting sunglasses even in the shady terminal canyon made Jasper think “student.”
“Uh, just in back, I guess. And I’m just Jasper.”
“Jasper it is, sir,” the driver said. “I’m Mickey.”
“Hey Mickey,” Jasper said, and as he was of a certain age to remember some things, he had to fight the urge to add, “You’re so fine you blow my mind, hey Mickey.” The kid probably wouldn’t have got the reference.
Mickey balanced the gifts on one arm to open the rear passenger door, and Jasper shed his coat before climbing aboard. He stared around at the plush seats, the soft track lighting, the wet bar and a blank TV screen, and thought how weird it was that the nicest room he had ever been in was in a car. Mickey circled around the trunk and opened the door on the street side to gently deposit the gifts for Jasper’s kids beside him. He gave him a smile and said “By the way, Merry Christmas, sir,” before closing the door.
Jasper just nodded.
He didn’t know how Mickey got them out of the airport, as the place was a rat maze of sharp turns and ramps, with about ten signs pointing in different directions at each. The kid knew what he was doing though, and the Chrysler 300 slunk around curves like a shark moving through a reef. The car was so long Jasper felt like he should have a separate steering wheel in back, like on an Olde Timey fire engine.
From what looked like a football field away in the driver’s seat, Mickey offered Jasper the use of the TV, a drink from the bar, or a bottle of water from the fridge, but Jasper declined and sat on his hands in the middle of the backseat, feeling like an idiot. He’d had no idea if he could get a cab in Phoenix on Christmas Day, so he’d gone online thinking of renting a car, even though he was only going to be in town a few hours. The ad for the limo place had popped up, and Jasper, feeling cranky about the whole trip, had thought “What the hell.” He was not, strictly speaking, a limo guy. He had almost been in one twenty-odd years back, on Prom Night in the tiny town of Rake, MN. There had been one limo for rent over in Blue Earth, but four classmates beat Jasper and his pals to it.
Mickey asked a couple of questions from the far end of the submarine, confirming where they were headed and then tentatively testing for conversation. Jasper answered only in monosyllables and the kid stopped trying. Soft Christmas music was playing — The Carpenters — and Jasper wondered if anyone in Arizona knew who Jack Frost was, or had ever had their nose nipped. He looked out the window as Mickey got them onto a highway, passing a big box store with a giant inflatable snowman in the lot, top hat and corncob pipe, surrounded by cacti and thorny green trees. It looked like an invader from another planet.
They were on the highway for twenty minutes or so, gliding along with sparse traffic, passing by a mountain Jasper recognized as he had seen it in on sports broadcasts. Sort of a standard shot whenever the Cardinals were on MNF, or the Twins were in Phoenix to play inter-league with the D-backs. It was supposed to be shaped like a camel or something, but Jasper couldn’t really see it from this close. They passed one end of the campus of Arizona State, and a stadium festooned with the biggest banner Jasper had ever seen, advertising the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. “Tostitos” was written much bigger than “Fiesta.”
The highway bent north for a few miles before Mickey took a Scottsdale exit and started navigating cross streets. At a stoplight, a haggard-looking guy in a jeep pulled up by Jasper’s window, and for some reason he just glared at the reflective glass like he was six kinds of pissed. Jasper felt like rolling it down and trying to explain that he didn’t really belong in this ridiculous, hulking status symbol of an automobile, but the light changed.
They moved onto a residential street, really nice houses festooned with an overabundance of decorations. Mockups of sleighs and sleds pulled by reindeer, sitting on sand and gravel. Mickey stopped in front of a big one, two stories tall and with a blow-up manger on the roof. There was a giant cactus in the front yard, one of those with all the arms. It had a big furry Santa hat on top.
Mickey got out up front, but before he had traversed the length of the stretch Jasper opened his own door and stood beside the car, frowning at the house. Sort of adobe looking, with electric candles in every window and just the top and the star of a Christmas tree visible above the shutters of a big bay window off the entryway. Jasper thought about the dumpy Dinky Town apartment he and Janet had been living in for their first Christmas together, and he did not hear whatever Mickey said.
“What?”
“Shall I get the packages for you, sir?”
“I’m just Jasper,” Jasper said again, and he felt like a “just.” Not righteous, but barely adequate. A curtain moved in a window upstairs, but he couldn’t see who was looking out.
He took the gifts himself and shuffled his feet in work boots on the way to the door.
This was supposed to be Hollings’ job, but that twerp had called Mickey at ten this morning to say he was still too drunk to drive from the night before. Eggnog. A-hole. So Mickey took one for the team.
He waited back by the car, standing attentively like a lawn jockey until a really good-looking blonde answered the doorbell, total MILF. Mickey thought he’d probably wind up in hell for having that thought on Christmas Day, and sighed through his nose. Like about half of the residents of Scottsdale, she appeared to have been dipped in something and preserved about ten years before. A couple kids appeared, also blondes though the boy was built thick like his Dad. Assuming Mickey had the family tree figured right, which he thought he probably did as the kids squealed and hugged Jasper. They all went back inside, and the MILF looked as ornery as Botox allowed.
Mickey sat in the driver’s seat and made a call, then waited, drumming his fingers on the wheel and checking his watch. He usually brought a book, but he’d left it on the nightstand. It was going on three by the time Jasper emerged, with the kids and their Mom, and Mickey stepped back out. It was five more minutes of hugs, the kids sniffling, while their Mom stood on the stoop with her arms crossed in a cashmere sweater, her face neutral rather than frowning. There was a guy who stayed in the house behind her, only peeking out a couple times. He looked to be wearing a red sweater vest with green trees on it.
When the kids finally let Jasper go he shuffled back toward the car, wide shoulders slumped. The guy’s frame made Mickey think he’d probably played some ball in high school, maybe fullback or linebacker. But his paunch made Mickey think the guy had been watching football from the couch ever since. He opened the door and Jasper climbed in without looking at him. The MILF had taken the kids back into the house already.
Mickey got behind the wheel and asked, “Back to the airport, sir?” and Jasper nodded without saying anything. He was small in the largely useless rearview mirror, sunken into the seat despite his size. Mickey headed for the highway, and after a block the guy started to cry.
It was freaking awful. Broad shoulders hunched, face in big, meaty hands, honking like a duck. Mickey’s heart started hammering. He wanted to turn up the radio but it was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and that would have seemed jolly to the point of suicide. He wanted a cigarette, though it had been two weeks. Dry run for New Year’s. He wanted to pull over and run for it, leaving the door open and the motor running. He wanted to drive toward a cliff and barrel-roll out of the moving car; he was that embarrassed for the guy. People had vomited and pissed themselves back there before at 3 AM on a Sunday morning, and this was infinitely, infinitely worse.
Mickey could have hit the highway and put the hammer down, maybe opened his window and lost the noise in the slipstream. Get to the airport with all due haste and let Jasper Czarnewzki sob his way through security, probably earning himself a full body cavity search. Dump the fare, call it a day, and go home. This wasn’t even supposed to be Mickey’s shift. It should have been Hollings behind the wheel with his eyes wide open and his palms sweating. But it was Mickey. He pulled over in a shopping center parking lot short of the highway and put it in park. He sat behind the wheel, staring out the windshield for five minutes until the guy got a hold of himself.
“Sorry,” came from way far away in the back seat. Mickey looked in the rearview, seeing a distant, pink face, splotchy and jowly. Objects in the mirror may be closer than they appear.
“You positive you don’t want to open that bar up back there?” he asked. “It’s on the house.”
The guy shook his head. “No, I forgot to eat this morning.”
Mickey nodded, and popped the car into drive.
“Okay, then. Lunch it is.”
Even the fast food joints were closed. The driver went to a gas station and bought a couple sub sandwiches wrapped in plastic, then parked under a tree at the edge of the lot. He got in the back and produced a couple bottled waters out of the short fridge. Jasper talked some while they ate. The kid was quiet, but he nodded at the right times.
“You got any kids?” Jasper asked after a while, and Mickey gave a little smile. He’d finally taken the sunglasses off. His eyes were green, and set in a sort of permanent squint Jasper supposed went with living in a desert.
“What’s the old joke? None that I know about,” Mickey said.
Jasper snorted. “Geeze, that joke was old when I was your age.”
“The classics never go out of style.” Mickey frowned. “That’s probably a cliché, too.”
Jasper chuckled. He felt a little better with the food, or at least something approaching food, in his stomach. There was no ring on Mickey’s finger, so he didn’t ask about a wife.
“Do you want to have kids, someday?” Jasper asked. He wasn’t sure why he asked, and couldn’t remember if he had ever really asked himself. It had just seemed like the thing to do at the time.
Mickey shrugged, half his sub still sitting on a console, swishing around the water in the bottle.
“Haven’t thought much about it.”
“You should,” Jasper said. “Have kids, I mean.”
Mickey raised an eyebrow. “Really?” he said, looking both perplexed and slightly amused, and Jasper chuckled at himself.
“I know, that wasn’t exactly domestic bliss half an hour ago. I’m not a billboard for the joys of fatherhood. But seriously. This, this all hurts now. But it’s still worth it. Just seeing them every couple of months, even for half an hour. It’s still worth it. It’s worth everything.”
They sat in the back of the stretch for another half hour, still talking but just a little. Jasper’s return flight was at five-thirty, and Mickey got him back to the airport around four. Jasper tried to tip him, pretty much all the cash he had on him, but the kid wouldn’t take it. He just told him Merry Christmas.
Mickey returned the car to the garage, where of course nobody was on today, so he did the sign-in and what not himself, cleaned out the sandwich wrappers and gave the floor a quick vacuum. He drove his Dodge back home out to Chandler and parked on the street, as the driveway of his own modest house was full of cars with license plates from this state and two others.
The kids rushed him from the back before he was halfway up the driveway, running around in the seventy degree temps of Christmas Day, brandishing new toys Mickey had been here to see them unwrap this morning before he got called in. He picked his own, Mickey Junior, out from among the cousins and gave him a big hug that made the five-year-old squirm and squeal. Mickey put the chauffeur hat on MJ’s head and the pack of them raced back into the house as Steph came outside. Mickey stayed on one knee looking after the kids. She sashayed over, smiling, and he grinned up at her.
“You know, you’re kind of a MILF,” Mickey said, and Steph widened her big brown eyes.
/> “Geeze, Mick, on Christmas even? You’re gonna burn in hell for that kind of talk.”
She held out a hand, pinching the circle of his wedding ring between one thumb and finger. He stood up and held out a finger. She raised a brown eyebrow but slid it back where it belonged.
“Left it on top of my book, didn’t I?”
“Yup. You trying to pick up chicks behind my back?”
“Never, ever, ever.” He kissed her, softly, and squeezed her hand. She gave him a look, and a smile. He put his arm around her shoulder as they headed up the drive.
“What’s with you?” she asked. “The guy tip really good or something?”
“Not money, just advice.”
“What? Cheap ass bastard. Was it good advice?”
Mickey’s mouth took a contemplative turn. At the door, he could smell ham and turkey both wafting from the kitchen. His and Steph’s Moms were both intent on putting somebody in the family into a food coma this year.
“Wasn’t really about me taking the advice, it was more about the guy saying it out loud. You know, the limo biz. It’s about the passenger, not the driver.”
Steph turned to him on the stoop and rolled her eyes.
“You’re too nice, Mick. The guy gypped you. Jerk.”
“Oh, he was all right.”
The pack of cousins went tearing through the front hall from one room to another, MJ with Mickey’s hat sliding down over his eyes. Steph started to tell them to be careful, but they were gone too fast and she sighed. Mick squeezed her hand again, told her that he loved her, and shut the front door. The cardboard cut-out of a smiling cactus with a Santa hat rocked on the door.
* * *
M. Edward McNally lives in Phoenix, but hails from somewhere much, much colder. He is the author of a Musket & Magic fantasy series beginning with The Sable City, and a number of contemporary short story collections. Info/links on all may be found at https://sablecity.wordpress.com/
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