“What took you so long in there, Lacy?” asks Hub frantically, and it’s so boring to hear my name pronounced right that I almost – almost – prefer Rocco’s version.
“It’s a long story,” I sigh, knowing the truth – I mean, the real, unvarnished, living dead truth – would below little Hub’s mind. “Listen, where’s your stupid insulated lunch bag, and don’t tell me you left it at home because I know you brought it.”
Hub blushes beneath his adorable little elf cap and reaches into a cabinet behind Santa’s “throne” where we store the extra candy canes and gallon jugs of hand sanitizer.
When he emerges, he has his Darth Vader lunch cooler in both hands, like he’s presenting me with some kind of award.
I take it brusquely and yank out his liverwurst sandwich – he eats one EVERY day – and replace it with my two delicate boxes of brains on ice.
“Hey!” he says. “My sandwich will spoil.”
I zip the lunch sack, shove the sandwich on top and put it back in the cabinet myself, for safekeeping.
There’s nothing I want to do more than dig into my pound of brains this very second, in public, with my bare hands, for the whole wide world to see, but Santa will be here any minute, kids are already lined up around the block and there are way, way too many witnesses.
“Please,” I snap. “Do you know how many preservatives are in that crap? You could leave it out on the sidewalk, for weeks, and it would still be fine for Christmas dinner!”
“Maybe,” he kind of whines, “but I happen to like it cold. Which is why I bring an insulated lunch bag in the first place. What’s so special you have to keep it on ice all shift anyway?”
I want to snap, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”, but that would only make him jealous and all kinds of curious and, somewhere along the way, with my hands full of third graders squealing for Santa and my back to him, Hub would find time to sneak in there and find it, maybe even taste it – and then the jig would be up.
So instead I say, “Dad’s Christmas present.”
That shuts him up, just like I knew it would.
“Oh,” he says. “Cool.”
Hub is one of those “closet cops,” a real CSI freak who (probably) has every episode Tivo’d and who (probably) sleeps in pajamas that look like a lab coat, if not a real, live, actual lab coat itself. The minute he found out my dad was a crime scene photographer, he had an instant “man crush.”
I smile, because, well… Hub is Hub; and he usually makes me feel better, no matter what.
The thing about Hub is he’s actually really cute, he’s just so, I dunno… boring, maybe?
Or maybe not boring, exactly… just really, really single-minded.
Like, in a really, really boring way.
And I really, really don’t mean that in a bad way.
He IS the sweetest guy ever.
I mean, who else would jump the second some chick in a Santa’s Helper costume barks and give up his lunch bag for a brain two-for, right?
And he’s always asking me if I want a soda when he grabs himself one for break, and never fails to walk me out to my car at the end of another long night shift, while never speaking ill of my boyfriend (unlike some certain gourmet meat shop vendors, I might add) for failing to do the same.
But, when he starts talking about Star Trek or Lost or some new video game or YouTube video with fuzzy cats, I just… it’s hard to stay very interested.
(Or, at least, half as interested as he seems to be.)
My boyfriend Grady and I don’t talk about much, but when we do it’s about something pertinent to our lives, like some teacher we’re hating on, some runner who really inspires him, a song that kind of means something special to us… that kind of thing.
But Hub, I dunno.
I mean, I’ve never heard him talk about anything other than a movie, a video game or a book, typically in that order.
Still, he does look pretty cute in those—
“Hi Santa!” I ooze suddenly, knowing that children are watching as the big man himself walks out of the food court entrance and into his own personal “Winter Wonderland.”
Of course, Santa can’t hear me because he’s being mobbed by kids, who are kept at bay by a security detail consisting of the manager from KB Toys, a fry cook from the Asian Panda booth and my boss, Mr. Dickens (yes, actually, his name really IS “Mr. Dickens”; the jokes just write themselves, folks) who leads the way with a polite but firm, “Wait your turn, children! We don’t want to end up on the ‘naughty’ list at the last minute now, do we?”
Yes, Mr. Dickens IS the kind of guy who says “we” when talking to little children.
(To say nothing of using the words “naughty” and “list” in the same sentence.)
He’s also the kind of guy who has a comb-over, those sleek rectangular glasses across his thin, beak-ish nose, a big red Christmas sweater (!) with kittens (!!) and the inevitable grownup male fashion choice of pleated khaki slacks, brown dress socks and broken-in topsiders.
With Hub right behind me, I race to open the rickety (plastic) white picket fence that surrounds Santa’s Winter Wonderland so he can make a grand entrance.
I whisk Santa in while Hub plays defense, deftly (I guess he IS good with kids) stopping the first twenty or so kids from rushing through the gate with a handful of miniature candy canes, the ultimate in kid bribes this time of year.
While I get Santa (i.e. Mr. Waverly who doubles as the stereo store manager) into his throne, Hub makes sure the kids start walking through single file.