The garage door rattled and sputtered to life, shaking the cheap, thin walls like saplings in an early spring squall. Old Christmas decorations quivered on the shelves as the door locked into place overhead.
“Miracle of miracles,” Crissy said. Nothing in the place worked anymore, and she hadn’t expected the garage door to be any different. Especially not after the winter they’d had.
She kicked an old gas can out of the way and skirted around a stack of boxes, angling toward the front of the garage and the short, crumbling driveway. Paul had said he’d finish unpacking in the new year, once he found work again.
Paul had said lots of things.
Crissy shook her head in disgust, remembering all the broken promises, and pushed past a rusty metal cabinet that stood in the middle of the floor, junk piled all around. She felt the air change above her and ducked just in time to avoid a big plastic Santa that tumbled out of the darkness and crashed to the concrete in front of her.
“Santa,” she said, and rolled her eyes. Just another broken dream.
She thought of Paul again, and the last time she’d seen him.
“Trust me,” he’d said. “I have something really special planned. The kids are gonna love it!”
It had been just after five on Christmas Eve when he’d walked out the front door. Kelly and Chad were in the kitchen stringing popcorn into a makeshift garland.
“When will you be back?” she asked.
“Just get the kids ready for bed.” He kissed her. “This will be great. Trust me.”
And with that, he stepped out into the steely evening. The last thing she saw was the hole in one sole of his worn Docker work boots.
An hour later, the winter storm dumped two feet of snow across northern Indiana, and Crissy hadn’t seen the ground since then.
She hadn’t seen Paul, either.
Santa didn’t come, and the kids woke up to empty stockings and nothing underneath the ancient artificial tree that was missing more than half its branches.
A week later, they were back at school, walking two blocks each way to and from the bus stop each day.
Paul had been going to buy a car once he found work, too.
Crissy was grateful the Drug-n-Bun had been a block the other way, and that they took food stamps, or they might have starved. But the kids were sick of beans and wieners. And generic mac ‘n’ cheese.
The garage apron was slick as snot when Crissy took her first step outside, and she stopped to catch her balance.
All around her, water ticked — in the gutters, on the ground as it fell from the trees, against the hard plastic Christmas decorations as it splattered off the remaining snowbanks.
Crissy pursed her lips and shook her head.
Christmas decorations.
“Christmas decorations, Mrs. Stott,” Floyd Mason had barked into the phone that morning.
“It’s Sanders. Crissy Sanders,” she told him. She’d told him before. She and Paul weren’t married.
“You’ve got to take down the Christmas decorations,” Mason had said, ignoring her correction. “A prospective buyer is coming to look at the place this afternoon, and you can’t have those decorations out there. It’s March, for Christ’s sake!”
They were being evicted, and on top of it all, the loudmouth landlord wanted her to take down the Christmas decorations. Paul was supposed to do that, too.
Crissy grumbled under her breath as she trudged through the icy snow. She stopped at the waist-high candle whose flame was missing. She pried it loose, unplugged it from the ratty extension cord, and tossed it toward the garage.
Next up was the yellowed snowman with a gaping hole in its belly where some long-ago rock or snowball had crashed through the brittle plastic. Crissy had to lean into this one to break it loose, and when it came free, she saw that some varmint or other had chewed through the cord.
She tossed the knockoff Frosty toward the garage and turned her attention to the main attraction.
There in the center of the front yard, arranged just so under the big maple, was Santa’s sleigh, big enough for a lifesize replica of the fat man himself to perch on top.
Crissy sighed and tugged at the front end of the sleight, but it hardly budged. Either it was heavier than she remembered, or she needed to clear off more snow before she tried to move it.
Even though the maple had shielded Santa from the brunt of the winter storms, there had been enough sideways drifting to pretty much cover the thing, and the branches shielded it from the afternoon sun on that first day when temperatures finally climbed above freezing.
Crissy sighed again and focused on the sleigh rider and his bag of toys. Maybe if she cleared the snow off Santa first, she could move him off and then break the sleigh free.
She took a swipe across the back end of the snow-encrusted figure with her sleeved arm, then stopped to shake her hands, massage her fingers. The cold was biting, and she didn’t have any gloves.
After a minute or so, she leaned in to knock off more snow but stopped and gasped.
Realization hit her like an avalanche, and she shot a glance back into the garage. She could just make out Santa’s plastic arm stretched across the cluttered garage floor, catching a patch of sunlight.
That was the Santa who was supposed to be riding this sleigh.
Crissy’s stomach roiled as she kicked and clawed at the snow in front of her, revealing first her green blanket, corners folded up to form a bag, packages spilling out.
And then, at the front of the sleigh, a worn yellow Docker work boot with a hole in the sole.