The Christmas Promise (Christmas Hope) Read online

  “Mr. Wilson told me to come in this morning to fill out paperwork for a job.”

  “The office is just up the stairs behind the purses.” The stack of sweaters tumbled to the floor but Chaz ignored them, walking past the salesgirl toward the small flight of stairs. The store was old: As he looked at the elevators, his guess was it dated back to the early 1950s, but they’d done a lot of remodeling over the years. The floor on the main aisle was made of bright white tiles. The cosmetics and jewelry counters faced each other on the main aisle, and oversized lit Christmas stars and bulbs dangled from the ceiling above each counter. The men’s and women’s departments were on either side of the main aisle, with carpeting in shades of burgundy and green. Beyond the cosmetics counter were shoes and ladies’ handbags, and the stairs leading to the office.

  Chaz took the stairs by two and found the small office. A woman wearing a red sweater covered with green and silver beaded ornaments was on the phone. She had a small sign on her desk that read JUDY LUITWEILER. “I’m sorry,” she said when she hung up the receiver. “My daughter’s having a baby any day now and I keep calling her. Anxious grandma, you know!” She spun her hands in the air and Chaz tried to smile but was too wet to care.

  “I’m supposed to start work today. They told me to come up here for the paperwork.”

  “Sure. Sure,” Judy said, opening a metal file drawer behind her desk. “What’s your name?”

  “Chaz McConnell.”

  She rifled through the files like a squirrel after a nut. “And which department will you be in?”

  “Security.”

  “Sure. Sure,” she said, pulling a manila folder from the cabinet. “Do you have any children?” she asked, sorting the papers. “We love children around here.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Morning, Chaz.” Marshall Wilson stepped down from the office behind Judy’s, wearing jeans and a denim shirt. “How are you, son?” No one had called Chaz son in years and the word sounded odd to him.

  “Fine. How are you?”

  “Better than I deserve to be at my age, I’m certain of that,” Marshall said. “Did you get settled into a place?” Chaz nodded. “We’re ramping up for a busy Christmas season, so we’re glad you’re here.”

  “You must be Chaz.” Chaz turned to see a black man dressed in dark pants and a gray shirt with a badge attached to the left side of his chest pushing his way into the cramped office. The man stretched out his hand and Chaz wiped his off on his jeans before shaking. “I’m Ray Burroughs. I’ll be training you.” Chaz summed him up: He was about his size, maybe a little heavier, but he knew he was going to look as dorky as Ray did in that uniform. “Come on down to the office. You can fill out the papers there and get something dry to put on.”

  Chaz followed as Ray ran down two flights of stairs to the break room. He pointed to the time clock on the wall. “Clock in here when your shift starts.” He took the card with Chaz’s name on it and handed it to him so he could punch in, then led him down the hall. He glanced down at Chaz’s soggy shoes. “Did you walk here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t you have a car?”

  “I did. It was stolen a couple of months ago.” The truth was, Chaz had owed some small gambling debts to a guy a few towns ago and the man had taken the car as payment. Chaz didn’t care; he thought it was a piece of junk anyway.

  “Are you going to walk to work every day?” Ray asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you’d better invest in an umbrella.” The top of the office door was etched glass. The word SECURITY was written in black block letters in the middle of the window. They stepped inside. The walls were brick, but someone had painted them off-white. Four video monitors sat on the large desk in the center of the room with images from select departments in the store. Ray pointed to a black vinyl sofa against the wall. “You can sit there if you want, or here at the desk. It doesn’t matter.” Chaz looked at the desk covered with papers, files, and cups of old coffee, and opted for the couch. Ray sat on the wooden swivel chair at the desk and leaned back. The thick spring whined beneath him. “So, word is that Mr. Wilson hired you away from another store?”

  “That’s right,” Chaz said, filling out the first line.

  “How long did you work security there?”

  “I didn’t,” Chaz said. “I stocked shelves.”

  “Then how’d you get hired for security?”

  Chaz had been living in a town an hour away when he met Marshall Wilson. For the first time in his life he was working in a retail store rather than in a restaurant as a waiter or cook. Chaz was stacking men’s jeans in cubbies that stretched to the ceiling when Marshall needed assistance, but Chaz wasn’t paying attention—his eye was on a young woman pushing a baby stroller. The baby was asleep and the woman was discreet as she first put a pair of pants and then a sweater into the bottom of the stroller, covering the items with the baby’s blanket and diaper bag. “You forgot a belt to go with that outfit,” Chaz whispered as he moved past her toward his cart filled with denim. Her back stiffened as she flung the goods onto the clothing table in front of her and fled the store. The baby never wakened. Chaz laughed as he watched her and climbed back onto the ladder to replenish the top row of jeans.

  “You handled that well,” Marshall said.

  “Thanks,” Chaz said without looking down.

  “Would you be interested in changing jobs?”

  Chaz stacked four pair of jeans into the top cubby. “Nope.”

  “I need another security guard at the store. I’m sure it pays better than what you make here.”

  Chaz looked down and saw an elderly man with white hair wearing jeans and a red plaid flannel shirt. Probably owns a hardware store, Chaz thought. “I’m listening,” he said, shoving the pair of jeans he had wedged under his arm on top of the stack.

  A full-time job sounded good to Chaz at that point. There’s a great cure for being broke, his mother used to say. Go to work. He didn’t like to stay in one place too long and was ready for a change. Chaz was always ready for a change. With every move he’d think, Okay, this time I’ll do better. I’ll be better. I’ll change. But he never did. He couldn’t. But this time he really thought he could make it stick, so he packed his bags.

  “What kind of guy is Mr. Wilson?” Chaz asked.

  Ray took a sip of coffee from one of the cups on the desk and grimaced: obviously not the one he was looking for. “He may not look the part of a department store owner, but he knows what he’s doing. Not a lot of gray area with him. He’s to the point. He won’t stand over you and watch you work. The way I see it, he figures you got a job to do, so do it. If you don’t do it, then there are other people who will.”

  “So he stays out of your business?”

  Ray swallowed something out of another cup and shook his head in disgust. “Unless you’re doing something that makes him get up in your business.” He put his feet on the floor and leaned toward him. “You married?”

  “No,” Chaz said.

  “Got a girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Chaz stopped and looked up at him. Ray raised his hands. “Just asking. You’re a good-looking guy. Keep yourself in shape. No love handles. Just seems like you’d be married or have a girlfriend.”

  “I do okay,” Chaz said, writing his Social Security number.

  “I did okay, too, until I got married. Now I do what she says.” Ray broke out laughing and leaned forward, shoving a picture in Chaz’s face. “These are my kids: Alexandra’s four and Joseph is two.”

  “Cute,” Chaz said, glancing up.

  “Cute nothing. They’re downright gorgeous. Look again.”

  “Yeah. Really cute.”

  Ray shook his head and put the picture back among the mess on the desk. “Man, you don’t know anything about etiquette.” Chaz looked up at him. “You’re supposed to flatter somebody when you talk about their kids. Be sure to remember that when Mrs.
Grobinski comes into the store with her ugly twins.” He pounded the desk, laughing at himself. He watched as Chaz filled in the blank lines on the form. “I only work thirty hours a week because I go to school for computer programming. You in school?”

  “No,” Chaz said. Ray leaned forward and Chaz knew there would be a fresh onslaught of questions. “What do you do all day as a security guard?” he asked, distracting Ray.

  Ray leaned back in the chair and folded his hands on top of his chest. “The biggest part of this job is being a courtesy officer,” he said. Mr. Marshall told Chaz he needed a security guard, not a courtesy officer. What sort of wimp job was that? It sounded like it should come with an atomizer and a napkin folded over his arm. “You want to walk through the departments and make sure the employees are all right, ask them if anything’s wrong that you need to know about. Every now and then they’ll signal to you to keep your eye on somebody who might look fishy. It’s your job to walk through the department so that person sees you and the badge and uniform.”

  “But you don’t carry a gun?”

  “We’re not cops,” Ray said. “We can’t arrest anybody. Remember that if you see somebody stealing something and you call them on it. If they pull a knife or gun, just back up and say, ‘Let me get the door for you.’ Our job is to prevent theft, not get in fisticuffs with thieves.”

  Chaz watched as Ray pointed out the video monitors. “One of us is usually back here on the monitors and that person will radio the guy on the floor and tell him about suspicious behavior.”

  “What if you catch somebody?” Chaz said.

  “You write them up and leave it up to management if they want to call the police and press charges. A huge part of the job, especially now at Christmas, is to carry customers’ bags to their cars.” Chaz looked up at Ray. “I know. You had envisioned guns and glory and you get bags of towels instead.” Chaz went back to the paperwork. “We also help parents find their lost toddlers, help the elderly in and out of their cars, help people find their keys they lost somewhere in the store, and we fix a lot of flat tires.”

  “Is that it?”

  “We make sure that nobody hurts Santa or destroys his workshop.”

  Chaz stopped writing. “We’re security guards for Santa?”

  Ray smiled and nodded. “He shows up every morning from nine till noon and each evening from five till eight. Some kids will beat the crap out of the big lollipops and candy canes, and a few of them get pretty rough with the big man.” Ray took a breath. “And! We answer a lot of questions like, ‘What do you think of this dress?’ ‘If you were my husband would you like these pants?’ or ‘Do you think these shoes are cute?’ But no matter what you think, always be courteous. Our job is to treat the customer with respect and be as helpful as we can. This time of year we rack up lots of overtime and can make some decent money.” The money part caught Chaz’s attention. He knew that if he could just make enough to move on to something better, he’d be happy. “Think you can handle it?”

  “Sure,” Chaz said, with as much enthusiasm as he could rally.

  Ray pulled open a drawer and ripped into a small bag of chips. “Are you from here?”

  Chaz shook his head.

  “Where’re you from?”

  “I’ve moved around a lot.”

  “Army brat?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you originally from?” Ray asked. “Where do your parents live?”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “I’m sorry, man. You got brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  “No wonder you move around a lot.” Ray handed Chaz a uniform. “Maybe you’ll find something to keep you here for a while.”

  Chaz forced a smile but knew he wouldn’t stay here, either.

  Early that evening Chaz unloaded a bag of groceries onto the kitchen counter and pulled out a case of beer, opening one can. He’d taken his first drink when he was fourteen at a neighbor’s house down the street. He drank what he could get away with in high school but that wasn’t much; his mother had been a watch-dog. She told him he was bent for self-destruction but he ignored her; he got to the point where he ignored everything she said. Once he was out of the house it was easier to party and he eventually found himself thinking about when, where, and how he’d get his next drink. He once worked with a guy who told him he drank too much and Chaz had told him to go to hell. He drank cheap beer, no hard liquor, and a few beers made him feel ten feet tall inside and helped him forget what he’d done. Something had to make him feel good about what he’d become. He looked at the stark walls and sank into the cushions on the futon. His father once said that we all have wild horses deep inside us. As a child, Chaz was unsure of what he meant, but over the years those horses had driven him to do things he never imagined.

  When he was a boy in third grade Chaz sat with his class and watched a film about researchers sifting through the debris of Mount Saint Helens. When the volcano erupted in 1980, the lava actually melted away the soil. Naturalists wondered how long it would take before anything would ever grow there again. Then one day a park employee stumbled across a patch of grass, ferns, and wildflowers in the shape of an elk. “They were growing right out of a dead animal,” Chaz had told his parents. “Isn’t that gross?”

  “I think it’s amazing,” his father had said. “Shows that life always makes a way.” Chaz held firm that what happened on Mount Saint Helens was eerie and disgusting, but his parents rarely ever saw the repulsive side of something: It seemed they were always looking for signs of life, and that annoyed him to no end.

  Days later, Chaz found himself still talking about the flowers. “God’s in the smallest detail,” his mother had said as he helped her decorate the tree. “We see something as the end but He sees it as the beginning.”

  “Beginning of what?” Chaz had asked.

  “New life,” his mother had said, stretching to hang a bulb at the top of the tree. “God’s in that market, you know, but a lot of times we forget that.”

  “Why do we forget?”

  She wrapped a strand of gold garland around the top of the tree. “Oh, I don’t know. Blurry vision, I guess. It’s easy to lose our vision when we get bogged down in everyday stuff. We just get in a rush and without really knowing it we leave God behind.”

  “Then why doesn’t He get closer?”

  “We’re the ones who move,” she had said. “God never moves.” She leaned over and bent her head close to his ear. “Don’t forget that.”

  “I won’t forget,” he had said.

  But he did. Chaz pushed aside the memories and meaning of Christmas until there wasn’t anything left but him and he found himself dreading the season that his parents had loved. “It’s just a bunch of people pretending,” he would say. Who knows when he made the leap from innocence to disbelief, but it had happened.

  Perhaps if his parents had been with him he wouldn’t have lost his way, but without them he had no compass. He convinced himself that peace on earth and joy to the world existed only in sappy songs, not in the real world. In the real world there was rape and murder, disease, and child hunger. Not even Christmas, with its promises of goodwill to all, could fix its multitude of problems.

  He took a long drink. Outside the door he heard a couple with a small child maneuvering a Christmas tree through the breezeway. “Wait, wait, wait,” the woman shouted. “I can’t go that fast!”

  The man bellowed a laugh and the child giggled. “What are you doing back there?” the man said.

  “I swear something just fell out of the tree and crawled on me,” the woman shrieked. More laughter from the happy family. Chaz turned on the TV to drown them out. Why had he come to this town? Now it seemed like a stupid idea. He was better off working job to job instead of committing to something long-term, especially this close to Christmas, which was a day he endured at best. The couple shoved the tree through their front door to more peals of laughter. He opened another beer and s
tared at the TV screen. This town was no better than the last, and nothing could make him stay. Unlike his parents, he could never see the rays of hope or sprigs of life clinging to devastation. At least that’s what he thought.

  Two

  From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however, makes a life.

  —Arthur Ashe

  I ran down the stairs pulling a red sweatshirt with a Christmas tree on it over my head. “Hold on! I’m coming!” The phone rang again. I always tried to answer by the third ring before it went to voice mail. “Get out of the way, Whiskers.” The cat jumped from his spot on the bottom step and ran in front of me to the kitchen.

  “Miss Glory, they shut off my electricity.” It was Carla Sanchez.

  “Why’d they do that?” I asked, catching my breath.

  “I was late paying….”

  “How late?”

  “Just a few days,” Carla said.

  “They don’t shut off your electricity if you’re just a few days late. How late?”

  “Almost three months. But I got a job now. I’m down at Wilson’s just like you said. They still had the sign in the window when I went down and they hired me just like that.”

  “How’s Donovan?” I asked.

  “He’s good.”

  “What’d he eat for breakfast?” There was silence on the other end. “What’s he going to eat for lunch?” More silence followed. “Let me see what I can do.” I hung up the phone before dialing the number for the church I attended. “Linda, it’s Gloria. Can I talk with Rod?” I joined the church six years ago, shortly after moving to town to be closer to my oldest daughter, who’d had a baby. The church was always the first to help when I needed something for my work, but I was careful not to take advantage of their good graces. I listened to Christmas music until Rod picked up his line. “How are you, Rod?”

  “Great,” he said. “What’s happening, Gloria?”

  Rod was always willing to listen. “I have a single mom who needs help,” I said. I explained Carla’s circumstances and waited.