“That’s all?” asked Natalie, which made Rebecca wish she’d made up something juicier.
“I don’t get tingles very often. Bad circulation, I think,” she answered, rubbing her feet.
Natalie’s gaze turned wistful. “I had one of those. Once.”
“What happened to yours?”
“He got incarcerated, ten years for grand theft auto. I consider myself lucky to have escaped. Think of it, instead of planning a Disney cruise for the little guy, I could be scheduling my conjugal visits.”
“Think he’s turned around?”
Natalie shook her head. “Ha. And Santa’s going to drop down my chimney.”
“Bite your tongue lest the reindeers and elves hear you and start offing themselves because you’ve dashed their Kris Kringley version of reality.”
“You think this Cory person got incarcerated?”
Rebecca thought for a minute. “Odds are good. He wasn’t at school long. Half a semester at the most. They said he had lots of problems. Foster kid. No parents. Hair too long, and eyes that revealed a level of experience far removed from the restrictive bonds of traditional adolescent behaviors. Every female has one of those boys in her closet.”
Natalie wiggled her brows. “Would you have slept with him if those experienced eyes wandered in your direction?”
“No. I had plans, goals, aspirations. I still do.”
“Would have been fun.”
“So is jumping out of airplanes. Don’t want to do that, either.”
“And now?” asked Natalie. “What would you do today?”
Rebecca allowed a moment of introspection, savoring the idea. As a rule, she stuck to predictable men, and with the clock ticking, she couldn’t afford to waste her prime-matrimonial years. But the single second in time had lodged in her brain, chiseled there for over a decade. Sometimes, late at night, when she was lying in bed alone…
Whoops. Rebecca shook her head, her blond page boy shaking artfully. “The fantasy is better. Besides, my tastes were never a black leather jacket. My standards are higher.”
“Alec Trevayne high?”
Alec Trevayne. Now there was a man who rated A+++++ on her scale. She’d never met him in person, only drooled from afar when he pulled up in a bright red Bentley and dropped off Natalie’s husband at a party two months ago. Rebecca lifted her hands innocently. “I can’t help it if I’m seduced by such shallow things as a dimple, golden hair and abs made of steel.”
“You said that about Jeremy Smithson when I set you up with him. Three dates and you dumped him.”
“Snooze alarm, Nat.”
Natalie got up and began to shuffle slowly around the room. Rebecca knew she’d be losing her partner in crime soon. Childbirth could do that to a woman, and Natalie was due in six weeks.
“You’re too picky, Rebecca.”
“You didn’t settle. Why should I?”
Natalie leaned against the Wall of Presidents, a contented smile on her face. “No, I didn’t.”
“Thank you for the vindication. I’m waiting for true love, too.”
“Is that what you’re putting in your Dear Santa letter?”
The Dear Santa letter was Rebecca’s annual Christmas tradition with her class. She believed in Santa as strongly as the kids. So the kids wrote their letters—wish lists, really—and then Rebecca took charge of mailing them off.
This year Rebecca’s letter to Santa contained three wishes: a new, less volatile father for Pepper Buckley, a reading breakthrough for shy Isaac Gudinov and a fiancé for herself. “I also want you to know that I answered thirty-seven Dear Santa letters, all presents paid for out of my own pocket.” Part of the Dear Santa program organized at theThirty-third Streetpost office was the ability to write reply letters and send presents to kids, particularly to less fortunate ones.
Natalie shook her head, rubbing her alarmingly distended belly. “It’s an inhumane heart that tries to bribe Santa Claus.”
“Just want to make sure I’m making it onto the right list,” she answered. However, Rebecca privately admitted that somewhere in the last few years, what had been a holly-berry outlook on the Christmas season, had become something of a routine. A desperate tradition that she kept up with, only because she couldn’t bear to let it go.
Just then, the hallway filled with the sound of DG sneakers, UGG boots and Roberto Cavalli hightops, signaling the end of her break. Rebecca slipped on her shoes and rose to her feet, a weary smile on her face.
No matter how much she complained and worried, and griped and moaned, Rebecca loved her job. There were some days, some rare days, when the kids would get it, would actually learn, and she, Rebecca Neumann, Girl Most Likely To Become A Trophy Wife, was responsible. Those elusive happenstances made all the “thou shalt have no sugar,” nor any fun lectures from Cruzella worthwhile.