I did not go to church on Tuesday. I put on the red suit, the real one, with the wide black belt and the bell that Ingrid sewed on the hat, and I drove my old Buick to the house of Eric in Cedar Falls at four in the afternoon, when I knew he would be at the dealership and Courtney would be out. The house was a big gray thing with a three car garage. I parked at the curb. Then I sat in the car a long time, with my gloves in my lap, because I had never in my life been afraid of my own son, and I was now.
Owen opened the door. He looked up at the red suit, and his whole face lit, and then, because he is seven and not a fool, he lowered his voice. “Santa,” he said, “how did you find our house?” “Santas know,” I said. “Is your mother home?” “She went to get Ava from dance. The babysitter is in the basement with headphones.” He took my glove in his little hand. “I know where Daddy keeps the letters,” he whispered. “I looked once. I did not touch them. I only looked.” He led me down the hallway, past the school photographs, to a dark office with a leather chair.
The key was taped under the lamp. Owen showed me with one finger, as if pointing out the scene of a crime. I opened the center drawer. There they were, tied with a blue rubber band, four envelopes from my stock company and a fifth from a bank, all addressed to me in the careful type of the mailing house. Beneath them lay a printed form, Change of Address, with my name and a signature that was not mine. And beneath that, folded in thirds, a certificate that said, in the formal words of the county, that Harold Gustafson had passed away on the fifth of September.
A Santa suit and a seven year old boy gave one grandfather the length of a single Tuesday to bring his son back to the truth in Waterloo.
I sat down in the leather chair of my son, in the red suit, with the drawer open, and I gave my terms to my grandson, because he was the only one in the house who was awake. I told Owen that when his father came home, I would be at the kitchen table, and that he should go upstairs and play with Ava and not come down until I called him. I told him he had done nothing wrong. He nodded the way a small soldier nods. Then he asked if Santa wanted a cookie. I said Santa would love one.
Eric came home at six, in the BMW, humming. He found his father in a Santa suit at his kitchen table, with five letters and a forged certificate laid out on the placemats and a plate of oatmeal cookies. He did not run. He took off his coat and sat down opposite me. “Dad,” he said, “I can explain.” “Please,” I said. He explained. A bad run at a casino in Waterloo, then a worse one online, then a loan on the car, and a loan on the loan. Two hundred sixty thousand dollars. “I thought you would never miss it,” he said. “You live so small.” I said I had lived small on purpose.
When I picked up the telephone to call the lawyer, Eric came out of his chair like a man shot from a cannon. He snatched the letters and the certificate off the table, meaning to run down the hall and feed them to the shredder in his office, and he took three long steps toward the doorway with his arms full of paper. In that doorway, in pajamas with reindeer on them, stood Owen. He had not stayed upstairs. He had a cookie in his hand and an expression on his face I had never seen on a child.
“Daddy,” Owen said. “Santa said stop.” Eric stood in the doorway with his arms full of paper and his seven year old son blocking his path, holding one cookie, looking up at him with the big serious eyes of Ingrid. I saw something go through my boy that I had been waiting forty years to see. It was shame, and under the shame, something older. Eric slowly sank to his knees on the kitchen floor, in front of his son. The papers fell around him like snow. “I am sorry, buddy,” he said, in a voice I did not know. “I am so sorry.”
I did not call the police. My lawyer, a patient man named Dorsey, said there were things the law could do, and things it could not. Eric signed a confession of the forgery, to be kept in the safe. He agreed to enter a program for gamblers, and he went, every Thursday, for the rest of that year and the next. The company that manages my stock canceled the false change of address and added a password that only Owen and I know. Courtney, who had known more than she said, took the children to her mother for a month, and then she came back. She asked to be forgiven. I said I had a standing order.
In the name of Ingrid, my wife, who passed in 2014, I started the Ingrid Gustafson Fund. It pays for toys, winter coats and Christmas dinners for families in Black Hawk, Bremer and Buchanan counties. In the first year we filled six hundred forty stockings and fitted two hundred eleven children with coats at the mall where I sit. One little girl in a threadbare jacket asked me for a doll named Ingrid. I did not tell her it was the name of my wife. I only said Santa knew a doll who had been waiting for her.
I am still the Santa at the Crossroads Mall, at fourteen dollars an hour, and the beard is still real. This year the line is longer, and the first child in it, on the first Saturday of December, is a seven year old boy in a school sweater, walking up holding the hand of his mother. His father waits at the back by the pretzel stand, in a plain coat, with a cup of coffee, and he does not touch his phone. When Owen climbs onto my lap, he whispers the same wish as last year. Then he adds, “It came true, Santa.”