Free Santa Steps Out: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups by Robert Devereaux

wisdom of moving into her parents' house on K Street, but they'd been looking for an old house anyway and Rachel's girlhood had been a time of magic, rich memories woven into every room. Rachel hadn't regretted the move for a moment, and Frank and Wendy quickly fell in love with the place.
    Now she and her daughter would be alone there. Her husband of seven years—that rarest of all breeds, a truly compassionate underwriter of life and health—had cared more for his clients' well-being than his own. High blood pressure, ignored to the point of disdain, had felled him while Rachel retrieved Wendy from school and stopped at Corti Brothers for groceries. Wendy cried for days. So did Rachel.
    She bent over and kissed her daughter on the top of the head, pausing long enough to breathe the sweet scent of Wendy's scalp. Wendy gave her a look of disapproval that was pure Frank.
    Funny how they'd met. At nineteen, she had come home from Chico for the holidays, happy to divert her thoughts for a few weeks from the study of bits and bytes, pixels and Pascal, semaphores and CPUs. Her intense flirtation with lesbian love was a year behind her, she was a junior now, between boyfriends, and happy to be home for the holidays. She had gone to Macy's on the corner of 5th and K to hunt for Christmas gifts.
    Rachel usually avoided large department stores. She much preferred out-of-the-way places: bookstores, toystores, stores filled with exotic foods or given over entirely to puzzles and games. But Macy's was different. Macy's laid claim to Santa Claus in a way no other store could match. She had seen Miracle on 34th Street many times on TV. Once she had even seen it downtown at the Crest Theatre.
    Though she'd stopped believing in him around age ten, the figure of Santa Claus held an eerie fascination for her. That year, she lingered at Santa's Workshop, watching him dandle kids on his knee, pose for Polaroids with them, hand them candycanes. In that lingering, the man wearing the red suit captured her heart. She stood transfixed; he noticed her; when closing time came, he changed clothes, met her at the doors, and took her to dinner at his favorite restaurant, Fat City in Old Sacramento.
    Six months later, she and Frank were wed. He urged her to complete her degree, then look for work in the Sacramento area. Every few weeks, he'd drive up to spend time with her, inner-tubing down the river (quite a sight, Frank at fifty, floating among the youngsters), or taking long walks through Bidwell Park (where Errol Flynn had once played Robin Hood), or indulging in an endless night of marital bliss locked away in her apartment off the Esplanade six blocks north of campus. Her pregnancy ran neck and neck with her studies that year. She graduated in mid-May of 1984, gave birth to Wendy the following week, and began work three months later as a software engineer for HP in Roseville, some thirty miles east of Sacramento.
    "Mommy?"
    "We'll be going home soon, honey."
    "Where did you say the Easter Bunny lives?"
    "Underground in a big burrow. Just show a little more patience, Wendy. You've been very good."
    Graveyard grass swayed long and green in the breeze. Father Doyle's lilting voice caressed the words he held in his hands. Opposite Rachel and Wendy, old Mrs. Fredericks coughed into her hand and shifted her feet. Tears welled in her eyes.
    "Mommy?" Wendy whispered.
    "Not now, dear."
    "Is Daddy going down there to be friends with the Easter Bunny?"

II. Discovery
    The rabbit has a charming face;
    Its private life is a disgrace.
    I really dare not name to you
    The awful things that rabbits do.
    —anonymous
    Adultery is a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of the meanness and selfishness and lying flow love and joy and peace beyond anything that can be imagined.
    —Dame Rose Macauley
    4. What the Easter Bunny Saw
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