Hank went over to her. Theodore tagged behind.
“Right there are the hours.” Lydia looked up. “And here are the numbers from one to thirty-one. See? They spin around the numbers of one through twelve.”
Hank looked at it for a minute, then looked at her, amazed. “She’s right. According to this, it’s December twenty-first.”
“Four days till Christmas?” Theodore began to jump up and down. “That means Santa’s coming!”
Margaret shot a quick and knowing look at Hank.
“Santa Claus is coming!” Theodore frowned down at his bare feet. “We need stockings.” He was quiet for a second, then asked, “Does Santa come if there are no stockings?”
With that question, Margaret looked at Hank. He played the coward and stepped back a few steps.
She looked down at Theodore, her mind still seeing his teary face from the evening before. She had tried to make him understand that Hank hadn’t been trying to hurt him. But little boys didn’t understand complicated moods the way adults did.
For children, things were either black or white. Luckily, though, children were resilient, too. They seemed to bounce back quickly when something new caught their eye. Something like a promise by Hank to take Theodore fishing today and now something as exciting as Christmas.
She slid her arm over Theodore’s shoulders. “I think I remember seeing some woolen stockings in one of the trunks.”
“You did?”
She nodded, then picked up Annabelle. “Come along.” She held out a hand to Lydia. “Let’s go look.”
* * *
Later that afternoon,Hank reached around Theodore’s small shoulders and pulled the fishing line higher. “Let me show you how to do this.” He looked down at the kid and winked. “It’s easier to catch a fish with a long pole. The current pulls at this string.”
“But you caught a bunch of fish this way.”
The kid always had an argument. “Only because I didn’t take the time to make a fishing pole.”
A second later they got a strike.
The kid squealed like a pig and started jumping up and down. Hank grabbed the line and wrapped it around his wrist. It was a helluva good-sized fish. He dropped his hands so the line was in front of the kid. “Pull!”
And they did. A few minutes later they had a large grouper flopping in the sand.
The kid was still hopping up and down while Hank pulled the hook out and added it to the other two perch he’d caught.
The kid looked at it. “What is it?”
“A grouper.”
“It’s a big one, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, kid. You did good.”
Suddenly, without warning, the kid flung his arms around Hank’s neck and hugged him. It caught Hank completely off guard. He just knelt there, his arms hanging at his sides with Theodore clinging to his neck.
Very slowly Hank rested his palms on the kid’s bony little back.
“Thank you, Hank. I’m gonna make you the bestest Christmas present! You wait and see!”
“Christmas present?” he repeated, then he stared at the kid.
“Yeah! Smitty says we’ll make each other Christmas presents. Can I go tell ’em ’bout my fish? My grouper?”
“Sure, kid. Go on.”
