Petey rolled his eyes. “He’s a stickler about all the wrong things. He’ll ride everyone’s asses about whatever doesn’t matter, like a replacement Santa’s fake belly or his weird one-off ideas, but meanwhile, we’re short on elf costumes, the carol-oke machine doesn’t have enough songs, we run out of giveaway toys... and don’t even get mestartedon—” He must have seen the dawning alarm in Wade’s face, because he hastily cut himself off. “But you’ll figure all that out! Half the fun of the Christmas Village is learning the lay of the land on your own.”
“That can’t possibly be true.”
“No, it’s not, but you’ve already agreed, and I already said no take-backs.” He handed Wade the fluffy white beard and a bottle of spirit gum.
Don’t sulk, Wade reminded himself.No matter how wild a situation you’ve gotten yourself into. You didn’t have any holiday plans anyway.
Lately, he almost never had any plans at all. He liked a quiet life, but he’d started to wonder if he was pushing that to an unnatural extreme. He would never want to bounce around from place to place, hobby to hobby, and girlfriend to girlfriend the way Petey did, but there was a difference between living in a full-on riot and living in, well, a rut. Maybe shaking up his routine would be good for him.
Petey said, “Now, things to know in advance. At some point, one of the littler kids might pee on your lap—”
Then again, maybe not.
Chapter Two
“Who areyousupposed to be?”
“I’m an elf,” Mira said patiently.
That was a lie. Not the elf part—for every day up until Christmas, shewasan elf, at least as far as her job description went. The pointy ears were fake, but the holiday spirit was real. Or it had been real when she had started the job back in November. It was getting pretty frayed by now.
But the sweet patience in her voice when a kid asked her that question for the hundredth time? That was absolutely a lie. Mira Allenby was no longer feeling patient. She was feeling ready to snap.
She wasn’t going to snap at a kid, though. She had to save her ire for a proper target, and since the only person who qualified was the boss she couldn’t afford to upset ... it was going to bubble up under the surface for hours. When she got home, she could scream into her pillow.
“You don’t look like an elf,” the little girl said.
“Yes, I do.” All she could manage was a kind of artificial brightness, like she was a perky old-school weathergirl. “Haven’t you seenLord of the Rings?”
The little girl shook her head. No, of course he hadn’t seenLord of the Rings. She was only four or five. Her parents would never let her watch something with so many scary battle sequences.
By this point, Mira had tried theLord of the Ringsline on over a dozen kids, and none of them had known what she was talking about. The closet she had gotten was one bright six-year-old whose mom had readThe Hobbitaloud to her.
But Galadriel wasn’t inThe Hobbit, so that still hadn’t helped much.
It was a Galadriel costume Mira was stuck in, while all the other, luckier Honey Brook Christmas Village elves got to bustle around in the traditional green skirts or shorts and candy-cane-striped leggings. They looked like Santa’s elves. She looked like an inept cosplayer trying to make a floaty white nightgown pass for professional Hollywood design. And she was too curvy to be ethereal.
But the discount Galadriel outfit was the best she could do. At the start of the holiday season, Mr. Marsh had accidentally ordered the wrong number of elf costumes from Honey Brook’s supplier, and since phoning in another order would mean admitting he’d made a mistake, he wasn’t going to do it. He wouldn’t even let her buy an off-the-rack costume online, either, because it wouldn’t match everyone else’s.
“Neither does Galadriel!” Mira had protested.
“Ah, but Galadriel doesn’tlooklike she’s supposed to match the rest of the Christmas elves,” Mr. Marsh said, steepling his fingers together and trying to look wise. “You see how that matters?”
Mira could tell that he wanted to watch her jaw drop. She was supposed to say,My God, you’re right! That’s brilliant!
But it wasn’t brilliant. It was dumb. No one would care if one elf wore candy-cane-striped tights instead of leggings or if her skirt was a slightly different shade of green. They probably wouldn’t even notice. She would still be recognizably a Christmas elf, and that was all anyone cared about.
“I’m begging you,” Mira had said, powering through Mr. Marsh’s lofty “I am unappreciated in my own time” look. “Please just let me find a regular elf costume. I’ll even pay for it myself.”
That was saying a lot, since she had only take this seasonal job to make some much-needed extra cash. Mira’s romance movie podcast was a modest success, with its sponsors and Patreon subscriptions bringing in enough for her to live on aslong as she kept her expenses low. She had picked up extra work before, funding vacations by doing the occasional spot of video production and audio editing for podcasters and vloggers. She liked it, and she liked it even more because she didn’t have to do it all the time.
But this year, she needed every dollar she could get. This year, she had her podcastandher editing on the sideandthis Christmas elf job, and every cent counted.
She wished it were all going to fund a nice trip. Then it wouldn’t matter if she fell short: all it would mean was trading one hotel reservation for another or cutting her vacation short by a day.
But this was serious. For years, her stepfather’s health had been in decline, and he had finally gotten to the point where her mom was having trouble taking care of him on her own. Her stepdad was, thank God, still as mentally sharp as ever, and he and her mom were still as madly in love as they’d always been—they just needed some extra help.Professionalhelp, ideally even round-the-clock help.
There was a great retirement home they could move into, one many of their friends already lived in. Between their savings and Mira’s usual income, they should have the monthly rates covered ... but there was a mind-bogglingly high entrance fee that had to be paid up-front. Mira needed to get them the money for it as soon as she possibly could. Until then, no matter what they said, she was going to worry about them.
