My husband is 77. For three weeks, he’s come home every single night covered in glitter. In his eyebrows. In his ears. Once, in his socks . He smells like candy canes. I found a receipt in his coat for beard whitener . Hank doesn’t have a beard. Then his phone buzzed on the counter. A woman named “Mrs. C” : “Same time tomorrow, big guy? You were wonderful today.” My sister didn’t even blink. “Wanda, at his age, glitter means one thing. A younger woman.” So the next afternoon, I followed him. To the mall. Past the food court. And there, behind a velvet rope , I saw.
my husband of fifty-one years, Henry “Hank” Fairclough, retired insurance adjuster, sitting on a gold throne in a red velvet suit, with a fake white beard hooked over his ears and a four-year-old on his knee.
He was Santa Claus.
My husband was the mall Santa.
I stood behind a potted plastic palm tree by the pretzel stand and stared. The beard whitener, I realized, was for his eyebrows, which are dark and bushy and which nobody would believe on Santa. The glitter came from the fake snow they blow around the North Pole display every twenty minutes. The candy canes were in a bowl beside his throne. He was handing them out to every child, along with a wink that I have to admit was very convincing.
And standing beside him, in a red dress with white fur trim and little gold glasses, was a woman of about seventy holding a clipboard. Mrs. C.
I should tell you I was relieved. I was. Mostly. But I’m also a woman who drove forty minutes and hid behind a plastic palm tree because of a text message, so I was not about to just go home.
I got in line.
It was a long line. Twenty-five minutes. I stood between a young father with twins and a teenager who was there, she said, “ironically.” When I finally got to the front, Mrs. C looked at me, then at her clipboard, and said, “Ma’am, are you here with a child?”
“No,” I said. “I’m here with a question.”
And I walked right up and sat on Santa’s knee.
Hank looked down at me. I have never in fifty-one years seen my husband’s face do what it did then. His eyes went wide behind his little round glasses. His beard twitched. He made a sound like a teakettle.
“Ho,” he said weakly. “Ho. Ho.”
“Santa,” I said sweetly, loud enough for the line to hear, “I’d like to know if my husband is cheating on me.”
The teenager behind me gasped with absolute delight.
Hank cleared his throat. He looked at Mrs. C. Mrs. C looked at me, then at him, and started to laugh so hard she had to lean on the North Pole sign.
“No, my dear,” Hank said in his deepest Santa voice. “Your husband is not cheating on you. Your husband is a very good boy who has been working very hard on a surprise.”
“What kind of surprise?” I said.
“If Santa told you,” he said, “it wouldn’t be a surprise.”
Then the elf with the camera said, “Smile!” and took our picture, and I am told it is still the most popular photo the mall has ever posted on its Facebook page. Me in my winter coat, sitting on Santa’s lap with my purse in my hands and my eyebrows up to my hairline, and Santa looking like a man who has just been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. Which he had.
He told me everything that night at the kitchen table, still with glitter in his ears.
Two years ago, I lost my wedding ring. It slipped off in the garden while I was planting tulips, and we never found it. We looked for weeks. Hank rented a metal detector. We found four bottle caps, a 1962 dime and a dog tag from a dog named Biscuit, but no ring. I told him it didn’t matter. I told him I was too old for jewelry anyway.
He knew I was lying. I cried about it in the shower for a month.
