Secret Santa. Cynthia Reese

do we kick him loose or put him on the floor? We’ve got to do something.” Lainey wrinkled her forehead. “He’s driving us nuts.”

      Charli scrawled a signature on the admissions order. “Send him to serenade the floor nurses.” She put the phone to her ear. “Dr. Charlotte Prescott speaking.”

      “Charli!” Her mother’s greeting was a mix of relief and irritation. “Neither you nor your father have been answering your cell phones. You have to send your father home! He’s sixty-seven years old, and he’s not in any shape to be staying at that hospital all night long.”

      “Mom.” Charli sagged against the counter and let her forehead sink into her palm.

      “He’s an old man, Charli. He needs to be home.”

      Charli cast a sideways glance down the hall, where her father was doing some shadowboxing with a tree trunk of a man in a camouflage coverall. Her father’s fists were light and fast, and his face glowed with merriment. He was in his element.

      “I think he’s okay, Mom.”

      “What do you know?”

      “Oh, I dunno. Maybe a few years of medical school and residency? Mom. Trust me, if he looked really tired, I’d send him home—I’d have to bind and gag him first, but I’d do it. You don’t need to worry, okay?”

      “But you and he need to come home. I’ve got a surprise for him! And for you, too, of course.”

      Her mother’s words caught Charli off balance. She straightened up and pressed the phone closer to her ear. “Mom, a surprise? Did you, uh, buy it?”

      “No. No, Charli, I made it. I didn’t buy it.” Her mom’s words sounded resigned and hollow. “You know how your father is―he worries so much about my shopping. I’m very careful now. Why everybody always has to obsess about me and my shopping... The surprise is a coconut cake. He’s been working so hard this week, so I thought a coconut cake would be a nice treat. So today I bought a fresh coconut, because you know your Mama Grace’s coconut cake recipe calls for fresh grated coconut.”

      “You’re not serious.” Charli knew that her mother was indeed drop-dead serious. If there was anything Violet Prescott was serious about, it was pleasing her man.

      To get the most perfect coconut, her mother wouldn’t have thought twice about jumping a plane to Hawaii to pluck it off the tree herself.

      That is, if her dad had trusted his wife with a credit card.

      Her mother had most likely spent hours on that cake—it was a nightmare of a recipe. Charli looked down the hall at her dad, his face still lit up, and her heart softened. Maybe she could handle the shift until the new E.R. guys showed up—it would only be an hour or so more. “I will tell him what you’ve said.”

      “Not the bit about the cake. Let something be a surprise, okay? Just tell him I’m worried about him.”

      “How about this?” Her father had left the shadowboxing behind and was grinning as he headed toward the nurses’ station. “You tell him yourself.” Charli jabbed the phone in her dad’s direction. “For you, Dad.”

      “Sugarplum!” her dad warbled into the phone once he realized who was on the other end. “Are you worrying your little head about me? Do you miss me, sweetums? Are you lonely?”

      He sounded pleased as punch that a woman needed him so much she was miserable without him. Honestly, he’d created a monster. Charli shook her head and gave Lainey instructions about Neil Bailey.

      Lainey grinned. “Isn’t it sweet?” she asked, nodding toward the phone. “Your dad is so in love with her. Still, after all these years.”

      A sour feeling followed by a chaser of guilt swept over Charli. She’d always felt overshadowed by her parents’ mutual admiration for each other—mutual except when they’d battled over her mother’s shopping. It wasn’t that she was jealous of her mother’s ability to wrap her father around her finger. It was that she knew she could never be the sort of sweet little woman her mother pretzeled herself into being for her father. If that was the kind of woman Charli needed to be for her father—or any man—to love her, she was doomed.

      But Lainey was waiting expectantly for Charli’s reply. “I’m glad they’ve got each other,” she said. “Let me know when the Toradol has had time to work its magic, okay? I’m off to see—who am I off to see?”

      “This one. A dad got his, er, backside stuck in a trash can that he was using for an impromptu toilet.”

      “Huh?” Charli flipped open the chart and started reading. “Eww. Scout camping trip. Got a bottle opener?”

      “What?” Lainey fished around in her desk drawer and came up with one.

      “He’s created a vacuum, and I need to release it.”

      “No. Not with my bottle opener.” Lainey held the gadget out of Charli’s reach.

      “Come on. I’ll buy you another. We need the bed. The waiting room’s overflowing, right?”

      Lainey hesitated. “A brand-spanking-new one. Tomorrow. In the package. So I know beyond a shadow of a doubt you didn’t wash this one.”

      “And the receipt. That clinch the deal?” Charli yawned again, tired to the marrow of her bones.

      “That’ll do it.”

      Bottle opener in hand, Charli sailed off to uncork the scout leader.

      * * *

      A STARRY SKY. A beautiful, clear November night. Charli soaked in the silence of her car. No more hearing her name paged on the overhead. No more screaming patients. No more Knife Guy singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” No more telephone calls from her mother, begging her to send her father home.

      No more father telling her she didn’t know anything because she didn’t know the “real world of rural medicine.”

      I want to sleep forever. I don’t care if it’s just 8:00 p.m. I don’t care if I have office hours tomorrow morning. I’m going to bed and sleeping until next week. Thank goodness they finally sent in those wonderful, wonderful E.R. docs.

      Charli turned on her street and saw a line of cars almost to the intersection. What? Traffic? On a side street in Brevis? Red taillights glowed in a long series, looking like Morse code as people tapped brakes and inched forward.

      Charli rolled down her window and heard...Christmas carols? Yes, it was a way too cheerful “Winter Wonderland” being belted out of speakers.

      She wasn’t the only one who had her window down. The car ahead of her had kids hanging out the back window, faces aglow with excitement. What on earth?

      Behind her a horn blew. The driver was impatient, a trio of kids bouncing in the backseat. Well, he was no more impatient than she was. What were they looking at up ahead?

      She inched around the curve, with her house in sight, and she saw what all the fuss was about. Her neighbor—whom she hadn’t met yet, but it was clearly high time to introduce herself—had enough Christmas lights to outshine an airstrip. And music. Loud music. “Winter Wonderland” had given way to “Frosty the Snowman.”

      Good grief! Her bedroom window was on her neighbor’s end of the house. So much for sleep. It’s only the first of November. Why the Christmas lights?

      Finally the car in front of her inched up enough that she could squeeze into her driveway. Just as she did, something tumbled off the roof next door—a reindeer whose nose went black as he dived into a somersault and headed straight toward her car. Charli hit the brakes and prepared for the thing to smash into a million pieces.

      But instead, it bounced. She blinked. Yes. It bounced. It was an inflatable. A big huge hulking inflatable Rudolph that had landed between her car and her carport.

      Charli got out. Rounded