It Must Be Christmas Read online

  “No, you changed from the library,” Nolan was saying. “You were funny in the library. You talked fast and made weird jokes and surprised me. I liked that. And then I took you out and you, well, you kind of went dull on me.”

  Trudy stopped dropping boxes on the floor. “You took me to a faculty party. If I hadn’t gone dull on you, you’d have lost points. You’d have been Nolan who brought that weird-ass librarian to the October gin fling. I was helping you.”

  “Did I ask for help?” Nolan said, exasperated.

  “And you took me to dinner at the department head’s house. You wanted me weird there?”

  “I couldn’t get out of that,” Nolan said.

  “And then the Chinese film festival.” Trudy dropped another box to the floor. “I thought I was going to see Crouching Tiger Two, but it was some horrible depressing thing about people weeping in dark rooms.”

  “It was?” Nolan said, confused.

  “Not that you’d know, since you left right after it started,” Trudy snarled, flinging a box at him. “You got a call and walked out of the theater, and I was left with people weeping in Chinese—”

  She stopped to stare at the shelf, the next box in her hand, her heart thudding harder than it had when she’d first seen Nolan.

  There was a camouflage-colored box at the back.

  She dropped the Twinkletoes box and pulled out the camo box and read the label: Major MacGuffin, the Tough One! “Oh, my God.” Trudy held on to it with both hands, almost shaking.

  The box was not mint—the cellophane was torn over the opening, a corner was squashed in with a black X marked on it, and there were white scuff marks on the bottom—but the MacGuffin scowled out at her through the plastic, looking like a homicidal Cabbage Patch doll dressed in camouflage, a grenade in one hand and a gun in the other, violent and disgusting and the only thing Leroy wanted for Christmas.

  “I do believe in Santa,” Trudy said as Nolan came closer.

  “That’s a Major MacGuffin.” He sounded stunned.

  “Can you believe it?” Trudy was so amazed she forgot to be mad.

  “No,” Nolan said. “I can’t. I knew you were an amazing woman, but this puts you in a whole new league.”

  “What?” Trudy said.

  “I’ll give you two hundred bucks for it,” Nolan said.

  “No.” Trudy stepped away from him, holding on to the MacGuffin box.

  Nolan smiled at her, radiating sincerity. “I know, your nephew wants a Major MacGuffin, but he doesn’t want that one. He wants the Mac Two. The one that spits toxic waste and packs a tac nuke, right?”

  Trudy thought of Leroy, waxing rhapsodic about how the ’Guffin spit green stuff when you squeezed him. “Yes.”

  “What you have there is a MacGuffin One,” Nolan said, sounding sympathetic and entirely too reasonable. “Last year’s model. No toxic waste.”

  Trudy looked back at the box. It did look different from the picture Leroy had shown her. “What does this one do?”

  “It has a gun. Basically, it shoots the other dolls.”

  “And the hand grenade?”

  “Just a plastic ball. Doesn’t do anything.” He shrugged, unimpressed.

  “Damn.” Trudy looked down at the doll’s ugly face.

  “Two fifty,” Nolan said.

  Trudy glared at him. “No. This is for my nephew. And I have to go now. Thanks for putting the boxes back.”

  “Trudy, wait,” Nolan said, but she picked up a perfect Twinkletoes box, stepped over the rest of the pink boxes, and headed for the checkout counter, her belief in Santa restored if not her belief in the rest of male humanity.

  * * *

  Trudy got in the long line to the register, clutching both the Mac and the Twinkletoes boxes, stepping back as a woman in a red and green bobble hat slid in front of her at the last minute. Then Nolan got in line behind her and said, “Three hundred. It only costs forty-nine fifty new. That’s six times—”

  Trudy jerked her head up. “No. I’ll never find another one of these tonight.”

  Nolan nodded, not arguing. “Okay. Five hundred.”

  “Are you nuts?” Trudy said.

  “No, I told you, I’m a collector.” He stepped closer, and she remembered how nice it had been having him step closer on the three lousy dates they’d had.

  She stepped away.

  Nolan nodded to the Mac. “You are holding a doll that is actually rarer than the Mac Two. They didn’t make many Ones.”

  “It’s not rarer from where I’m standing,” Trudy said. “I actually have this one, and there are no Mac Twos in sight.”

  “That looks like an original box,” Nolan said. “May I?”

  “No,” Trudy said, holding on to it and the Twinkletoes box, trying to put her shopping bag between them to block him, but he’d already opened the top and was reaching in. “Hey.” She elbowed his hand away as he pulled out the instruction sheet. “Give me that,” she said, and he opened it so that she could see the drawing of the MacGuffin showing how to detach the silencer from the gun.

  “No toxic waste,” Nolan said. “It’s a Mac One.”

  He slid the instructions back in the box. “Two thousand,” he said, and then Trudy heard somebody say, “I’ll be damned,” and turned to see Reese staring at her from the front of the checkout line.

  “You found it,” he said.

  “Yes.” She turned back to Nolan as he closed the box again. “No. I’m not selling it. This one is Leroy’s.” She checked to make sure the MacGuffin was still in the box, complete with hand grenade and gun, and then her cell phone rang.

  She fumbled the boxes until she could hold both of them with one arm, looked at the caller ID, clicked the phone on, and said, “Hello, Courtney.”

  “Did you get it?” Courtney said, and Trudy pictured her, sitting on the edge of her Pottery Barn couch, her thin fingers gripping her Restoration Hardware forties black dial phone, every auburn Pre-Raphaelite ringlet on her head wired with tension.

  “Sort of.” Trudy looked through the plastic window on the front of the Mac box at the fat little homicidal doll. “Damn, he’s ugly.”

  “What do you mean, sort of? Did you get him?”

  The line moved and Trudy stepped forward, bumping her shopping bag into the woman in the bobble hat.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said as the woman turned. “Really sorry.”

  The woman smiled at her, motherly in a knitted cap with red and green bobbles, her arms full of teddy bears. “Isn’t it just awful, this Christmas rush?…”

  Her eyes narrowed as she saw the MacGuffin. Animals in the bush probably looked like that when they sighted their prey. Trudy clutched the MacGuffin box tighter.

  The woman jerked her face up to Trudy’s. “Where did you get that?”

  “In the back, shoved behind some other boxes.” Trudy tried to sound cheerful and open. “Boy, did I get lucky.”

  The woman’s chin went up. “That’s not this year’s.”

  “No toxic waste.” Trudy nodded. “Well, you can’t have everything.”

  “I’ll give you a hundred dollars for it,” the woman said, her eyes avid.

  Piker. “No, thank you.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Courtney said, her voice crackling with phone static.

  “A lovely woman who just tried to buy the MacGuffin from me.”

  “No!”

  “Of course not, but listen, I’ve got last year’s model. The Mac One. I don’t think—”

  “Evil Nemesis Brandon is getting this year’s model. The Mac Two. With extra toxic waste.”

  Trudy shifted her weight to her other foot. “Okay, this ‘Evil Nemesis Brandon’ stuff? You have to stop that. Do you want Leroy thrown out of kindergarten for calling names?”

  “Evil Nemesis Brandon’s mother knows we don’t have a Mac,” Courtney said. “I saw her today at Stanford Trudeau’s Christmas party. She said if we hadn’t found one, Brandon would let Leroy borrow his last y