Seventeen

This year, for the seventeenth year, Gabriel will be Santa Claus.

Year one began as a bit of a joke, really- a gentle jab in the form of a shopping mall Santa application he found folded neatly under his electric razor. His laughter had shaken white whisker refugees from the corners of the page and sent them sprinkling like incriminating snowflakes onto Chelsea's slippers as she wrapped herself around him from behind. "It's only that you'd be so convincing," she had whispered. He applied the following week, two days after their 37th wedding anniversary, still hopelessly unable to tell her no.

By year three, the job had started to grow on him. Getting him hoisted and strapped into that sauna of a red suit had become a ritual of sorts. Chelsea would stand ready on the end of the bed, dwarfed by the red poly-velvet coat, and the two of them would struggle to work his considerable self into character, cursing all the while the row of shiny black buttons that couldn't actually unfasten. Her eyes were incredibly bright that last good year, and she would watch him playfully as he adjusted his hat just so. She would never let him kiss her once that hat was on - something about an affront to the very essence of childhood. He would have given every moment of his childhood for a half a minute of her smile.

He was at the hospital for most of year five, but she insisted he not miss the season. Leaving her there, tubes snaking around her like cage wires, felt like a betrayal. He stopped by her room the first night of the run fully suited, a bouquet of poinsettias in his white-gloved hand. She was sleeping soundly for the first time in what must have been weeks, and he could not bring himself to wake her. That year, the fifth year, was the first that she wasn't sitting on the bench across the atrium, reading and laughing, waving and watching. In year five, he began to understand how much he was going to have to miss her.

Year six read like an obituary column. Loving wife, mother, sister, leaves behind grieving widower who will honor her by donning a suit and masquerading as joy in a shopping mall. He will hear nothing, see nothing, smell nothing, feel nothing. The children will love him, but he will not be moved. Instead, he will sit numbly and wonder how it is that the world has continued, that time has failed to stop completely. No one will be able to give him an answer that makes any sense.

In year nine, Leslie and Tom moved the grandkids back to Boston to be closer to their PaPa. Leslie got in the habit of bringing the girls by every Saturday morning and cooking breakfast for him on the stove that had been accumulating dust and memory in equal parts since Chelsea had first been hospitalized. Gabriel made a big show of leaving the heavy black boots by the chimney, claiming he'd won them from a now barefoot Santa in a bet. The house was better for every small moment of laughter, warmer, more tolerable.

He took a lover in year twelve, nine years his junior, with the memory of red still alive in the ends of her hair. They made love exactly four times. On the fourth night, she shifted in her sleep and made a sound that was so like his wife he forgot for a moment that she was a stranger. Reality hit with a force strong enough to drive him out the door, into the car, and back home to sit quietly and alone. He saw her again once, sitting on Chelsea's bench across the atrium, watching him with child after child. He pretended not to notice her, and when he looked up a second time, she was gone.

Year fourteen they hired a kid from New Jersey with the shiftiest eyes Gabriel had seen. On his break, Gabriel would watch the kid slink in and out of the mall store fronts, pocketing small items - a book here, a tube of lipstick, a pair of sunglasses. He could never quite bring himself to turn the kid in, though the kid regarded him with that specific breed of disgust the young reserve for anyone who reminds them that they too may one day be aging, and alone. When some eager Santa visitor made a selfish or impossible request, the kid would make a strange, disapproving sound that reminded Gabriel of the coyotes he and Chelsea would listen to in the evenings the summer he found work in San Antonio. She had loved the hauntingly sad conversations those dogs would have. He found them disturbing, and she laughed every time he jumped.

Gabriel almost didn't sign up the sixteenth year, but in the third week of October he found an old Polaroid tucked into the pages of one of Chelsea's mangled novels. In it, his wife perched gracefully on his knee, a little lighter and less tangible than she should have been. Year four. His beard had been especially long that year, and the kids were relentless with their questions and their tugging. Chelsea had begun to fade early that November, and by Thanksgiving they had a diagnosis and the weight of precious little time. She had shown up anyway, dressed in her best holiday sweater and smiling from ear to ear, to watch him interview child after child, afternoon after afternoon. He tucked the photo back between the pages and went straight to the car, the mall, and the rented red suit that, once upon a time, her hands had touched.

This year, for the seventeenth year, Gabriel will be Santa Claus.