“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Thomas repeated. “What’d you get your Secret Santa person? A Bible?”
“Well,” Peggy began proudly, “I had Carly, and yes, I did get her a Bible. I do believe a girl of her… type… needs direction and wisdom.”
“What type is she?” Thomas asked with mock innocence.
“Why… you know what type, Thomas. If I had dressed like she does when I was young, even close to it, my daddy would’ve paddled my behind, and my momma would’ve burnt whatever skimpy thing I’d been wearing. Nowadays these girls show the world everything…”
“Do you think she’s having lots of sex, too?”
Peggy blushed, but she valiantly refused to fidget or look away. “I think so. And it’s wrong, and it’s shameful, and I can’t believe her parents don’t take her in hand.”
“Yeah, she does dress provocatively,” Thomas said. “I don’t know about her sex life, but I do wish she’d cover up some. It’s distracting.”
Peggy’s jaw dropped. In her memory, Thomas had never agreed with her on anything that really mattered. She felt like she should be for public nudity now that Thomas had concurred with her on how troublesome Carly’s barely-there wardrobe was.
“We-ell, hm, I’m glad we can agree on something,” she said reluctantly.
“Me too,” Thomas replied, then swiftly moved on, leaving Peggy behind in a conversational vacuum. She instantly forgot their extraordinary accord, instead mentally crucifying Thomas (but in a humanitarian way) for rudely walking away before she got to say her full piece. And he didn’t even ask what her Secret Santa had given her!
Thomas, however, had a legitimate reason for walking away: he needed to piss, badly. It happened every year: he got caught up in the merriment, and didn’t want to take two minutes to go to the bathroom lest he miss something. Eventually his bladder filled to bursting, and he rushed to the men’s room and emptied it in an immensely satisfying marathon pee.
The tradition continued now. As his urine shot out of his half-erect penis like a firehose-blast, Thomas closed his eyes and sighed deeply, and then had a pee shiver. Finally, he had nothing left but a few dribbles, and he shook himself off, washed his hands, and stepped back into the hallway, nearly colliding with Eddie.
“Gangway!” Eddie hollered. “Gotta pee, gotta pee!”
Thomas shook his head and stepped aside as a wild-eyed Eddie lurched into the bathroom. He hoped Eddie didn’t fall asleep while peeing, which happened last year. Vernon had found him slumped by a urinal, his penis hanging out and his pants soaked. As Vernon put it later: “The term ‘Vienna sausage’ describes what I saw.” Eddie’s response: “You lie! It’s as big as a Pringles can! You know it! I know you know it!”
Thomas had no desire to learn who was telling the truth (though he suspected the truth, as in most cases, lay somewhere in the middle), so he let the bathroom door shut behind him and walked away. If Eddie collapsed again, someone else would have to find him.
In the hallway, Yolanda was berating her husband, who was hidden beneath his fluffy Santa suit, although he had, for some reason, discarded his white beard. Perhaps he’d removed it so the ladies would actually kiss skin instead of fluff.
“How many have you had?” she demanded.
“Six!” Vernon howled, as if no man had ever suffered such persecution. “Six! That’s it!”
“I don’t believe it! Thomas!” Yolanda hollered, motioning him over. “Do you believe this man when he says he’s only drunk six beers?”
“Well,” Thomas began, exaggeratedly pondering, “when I first got here, he said he’d drunk six or seven or eight beers…”
“Liar!” Vernon howled. His face was red and sweaty, and with his crouching stance and clenched fists, he looked like a particularly pugnacious Kris Kringle.
“Honey, I’ve never known Thomas to lie,” Yolanda said sharply.
“Uh… then he’s a traitor, if he ain’t a liar! There’s supposed to be a code between us men-folk. When the wife meddles, we got to stick together and knock her nagging aside!”
“You told me to watch out for you, Vernon,” Thomas said, chuckling. “Your words were ‘If you and Yolanda team up, maybe you both can keep me straight.’”
“Uh… well… if I said that, I take it back!”
“Oh, you’re something,” Yolanda said, grabbing her husband’s arm. “Come on, we’re going out to the car. You’re going to take off this Santa suit and get some fresh air. And then maybe I’ll let you come back in instead of tying you to the roof with bungee cords!”
“Leggo o’ me, woman! Why in the world should I take off my Santa suit? I still gots to get a few kissy-kisses from the ladies, and the suit makes it all possible! They may not want to kiss Vernon Oxendine, but they’ll kiss Santa Claus, sure enough!”
“That’s the main reason I want you to take it off! You’ve had enough fun with your mistletoe. You nearly tickled Carly’s throat with that last kiss…”
“I did not! She did that! She came at me like a bitch in heat! I’ve been trying all evening to get her, and then outta nowhere she nearly tackles me!”
“…but I also want you out of it because you’re about to sweat to death. Look at you! Don’t you want to cool off?”
“I do not!”
“Oh, you are something!” Yolanda wailed. “Get out here and take that suit off, before I slap some sense into you.”
“Slap sense into me?” Vernon said as he let his wife drag him away. “Why, woman, in this marriage I’m the one’s got all the sense…”
Thomas watched the arguing couple leave the building. They were certainly two peas in a pod, as the saying went. Thomas had avoided marriage — or maybe marriage had avoided him — but seeing Vernon and Yolanda together made him wonder. If he could find a good woman like that, a woman who dealt with her man as he was…
“What a couple,” said Orianna. She’d appeared beside him at the Chamber’s reception area.
“Yes, they are,” Thomas replied, looking over at her. She seemed more lively than earlier; perhaps alcohol had something to do with her perkiness. “I’ve known them for years, and they’ve always been like this.”
“This may be awkward to ask, but they don’t have any kids, do they?”
“No, they don’t,” Thomas replied. “I don’t think Yolanda is… capable.”
“I see.”
A pause that lasted an age.
“So,” Orianna said finally. “Your beer.”
“Yes,” Thomas replied. “My beer. What about it?”
“I drank a few.”
“Ah. So it was you, you little thief.”
“Yeah, it was me,” she said, rocking back and forth on her feet. It was an unsteady rocking which happily confirmed her tipsiness. “Hope you don’t mind. Didn’t think you would.”
“Nah, I don’t mind.”
“I can pay you back if you want,” she said, grinning.
“Nah, that’s OK.”
Outside, at the Oxendine’s hubcap-less, peeling Pontiac mini-van, Yolanda had wrangled Vernon out of the Santa suit and had it draped over her arms. Vernon himself was somewhere within the bowels of the mini-van, while Yolanda stood on the asphalt and continued her remonstration.