Page 3 of Daddy's Little Drummer Boy
The two pairs disappeared into the middle of the main club room, the littles completely adorable. Hudson’s holiday duckie onesie paired with knee socks and jingle-bell sneakers was every bit as cute as Lane’s holiday kitty tee and short shorts. He also had knee socks, his patterned with candy canes and polar bears.
What would a little of mine wear? Some daddies would say whatever he told them to, but I liked the littles I played with to express their own creativity. After all, it was their personality that drew me. Why wouldn’t I want that fully expressed?
The other daddies and their littles drifted off to the little room, leaving me alone with the empty platter and a lot of glassware. Our server came over and piled everything on the tray and took it all away, leaving just my solo glass.
Talk about emphasizing my solitude. Oh, there would be single littles in the little room, but watching the interplay between my friends and their littles, I just didn’t have the heart to go play with a rando. They would be cute, too, but it wasn’t the same.
So, I headed for the front door and retrieved my phone on the way out. I checked the received calls and texts to find a notification that my review would be the next morning. I looked over my shoulder, although my friends were in the little room by now. If I got the supervisor position, I’d be more stable and travel so much less. What might that mean for my life?
Chapter Three
Bobby
The woman waved at me from her open door and bent down to grab her Chinese food. It was my last delivery of the afternoon, and I needed to get home and get ready for my next gig.
When I moved into my studio apartment, I told myself I wasn’t going to keep delivering food for much longer, that I was going to relax and slow down for a while. I’d worked nonstop trying to save the house for so long, and it was time to relax.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work out. The first year I was here, I spent tons of extra shifts just keeping up with the credit card payments. But as I paid them down and got rid of one then two then a third, it had become a habit. And now, I was trying to save up enough to get a one-bedroom apartment.
Funny how dreams changed. Once upon a time, my dream had been about building that garden with the little gnomes and the covered swing. Now, it was hoping that I could sleep in a different room from where I cooked my food, ate my food, and watched television.
My place wasn’t awful, just small.
I didn’t mind working all the time either. Delivery was kind of fun. Most of the people were like the lady I just delivered to—big smiles on their faces, grateful for the food I brought. And while the money was sometimes better than others, it was always worth doing.
Two years later after my big move, I was pretty close to debt-free and had most of a down payment for a new place saved up. I called that pretty good. By the end of this season, I was going to be financially solid. That was, if “solid” didn’t include having a savings account because once I moved, that would be gone too.But I was better off than I had been since Daddy died, and I was proud of it. He would be too.
Daddy made me promise that I would be okay without him, that I would find my place in this world, would accept the help of others, and wouldn’t stay alone. I’d managed to do most of those and maybe one day, I’d meet someone to make my promise of not being alone come to fruition. I hadn’t been ready for years, but lately I’d been thinking it was time.
I went home, showered, and got into my costume for the new part-time gig I’d picked up. I was a Drummer Boy at the mall’s Christmas-with-Santa pavilion—well, one of them. I looked more like a toy soldier with a drum in the getup they gave me than a drummer, but the money was pretty good and, while I still wasn’t a huge fan of Christmas, I was having a great time. Christmas wasn’t ever going to be my favorite season, but this year I didn’t mind it so much. That was pretty huge, if you asked me.
Would I rather be whisked off to a cabin in the woods, sitting by the fireplace, wearing my little clothes, playing with my blocks with Rooney, and drinking hot cocoa while eating copious numbers of cookies and candy canes? Absolutely. But I was doing okay.
I arrived at the mall for my shift, taking over for Ron, the daytime Drummer Boy. He looked exhausted—he always did by the time I got there. He wasn’t good with the kids and found them very stressful. If a child tugged on my drum, wanting to give it a whack with the stick, I’d just kneel to their level, give the drumsticks to them, let them hear how bad the fake drum was, and they’d be on their way. Easy peasy.
Ron felt this unnecessary need to protect the drum—a fake drum at that—and would try to talk kids out of doing it. That didn’t make him a fan favorite and made it more far more stressful for him than it needed to be. I tried to explain thatto him numerous times but eventually gave up. If he wanted to work extra hard for the same money, let him.
I made the motions of hitting my drum—boom, boom, boom, boom—as the kids lined up, ready to see Santa and tell him all their wishes and dreams. From where I was, I could hear a lot of the lists. Most kids wanted a toy—not always one that existed but a toy. A few wanted electronics, like a computer “like my dad’s” or a video game “like my brother Stan’s.” All of those were expected, par for the season.
Santa would tell them he had to check his naughty-and-nice list and that he wasn’t sure if he had enough of those items in stock, but he’d see what he could do. It was a nice way to let the kids down easy if those weren’t things their parents wanted them to have—or if budgets decided they were out.
But today had been particularly difficult. I heard one little boy ask Santa for a kidney for his grandma. Another asked if Santa could bring his mommy back from deployment. Yet another asked for an apartment instead of sleeping in their car.
How I longed to be the one to grant them any of those wishes. But I couldn’t. All I could do was give them smiles and let them beat my very off-sounding drum.
“Hey, soldier man!”
I looked down to see a young girl, maybe five, looking up at me with big blue eyes. I didn’t correct her that I wasn’t supposed to be a soldier—it didn’t matter. This was all pretend, not a school lesson.
“Yes, honey?”
“I see drum?” Maybe she was less than five, given her question. I was really bad at guessing ages.
I squatted to be more at her eye level. “Did you want to give it a hit?”
She looked at her mom, who nodded, and then grabbed the offered sticks and banged away on it for a few seconds.
“That is beautiful music.” I was lying. It was more thud than any drum should be. If I did this next year, I needed to find a secondhand real drum to use, one that didn’t sound like a kid banging a plastic bowl on their high chair.
