Don't Call Me Christina Kringle (6 page)

Christina twisted the key in the lock. “Maybe you fixed his shoes in your sleep, Grandpa. Maybe you were sleepwalking.”

“Maybe you take the shoes over to Shoe World but you don't want to tell me this is what you do.”

“Whatever. We made two hundred dollars. We do that every day for a month or two, we'll be able to pay the rent … this month.” She realized what she'd just said made no sense and they were still, basically, doomed.

“I'm going to go grab some hot chocolate,” she said. “Do you want anything from the coffee shop?”

“No, thank you,” said Guiseppe. “I am going home and crawling into bed. Maybe I fix more shoes in dreamland. Do not work too late.”

“I won't. I just have some homework to finish up.”

“Maybe you will also write your letter to Santa Claus so I know what you want for Christmas?”

“That's okay, Grandpa. I don't really—”

“Christina—we have two hundred dollars! You can ask Santa for anything you want. This year, he can afford it!”

Christina smiled. “Go home, Grandpa. You need your sleep.”

“Good night, Christina.”

He crossed the street. She headed up the block.

“Where are you going?” her grandfather called after her. “Shoe World is the other way.”

“Grandpa, for the last time …”

He held up his hand. “Is okay. We play the games. We pretend you no fix the shoes. But, I tell you true—you are the most wonderful granddaughter in the world! Bless you, Christina! Bless you!”

Christina shook her head.

Grandpa still thought she was the one who fixed the shoes.

He was still wrong.

As soon as the front door to the shop was locked, a lamp snapped on to illuminate the worktable directly behind the drapes.

“Very well, my friend,” said the professorial brownie, “what's on our agenda this evening?”

“Another pair of shoes, natch. And this.” The tough brownie shoved a textbook across the table. “Homework. Mathematicals. The stuff with numbers and whatnot.”

“Very well,” said the thin brownie, pushing his wire-rimmed spectacles up the bridge of his pointy nose. “Which task do you prefer to undertake?”

The gruff brownie, with a toothpick of a nail perched between his lips, put his hands on his hips. He was wearing a carpenter's tunic with pockets for hardware and loops for hammers. He also wore fuzzy brown tights and a pointy hat because it was more or less part of the brownie dress code.

“You're kidding, right? Like I even want to know what an isosceles triangle is. …”

His dapper friend smiled and tipped his top hat. “Touché.” He straightened out the tails on his natty-looking waistcoat. He had on sleek black tights and black boots with curled toes, and looked like he was dressed for somebody's wedding.

He used the tip of his cane to pry open the math book.

“Look, Nails!” he gushed to his friend. “Quadratic equations and polynomial fractions!”

“Enjoy, Professor Pencilneck. Enjoy.”

And with that, the two brownies set to work.

A little while later, Christina came back from the corner coffee shop with a steaming cup of hot cocoa.

Her friend the alley cat was waiting for her at the front door. Wispy snow had just started falling when Christina placed her order with Nick at the coffee shop. Now it was tumbling down in frosty clumps.

“You must be freezing,” she said to the shivering cat. “Come on. Grandpa went home. You can sleep inside and help me do my homework.”

The cat meowed.

“Yes. There's more milk.” She tapped the pocket of her coat. “And I picked up a tin of tuna down at the deli.”

The cat rubbed against her ankles and purred.

“Come on.”

Christina unlocked the several locks on the front door and pushed it open.

Before she even flicked on the overhead lights, the cat hissed.

Then it leapt up to the counter and flew through the curtains into the back room.

Shoes toppled and polish tins crashed to the floor.

Then Christina heard voices in the back room:

“Get outta here! Scram! Scat, cat!”

“The cat is most likely hungry.”

“For what? Finger sandwiches? Ouch! That's my finger!”

The voices sounded funny—like the burglars had been inhaling helium from birthday balloons.

Christina stepped toward the curtains.

“Don't you hiss at me, sister!” screamed the angrier of the two voices.

“Actually, Nails, hissing is a feline's instinctual defensive gesture. …”

“I don't care! She's giving me a saliva shower here. …”

Christina moved closer.

“Hello?” she called out.

“Cheese it,” said the tough guy. “It's a human person!”

Christina bravely grabbed hold of the curtain and yanked it to the side.

“Oh my!”

She saw them.

Two little men. One in a top hat and tails. The other in a carpenter's smock. They were flinging shoe-polish lids and brass grommets at the cat.

“Dust 'em!” yelled the one in the smock.

The one in the top hat scoffed at that. “Oh, I don't think the situation calls for—”

Christina grabbed a broom and started swinging.

“Dust 'em!” screamed the tiny carpenter. “Dust 'em both! Now!”

The two trespassers (who had to be figments of Christina's cocoa-powered imagination) pulled out striped straws, bit off the tips, stuck the straws into their mouths and blew.

A cloud of sparkling purple powder surrounded Christina and the cat.

The alley cat stopped hissing.

Christina smiled and felt drowsy.

The last thing she heard before drifting off to sleep was the tiny carpenter person saying, “Pixie dust. Works every time.”

Across town, over where people had so much money they sometimes used it for tissue when they blew their noses, Donald McCracken, the lanky Scotsman with the carrot-colored hair, was visiting a squat pastry chef named Pierre who was about to open a brand-new bakery.

“
Sacré bleu! Mon
grand opening is tomorrow morning!” sighed Pierre. Since he was French, it sounded very dramatic. “Monsieur McCracken, kindly allow me to tell zee truth: I do not know how to bake! I do not know how to whip zee butter! I do not even know how to crack zee eggs or turn on zee oven! I am, how you say, a fake! A fraud! A French phone-knee!”

He brought his wrist to his forehead for extra drama.

“Don't you worry,” said McCracken as he set two small boxes on the stainless-steel kitchen countertop.

“Oh, why did I open a bakery when I cannot bake even a potato?” the chef bellowed. “I am so stupid!” When he said it, it sounded like “stew-peed.” He was, after all, French.

“I told you not to worry, lad,” said McCracken, flicking open the little brass latches on the fronts of his crates. “Tomorrow morning, you'll be makin' money hand over fist. Your tarts shall be so tasty, your cream puffs so puffy, you'll have customers lined up around the block.”

“How can zees be?” asked the chef. “Did you not hear me? I cannot cook!
Oui
, I am French, but I cannot even make French toast! Soon, zey will come. Zey will come and take away my toque!”

“Your what?”

“My poofy white chef hat! The French ambassador will come and he will say I am not worthy to wear zee poofy white hat!”

“Relax, Pierre. Relax. Ye need worry no more.”

“But I love my poofy hat.”

McCracken had more work to do in other shops around town, so he changed the subject.

“Did you set out all the ingredients as I instructed?”

“Oui, oui.”
The chef pointed to bags and tins and bottles lined up on the countertop. “Butter. Eggs. Flour. Sugar. Salt. More butter. Milk. Vanilla extract. Almond extract. Butter. Butter extract. We French? We like zee butter. The more butter zee better zee batter.”

“And did ye start the job?”

“
Oui.
I pour the flour into zee bowl. Should I do more?”

“No. Go home. Come back in the morning when ye'll be sellin' the finest baked goods anyone has ever tasted. Better than anything they be baking back in Paris.”

“You are certain of zees?”

“Aye. All ye need do is pay me my fee.”

“
Merci
, Monsieur McCracken. Merry Christmas!
Joyeux Noel!
”

The happy chef handed McCracken a flour sack stuffed with money.

“Ah, cash,” said McCracken, peeking inside the bag. “Everybody's favorite Christmas gift.”

The purring cat was sitting on Christina's lap.

Christina was sitting on a stool near the workbench. Her head felt kind of wobbly. So did her stomach. Her vision was all sorts of blurry because her eyes felt wobbly inside their sockets, too.

She was slowly waking up, drifting out of her daze.

“Well, hello there!” said the skinny little man in the top hat who, apparently, had been sitting on the edge of the work table waiting for Christina to wake up. He stood. Dusted off his trousers. Smiled.

“You … you're …”

She didn't know what to say. Christina had never seen a nine-and-a-half inch man in a top hat and tails before. She also didn't know if she was still asleep and having a nightmare. She'd had a turkey sandwich with mayo and then the cocoa. Cocoa and mayo may have made her
loco
.

“You're a little person,” she said when her mouth finally caught up to her brain.

“Yes, indeedy. Nine and three-quarter inches tall to be precise.”

“And it's all solid muscle, every inch,” said his friend who flexed both his arms to prove his point. His arms ballooned up. Christina vaguely remembered hearing somebody call this gruff little guy “Nails.” Made sense. He wore a carpenter's apron and had a tiny nail perched in his lips like a toothpick. In fact, he almost looked like a miniature version of Grandpa's motorized mannequin in the shop window.

Christina forced her eyes to focus.

“This is a bad dream, right?” Christina said.

Suddenly, the gruff guy hammered her nail—her fingernail.

“Ow!”

“Nails!” said the little guy in the top hat as Christina sucked her finger to take away the sting.

“You feel that?” asked Nails.

“Yes!”

The carpenter shrugged, holstered his hammer with a twirling flourish. “Guess we ain't no dream then, huh?”

His friend shook his head in dismay. “Honestly, Nails. That was rather rude.”

“So sue me.”

“So, what are you guys supposed to be?” said Christina. “Santa's elves or something?”

“Hey, watch it, little lady,” snapped Nails. “Just because I gave you a wake-up whack don't mean you get to call us names!”

“Technically,” said the other one, who sounded very proper and refined, “we are brownies, not elves.”

“Brownies?” said Christina. “Like the Girl Scouts?”

Nails threw up his arms. “Ya see? We always get that. ‘Brownies. Just like the Girl Scouts.' Why? Because nobody knows their legends and lore no more. They can't tell a brownie from an elf from a sprite from a—”

“Okay,” said Christina feeling wide awake, “this is now officially weird. I'm sitting on a stool talking to … brownies?”

“Yes indeedy,” said the smart-looking fellow who had a miniature pair of glasses perched on the tip of his pointy nose. “Perhaps a brief history lesson regarding magical creatures is called for. You see we brownies are good-natured spirits.”

“Speak for yourself,” snapped Nails.

The smart one pressed up on his spectacles, cleared his throat, and continued. “We brownies are good-natured spirits—present company excluded—who come to finish work left undone by humans.”

“We're like a good closer in baseball,” said Nails. “We only come in to finish up what somebody else has already started.”

“Like the shoes you finished for Grandpa?” said Christina.

“Precisely,” said the skinny one. “And when we complete our task, we expect nothing in return, save, perchance, a bowl of cream or a slice of cake.”

“Oh. I had cocoa. It had whipped cream on top. …”

“We know,” said Nails. “It spilled. During the catfight. Nearly scorched my toes. Stained my boots. They're suede, you know.”

Christina glanced at the little man's shoes. In front, they curled up like a genie's lamp. She wondered how many toes he had in there and whether the toes were curled, too.

“Sorry about that,” she said.

“Yeah, well, suede stains don't come out easy.”

“They do if you prevent the moisture from soaking through the nap,” said his scholarly friend. “Blot it, my good fellow. Blot it immediately!”

“Yeah, right, Professor. As if I got nothin' better to do here than blot.”

“Uhm,” said Christina, as Nails dabbed at his boot with one of Grandpa's soiled rags, “what exactly are you guys doing here?”

“Well,” said the skinny one, “we are currently on the run from—”

“Whoa,” said Nails, tossing away the rag. “Chill, Professor. I'll field this question.”

“Very well.” The elegant brownie bowed slightly. “Proceed, my good man. Proceed.”

Nails looped his hands underneath the straps of his carpenter's apron. “Ahem. We two brownies are here to, uh, grant unto you your, you know, your fondest Christmas wish!”

“Nails?” said the professor, sounding miffed. “Honestly!”

“Sorry,” said Nails. “Couldn't resist. Saw that in a movie once. That bit about granting Christmas wishes and whatnot. Always wanted to say it. …”

Christina's face saddened. “Well you two can't grant my Christmas wish. I don't care if you really are fairy-tale brownies or how much magical purple powder you blow up my nose. Nobody can make my wish come true.”