“Thank you.” Okay, for some reason this infant was trying to pick her up. Whatever. She had problems, so later for him.
Trudy zeroed in on the boxes that backed up against the MacGuffin shelf. Dolls this time, with big heads and miniskirts and too much eye makeup. Too bad Leroy wasn’t a girl; she could have loaded him up with pop-tarts. But no, he had to have a violent, antisocial ’Guffin.
“Men.” She put her shopping bag down again and began to take the dolls off the shelf. Over the tops she could see Nolan restocking Fantastic Fours. He shook his head at her, probably disgusted she was flirting with an infant like Reese, and she turned away to see the infant looking at her, confused.
“Men?” he said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“What?” Trudy said, stacking doll boxes on the floor. “Oh, not you. My nephew, Leroy. He’s five and he wants a Major MacGuffin doll, and of course, I can’t find one.”
“Yeah, you had to shop early for those,” Reese said, sounding sympathetic. “So I guess you haven’t seen one here?”
“I would have shopped early if I’d known his father wasn’t going to get him one,” Trudy said, exasperated. “But since his father told me he was going to, I didn’t.”
“So what are you doing over here?” Reese frowned, looking at the dolls she was taking down.
“I’m looking for a misplaced MacGuffin. This place is pretty sloppy, and I’m hoping there’s one stuck at the back of a shelf someplace because if there isn’t, I’m screwed.” She took the last box down and faced another empty shelf.
On the other side, Nolan looked serious as he put back the last of the Fantastic Four boxes. He couldn’t possibly care that she was talking to Reese. Unless he was one of those guys who didn’t want something until somebody else wanted it. He hadn’t seemed like that kind of guy.
He’d seemed pretty much perfect: smart, funny, kind, thoughtful …
Ignore him, she told herself, and started to put the boxes back. Okay, suppose I was hiding a toy so I could come back and get it later, maybe when I had more money. I found the last MacGuffin, but I didn’t have enough to pay for it, so I needed to hide it. The first thing I’d do is go to another row of shelves so nobody who wanted one would trip over it accidentally.
Nolan came around the end of the shelf and started to say something and then saw all the doll boxes on the floor. “Great.”
Trudy ignored him to smile at Reese and then picked up her bag to go look in a different aisle.
“So no MacGuffin,” Reese said. “Really sorry about that.”
“Yep,” Trudy said, and then stopped when she caught another glimpse of the pink confetti-patterned box sticking out of Reese’s shopping bag. “What is that?”
He looked down. “This? It’s some nail polish doll my niece wanted.”
Nail polish doll? Trudy reached down and pulled the box out of the bag. “Oh, my God,” she said, looking closer at the Pepto-Bismol pink box that said: Twinkletoes! in silver sparkly paint. “This doll is twenty-five years old!”
“I think it’s a reissue,” Reese said, sounding confused as he tried to take it back.
“Is the box mint?” Nolan said, and Reese frowned at him and tugged on the box again.
“A reissue.” Trudy held on to the box. Her sister would have a heart attack if she knew they were making these again. She brought the box closer to see through the clear plastic. Yep, it was the same pouting blonde bimbo, Princess Twinkletoes, and there at the bottom next to Twinkletoes’ fat little feet was the same pink plastic manicure set with three heart-shaped bottles of polish—pink, silver, and purple—that had made Courtney’s six-year-old heart beat faster, the Hot Toy of 1981. “Where did you get this?”
Reese yanked the box from her hands and nodded to the next row. “Over there,” he said, sliding the box back into his bag. “There are a lot of them.”
Trudy rounded the corner to see the Twinkletoes shelf, crammed full of hot pink boxes. Evidently lightning did not strike twice; Twink was clearly not the Hot Toy of 2006. You get a little age on you and nobody wants you, Trudy thought. Well, unless you were Barbie. That bitch lasted forever. Trudy picked up a Twinkletoes box.
Reese came to stand beside her. “Your nephew wants a doll?”
“This is the doll my little sister never got,” Trudy said. And she could use some payback this Christmas.
“How old’s your little sister?”
“Thirty-one.”
“Oh.”
Trudy looked up at the confusion in his voice. “Courtney was supposed to get this the Christmas she was six, but my dad forgot. He told her it fell off Santa’s sleigh.”
“Uh huh,” Reese said, probably trying to picture her academic father talking about Santa.
“That was his line for whenever he forgot the Christmas presents,” Trudy said, thinking of Leroy, waiting at home for his MacGuffin. If she didn’t find a MacGuffin, would she be reduced to the “fell off the sleigh” line?
Never.