"She can't really mean that."
"She absolutely means that. I watched her eject a man in a Gonzaga jacket twenty minutes ago for going to get a churro. He tried to argue. She called mall security on her headset. They came on a Segway."
"You're joking."
"I wish I were joking. It was the most exciting thing that's happened to me all week, and I work in an ICU."
I looked at Bryn. Bryn looked at me. She tapped her headset meaningfully.
"How much longer is the line?" I asked.
He looked at his phone. "Hard to say. Santa takes a break at two-thirty for fifteen minutes. We're about thirty families from the front. Call it forty-five minutes, if no one has a meltdown, which someone will."
I could have left. I want to be clear about that. Nobody would have handcuffed me. I could have ducked under the rope and walked off and let Bryn throw him out, and he would have been a man in an orange hat I had cost forty minutes of his life and a story I told at parties. But he had caught my brother's knight out of the air with one hand, and he had lied to a seventeen-year-old for me, and the woman in the sequined reindeer sweater was watching, and I have never been able to walk out on a debt.
"Why are you in a Santa line alone?" I asked.
"I'm not alone," he said. "I'm with you."
"Before me."
"I'm holding the spot for my sister. She's got twin four-year-olds. One of them had what we in the medical profession call a blowout. She took them both to the family bathroom by the food court twenty minutes ago and she hasn't come back, which is a bad sign." He held out the pretzel cup. "Pretzel bite? They're cold, but the cheese is still structurally sound."
I took one. It was terrible and I ate it anyway. "I'm Greta."