The Secret Life of Mrs. Claus Read Online Free

surgery.
    Then again, this was Pigtown.
    In historic Baltimore, these streets were home to stockyards and slaughterhouses, Irish and German immigrants. Later, the neighborhood got a big lift when people realized that Babe Ruth was born in a Pigtown home and raised here until he was ten.
    These days, the neighborhood’s big claim to fame was the stadium built at the old Camden Yards. When the Orioles had a night game, the stadium lights glowed in the sky and vendors set up their plywood sheets of orange and black shirts, caps, megaphones, and foam hands on corners, and traffic streamed into the streets, jamming intersections and parking lots. And the locals loved it, the frenzy surrounding their beloved “O’s,” pronounced “Ows.”
    Chalk on a board for me. But at least I was spared embarrassment in the mailing address, which was simply Baltimore, Maryland.
    I’d worked hard to lose my accent, and coming back to all this felt like a demotion—bumped from high school to third grade.
    This is temporary , I told myself. Temporary, temporary …my mantra. After the holidays I’d be feeling better, dancing again, taking the train to auditions for Broadway shows in New York instead of the bus to audition for the role of elf at Rossman’s new downtown department store.
    Cold wind swept down the street, and I pulled my coat closer.
    “Got cold last night,” the man with the watch cap said.
    “Really,” I agreed, while the woman in the puffy down coat stared hard down the street, as if willing the bus to come immediately and remove her from this inane conversation.
    A strong-willed woman, that one, summoning a bus like that. I blinked in wonder as the frame of the Pratt Street bus lumbered toward us.
    The three of us shuffled on the sidewalk, jockeying for position as the bus pulled up to the curb. I teetered carefully in my heels as the side of the bus cruised close, its colorful billboard rolling past.
    What was all that red? A cartoon drawing of a wild-eyed redhead, a vixen glowering over the copy:
    She’s got him in a squeeze. Torture or terror?
    WATCH OLIVIA , THE NUTCRACKER
    Premieres Tuesday at 9 on BigTime Cable
    I reeled back, stumbling in my heels. Olivia?
    This was Bobby’s show?
    The impact of seeing a caricature of myself along with my own name on the side of a bus was too much. I went down, my left shoe slipping off as my bottom landed on the cold pavement.
    “You okay?” Mr. Watch Cap asked, pausing by the bus door.
    I sat there staring at the poster, knowing that I wasn’t okay at all. Not with Bobby stealing my name and making me into a caricature soon to be frequenting buses and print ads. “This is not okay,” I said sternly as I pressed my shoe to my chest in horror. Not okay for the lying ex to take my name and my red hair and exploit me as some villainous shrew.
    “C’mon, hon. You’ll be okay.” The watch-cap man extended a hand, and I let him help me up, my eyes fixed on the horror.
    I wobbled to my feet and staked out the billboard as if it were my opponent in a wrestling match.
    Did the boy have a creative bone in his body? Could he at least have taken some creative license and changed a few details of my life?
    “Not o-kay.” With each syllable, I banged the heel of my shoe against the poster. Surely the stiletto would cut through the poster like a knife, then I could rip it up, shred it off with my fingernails.
    “Hey, there. You don’t want to be doing that.” The man stepped away from me, toward the safety of the bus steps. “You coming?”
    With as much dignity as I could muster I put the ad behind me and waddled onto the bus. Click-thomp, click-thomp.
    All the grace and finesse of a professional dancer.
    With the demeanor of a man accustomed to the shoeless, the toothless, the homeless, the bus driver slanted his eyes at me in annoyance but didn’t bother to turn his head. The watch-cap man scrambled into a seat near the driver, giving me a suspicious look as I