Page 22 of The Christmas Stroll

Winter Street was far quieter than Main, the foot traffic mostly gone ,and now the cedar-shingled fronts silvered under the street lamps.

The café at the bottom of it, even closed for the day, glowed like the one-lit window in a dark house.

Maggie saw it long before they reached it, the fog on the panes, warm bulbs strung round the frames and the wreath on the door, and she felt her boots slow on the cobbles as if by rote.

Will unlocked the door and much like Lucy’s, the bell over it gave a little brass double-note. It had been years - decades even - since since had been at Winterstreet Cafe, not since his dad Gerard, had been running it.

Maggie stopped just inside the entrance onto the worn wooden floorboards and forgot for a moment everything that had just happened in her mother’s house.

Will had done something different with the place since.

Something incredible.

The low ceiling with its dark beams she remembered from his father’s time, had been threaded end to end with garland, and all through the green were dried orange slices gone translucent amber, sprigs of silvery eucalyptus and pale seed heads Maggie couldn’t name, so that it almost felt like an entire … garden was suspended above the room.

Edison bulbs dropped on black cords over the mismatched tables, throwing low honeyed light that pooled on the wood, and every chair was scattered with moss-green colored cushions. The smell of the room was cedar first, then the deep mulled sweetness of something warmer going cold on the stove behind the counter, cinnamon, star anise and orange, and beneath it all, the buttery ghost of that day’s Flour Jar stollen.

“Will …” Maggie said, and it came out on an awed breath. He’d gone behind the long bar polished dark and gleaming and taken up a copper ladle, and now he dipped it into a still-steaming pot and poured warm cider into two copper mugs, the steam rising up past his face.

Above him, the chalkboard had been redone in his own looping hand, WINTER WARMERS across the top and a list beneath; mulled cider, cocoa with sea salt, hot buttered rum ‘for the brave’, drawn all round with little hand-sketched holly leaves.

“Sit anywhere,” he said. “Though the back corner’s warmest. Away from the door.”

Maggie remained turning in a slow circle, taking it all in. The greenery. The moss. The jars. The chalkboard holly.

A lot of hands had gone into this. Or more likely, one pair of hands over a lot of hours, standing on chairs, winding garland, cutting oranges thin enough to dry.

“This is … extraordinary,” she said. “I curate gala events for a living, Will. I’ve had decorators with vans and crews and budgets you wouldn’t believe, and I’ve never once stood in a room that feel like this. This feels - ” she searched for the right words, “ - like walking into Christmas.”

Will just shrugged. He carried the two mugs over and set one in front of her at the back corner table, and slid into the chair opposite.

“Had time,” he said. “Off-season. Long nights. You get to fiddling.”

“That’s not fiddling.” Maggie wrapped her cold hands round the warmed copper, and the cider smell rose up sweet and dark. “That’s somebody who cares. You don’t hang an entire winter garden off a beam because you had time. You do it because you love nature. Always have.”

Something again moved across his face and settled, but Will didn’t argue. He looked around his family café instead, the way you look at something you’d stopped seeing a long time ago until somebody else pointed it out.

Maggie took a sip. The cider was perfect, apples and clove and a low warmth of something stronger underneath, and it undid a knot behind her ribs she hadn’t known was pulled tight.

And then the whole sorry situation resurfaced.

“I made it all worse,” she said. “That’s the part I can’t get past. I came home to fix this, I’ve fixed a hundred things harder than this, and every single move I make just digs the two of them in deeper. Today’s wreath maneuver, yesterday’s hotel blind date. I try to engineer a peace, it holds for ninety minutes, and then the bloody Greek bistro guy blows it all up buying stamps.”

Will smiled. “I’ll give George your regards.”

Maggie shook her head. “Oh I know it’s not his fault. And I love George,” she insisted, referring to the proprietor of beloved Nantucket Greek bistro, Thalassa. She turned the mug a quarter-turn on the wood. “But they won’t tell us what actually happened, my mother and yours. Which is the worst part.”

Will listened. He didn’t jump in, didn’t reach for the fix, just let Maggie get to the end of her rant, and when she’d stopped he wrapped his own hands round his mug and looked at her with that steadiness she was starting to rely on far more than she was comfortable with.

“Sullivan,” he said. “Can I say something?”

“You’re going to anyway.”

“You can’t event-plan our mothers into getting over this.” He said it gently, no edge on it at all. “There’s no spreadsheet for this kind of thing. No contingency, no confirmed load-in time. You and I can put those two in the same warm room a hundred times, and it won’t move them an inch, because whatever happened is something we can’t bulldoze.”

Maggie felt her back go up. “So what, we do nothing? Doing nothing isn’t a strategy Will, not two days away from Stroll weekend. Doing nothing is how a beloved traditional Nantucket institution goes dark, and a fifty-year friendship dies of neglect.”

“In nature,” he said simply, “sometimes things need to burn before new growth can thrive.”