Page 28 of The Christmas Stroll

Tonight, the long table held no plate of gingerbread going stale in a no-man’s-land, because tonight there was no no-man’s-land. Only nine people who had given a great many winter evenings to this weekend over the years, and who had tonight come out in the cold to find out whether those evenings had been wasted.

Six volunteers. Three retailers and now all of them turned toward the door when it opened, though none of them, Maggie noticed, looked especially pleased to see her.

Needless to say, Marianne and Helen had not been invited.

Maggie hung her coat, took a seat at the head of the table and Will slid into the chair at her left.

Eleanor Whitmore did not wait for a welcome. She had run the caroler schedule for eleven years with the upright bearing of the school principal she had once been, and now she held up two printed sheets, one in each hand, at arm’s length, like a woman weighing two dead fish.

“Margaret,” Eleanor said, and her patience was audible, and audibly running out. “I have my quartet - four people who have rehearsed since October and who trust me to tell them where to stand and what to sing. This sheet says they open with ‘Silent Night’ at the Pacific Club. This one says they open with ‘Joy to the World’ at the bank steps. We cannot be in two places, singing two songs, on two corners, at once. So I would very much like someone to tell me which of these is real. Tonight. Before I lose a soprano.”

“The bank steps,” Maggie said. “Confirmed. ‘Joy to the World.’ The song list is finalized and you’ll have it in your hand before you leave this room,.”

“And by whom is it being finalized?” asked Eleanor pointedly.

Maggie held her gaze. “By me.”

A retailer from the cobblestone row leaned forward, a heavyset man who Will had described as the most reasonable person on the island. “And what about the carriage?” he said. “Because the horse line on this sheet comes down Centre right past my door, at the exact same hour the vendor tents are meant to be loading in on the other sheet. Somebody’s telling the man with the horses one thing and the woman with the tents another, and they are going to arrive at the same corner at the same minute, and I would prefer not to be standing in the middle of it.”

“You won’t be,” Will told him. “Carriage at two-thirty, Centre Street. Vendor load-in finishes at two. Half an hour clear between them. I’ll write it down for both.”

Down the far end of the table someone muttered, not softly enough, “Might help if the two people actually in charge showed up?”

And someone beside him did not bother to mutter at all. “I heard they had a proper falling-out. Big one. Not talking at all these days.”

Nobody answered. Nobody agreed. But every person at that table looked for one instant at the two empty chairs at either end where Helen and Marianne always sat, and then looked away.

Maggie let it pass. She had learned long ago that you did not chase the comment; you fixed what was underneath it instead. So she worked. She went down the conflicts one at a time, and kept her sentences short, because short was what a rattled room could bear.

The caroler placement, the carriage route, the vendor windows. The lantern procession, which Maggie gave, flatly, a single direction - top of Main via Willow to the harbor, seven o’clock and no other version existed as of tonight.

Every time a hand went up she gave it a number and a time and a note that she was inputting to the laptop as she spoke, so that everyone could see the master schedule assembling itself in real time.

It was working. But it was also not enough, and she could feel that too. She saw it in the glances that went round the table between the old volunteers, the ones who had done fifty committees and knew that a tidy schedule was the least of what made the Nantucket Stroll, the Nantucket Stroll.

Will took the sharper questions. He seemed to know which ones were really complaints and which were fear wearing a complaint’s coat, and he defused the first kind with a joke and answered the second kind straight.

When the cobblestone man reiterated with an edge, that he wasn’t going to spend Saturday refereeing, Will said, “Neither am I and I grew up doing exactly that, so let me tell you, refereeing horses is the easy part,” and got a laugh and the edge went out of the man’s shoulders.

When a volunteer asked whether the whole event might just be smaller this year, quieter, Will said, “It’s the Stroll. On this island, ‘quieter’ isn’t a plan, it’s a threat,” and even Eleanor almost smiled.

But once, in the middle of it, Maggie looked up from the laptop to find something to confirm with him, and caught him watching her across the corner of the table. He wasn’t smiling then. He held her eyes for a second, and something passed between them that for once had no joke in it, and she understood it completely, because she was thinking the same thing.

This isn’t a fix, this is a band-aid.

Maggie looked back down at the list and kept working.

The meeting wound down at last, not resolved so much as exhausted into order, and they sent everyone away with a printed sheet and a promise.

Eleanor took hers, read it twice at arm’s length and finally, at the door, folded it once and put it in her bag, which Maggie counted as a victory.

The room emptied out into the cold, and the front doors thudded, until it was only the two of them among the scattered agendas and the pillar candles guttering low in the windows.

Will stood and gathered a few of the abandoned sheets, tapping them square, then set them down again.

“We need to resolve this thing once and for all,” he said, his voice unusually sombre. “Talk to them both and get it all in the open. Tonight.”

Chapter 22