Page 29 of The Christmas Stroll

On Maggie’s return to the house, Helen stood at the kitchen table with a half-assembled wreath in front of her, a wire ring and a heap of fresh greens and a spool of floral wire, her hands busy binding a sprig of cedar to the frame.

“Well,” her mother said. She set down the cedar and turned to Maggie, her eyes were bright and hard. “I understand there was a meeting.”

Maggie hung her coat on the middle hook. “There was.”

“An emergency meeting. Of the Stroll committee. To which I was not invited, and about which I again heard from Evelyn Price, in my own front hall, this time over a plate of her almond bread.” Helen’s chin came up. “Do you have any idea how that feels, Margaret? To be told by a neighbor that your own daughter has convened your committee behind your back? I have run that weekend for fifty years.” Her voice tightened. “Tell me at least that she wasn’t there. Tell me you didn’t sit her down at that table while I was left out in the cold.”

“Marianne wasn’t there,” Maggie confirmed. “Neither were you. That was the point.”

“Still … betrayed like this by my own flesh and blood!”

“Mom.” Maggie pulled out a chair but did not sit in it, she just stood behind it with her hands on the back. She was tired, but she had promised Will, even though she did not have it in her tonight to be managed into a fight about who had wounded whom. “I’m not doing any more drama. Can I just tell you what’s going on, and then you can be as angry with me as you like.”

Something in her tone seemed to reach Helen, because she closed her mouth.

“I spoke to Dorothy Hatch earlier,” Maggie said. “She’s thinking of pulling out of the Stroll this year. Off the merchant map, out of the program. She’s had three regular customers call this week to ask which schedule is real, and she couldn’t tell them, because she doesn’t know, because there are two.” She let that sit. “Dorothy Hatch, Mom.”

Helen’s hands went still on the greens.

“And there’s a travel writer,” Maggie went on. “The one from the Boston Times who does that nice two-page spread every December, the one you cut out and keep. She emailed Dorothy wanting to confirm that the event is actually going ahead before she pitches the piece, because - her words - she’s heard about the rumored chaos surrounding the Stroll this year.”

Helen did not move at all now. The carol played on behind her, low and sweet, ironically about faithful friends who are dear to us.

“So we called the an emergency meeting tonight to fix what we could,” Maggie said. “And,” her grip tightened on the chair. “The whole committee is also deeply concerned. Not so much about the lights or the schedule but about you. About the two of you.”

Helen drew a breath and Maggie watched her reach, instinctively, for the stubbornness. “Marianne is the one who - ”

“No.” Maggie said it flat and even. “Marianne rerouted the carriage, Marianne moved the carolers, Marianne wants the LEDs. You keep telling me that. And every bit of it might be true. But it takes two to tango, Mom and you know it does so I’m asking you again. What really happened?”

Helen straightened. She was very upright now, and her voice went cold and courteous, the voice that had run a family, various committees and a household for decades.

“You are interfering,” she said, “in something you don’t fully understand. You’ve been here three days. You don’t know what’s happened. You don’t know the half of it.”

“You’re right.” Maggie held her ground. “I don’t. Because you won’t tell me. I’m trying to help Mom, but I’m working blind so I need you to hear one thing while I’ve got the nerve to say it.” She took the breath. “You and Marianne Callahan have stood on that wharf every single Christmas of my life and told everyone that the Stroll is about the island. About this community, about the people who stay - and that it’s about all of us standing shoulder to shoulder in the cold together, celebrating everything that makes Nantucket special.” Her voice did not rise. It didn’t need to. “But right now, the two of you are making it about you. Making a weekend that belongs to this community into a private quarrel between two women who won’t say why. And it’s hurting everyone. You and Marianne included.”

The kitchen went quiet. There was only the carol left, turned down almost to silence, the tick of the radiator and the green smell of the cedar on the table between them.

Still, Helen did not answer. She turned slowly, away from her daughter, toward the window over the sink where candles glowed in the neighboring houses and the snow lay blue in the yard, and she put one hand flat on the counter, and remained there, saying nothing at all.

Maggie knew that silence. She had grown up on Helen’s silences, and she knew the difference between the kind that was armor and the kind that was something else.

This was the other kind.

It was as close to yielding as her mother had ever come in her life. Maggie recognized it, but knew all the same that it was not enough because Helen still wouldn’t admit what was really going on.

She looked at her mother’s straight back and thought about fifty years of Christmas Strolls, the tuba player and the boat hook, two ribbons on the tree, and two old friends standing on the wharf at the end of it every single year with their arms around each other.

Something had come between them that was strong enough to erase all that history, strong enough to make two of the most stubborn women on the island rather burn the whole weekend down than make amends.

And Maggie thought - watching the snow fall past the window beyond her mother - until she knew what it truly was, she would be fixing the wrong thing every single time.

Chapter 23

Across town, in the gray-shingled house with the plain green wreath and no bow, Will found his mother in the room she called the office and everyone else called the war room.

There was a cork-board the size of a door on one wall, dense with various sprinted schedules and sticky notes, and pinned dead center at eye level, a laminated map of downtown Nantucket with the Stroll route drawn on it in Marianne’s own hand; the carriage line and the vendor stations and the caroler corners all marked in the small precise capitals she’d used on Will’s school lunchboxes decades ago.

Her reading glasses lay folded on the desk beside a cup of tea gone cold and skinned over. Marianne sat with her back straight and did not get up when he came in.