Page 32 of The Christmas Stroll

In a hurry, too afraid to look back.

Chapter 25

Downstairs, the living room had been given over entirely to Christmas, the way it was every year, and now it glowed.

The tree stood in the front window strung with the warm white lights her mother preferred, and the ornaments she’d collected across the decades; one of Lucy’s very first handmade lighthouses, a glass sailboat, a pewter star, and two knotted ribbons Maggie didn’t want to think about tonight.

A fire burned low behind the grate and threw its warmth across the rug, and the whole room smelled of pine, burning wood and the orange-clove pomander Helen renewed on the mantel every December first without fail.

Bing had gone silent for once. Into the hush came only the crackling of the fire, the wind moving somewhere out over the harbor, and the click of pine cones as Maggie’s mother set them, one at a time, into a wide silver bowl on the side table.

She was arranging them with tremendous concentration. Maggie knew that concentration too. It was the concentration of a woman who had decided she was not going to interfere, and who would arrange pine cones until dawn rather than ask a question.

Maggie set the bag down just inside the doorway. “Mom.”

Helen turned a pine cone a quarter-turn in the bowl, considered it, and still did not look up. “You’ve packed.”

“I really do need to get back to Boston.” Maggie heard herself reach for the clean flat sentences, the ones that left no seam to argue with. “The gala next week is at The Four Seasons, five hundred people, the florist’s let me down and the client’s already emailing. I need to go back and handle this. I don’t have a choice. I wish I did but …”

For a long moment, Helen said nothing at all. She lifted the last pine cone from the basket at her feet, turned it in her fingers, and set it into the bowl among the others.

Maggie heard the click of it against the silver, precise and deliberate, the sound of a full stop being placed at the end of a sentence.

“I understand.” Helen said it in the tone she’d been using since Maggie was old enough to hear the difference - the courteous one, the one with the frost laid along the underside of it; the one that meant her mother understood nothing of the kind and had no intention of pretending otherwise.

“You don’t, though.”

“I said I understand, Margaret.” Helen adjusted the bowl a half-inch to the left on the table, squaring it to some private line only she could see. “You have your life. In Boston. You’ve made that very clear over the years, and I would never dream of asking you to put an important client’s cocktail party second.”

“That’s not fair.”

Maggie stood in the doorway with the fire warming one side of her face and felt the last three days rise up in her at once; the Stroll committee confusion, the travel writer and her rumored chaos, how Will’s impossible blue eyes looked earlier as he caught her in the snow …

And now this, her mother arranging pine cones as if the arrangement of pine cones were the most pressing matter on the island.

“Mom, I have spent much of this week trying to hold things together. I’ve patched schedules, I’ve smoothed down half the merchants on Main Street, I’ve apologized to a choir director, tried to engineer a peace deal that didn’t even last the length of one plate of scones. I’ve done everything I know how to do.” Maggie’s voice didn’t rise; she wouldn’t let it. “But I can’t keep doing it. I can’t keep trying to fix something if you won’t tell me what actually happened between you and Marianne. Because I don’t even know what I’m fixing. These last few days I’ve been running around this island patching a hole I can’t see, and every single time I think I’ve got it, it opens up somewhere else, and you stand there and tell me it’s the lights, or the carriage, or that you know your own mind - and I believe you know your own mind, Mom, I’ve never once doubted it. But a fifty-year friendship does not suddenly die over warm or bright white lightbulbs, and you and I both know that.”

Helen’s back straightened. That lift and set of the shoulders that meant she was arranging herself for battle, and Maggie braced for the flat declarative volley that had ended every version of this conversation for the last few days.

Marianne rerouted the carriage. Marianne moved the carolers. Marianne, Marianne, Marianne.

But it didn’t come.

The fire settled with a soft collapse of embers. Outside, the wind came up off the harbor and pushed at the window and died away again. And Helen remained there with one hand resting on the edge of the silver bowl, looking at the pine cones she’d arranged, and when she finally spoke her voice had lost something Maggie had been hearing in it her whole life - that load-bearing certainty - so that the sentence came out thin and clipped and almost quiet.

“It seems Marianne was right after all,” she said dully.

It was the last sentence she’d expected. It wasn’t a sentence her mother had to Maggie’s knowledge, ever once produced in her decades of running committees and households and other people’s opinions.

Seems Marianne was right.

Helen had never conceded that Marianne Callahan could be right about the caterer, the swans, the ribbon, the color of a single bulb … anything.

“What the heck does that mean?” Maggie asked. “Right about what?”

Helen still didn’t answer.

She kept her hand on the rim of the bowl, and her eyes on the pine cones, and the fire painted the side of her face in low gold.