Page 34 of The Christmas Stroll

“I’m serious. Do you know what Evelyn drinks? A single-shot latte, oat milk, two-thirds full, in the same corner-table mug every morning, and if that mug is in the dishwasher she will wait. She’s waited forty minutes sometimes. She reads her book and drinks nothing and waits for the correct mug like a woman at a train station.” He spread his hands and grinned. “I couldn’t leave, even if I wanted to. There are probably bylaws by now.”

Marianne’s mouth did not move, but something behind it did.

“And the early morning boat crowd,” Will went on, warming to it, because it was easier than confronting the other thing that still remained unsaid. “Who’ve decided that blueberry muffins are a civic right. Not a menu item. A right. I ran out one morning last month, and a man who’s fished these waters for sixty years looked at me like I’d repealed the Constitution. He said, ‘Son, some of us have to be on the water before God’s awake.’ Over a muffin.” Will shook his head fondly, the hilarity of it still warm in his chest.

He’d loosened the room. He could feel it give, the way it always gave when he did this, and he sat back a little, pleased, expecting his mother to forget the question and come back at him about the Stroll meeting.

Instead Marianne set her schedules down. She squared them, laid her hands flat on top, then she folded them in her lap and sat back in her chair. The warm white lights along the cork board caught the silver running through her hair and made her look, for one strange second, like someone he didn’t quite know.

“That’s not an answer,” she said, basically echoing what he’d just said to her about what was going on with Helen. “When your father and I started Winterstreet,” she continued, “we did it together. Everyone forgets that now. They think it was always mine, the way everything on this island eventually becomes whoever’s still standing in it.”

Her hands moved to the poinsettia again. “But in the beginning it was the two of us, on our knees on that awful floor, scraping up whatever the last tenant had glued down.” She looked at the map behind him without seeming to see it. “It was all Gerard’s dream though. The café. The island. He came here on a summer job when he was twenty-four and never got over it. He used to talk about Nantucket the way other men talked about women.” Her jaw moved. “I went along with it because I loved him. That’s what you do at twenty-four. You go along.”

“Mom - ”

“Let me.” She said it without heat. “I’ve been not saying this for a very long time and I find I’ve run out of the strength it takes not to.”

Will closed his mouth.

Her voice dropped a register, went lower and flatter, the theatrical crispness draining out of it until what was left sounded almost ordinary. “I wanted to act,” she said. “Not church basement productions. Not the summer thing at the playhouse where they let the doctor’s wife do Blanche DuBois. I mean really act. In the city. I had a teacher who thought I could. I even had a place I might have gone.” She turned one hand over in her lap and looked at the palm of it. “But Gerard wanted Nantucket, and Nantucket doesn’t have that, so I told myself it was just a young woman’s foolishness, and I put it in a drawer, and I married your father. We came here, and instead I learned how to make a family and a life.”

The fire of the desk lamp lay along the side of her face. Behind her the little lights ticked against the cork.

“I wasn’t unhappy,” she added quickly. “I want you to understand that. I loved your father, so so much. I loved the café too by the end, most days. But there was still a resentment in me I never let out into the daylight, and I hated that, was ashamed of it, and I thought if I never spoke of it, it would starve.” She drew a breath. “And then he got sick. Right after you finished school. Right when you had your own dreams and your own drawer to put things in - or not, as the case may be.” Marianne’s hands tightened on each other. “And I looked at that boy who loved nature and wanted to study gardens and go be somebody in the world, and I heard my own mother’s voice, which was the only voice I had in a crisis. And my mother’s voice said, do your duty. Do not ask whether it’s fair. You just keep the family standing.”

Will wasn’t sure what to say to that.

“So I put it all on you.” His mother admitted it plainly. “Gerard’s dream, the café, the regulars, the suppliers. The thing I’d resented for all those years, I handed to you without once asking whether you wanted it. Because asking would have meant looking at the whole of it, and I couldn’t afford that. I had your father to nurse. I told myself that was the reason.” Her voice thinned. “I nursed him to the end and I let you carry everything, but I never asked. I never once asked you, Will, did I?”

Will had leaned forward somewhere in the middle of it, elbows on his knees, and he stayed like that, watching her, and he did not say any of the three or four things that came up in him, because none of them fit through the space her voice had opened.

“Where’s this coming from, Mom?” he asked at last. Gently. “Truly?”

“Answer the question,” Marianne said. “The one I just asked. What would you do if the cafe was not your responsibility?”

He sighed and looked at his hands hanging between his knees, the faint calluses from the machine and the trays, hands that had never once, now that he thought of it, planted anything in the ground for himself.

“Honestly? All I ever wanted,” Will replied, “was to make you happy.” He hadn’t planned to say that, but it came out level and true, and it landed in the middle of the desk between them.

But Marianne flinched from it as if he’d raised his voice, which he hadn’t. She looked away from him. Her eyes went back to the poinsettia, and then past it to the windowsill, where a row of other plants sat in the lamplight.

A jade plant gone leggy, a Christmas cactus with three buds that might or might not open, a little rosemary in a blue pot with the tips going brown. Will knew every one of them because he’d brought her every one of them, grown from props of his own versions.

But she killed them, one after another, with a devotion that was almost its own form of love. Marianne Callahan could organize a Christmas Stroll for three thousand strangers, but could not keep a living thing alive on her own windowsill.

“Look at what you’ve always given me,” she said gesturing to them, her voice so low Will had to lean in. “You’ve been trying to grow me a garden for years.” She pressed her lips together. “And I’ve killed everything.”

The Christmas cactus sat there with its three closed buds, looking innocent.

“Maybe Helen was right after all,” she whispered then.

Will frowned. ‘What do you mean?”

His mother’s hand moved a little, taking in the desk, the map, the lights, the whole silent house. “That is the root of it. The argument with Helen, like you asked about.” She sighed heavily. “It was never about the stupid lights, Will. I know you all think I’m a lunatic about those new-fangled LEDs, and perhaps I am, but that isn’t what it was. Not really.” She lifted her chin, and the old bearing came back into it and then went out again, which was worse to watch. “We were doing the merchant list last month, Helen and I. And I mentioned something about you doing an errand, the way I always do, the way - as we’ve just established - I’ve done your whole life. And Helen; Helen, who has known me fifty years, and was the only person on this earth I ever told any of it to, back when we were young and stupid and thought we’d both do grand things … Helen remarked that I leaned on you too hard. That since Gerard, I’d run my whole life through you. That maybe it wasn’t fair on you.” Marianne’s voice cracked on the word ‘fair’. “And she was right, Will. That’s the worst of it. She was right and she even said it kindly, one mother to another, but I could not stand it. I could not stand being seen.”

She paused.

“I’ve been furious ever since,” she continued then, “and I told myself I was furious at Helen. But I’m not. I’m furious at myself. For burdening you with someone else’s dream and calling it family. For fifty years of a drawer I never opened. For all of it.” His mother looked up at him then, and her eyes were bright, her jaw set. “Can you ever forgive me, Will? I don’t know that you can or even that you should. But I’m asking anyway.”