Page 36 of The Christmas Stroll

Least of all from the daughter who always left.

“Oh Mom…” Maggie said then, and went to her.

Chapter 28

The frost had come down hard overnight, glazing the cobbles of Main Street so that the whole town seemed dipped in glass. Maggie walked it with her notebook open in one mittened hand, and her breath going up white ahead of her.

Beside her, Will carried two paper cups of Winterstreet hot chocolate, one in each hand, the steam curling up between them into the cold, and every few steps he held hers out so she could take a mouthful without breaking stride.

The garland along the storefronts wore a fresh dusting of snow, and the fairy lights strung through it burned gold against the pewter morning, and above the whole length of the street the great WELCOME banner frame still remained empty against the sky, waiting.

“The pharmacy,” Maggie pointed out, “has moved their display table three inches into the pedestrian zone. Again.”

“Three inches.” Will looked at the offending table, laden with bayberry bundles and little tin lanterns, sitting exactly where it was not supposed to sit. “You measured that?”

“I estimated it. Professionally.” Maggie clicked her pen and made a note. “Tomorrow there’ll be nine hundred people trying to funnel past that corner toward the wharf and every last one of them will catch a hip on the edge of it, and by four o’clock the whole table will have migrated to the middle of the street and someone’s grandmother will go down like a bowling pin.”

“You have a dark imagination, Sullivan.”

“I plan for the grandmothers. It’s part of the job description.” She took the cup he offered, drank, and handed it back. The cocoa was thick and dark and dusted with something that caught on the tongue after the sweetness, a pinch of sea salt, which she recognized from the chalkboard in his café.

They came to a lantern post where a strand of warm white lights had worked loose at the top and hung down swinging in the harbor wind. Will handed Maggie both cups without discussion, reached up, hooked the strand back over its nail and pressed it fast with his thumb, until the whole post went steady and bright again.

He took his cup back. She ticked the line off. It was, she thought, the fourth time that morning they had done some version of this without a word passing between them about who would do what, and she chose not to examine how easily that synchronicity came.

“My mother,” Will said, resuming, “voluntold me at seven this morning to walk to the bank steps and personally confirm the caroler positions before eight. In person. On foot. As though the corner might have wandered off overnight.”

Maggie grinned. “And had it?”

“I stood on the bank steps in the dark like a fool and confirmed to no one that a set of stone steps was in fact still located where stone steps have been for a hundred and forty years, and texted her the good news.” He drank. “This is my life now. I run a café and confirm the ongoing existence of municipal architecture for my mother.”

“You’re very good at it though.”

“I have a gift.”

“Truly.”

They stopped outside the hardware store, where the wreath on the door had caught a night’s worth of snow and gone lopsided under the weight of it. Will brushed it clean with the flat of his hand, snow sliding off in soft sheets, and knocked it level, and inside the fogged glass the man behind the counter raised a mug at them.

Maggie raised her cocoa back at him.

“So,” she said, and she kept her eyes on the notebook. “Last night …”

She felt rather than saw him settle a fraction, the way a man does when he knows a snowball is incoming.

Maggie went on, and heard her own voice go level and clipped, the register she used for load-in windows and vendor manifests. “The carolers. ‘Joy to the World’ to open on the bank steps. Helen’s agreed to begin the lantern procession at the top of Main and let it run down to the harbor at seven, and she’s - “ she chose the word “ - accepted the harbor walk lights. No further discussion. That’s her position. It’s a good position. It’ll work.”

“Good,” Will said.

“How’s Marianne’s … take?”

“Reviewed.” Will looked down the street, past the empty banner frame, toward the wharf where the lantern star stood dark against the grey, waiting for its moment. “She’s … reconsidered a few things. The carriage timing lines up with yours now. She’s also fine with ‘Joy to the World.’ She had opinions about the emotional arc, which I will spare you.” A muscle moved along his jaw, there and gone, and then the wry line came up over it. “She wanted me to relay that she remains ‘available to consult, should the committee so require.’ Consider it curated.”

“Curated,” Maggie repeated.

“A service I provide where warranted.”

There it was - the tone she had learned to watch for, the careful territory neither of them stepped into.