Page 42 of The Christmas Stroll

Marianne then turned to Will. She pointed the red stylus across the square at the stage power panel bolted to the far wall, and her voice went crisp and businesslike and entirely without an edge, the voice of a woman with a problem in her hands and no time for anything else.

“Get me the site manager,” she ordered. “We need to find out where they’ve put the secondary seating risers, because if we do need to reroute crowd-flow through this square we’ll want them repositioned before two, and I am not doing it after the boat comes in.”

She was already moving, already pulling the tablet cover back open, walking toward the power panel in the same direction Helen had gone.

Marianne did not appear to be following Helen.

She was simply, Maggie noted, going the exact same way.

Chapter 32

Maggie drew Will back to the edge of the square, near the chestnut cart, out of the current of the crowd, and the two of them stood with their backs to a lantern post.

There was nothing left for them to do, but wait.

Helen came back first. She came down Washington Street with her scarf still flying and her chin still up, and she was holding a single sheet of paper away from her body the way you hold something you do not want to crease.

Even from across the square Maggie could read the stamp on it, red and official, and the expression on her mother’s face; the expression of a woman who had walked into an office at eleven thirty and walked out at eleven fifty with the entire matter resolved and no intention of explaining how.

She did not gloat. Helen Sullivan never gloated. She simply arrived at the padlocked gate and held the stamped permit up against the laminated notice, side by side, so that the difference between the two could speak for itself, and she waited.

Marianne meanwhile, had not stopped moving the whole time either.

Maggie had watched Will’s mother work the far side of the problem with the site manager’s radio in one hand and the tablet in the other, and it was a sight to behold - the merchant tents’ load-out rerouted, the secondary seating risers hauled round and repositioned along the square’s north edge, the stage power pulled off the dead panel and run clean through the secondary one.

All of it done and dusted before Helen’s stamped permit had even come back into the square. Neither woman radioed the other. Neither woman consulted the other. Neither so much as glanced at the other’s half of the work.

Helen fixed the paperwork and Marianne fixed the ground, each certain she was carrying the whole thing alone, and between them, without a single word passing, the entire crisis was magically resolved in their hands.

The site manager came with the key. The padlock turned. The chain slithered off the links and the gate swung wide, and the stage crew flowed in with their coils of cable and gaffer tape, and the square exhaled and kept going, and no one in the thickening crowd knew a thing had ever been wrong at all.

The carolers filed past in their top hats and bonnets to take the steps for their sound check. The cocoa vendor’s line had doubled. The smell of mulled cider drifted over from the cart on the corner, cinnamon and clove and apples warm on the cold air, and mixed with the woodsmoke and the roasting chestnuts until the whole square smelled like every Christmas Stroll Maggie had ever had on this island stacked one on top of another.

She noticed then at the foot of the stage steps, watching the crew set the risers, stood the two old friends. Side by side. Neither one had crossed to the other. They had simply ended up there, the way water finds its level, both of them facing the stage rather than each other, hands folded, watching the setup resume as though it were the only thing worth watching in the world.

It was Marianne who broke the deadlock.

“Those older lights …” she murmured, her gaze on the string of warm white bulbs the crew was running along the stage railing, her voice stripped of every sharp edge it had carried for weeks, “do look better actually.”

Helen turned. She looked at Marianne for a long beat, the length of all those years of friendship, while Maggie held her breath the way she’d held it in the kitchen the night before.

“I don’t know,” Helen said at last. Slowly. As though the words cost something and she was paying it. “Maybe we could modernize them. Next year.”

Marianne didn’t answer. She looked at the stage a moment longer, and then without a word, walked off.

Maggie’s heart dropped as Helen watched her go with the beginnings of an expression she couldn’t quite name.

But then Marianne came back. Back holding two paper cups of mulled cider, steam curling off both of them and she held one out to Helen without looking directly at her.

Helen took the cup and Maggie saw the whole of her mother soften around it, her shoulders coming down out of fighting stance.

She glanced sideways at Will. He was watching his mother, and there was something working behind his easy face, an emotion he wasn’t bothering to hide.

And the two old friends stood there at the foot of the steps drinking cider in a silence that had nothing armored in it at all, the steam rising past their faces into the cold, while as they drank, the quartet on the stage found their pitch and the first notes came down over the square, sweet and full and rising -

Joy to the world.

Maggie and Will remained at the lantern post and did not move an inch, as they watched it all happen.