Page 45 of The Christmas Stroll

Ellen Doyle’s niece, the meticulous one who counted everything twice. She had a clipboard of her own tucked under one arm, and she must’ve caught Lucy’s last words on the air, because she called out without being asked.

“It’s the smoothest public event I’ve ever seen,” Caroline said, and there was real feeling under it, the feeling of one who kept order for a living and knew how hard order was to keep. “Whatever you did. It shows.” Then she ducked back inside to her sea glass, her ivory and her twice-counted stock, and that Maggie realized that praise from a woman who counted everything twice, offered up unbidden into the snow - was about as high as praise went.

“There,” Lucy said, grinning. “That’s your verdict. Frame that one.”

Chapter 35

Finally, once darkness fell, the famous lantern procession came down Main.

It started at the top of Willow street, where the volunteers lit their lanterns one off the next until the whole line of them glowed, and then it moved down through the town, a slow river of warm light, children and grandparents and dogs in tartan and the college kids and the schoolteacher and half the island besides, boots crunching, breath clouding, the handbells going somewhere near the front with their bright shivering peal.

It came down past the wreath-hung lampposts and the fogged shop windows to Main, where the lantern star had been lit at last against the dark, blazing white over the wharf. There the whole procession pooled and stopped and turned toward the square stage they had fought so hard to re-open, and the crowd banked up under the falling snow to witness whatever came next.

What came next was Will, climbing the stage steps with the reluctance of a man being fed to the wolves.

He took the microphone off its stand and looked at it as though it might bite, and the crowd laughed before he’d said a word, because everyone on this island knew Will Callahan preferred to do his talking from behind a cafe counter with a muffin in his hand.

“So,” he began, and the speaker crackled as the square went warm and quiet. “I run a café. I serve coffee. Public speaking is well outside my job description.”

They laughed again, and he let them, and then he looked out over the lanterns and the snow and the upturned faces, and his voice changed, dropped into something truer.

“But here’s the thing about our beloved Christmas Stroll,” he said. “It’s not really about the lights, or the carriage, or the cocoa, or whether Santa gets his boat in on time - though God help us all if he doesn’t. It’s about this. All of us. Standing out in the cold on the first weekend of December because we’d rather be cold together than warm apart. That’s the extent of it. That’s Nantucket.” He turned the microphone in his hand.

Maggie stood at the edge of it with her cold cocoa forgotten in her hand and did not take her eyes off him.

“This is an island that empties out in the winter. The ferries thin, the summer people go home, the streets go quiet. And then, right when it would be easiest to just close the shutters and wait for spring, this town does the opposite. It lights every lamppost and hangs every wreath and hauls the whole community out into the snow to remind them that it’s still here. That this island belongs to the people who stay.” He smiled. “My dad used to say the Stroll was Nantucket’s way of proving it hadn’t gone to sleep. I think he was right. Usually was, but mostly quiet about it. Unlike my mother.”

Warmth moved through the crowd, the low affectionate sound a community makes when someone says the thing they’ve all felt and never found the words for.

“But none of this happens by itself,” Will went on. “It happens because two women in particular have spent the better part of their lives making it happen. Every corner, every hour, every wreath on every lamppost - that’s them. Helen Sullivan and Marianne Callahan.” He gestured to where the two women stood together at the foot of the steps, and the crowd turned and found them and began to applaud, and both went very straight and pretended to be entirely unmoved. “They are, without any question, the strongest women I know.” He paused, and the corner of his mouth went. “And, it must be said, easily the most stubborn too.”

The square erupted.

They roared, the whole cold crowd in delighted laughter, because there was not a soul in the island who hadn’t heard some piece of it over the last few weeks - the two schedules, the notes through the fudge shop, the great silence between two grand dame chairs at either end of a committee table.

And here was Will saying it right out loud to their faces with the snow coming down, and it broke the last of the tension over the whole week the way his jokes always broke tension. Maggie laughed too, laughed with her hand over her mouth and tears in her eyes because she understood it better than anyone.

While Helen and Marianne, down at the foot of the steps, looked at each other and incredibly, laughed as well.

“I love them both,” Will said, when it had died down. “This whole island loves them both. So, thank you Helen and Marianne. From all of us. For every December of the last five decades.” He held the microphone out toward the steps. “Now I’m getting out of here before they change their minds about me. But I’d love it if they’d maybe say a few words too?”

Helen came up first. She took the microphone the way she took everything, as though it had been waiting for her, and she looked out over the crowd and the lanterns, and for a moment she didn’t speak.

Then she began, “My late husband volunteered me for our first Stroll together the year we married. I was terrified. I thought if a single wreath hung crooked the whole island would know I wasn’t up to it.” A murmur of warmth. “And then I discovered that the island didn’t much care about the wreaths. What it cared about was that we’d all come out into the cold together, one more time, before the dark of the year. That’s what this has always been. Not a performance. A gathering.” Her eyes moved, and found Marianne beside her, and stayed there. “And you cannot hold a gathering alone. Nobody has never once run this weekend alone.”

She handed the microphone across to her friend without another word. Marianne took it. She was not a woman given to sentiment and everyone knew it, and so when she spoke the frankness of it landed harder than any theatrical flourish could have.

“Helen and I met fifty-one years ago,” she said. “We were young and we were foolish and we thought we were going to do grand things in the world. And instead we did this.” She looked out at the lanterns, the snow, the star blazing over the wharf. “Which turns out to have been the grand thing all along. I forgot that for a little while this year. I let something come between us that ought never to have been let.” She did not explain it, and no one asked her to. “But a great friendship is a load-bearing thing. You can lean the whole weight of your worst self against it and it holds. Mine held. Helen held it.” Her voice roughened, and she covered it with briskness, the way she covered everything. “So. Merry Christmas, all of you. Go home before you freeze. The handbells close apparently, whatever I may think about it.”

The crowd laughed and clapped and the handbells rang out as if on cue, bright over the harbor.

Maggie stood in the snow with her whole chest gone tight and her eyes swimming, and she didn’t try to stop it this time. She had held it together last night in the kitchen and on the café step, and now she let the tears come, warm on her cold cheeks, watching two stubborn old women she loved stand side by side on a stage they’d nearly lost.

A tissue appeared in front of her face.

“Second one today,” Lucy said, not looking at her, holding out the packet. “You’re worse than I am, and I cry at ferry departures.”

Chapter 36