Page 48 of The Christmas Stroll

The house came up out of the dark, battery window candles burning in their absence and a wreath on the door and the porch light throwing a warm yellow square out onto the snow, and now Maggie felt the whole week settle in her chest at the sight of it.

Inside too smelled of pine - the fresh balsam wreaths Helen hung in the hallway, on every interior door, even the pantry, so that you couldn’t move through the house without catching green on the air. On the side table by the stairs, a silver bowl held clementines heaped up bright against a fistful of cinnamon sticks.

In the sitting room the fire had been banked low before they left and since burned itself down to a bed of soft orange coals. Now, it crackled and settled as the heat of the room found them, and above it on the mantle, in the plain silver frame, Ken Sullivan looked out at the two of his girls coming in from the Christmas Stroll with the same easy half-smile he’d worn every day of his life.

“Well,” Helen announced to the house at large, and began the business of getting out of her camel coat. “That’s that.”

“That is that,” Maggie agreed.

Helen got one arm free, misjudged the other and had to be helped, which Maggie did without comment, and if her mother’s balance was a touch grander than usual, and she hung the coat on the hook with the ceremony of a woman decorating a tree, well ...

Maggie unwound her mother’s red scarf from where it had bunched at the collar and hung it beside the coat, and Helen patted the holly brooch on her lapel to make sure it was still there, still level, and went off toward the sitting room and the fire with the upright, deliberate tread of a woman concentrating very hard on being entirely composed after too many ciders.

Maggie shrugged off her own coat, hung it on the middle hook and followed. She dropped into the armchair across from her mother’s, the one that had been her dad’s once, and the cushions took her in.

Helen settled herself with a cushion at her back and her stockinged feet up on the low stool, which she never did in company, and she was staring into the coals with a look Maggie couldn’t quite read.

She stretched her hands toward the fire. “Dorothy Hatch cornered me by the cider cart and told me it was the finest Stroll in thirty years.”

Helen sniffed. “Dorothy Hatch says that every year.”

“She was going to pull her shop off the map two days ago.”

“Dorothy Hatch threatens to pull her shop off the map every year.” Now Helen’s mouth twitched. “It’s a tradition. Like the handbells.”

“The handbells that Marianne wanted to move.”

Maggie said it lightly, testing, and watched her mother the way she’d watch a flame she wasn’t sure would catch.

Helen turned a clementine over in the bowl beside her chair without picking it up, and did not take the bait.

“The handbells stayed where they belong,” she said. “That’s the important thing.”

“And you and Marianne - ”

“Are in perfect agreement about the handbells, about a great many things, and about very few others. Which is exactly how it has always been and how it will continue to be, thank you.” She said this to the fire, in the courteous, final register that meant a door had closed and her mother had every intention of leaning against it. “We’ll be arguing about it all again next November. Now. I’d offer you a sherry but I suspect one of us has had enough for the both of us, and I’m not certain it’s you.”

Maggie laughed.

“It’s a strong cider, that cart. They always use too little clove and far too much alcohol.” Helen finally selected the clementine and began with tremendous dignity, to peel it, the skin coming away in a single curl and the sharp bright smell of it filling the warm air between them. “There. That’s better. Have one, they’re very good this year, the man on Straight Wharf gets them from Spain I think.”

Maggie took one but didn’t peel it, only held it, and looked at her mother across the low fire with her feet up and her coat off and the day gone out of her a little, softer around the edges than she let anyone see her.

She thought about all the different ways mother and daughter had done this over the years - sat in this room after a long day and talked about everything except the thing - the two of them fluent in it, a whole language built out of lists or pinecones or clementines and who was wrong about what.

And she thought about the night before, the pine cone turned in her mother’s fingers, and the question Maggie had wished she’d swallowed, and the crack in her mother she had watched open as she revealed the truth.

Something had shifted since, and both of them knew it.

It sat here now in the warm pine-scented room with the fire settling and Ken Sullivan smiling at them down off the mantle.

Something that had been said out loud once and could not now be un-said, waiting for one of them to be brave enough to say the rest.

Chapter 38

Maggie set the clementine down on the arm of her father’s chair, unpeeled it and looked at the coals, and knew she was going to be the one.

“I always wanted to come home you know,” she said gently. “You do know that, don’t you? Marianne was wrong.”