Page 53 of The Christmas Stroll

Will was silent a beat, and this time the quiet wasn’t a wall going up. It was a door opening, slow, on hinges that hadn’t turned in a while.

“You got it half right,” he said. “It was the half everyone gets right, because it’s the easy half. Will Callahan liked plants. Will should’ve been a gardener. Poor Will, stuck behind a counter, ought to be out in the dirt somewhere.” He shook his head, and then the wry line came up over it. “But it was never the dirt I wanted, Sullivan. I never really dreamed about gardens, not in the way you think.” He lifted his glass toward the ceiling, toward the whole green vault, and his brown eyes moved across the installation slow and deliberate, the way a person reads a thing he made with his own two hands and still can’t quite believe is real. “It was this. Bringing the outside in where it’s got no business being. Taking a ballroom made of marble and money, or a low ugly café off Main, or a barn, or a church hall - somewhere dead, somewhere that’s just walls - and making it come alive. Making people walk in out of the cold and stop in the doorway, because for one second they can’t tell if they’re indoors or out.”

The satisfaction in his face was unmistakable now, unguarded and lit up. “That was the plan. It doesn’t have a tidy name though. You can just say landscape gardener and have people nod. So I stopped correcting them. Easier to let them think I just wanted to plant trees, but gave it all up for family.”

Her heart melted. “So instead you grew a forest over a coffee shop …”

“And instead I grew a forest over a coffee shop.” He smiled at that, a real one. “Years of practicing in a room the size of a shoebox with an audience of blueberry-muffin fundamentalists. Turns out that was the apprenticeship. I just never had a space worth the trouble.” He tipped his glass at the ballroom’s great vaulted expanse overhead.

Maggie considered this. She let the moment run, the band brushing along behind them, the light coming down warm through the green, and she took a slow drink of her champagne and set it down on the ledge of the pillar with the deliberateness of a woman filing something under decided.

“You know,” she said, dry as the wine, “there might be a future in that.”

“In muffin fundamentalists?”

“In this. In whatever this is you do that doesn’t have a tidy name.” She nodded at the room, at Hartwell still gesturing, at the woman in emerald photographing the ceiling for the fifth time, at five hundred people who were spending the evening basically forest-bathing in Christmas itself.

“I plan two dozen of these things a year,” Maggie continued. “Galas, weddings, the kind of corporate parties where the decor cost more than a car. Every single one of them wants exactly what you built and none of them can get it, because the people who do this work do rooms, and the people who do rooms don’t do this.”

She let it land. “There’s a market, Will. A hungry one. With very deep pockets and a bottomless appetite for being made to feel something. You could name your price. You’d have to fight them off.” She lifted one shoulder.

Will laughed. It came up out of him easy and full, the laugh of someone who’s finally stopped holding something in, and it warmed the green-shadowed pocket they stood in.

“A fat paycheck huh,” he said, when the laugh had settled. “You buried the lede, Sullivan.”

“I never bury the lede. I simply let the client find it himself. It’s a service I provide.”

The band slid into something slower then, and he set his glass down on the ledge beside hers.

He didn’t ask. He’d never asked her anything all week - had made the cocoa she hadn’t ordered, resolved a warring committee, and hung an entire forest over her head - and now Will reached out and took Maggie’s champagne from her fingers and set it down next to his own; both abandoned there on the cedar-wrapped ledge, and held his hand out flat between them.

Maggie looked at it. She looked at the open collar of his tuxedo and his face gone gold in the light, put her hand in his, and let Will Callahan lead her out beneath the twinkling forest he’d built.

For her.

Chapter 42

The floor was half full, couples turning slow in the warm light, and Will drew her into the middle of it, under the deepest run of the garlands where the cedar swagged low and the orange rounds turned on their threads and the ten thousand bulbs burned down through the greenery like stars caught in a fairy forest.

His hand found the small of her back. Hers came to rest against his lapel, flat against the fine wool, and she felt the warmth of him come through it, and the band brushed on, and the room began to recede.

The clink of glasses faded first, then the low corporate hum, the laughter, Hartwell’s voice booming his story to a fresh audience - all of it drawing back and thinning out until there was only the brushed rhythm of the music and the two of them moving inside it; slow, unhurried, the greenery breathing its clean cold scent down over them and the lights swimming warm and gold at the edges of her sight.

Maggie had already walked this room a hundred times and now she couldn’t see the room at all. She could only see him.

“You’re not counting the exits anymore,” Will said, low, near her ear. “I’ve been watching. You’ve stopped scanning for the grandmother who’s going to go down like a bowling pin.”

“There’s no grandmother in this room.”

“There’s always a grandmother. It’s the job. You told me that.” She felt the smile move through him where her hand lay on his chest. “And here you are dancing with your eyes half shut, letting the whole thing run itself. Do you know what that is, Sullivan? That’s trust. That’s a woman who’s decided the room can hold itself up for four minutes without her.”

“Don’t get used to it. The band takes a break soon, and I’ll be back to my usual charming self.”

“I’m counting on it.”

She tilted her face up toward his. She hadn’t decided to - it happened the way the fixing of the drooping bow had happened, some deeper part of her moving before the deciding part caught up, and she found she was looking at his mouth gone still, and at the laugh lines that had gone still with it, and at the thing in his eyes that had been building all week.

The same thing that had hung in two feet of cold air on a café step. The same thing that had stood between them behind a truck on Federal Street as teenagers, on Main in the falling snow, and on a pavement with her mother’s laughter carrying up the street. The thing the ringtones and the florists and the crises had kept interrupting.