Page 17 of The Christmas Stroll

Her friend’s own handcrafted lighthouse ornaments crowded the shelves, dozens of them, each one hand-painted and no two alike, little white towers with red caps and gold light glowing in the lantern room. They threw a soft speckle of color across the ceiling every time the door let the wind stir them. A roll of brown paper printed with silver stars unspooled halfway across the counter where Lucy had been in the middle of wrapping something.

Her friend looked up, set down her spool of ribbon, and reached for a mug before Maggie had gotten her scarf half unwound.

“Sit,” she said. “You look like a woman who’s been through a war.”

“Two.” Maggie draped her scarf over the back of the stool by the counter and lowered herself onto it. “Fought entirely by proxy, thirty feet apart, without either party acknowledging the other’s existence.”

“So the hotel reunion idea didn’t work, I take it.”

“How do you …? ” Maggie stopped, then shook her head.

“You should know by now, Mags. There are no secrets on this island. Only rumors that haven’t reached you yet.” Lucy tipped the pot and hot cider came steaming into the mug, dark and clove-fragrant, a curl of orange peel riding the surface. She pushed it along the counter into Maggie’s cold hands. “Logan told the girl who does his flowers, who’s my supplier’s cousin’s neighbor.”

Maggie closed her eyes, wrapped both palms around the mug and drank until the heat and the spice went all the way down.

Her friend looked at her. “That bad?”

“Oh, much worse.”

Lucy stopped what she was doing and hitched herself up onto the other stool, elbows on the wood countertop. “You want the whole rumor tour then? Because I’ve been mapping.”

“I do not want it. But tell me anyway.”

Lucy held up a finger. “One. There’s a man on Federal Street - you know the guy, the antiques place with the ship in the window - who was in The Flour Jar buying his stollen at the weekend and overheard your mother telling Tom Morgan, apparently at some volume, that certain people were, and I quote, ‘dismantling fifty years of tradition out of pure ego.’ He has since told this story to everyone who’s crossed his threshold. He even does the voices.”

Maggie opened her eyes. “The voices?”

“He does a very good Helen apparently. Chin and all.” Lucy raised a second finger. “Two. There’s a volunteer coordinator - sweet woman, runs the caroler sign-ups - who got two instructions in the same morning. One from your mother saying the quartet stands by the Pacific Club, another from Marianne’s fudge-shop girl saying they’ve been moved to the bank steps. So she’s decided the only safe thing to do is nothing. She says, and I actually think there’s a real dignity in this, that she refuses to be responsible for putting carolers in a place they’ll later be shouted out of.”

“That’s not dignity though. That’s a work stoppage.”

“On this island, they can be the same thing.” Lucy raised a third finger, and now her mouth was fighting a smile. “Three. There’s a business owner up on Willow - I won’t say which, but his window has a train in it - who cornered me yesterday to tell me, with the biggest eye-roll I’ve seen since high school, that he’s now getting separate phone calls from ‘both camps’ about how to angle his display. One camp wants it facing the procession. The other camp wants it facing the harbor. He asked me whose side he should be on. He actually asked me that, Mags. Whose side.”

Maggie set the mug down on the star-printed paper, pressed one finger against her lip, and looked into the cider as though the answer to any of it might be floating in there with the orange peel.

Camps. Sides. In a town of a few thousand people who had spent every December of her life standing shoulder to shoulder in the cold, handing each other cocoa.

“I don’t even know why they’re fighting,” she said to Lucy. “That’s the maddening part. I’ve asked Mom directly. “And twice over the last twenty-four hours I’ve watched them be in the same room and refuse to say a single word to each other. And I still don’t know what actually happened.” She moved the mug a quarter-turn on the paper. “Helen keeps calling it a difference of opinion. Creative differences. The lighting, she says. The carriage route. As though fifty-odd years of friendship falls apart over LED bulbs.”

“It doesn’t,” Lucy said.

“No. It doesn’t.” Maggie looked up. “Have you got a theory? Since everyone else on this island apparently has three.”

Lucy was quiet for a moment, then turned one of the lighthouse ornaments where it hung, so its little painted light caught the fairy string and flickered.

“I’ve got theories,” she said. “A whole shelf of them. But none of them are worth a thing because the two people who know aren’t telling, and everyone who’s guessing is guessing wrong.”

She let the ornament settle. “The gossip’s not the problem though,” Lucy continued, and now the wry lightness went out of her voice, and something steadier came in behind it. “That’s all just noise. It’s what happens next that worries me.” She tapped the counter once. “People are starting to choose. That’s new, Mags. A week ago this was just two old Nantucket grand dames having a spat, and everybody rolling their eyes fondly. Now the market vendors are lining up one way. The volunteers are lining up another. And the second this island decides there are two teams instead of one - ”

“The Stroll suffers,” Maggie said. “I know.”

“Even worse, the Stroll stops being something the whole town builds together for one weekend a year, and instead becomes a something the town fights about and everyone has an opinion.” Lucy sat back. “And that’s not something you fix easily. Once it’s a battlefield, it stays a battlefield. Even after the lights go up. Even after Santa sails in. People only remember which side they picked and who came out on top.”

Chapter 13

The phone buzzed against the countertop before Maggie could decide what to say to any of that, skating an inch across the star-printed paper, and Will’s name lit up the screen.

Further relay from HQ, the message began. My mother would like it known that the flaming lantern star installation on the wharf requires a two-hour setup window and a fire marshal walkthrough. And that the walkthrough cannot happen after dark for reasons she considers ‘blindingly obvious,’ and that if this proves inconvenient for anyone, she is deeply and sincerely unbothered.