Page 24 of The Christmas Stroll

“It was. I remember it fine, though. You and Will at sailing camp - the two of you always in the same boat, always partnered up. Neither one of you would say why, but you just always ended up in the same boat somehow.” Lucy tipped her head. “And that snowball fight years before, the one on Federal when we were teenagers. The whole top of Main turned into a war zone and the two of you ended up behind that truck? And when it was over you stayed there, the pair of you, out of breath, close enough that half the island could see what was happening even if you two didn’t.” She tapped the rim of her mug once with her fingernail. “It never did happen though. Did it.”

It was not a question.

Maggie straightened a silk scarf where it hung on the hook beside the counter, and which did not at all need straightening. “We were always just friends, Luce.”

Lucy nodded, bent and picked back up her strand of lights. “Stubborn as your mother, I see,” she said, shaking her head.

Maggie opened her mouth. She had a whole sentence ready, level and pleasant, the sort she used on catering captains. She got as far as drawing in the breath for it but found there was nowhere for the sentence to go, because Lucy had said the one thing there was no polite argument against.

She closed her mouth again. Stood in the middle of her friend’s shop with her drink going cold in one hand and the half-eaten scone in the other, her best friend calmly threading lights along the top of the display as if she hadn’t just laid an entire history out on the counter and left it there for Maggie to look at.

The brass bell saved her. It went off in a burst, both notes at once and then again, until the doorway was full of coats and scarves and stamping boots and cold air - a whole first ferry’s worth of visitors arriving, five or six voices going up at once.

A tourist was already asking Lucy whether the ornaments were truly hand-painted and whether she shipped, and Lucy turned to the doorway with the pencil still behind her ear and the smear of glitter on her cheek and became, in an instant, the warmest and most attentive gift shop proprietor on Nantucket.

Chapter 18

By lunchtime, the snow had stopped asking permission.

It came down thick and steady out of a low pewter sky, and Nantucket’s cobblestones went white beneath it, the garland on the storefronts furred white, the great bare elms holding it along every branch.

The harbor had vanished altogether into gray, so that the town seemed to have detached itself from the water and set sail into a cloud, and Maggie, walking the length of Main with her collar up and her boots crunching fresh powder, could not have said for once, whether she was thirty-five or twelve.

“Left one’s crooked,” Will commented, nodding at the bookshop window where the wind had knocked a row of picture books off their little easels and left them fanned across the sill like a hand of cards.

Today, he had a coil of warm white lights over one shoulder and a replacement wreath under his arm, and he moved down the street the way he moved everywhere, unhurried and certain, greeting shopkeepers through their fogged glass without breaking stride.

They fixed Noah Browne’s books. They fixed a garland swag that had come loose at one end and was dangling toward the snow.

Outside Sea Glass Bridal - with the lettered sign that had SANTA ARRIVES SATURDAY on its window - they found the door bare and its wreath lying face-down in the middle of the street where the wind had flung it. Will stooped, shook the snow out of it and handed it to Maggie while he found the hook.

“You seem in a better mood today,” he commented chuckling.

“I’m cold and my feet are wet,” she grumbled.

“Still, you’re enjoying this. You’ve got the look.” He took the wreath back, settled it on the hook and straightened it a degree. “Boston’s Maggie’s fading. This is a whole different woman. This one hangs wreaths in the snow and doesn’t look at her phone every five seconds.”

She did look at her phone then on principle, found nothing so put it away again. Will grinned at her, and Maggie let him.

The Flour Jar’s window had steamed itself blind again, and when Will pushed open the door the warmth rolled out to meet them and the smell arrived a full second ahead of the heat; butter, cinnamon and the deep molasses dark of gingerbread, and under it the yeasty richness of the day’s bread rising somewhere in the back.

Tom Morgan was at the counter in his apron, flour to the elbows, sleeves shoved up over forearms built by decades of dough, and his weathered face folded into welcome at the sight of them.

“Ah the peacekeepers,” he greeted, which was apparently what the whole island had since decided to call them. “You’ve come in out of the snow. Sensible.”

“We’ve actually come to announce that Saturday’s parade time’s finally confirmed,” Maggie said. “And it is. Confirmed, written, signed. You’ll never have to guess again.”

“Thank you.” Tom looked at her for a moment and something in his old face eased. He reached under the counter without a word and came up with a slice of stollen, thick and pale and dense with fruit, dusted white with sugar so fine it drifted when he moved.

He pressed it into her bare hand across the counter, still warm, and closed her fingers round it.

“Eat that. You’re too thin, your mother said.”

Maggie rolled her eyes. “My mother says that to everyone.”

“She said it about you specifically.” Tom was already turning back to his bread. “Go on. Before it goes cold.”

Out in the snow she ate it walking, tearing off warm pieces, marzipan and candied peel and the sugar melting on her lips in the cold, and it was so good she stopped talking altogether for half a block.