Page 27 of The Christmas Stroll

Above the counter Dorothy Hatch had strung dried orange slices and cinnamon sticks on lengths of red twine, so that the whole low room smelled of citrus and spice, and shelves ran back into the dim crowded with the things people bought when they wanted to take a piece of the island home - scrimshaw-patterned tea towels, jars of beach-plum jam, hand-tied bundles of bayberry candles that scented the air when you passed them.

Maggie stood at the counter, halfway through a sentence about Saturday’s confirmed load-in window, when Dorothy set down her pen on the worn wood and folded her arms.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But I have to tell you something, and I’d rather you heard it from me.”

Maggie recognized the tone. She had already heard it multiple times in Boston from hotel banquet managers, wedding photographers or every person who had ever been about to make her life considerably harder, while being scrupulously polite about it.

She looked up from the final Stroll schedule and gave Dorothy her whole attention.

“I’m actually thinking of pulling the shop from the retailer map this year.” She said it gently, the way you deliver news you don’t enjoy delivering. “The official one, if there is one this time. The final one that gets handed out to visitors at the wharf.”

Maggie kept her face level. “May I ask why?”

“You may, and I’ll tell you.” Dorothy reached under the counter and came up with a slip of paper covered in her own neat hand. “Three customers called this week. Regulars from the city, the kind who plan their whole December around coming over for the Stroll. Every one of them wanted to know which schedule is the real one, because they’d seen two different versions, and I couldn’t tell them, because I don’t know myself.” She turned the slip so Maggie could see it, a column of names and times, some crossed out. “I’ve got the horse carriage passing my door at two on one sheet and at half past three on the other. I’ve got Santa arriving Saturday at two, which everyone agrees on at least, thank heavens, but absolutely nothing else that people will confirm the same way twice.”

“That’s being resolved as we …” Maggie began.

“There’s more.” Dorothy interjected, but kindly, and pulled her phone from her cardigan pocket, and turned it round. “This came yesterday.”

Maggie leaned in. It was an email from a lifestyle writer for one of the Boston Sunday supplements, the sort who did a warm two-page spread on the Stroll most Decembers, the sort of coverage island retailers papered their back rooms with.

Dorothy, hoping you can help me get a handle on the rumored chaos around the event this year? A few sources have mentioned scheduling trouble, and I wanted to confirm whether the Stroll is in fact going ahead before I pitch my usual piece.

“Rumored chaos,” Maggie repeated out loud.

“Her words. Not mine.” Dorothy slid the phone back into her cardigan. “I haven’t answered her yet. I wasn’t going to answer her until I knew what I was answering. But you understand my position, Maggie. If The Times runs a piece saying the famous Nantucket Stroll’s a mess, that’s the story that goes out to a hundred thousand people who might otherwise be booking a ferry. And if my shop’s on the map next to a headline like that, well …” She spread her hands. “I’ve a business to run in January too, when all the lights come down.”

Maggie set both hands flat on the counter, the way she did before she reorganized a seating chart at speed, and she made her voice the one she used when a room needed to believe her.

“Dorothy. The schedule will be resolved by end of the day I promise. One schedule, confirmed, printed, in your hand and every other retailer’s hand before the weekend. And when that writer emails you again, you’ll be able to tell her the Stroll is going ahead exactly as it has for fifty years, because it is.”

Dorothy looked at her for a moment. It was not an unkind look. Just the look of one who had run a shop on this island for forty-odd winters and had heard a great many reassurances arrive with confidence and depart without ever becoming true.

“I hope so,” she said. “I really do. I’ve loved this weekend my whole life, you know that. My mother sold candles from this very counter at the very first one.” She picked her mug back up, and cradled it. “But again, I’ll be honest with you Maggie, I’m not the only one asking these questions. The new bookstore man, the girl at the art gallery, Ellen Doyle’s niece, the one who counts everything twice - business people talk. And the talk right now is about which side we’re meant to be on, and whether it’s worth the aggravation, and whether the whole thing might be better skipped this year altogether, and picked up again when the two queen bees have sorted themselves out.” She said it without heat. “That’s the talk. I just wanted you to know it.”

“I do now.” Maggie straightened. “Thank you. Truly. Give me until tomorrow.”

“You’ve got until tomorrow.” Dorothy almost smiled and then reached beneath the counter. “You want to take this candle for Helen? On the house. She’s been cranky, I hear, and bayberry helps.”

“Bayberry doesn’t stand a chance against my mother,” Maggie said, and that got a real laugh out of Dorothy, so she left it there, because it was the best note she was going to find.

The bell over the door let her back into the cold, and it hit Maggie clean after the citrus warmth of the shop - the sharp salt coming up off the harbor, and the fresh snow still furring the garland along the storefronts.

Main Street glowed gold and green in the last of the day, the WELCOME banner frame still empty against the sky above Maggie’s head, and it all looked for a moment, exactly as beautiful as it was supposed to.

Rumored chaos. A hundred thousand readers. One of Nantucket’s oldest stores, a woman whose own mother had sold candles from that same counter, thinking out loud about skipping the whole thing this year.

Maggie pulled off one mitten with her teeth and got her phone out. Her thumbs moved fast over the cold glass, and she did not soften her words to Will, because there was no softening this.

We have a real problem. Hatch & Hobby threatening to pull off the merchant map. Says others might too. There’s a travel writer sniffing around asking if the Stroll’s even going ahead this year. This isn’t just lightbulbs anymore, Will. Emergency committee meeting. Tonight.

She hit send, tugged one mitten back on, and stood in the golden light waiting for three dots to appear.

Chapter 21

Later, Maggie and Will came up the granite steps of the Atheneum together, the two young hollies still glowing on their strings of white lights, and Maggie knew before Will even reached for the door what kind of room they were about to walk into.

She had typed the word herself hours earlier into her own phone on the cobbles: emergency. People did not turn out at eight o’ clock on a snow-slicked evening for an emergency in a good mood.