Page 30 of The Christmas Stroll

“Will.” She said his name the way she said everything lately, crisp and closed. “How was work? Busy, I imagine, with the holiday crowd.”

“Café’s fine.”

“You’ll want to watch your almond milk order for Saturday. It always goes short on Stroll weekend and you never allow enough.”

“Mom.”

“And the pastries. You under-order for the tourist crowd every single year, I’ve told you - ”

“I’m not here about pastries,” Will said.

Marianne sat back. She folded her hands. And then she came at it sideways, the way she always did, with a question dressed up as a remark.

“I understand there was a gathering this evening. Evelyn Price phoned on some silly pretext but was delighted to be the one to tell me, naturally.” Her eyes moved over his face. “A Stroll committee meeting. That I, chief organizer was not invited to.” A beat. “Was she there?”

“No.”

“But it was her daughter who called it, of course.”

“It was both of us. Maggie and me. And before you ask, we didn’t invite either of you and that was on purpose.” Will didn’t sit. He stood in front of the cork-board with the map behind his shoulder and he did not ease into any of it, because he’d promised himself he wouldn’t. “Dorothy Hatch is threatening to pull her shop off the merchant map. And there’s a writer from a Boston paper poking around asking whether the Stroll’s even happening this year, because she’s heard about- ” he found the expression Maggie had used “ - the rumored chaos.”

Marianne’s face did not change and that was how he knew it had landed. When something reached his mother she went very still and very smooth, and she went smooth now.

“That,” she said, “is entirely a result of that woman refusing to cooperate. If she would accept a single change I’ve proposed - the harbor lights, the carriage route, the caroler placement, any of it - there would be only one schedule, the correct one. There is no chaos on my side of the ledger. The chaos is entirely a product of one stubborn woman insisting we run a modern-day event on a horse and a wax candle because she refuses to move with the times.” She unfolded her hands and folded them the other way. “You may tell the committee that when they’d like a schedule that works, they know where I am.”

Will let her get all the way to the end of it. He’d learned that from her, actually - that you let a person say everything, because half of what they actually meant lived in the final sentence.

“Here’s the thing, Mom,” he said, when she’d finished. “It doesn’t matter.”

Her chin came up half an inch.

“It doesn’t matter who’s right,” Will continued. “It doesn’t matter that your suggestions are more up to date and Helen’s are rooted in tradition. It doesn’t matter that you’ve done this for fifty-odd years and know it blind. None of that matters even a little if the whole weekend falls apart. Because then there’s no event at all, and nobody wins the argument, because there’s nothing left to be right about.”

“I will not sit in my own office and be lectured on event management, William.”

“I’m not lecturing you.” Will kept his voice low and even, and he didn’t rise to it, because rising to it was what his mother wanted and it would have let her off the hook. “I couldn’t lecture you on logistics if I tried, and we both know it. I’m not telling you how to run the Stroll, Mom. I’m telling you what I saw this week, on this island with my own eyes.” He nodded back over his shoulder at the map, at all of it. “A friend who’s run your carolers for eleven years holding up two pieces of paper because she doesn’t know which song to sing. A shop that’s had this island in its blood for two generations thinking about walking away from the whole thing. And a reporter from off-island already writing a story in her head, and it isn’t the nice one you keep on the fridge.” He paused, and then he said it, what Maggie had said to her mother across town without either of them knowing it. “You always told me the Stroll’s about Nantucket. That’s the whole point of it, you said. It belongs to the community. Right now it doesn’t. Right now it belongs to just you and Helen, and the two of you won’t tell anybody why.”

Marianne’s arms came up and crossed over her chest. She did not answer.

But her chin, which had lifted to fight him, stayed lifted a beat too long and then her eyes moved - off his face, past his shoulder, to the cork-board. To the laminated map with its hand-drawn route. To the ranked sticky notes and the printed sheets and decades of accumulated care pinned up in front of her, every hour and every corner and every vendor she had ever herded through a December weekend.

She looked at all of it. And she did not say, as she had said to him nine times in a week, that they were back where they started, or that ‘Her Majesty’ would not be told, or even that she was deeply and sincerely unbothered.

For once, Marianne was quiet.

It was half a second, no more, a hesitation before she reached out and unfolded her reading glasses off the desk and put them on.

Will had spent all his life reading this woman, had learned it in a busy family and an even busier cafe.

And he recognized a crack open when he saw one.

Chapter 24

Maggie’s phone went off on the kitchen counter before the silence had finished settling, buzzing hard against the tile with the ringtone she kept only for work.

She snatched at the device, picking it up on instinct. Eloise was calling after nine pm on a weekday evening, which meant something was up.

“Don’t hate me.” Her assistant’s voice came through fast and level with the Back Bay clip, the sound of someone pacing while she talked. “I swore I wouldn’t call you this week unless I could avoid it. But it’s the Hartwell gala. The florist is out.”