Page 33 of The Christmas Stroll

And for the first time all evening - no, for the first time in forever, Maggie realized - her mother looked like a woman who was about to say something she did not want to say at all.

When Helen finally spoke, she did it the way she did everything - on her own terms, in her own order, with her chin up even as the ground gave way beneath the words. She lifted one pine cone back out of the bowl, as though she needed something in her hands, and she turned it over once.

“A Stroll planning session,” she said. “Before any of this. Marianne and I, the two of us going through the merchant list, the way we’ve done every November for … well.” A breath. “For a very long time. And I said something, something silly.” Helen set the pine cone down on the table beside the bowl, out of its arrangement, which was not like her at all. “Something I really ought not to have said.”

“What did you say?” Maggie pressed, heart pounding in anticipation.

Helen exhaled. “Marianne suggested Will for an errand without consulting him, and I said something like she leaned on that boy far too much.” Her mouth pressed thin. “That since Gerard fell ill, she basically ran the whole of her life through him and Will let her, because he’s kind, and maybe it wasn’t fair on him.”

Maggie frowned. “That’s it? You told her she relies on Will, and she just stopped speaking to you? Mom, Marianne does rely on Will. He’s spent the last week relaying her grievances to everyone else. He said it himself, he’s not a diplomat, he runs the café - ”

“It wasn’t only that.” Helen’s fingers found the top of the armchair beside her and closed around it. “Not precisely.”

Maggie stopped. She let the silence do the work, the way Lucy had done it to her over her shop counter, the way Helen herself had taught her without ever meaning to.

The fire ticked. Her mother looked at her hand on the chair as if it belonged to someone else.

“I wondered aloud,” Helen continued, “whether Will’s life might have been different if Marianne hadn’t always simply assumed he’d stay. Take on the running of Winterstreet. Take care of Gerard before he passed. Take care of … everything.” She said it fast, as if to be rid of it. “Sometimes I wonder what he might have done, if you hadn’t always assumed he’d stay here and take care of things, I said. I said it kindly. I thought I said it kindly. One mother to another. But I still said it. And then … Marianne said something back.”

Maggie went still. Because she had wondered that same thing. She had wondered it out loud herself, the day before yesterday, standing with Will on the wharf with the winter sun on the water: I remember all you ever wanted was to be out in nature, gardens, you had that whole plan.

And she had watched Will’s easy rhythm catch for the length of a single breath before the curtain came down over his face. She had wondered it in the cafe yesterday, standing under a whole hanging garden he’d made with his hands because he couldn’t make one out of the earth.

I set fire to my dream so that my family could survive.

And now, here was Maggie’s mother, telling her she had said it - to the one person on the island who could least bear to hear it.

She could even imagine it, as Helen talked, the way Maggie imagined how an event space might look by the time she was finished with it.

The pair of old friends, reading glasses pushed up into Marianne’s hair, Helen’s voice, well-meaning and certain, the way Helen was always so certain.

Of everything.

Sometimes I wonder what he might have done, if you hadn’t always assumed he’d stay here and take care of things.

And Marianne’s face - Maggie could imagine that too, the practical, sharp-witted face that missed nothing - closing over like a door swinging shut, the pleasantness going out of it all at once.

And then Marianne said something back.

Marianne Callahan, who did not lose fights, who had gone into the harbor after a tuba player in good cashmere, straightening in her chair and firing a return shot.

But what did she say?

Chapter 26

Marianne had set a poinsettia Ben had given her a few weeks ago on the corner of her desk, deep red against the schedules. Now, she reached out and turned it a few degrees, as though its face had been aimed wrong.

It hadn’t. She looked at it for a moment, and then she turned back to Will.

“What would you do,” she asked, apropos of nothing. “if you weren’t running Winterstreet?”

Will blinked. It was not the kind of question his mother ever asked. His mother asked whether he’d ordered enough cream and whether he’d remembered to have the flue in the cafe looked at, and whether all that silly greenery on the ceiling would encourage spiders.

She did not ask people what they would do with a life they did not have.

“That’s never going to happen,” he replied, and let the easy grin come up over it the way it always did. “The island wouldn’t allow it. There’d be a town meeting. Somebody would draft a resolution. Evelyn Price would chain herself to the espresso machine.”

“I’m serious.”