Page 40 of The Christmas Stroll

“You’ve carried it the whole way up this street as a prop?”

“More of a comfort object, so don’t take it from me.” He looked genuinely mournful about the coffee, and Maggie felt the laugh come up and let it, because it was that kind of day - the frayed, giddy kind that came at the end of a hard planning session, when what you’d been working toward was finally, actually here.

And it was going to be fine, it was going to be beautiful, the whole street glowing green and gold and packed to the shingles with people who had come from on and off-island just to stand in the cold in Nantucket and be happy.

They had one item left. The main square stage - the lantern procession’s staging point; the beating center of the entire affair. Maggie threaded them toward it through the crowd, past the toy shop with its window train going round and round, past a man selling roasted chestnuts from a cart that scented the whole corner sweet and smoky.

They came around the last knot of visitors, her pen already on the schedule to tick the line. And stopped dead.

The gate to the stage was padlocked.

A run of chain had been threaded through and drawn tight, and a heavy brass padlock hung off the end of it. Zip-tied to the links at eye level was a laminated notice on town letterhead, its corner already curling in the cold.

Maggie read it once. Then read it again, because the first time her brain refused to accept the words in the order they were printed.

NO STROLL PERMIT ON FILE. PUBLIC ACCESS SUSPENDED PENDING REVIEW. TOWN PERMITTING OFFICE.

The crowd flowed around her. The carolers ran their scales. Behind her the chestnut man called out his prices, and the cocoa vendor’s ladle rang against the urn, and Santa’s boat was fueled and waiting, and the lantern star was wired, and none of it mattered, because the stage that all of it was arranged around was locked shut mere hours before three thousand people expected to gather in front of it to celebrate the official start of the holidays.

“No,” Maggie cried. “No, no, no.”

She had her phone up before she’d even finished saying it, thumbing at the screen, scrolling for the town website, the permitting office, a number, anybody, a person she could call and reason with on Stroll Saturday and fix this.

Her mind was already three moves ahead - shift the lantern staging, call the merchants and get ahead of it before the whole street noticed the padlock and the word went round that the Stroll was indeed falling apart after all - the rumored chaos between the main two grand dame organizers its downfall, despite the peacekeepers’ best attempts.

“Sullivan …”

She kept scrolling. “There’s an out of hours number. If I can reach someone directly, if it’s an administrative thing, a filing error, I can talk them through a same-day - ”

“Maggie.”

Will’s hand closed over her forearm. It stopped her hand and it stopped the scroll and it stopped, somehow, the three moves running ahead of her. She looked up from the screen and found him watching her with the padlock at his shoulder and the crowd going by behind him, and there was no panic in his face at all.

There was something else. Something that had a joke waiting somewhere under it but wasn’t reaching for it yet.

This was no time for jokes goddamnit.

Will shook his head. It wasn’t a no. It was gentler than a no - a not yet, a hold on, a hand laid flat on the thing she was about to bulldoze.

“You can’t fix this one,” he said.

“I can absolutely fix this one, it’s a permit, permits are about the one thing I actually understand - ”

“You could.” He glanced at the laminated notice, and then back at her, and now the corner of his mouth did move, because he’d worked it out and he was going to enjoy telling her. “But so could somebody else.” He nodded back toward the top of Main Street to Helen at the volunteer tables, and then the merchant tent two blocks down where he’d left Marianne with her red stylus. “We both know exactly who could fix this faster than either of us.”

Maggie looked at the padlock. She looked at him. And she lowered the phone.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Will.

Chapter 31

The volunteer check-in table had been set up on the sidewalk outside the bookstore, and Maggie spotted her mother from thirty feet off by posture alone.

Helen stood at the head of the table in her good camel coat and her festive red scarf, a clipboard held against her chest, and she was directing two teenagers in reflective vests with the crisp, unhurried authority of a schoolteacher even though she’d never worked a day since marriage.

“No,” Maggie’s mother was saying, “the lanyards go on before you hand out the programs, not after, because otherwise you’ll be juggling both and you’ll drop the programs, and the programs are not free.” One of the teenagers, a boy who looked as though he’d rather be anywhere on earth, fumbled a lanyard over his head backward. “The other way, dear. Good. Now you look like you belong here.”