Page 41 of The Christmas Stroll

Behind the table, in the doorway of his own shop, Noah Browne hovered with the expression of someone who had been press-ganged and could not find the exit. He had his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and when he saw Maggie coming his whole face went soft with relief, the relief of the drowning man who spots a rope.

“Thank goodness,” he said. “Your mother’s got everything organized; everything’s completely under control, she doesn’t really need me, does she?” It was half a question and half a prayer.

“She doesn’t need any of us, Noah. That’s her whole thing.”

“Right. Yes. Then I’ll just - ” He was already retreating backward into the warmth of the shop, where a woman Maggie didn’t recognize stood near the register turning a lighthouse ornament over in her hands, dark-haired, laughing at something, comfortable as anything among the book stacks.

Margot, Maggie recalled - his new lady friend from Boston and the reason according to Will, Noah had started buttoning his good shirts. She stood in the pine-and-paper warmth of the bookstore looking as though she might never leave. Noah gave Maggie a grateful little salute and vanished inside to be near her, and Maggie let him go, because a man in love deserved a soft landing.

She turned to her mother. “Mom. I need you.”

Helen’s eyes came up off the clipboard, sharp. It was not a sentence Maggie used often, and they both heard it.

“There’s a permitting wrinkle,” she went on, keeping her voice level, keeping it in the register she used for things she did not want anyone to panic about. “The main stage. There’s a notice from the town saying no Stroll permit’s on file. I need someone with the institutional knowledge to sort it out, and there is exactly one person on this island who knows how the permit system actually operates. So.” She let it sit. “Do your thing.”

Helen set the clipboard down on the table with a click.

“No permit on file?” she repeated, and something came into her that Maggie recognized and loved and had spent a lifetime bracing against - the straightening of the spine, the lift of the chin, the whole formidable engine turning over. “That’s absurd. I submitted that application in October. I have the confirmation email.” She was already reaching for the boy in the reflective vest. “Watch the table. Do not let anyone take a program without a donation. I’ll be back.”

She came out from behind it and set off up the cobbles with Maggie half a step behind, cutting through the crowd like a woman parting water.

She and Helen reached the stage at the same moment Will did, coming from the opposite direction with his mother beside him.

Maggie watched it unfold. The two of them threading their mothers toward the same padlocked gate from two blocks apart without either woman knowing the other had been sent for.

Will had told Marianne there was a logistics snag only she could untangle; Maggie could see it in the tablet clutched purposefully in Marianne’s hand, the red stylus poised, the reading glasses shoved up into her silver hair.

Two proud women, converging on the same problem, each certain she was the only one who could solve it.

They noticed each other. It was over in a heartbeat yet it lasted an age. Both women stopped. Both chins came up. Both sets of eyes went, deliberately, past the other and fixed on the laminated notice zip-tied to the chain, as though the notice were the only thing worth looking at in the entire square.

The carolers’ scales drifted down the street. The chestnut cart popped and smoked on the corner. Neither woman said a word, and the silence between them had fifty-odd years compressed inside it, tight as the chain on the gate.

Maggie stepped into the middle, because that was the job.

“So,” she said, in her most neutral event-planner voice, the one that had smoothed over collapsed cakes and drunk best men. “No permit on file. The stage is locked. The lantern staging is here, and the whole evening runs through this square. That’s the situation.”

Neither woman looked at her. Neither woman answered.

Then Helen said, to the general air in front of her, “This is outrageous. The application went in in early October. I have the confirmation email on my phone this minute.”

A pause.

“I concur,” said Marianne, also to no one, her eyes on the notice. “I saw the email come in too. It is outrageous. Somebody at the town permit office has clearly made a mistake.”

Another pause, and this one had a different weight - the first thing the two of them had agreed on in weeks, laid down carefully between them like a plank across a gap.

“Mistakes,” Marianne said, to the notice, “can be corrected. If one gets to the correct person in time.”

Helen’s head turned a fraction. Not toward Marianne. Toward the notice, still, but she was listening now, Maggie could tell, the whole of her sharp practical attention swinging round.

“The permit office closes at noon at weekends,” she announced. “It is currently eleven twenty-seven.” Helen was already reaching up to settle her scarf, squaring her shoulders inside the camel coat, and Maggie saw her mother do what she did before she walked into any room she intended to win - the little downward tuck of the chin, the breath drawn.

She then started up the square toward Washington Street without another word.

“Give ’em hell,” Marianne urged.

She uttered it to Helen’s back and Helen didn’t turn round, but her stride caught for half a step, and something moved through her shoulders that was almost, not quite, a nod, and then she was gone into the crowd with her scarf flying.