Page 43 of The Christmas Stroll

“Should we,” Maggie whispered low, “say something?”

Up at the steps, Marianne set her cider down on the bottom stair, reached out with the toe of her boot, and nudged a stray loop of garland back onto the railing where it belonged.

Helen, beside her, bent and straightened a program that had fallen off the caroler’s music stand, fussing at it, pretending to be very occupied with something that did not need occupying, so that neither of them would have to be caught standing there together with nothing to do but be reconciled.

Will watched their mothers find other things to fix rather than look at each other. “Absolutely not,” he said.

Chapter 33

The snow kept up while the carol wound down, and by the time the quartet stepped off the bank steps for their break, the whole square wore a fresh white coat, the cobbles soft underfoot and the garland along the storefronts furred and glittering.

The cold had sharpened and it carried everything with it; the mulled cider from the carts, the smoke off the chestnut brazier, the deep sugared warmth of The Flour Jar breathing out into the street every time its door swung.

Where Helen and Marianne now stood together at the folding table, and this time there was no fudge-shop volunteer, no notes being passed, no messages being curated. On the table between them, dead center, sat a white paper bag from bakery with its top rolled down twice, the way Tom Morgan rolled a bag he meant you to open before it went cold.

A week of standing at either end of a committee table with a no-man’s-land of stale gingerbread between them, and here they were shoulder to shoulder in the falling snow, sharing a strip of sidewalk as though they’d never done anything else.

Marianne looked up, and she frowned. Helen’s enamel Christmas brooch - the holly one, red and green, that she’d worn to the Stroll every December of Maggie’s life - had gone crooked, tipped nose-down toward the cobbles.

Marianne reached over without a word and set it right, a firm little quarter-turn of the fingers, tucking it back to true against the camel wool. She did not ask. She did not announce it. She simply fixed something that was wrong the way she’d been fixing wrong things all her life, and then went back to her clipboard.

Helen did not thank her. She did not flinch. She glanced down at the brooch, found it level and let it be, and then she reached for the white bag on the table and unrolled the top.

Maggie watched her mother draw out two thick slices of stollen, pale and dense and heavy with fruit, dusted so white with fine sugar that it drifted when she moved them.

Helen held one out. Marianne took it. The sugar came off on both their gloves, powdering the dark leather at the fingertips, and neither of them seemed to notice or care, two old friends standing in the snow eating cake out of their hands like a pair of schoolchildren let out early.

Marianne bit into hers. She chewed. She gave a nod - the barest incline of the head, the verdict of a woman who did not easily hand out approval. “Tom’s on form,” she said.

“It’s the marzipan. He does his own.”

“I know he does his own, Helen, I’ve been eating it as long as you have.”

And that was it. That was the whole peace, sealed over a slice of stollen, and Maggie had barely finished registering it before the two of them were bickering again.

“ - all I’m saying,” Marianne said, tapping the clipboard with a sugared glove, “is that if we open with the handbell choir next year they’ve a proper chance of being heard before the crowd thickens up. You put them at four and half the wharf’s already down for the boat.”

“The handbells close. The handbells have always closed.” Helen said it around a mouthful, gesturing with the remaining half of her stollen. “You close on the handbells because they carry over the water, that’s the entire point of them, that’s why they put them last in nineteen-seventy-whatever it was - ”

“The old timers aren’t running the schedule anymore, dear.”

“No, more’s the pity, they’d have had you sorted in an afternoon.”

“They’d have had the choir singing to an empty street is what he’d have had.” Marianne pointed at the map on the table. “Look at the flow. Look at where the crowd sits at seven. You want your best sound going up when there’s nobody left to hear it because they’ve all gone home to their cocoa - ”

“Nobody goes home before the handbells, Marianne - ”

“Everybody goes home before the handbells Helen, that’s why I’m proposing - ”

They were talking over each other now, both hands going, sugar snowing off their gloves onto the map, two voices braided together and rising, and there was no rancor in it anywhere.

Maggie couldn’t stop watching. There was heat and there was volume, and there was the absolute certainty of two people who had each decided decades ago that they were right and had never once been talked out of it.

But under all of it there was ease, the ease of an argument they’d probably had a hundred times before and would have a hundred times again, an argument that was itself a kind of love language, the one only the very greatest of friends spoke to each other and no one else.

The carols rose.

Santa’s boat was fueled off the wharf and the lantern star waited for darkness, and Main Street glowed green and gold from end to end, and somewhere in the thick of it, three thousand people were about to have the Nantucket Christmas Stroll experience they’d come all this way for, and it was going to happen, and suddenly, Maggie had nothing left to fix.