Page 49 of The Christmas Stroll

The fire ticked. Helen began peeling a second clementine, or pretending to, but did not look up.

“I did.” Maggie kept her eyes on the coals, because it was easier than the alternative. “It’s just that … after we lost Dad, it felt … different. Everything did. I’d come off the boat from Boston, and the island would be exactly how I’d left it, the same cobbles, the same streets, the same everybody, but it would feel smaller than I remembered, and heavier all at the same time. And I couldn’t work out how home could be both. Smaller and heavier.” She turned the unpeeled clementine over on the arm of the chair. “So I stopped staying long enough to feel it. I’d come home some weekends, a few days over summer, but I’d always be back on the boat before it had a chance to settle on me. I told myself it was work. It was always work. There was always a gala.” She let out a breath. “But it wasn’t only work, Mom. I think I was running from the size of it. From how much bigger missing him got, every time I stood in the middle of it.”

Helen said nothing.

That was what stopped Maggie’s heart for a beat - the silence. Her mother, who had an answer for everything, who had never in Maggie’s life needed to be asked a question twice, who filled every gap in a conversation before it could threaten to mean anything.

Helen sat with the half-peeled fruit in her lap and looked at the fire and said nothing at all, and Maggie understood that she’d finally said something true, and that true things bought silence whereas all the rest just bought argument.

She made herself go on, because she thought if she stopped now she might never finish.

“But I’ll admit I never really thought about you, and how you must be feeling it too.” Maggie’s voice caught, and she steadied it. “I mean - I did of course. I worried about you the way you worry about a person you’ve filed under fine. But I truly never stopped to think what it must be like. To live here. Every day. In this house with his empty chair, and his coat still on the hook for years after, and every single street out there with him in it. This whole island without Dad. At least I got to leave the size of that behind on the ferry. You’ve been standing in the middle of it for ten years, Mom. Alone.” Maggie looked up. “And I never let myself see that, because seeing it might have meant doing something about it. And honestly, I didn’t know what to do.”

Helen’s eyes went for a moment to the mantle. To the plain silver frame and the easy half-smile in it, the man who had so many times stood on Main Street at Christmas with a hand on each of their shoulders; the three of them together against the whole world.

She looked at her late husband for the length of a breath, and then she looked back at the fire, and when she spoke her voice had lost the courteous frost it had carried all week, and had gone lower and plainer than Maggie had ever heard it.

“I thought I was losing you as well,” Helen said gently. “That’s the truth. Not all at once. Bit by bit, one boat at a time. First him and then you, and a little more of you every year, until eventually you were just someone I saw over weekends, and spoke to now and again on the phone.” She turned the clementine over and set it down on the table beside her, uneaten. “And I would never have said so. What was I going to say - stay? Give up your city life and come back and keep an old woman company in a cold house? No. I’d have died first. So I did what I’ve always done. I ran committees. I hung wreaths. I kept the machine going, because as long as the machine was going nobody had to look at the woman running it.” She pressed her lips together. “And then Marianne, of all the people on this earth, looked at me across a merchant list and told me the truth straight out. And she was right. That’s why it took the skin off. That she might be right and it hurt, and I couldn’t forgive her for it.”

The fire settled into itself.

“We’re too alike,” Maggie said. “You and me. That’s the problem.” She half-smiled rueful, and picked at the peel of her clementine. “Both of us. Absolute experts at burying whatever we’re actually feeling beneath something useful. Something organized. You’ve got your committees and I’ve got my spreadsheets, and between us we could plan a thing for three thousand people in the blink of an eye, without either of us admitting we were struggling with anything important.”

Helen’s mouth twitched at the corner. Against her will, Maggie thought, and loved her for it.

“That’s not a compliment, you know,” she added.

“No,” Helen agreed, and looked at her daughter across the low gold fire. “But it’s accurate.”

And that was as far as either of them was ever going to take it. But it was far enough.

Maggie felt something come loose in her chest that had been wound tight for so long she’d stopped feeling it - the guilt, the low steady hum of it, the not-noticing that her mother had been standing alone in the middle of everything while Maggie built her tables for five hundred.

It lifted, and it did not come back.

And across the fire she watched the same thing happen in her mother, watched the fear go out of Helen’s shoulders, the fear that had never once said its own name, that Maggie had been slipping the leash off for years, might be gone entirely on the next boat and never truly come home again.

Helen picked up the clementine and finally ate a segment of it and looked content, while the pine hung green on the warm air, and Ken Sullivan smiled down off the mantle at his girls sitting together in his fire-lit room.

They didn’t speak for a while. There was no need.

The coals shifted and glowed, and on the cushion beside Helen a length of red satin ribbon lay coiled and forgotten, catching the low light.

Maggie let her gaze rest on her father’s photograph, on the half-smile, and thought he would have liked this, the two of them here, quiet and easy and finally, finally on the same side.

Then her jeans pocket buzzed. Once. Twice.

Maggie pulled the phone out without thinking, and the screen lit her palm in the dim room, blue-white against the fire’s gold. ELOISE.

And beneath the name, the first line of the message before she’d even opened it: the Cambridge Street wholesaler had come through but there was a problem with the quantities and the client had asked again, when Maggie would be back in the office -

She looked at it.

Across the fire, Helen watched her look at it.

Neither of them said anything. The room was warm and it smelled of pine and clementines and woodsmoke, and the ribbon lay coiled on the cushion, and her father smiled from the mantle.

While in Maggie’s palm the cold bright fact of the return boat glowed steadily on.