Page 9 of The Christmas Stroll

“Well,” her mother announced, voice bright and resonant as she stood tall, projecting for all to hear. “Good evening, everyone. How good of Her Majesty to grace us with her presence this time.”

At the far end of the table, Marianne still didn’t look up from her meticulously organized folder. Instead, she turned a page with deliberate slowness, her expression unreadable.

“How good of our Chair to agree with who reigns in this committee,” she replied, her tone dripping with sarcasm.

A chill swept through the room, dropping the temperature a solid ten degrees. The creak of a chair echoed in the tense silence, and the plate of gingerbread remained abandoned between the two factions, slowly losing its appeal in the awkward standoff.

Maggie closed her eyes for half a second. When she opened them, Will was watching her with one eyebrow gone up and the corner of his mouth pulled sideways. The look on his face said plainly and without a word, welcome home.

And she found to her considerable annoyance, that she had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.

Getting Helen under control it seemed, was going to be the easy bit.

A volunteer at the head of the near table cleared her throat, tapped a pen against a water glass, and got out three words of a welcome before Marianne set down her reading glasses, folded her hands atop the squared stack of manila folders, and spoke.

“Will,” she said, “could you ask Madam Sullivan which version of the volunteer schedule she intends people to follow? There appear to be two of them circulating, and I’d hate for anyone to arrive at the wrong hour and stand in the cold looking foolish.”

Will carried the patient expression of a man who had already lived through several versions of this exact afternoon. He turned his head toward the left-hand side.

“Helen - ”

“I heard her.” Helen did not look up from her notes. She uncapped a pen with a click that carried the whole length of the beeswaxed table. “You may tell your mother that the schedule people will follow is the correct one already long-established, and that the current confusion arises entirely from a second, unauthorized schedule that appeared out of nowhere last Tuesday.”

Will paused. Maggie watched him weigh what it would cost him to relay this and then decide against it.

“Thanks,” he said. “Saves time.”

And that was pretty much the shape of the entire meeting.

The lighting ‘wrinkle’ came up. Helen asked Will to inquire whether his mother had, in fact, cancelled the harbor walk installation altogether because she couldn’t get her way on the LEDs, and Marianne informed Will that she had cancelled nothing, that one could hardly cancel an order that had never been placed. And that if Helen insisted on keeping the ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘non environmentally friendly’ lights, it seemed she’d got her way.

The vendor load-in windows came up next, and Will found himself relaying in the tone of a weatherman reading a storm report he did not believe, that one side had promised an eight o’clock start and the other had confirmed ten.

Next came the carriage route, and Maggie learned that the horses would either process down Centre Street as they had since before she was born, or down Fair - Marianne’s suggestion which according to Helen, was far too narrow.

Down the table, a chair creaked. Somebody reached for a water glass, misjudged it, and steadied it before it tipped.

A vendor rep near the end kept breaking off wedges of the gingerbread and turning them over in his fingers without eating them, so that a scatter of dark crumbs grew across the beeswax in front of him.

Two of the longtime volunteers on Helen’s side exchanged a weary look across the table, locals who’d sat through fifty Decembers with these two and knew exactly how they usually went, but who were finding this year did not go that way at all.

Will caught Maggie’s eye again, over the top of a manila folder and produced a half-smile that she recognized for exactly what it was - one of a man drowning very slowly in shallow water but unable to do anything about it.

Midway through, the caroler staging came up, and both women again went at it at once. Marianne wanted the quartet moved to the foot of the bank steps; Helen wanted them precisely where they had always stood on the corner by the Pacific Club, where her late husband had once declared the acoustics were finest in all of town.

The two versions collided over everyone’s head, each slightly different, each certain, and Will opened his mouth and closed it again like a referee waiting for a break in play.

Maggie reached for the papers in front of her.

Two of them, both headed STROLL WEEKEND MASTER SCHEDULE, both in her mother’s preferred font, though one had clearly been amended by a different hand entirely.

She lined them up side by side, squared their edges, and let her fingertips move down the columns while the meeting went on unraveling around her.

The vendor arrival windows did not merely differ; they conflicted by hours, whole mornings pointing in opposite directions. A crossed-out line here, a handwritten amendment crowding a margin there, an install date scratched out and rewritten and scratched out again.

And then her finger stopped on a single line, and her jaw tightened.

The lantern procession. The heart of Saturday evening, the moment the whole town poured down Main behind the paper stars and the candlelight while the shop windows glowed beneath the golden light, and sometimes even snow if they were lucky, coming down soft and slow.