Lou was playing guitar. She hadn’t known that about him. He wasn’t performing. He was just making sound while people talked around him.
She heard footsteps on the beach path and looked up. Evan, with a canvas tool bag over one shoulder, came down the path and stopped at the edge of the firelight. He looked at the circle of people.
Lou lifted a hand. Ray, who’d appeared from somewhere, patted the log beside him. Evan set down the tool bag and sat.
Margot watched him take the cup of something Ray offered, settle his forearms on his knees, and become part of the circle with the same quiet competence he brought to everything. No performance. Just presence.
“You clean up after yourself out there?” Ray asked him. “Or you leave it for the morning crew like everybody else.”
“Coiled the lines. Killed the dock lights.”
“Listen to that. A man who locks up.” Ray looked around the circle like he’d proved a point nobody had argued. “Forty years I’ve been telling people the marina runs on two things, and neither one of them is the fuel.”
Evan didn’t ask what the two things were.
Ray told them anyway, at length, and Evan let him, turning the cup slowly in his hands and saying nothing.
Dana leaned over. “What’s your best Christmas?”
She was asking the group, but the question opened itself up and people started answering. One of the housekeeping crew described a Christmas in the Dominican Republic with forty cousins and a goat that escaped the yard.
“The goat got into the rice. We still ate it.”
“The rice or the goat?” Ray asked.
“Both, eventually.”
That got a laugh out of the circle. Lou waited for it to settle before he took his turn. “My grandmother made everybody name one thing they were grateful for. Going around the table.”
He kept strumming while he talked. “Then she made us go around again. And again. Till we ran out of the easy ones and had to mean it.”
“How many times around?” Dana asked.
“Four. I was grateful for the dog by the end. The dog had already been named twice.”
Dana told one about a Christmas on a sailboat in the Chesapeake, cold and beautiful and miserable, everyone in foul-weather gear opening presents that kept sliding off the bench. It sounded impractical and she described it like she’d do it again tomorrow.
“Evan?” Lou kept strumming his guitar.
Evan was quiet for a moment. Looking at the fire. “Lauren made this thing every year. Paper stars. She’d cut them from old sheet music, fold them into these little eight-pointed things, hang them from fishing line in every window. Said they were better than tinsel because they caught the light differently.”
His voice was even. “The last Christmas we had together she made two hundred of them. Stayed up until two in the morning. Said she wanted the whole place to look like the inside of a snow globe.”
The fire crackled. Nobody rushed to fill the space.
Finally, Lou said, “That’s a good Christmas.”
Evan nodded.
Margot’s turn came around the circle. She’d been forming an answer about a corporate event she’d organized one December that had gone beautifully, professional and contained.
What came out instead was the other one.
“When I was nine, my mom tried to make a Christmas that was going to be perfect. She’d planned everything. Tree, cookies, the whole Christmas Eve schedule.”
She looked at the fire. “The oven broke Christmas morning. Then the neighbor’s dog got into the house and knocked the tree over, and we lost about half the ornaments. Then my dad got a flat tire picking up my grandmother and we didn’t eat until nine o’clock.”
Lou smiled. “What happened?”
