Page 7 of The Christmas Stroll

“So who told the merchants about the carriage change?” Maggie went on, keeping her voice easy, pleasant, the voice she used on catering captains. “Was that an email? A meeting? Did anyone tell the man with the horses?”

“It’s being communicated.”

“Communicated by who?”

“Through the appropriate channels.”

“Which channels, Mom?”

Her mother’s answers were getting shorter. Maggie had grown up reading exactly this, the way the sentences tightened when the ground got soft, and she recognized it now too.

She let her eyes drift to the counter beside her, where a printed sheet lay next to the bread box. STROLL WEEKEND MASTER SCHEDULE, it said across the top, in her mother’s preferred font and Maggie reached over, slid it toward her and started to read.

She had spent years living inside documents exactly like this, and the discrepancies came up off the page at her the way the crooked centerpiece had come up off table eleven in the ballroom a few days ago.

Two line items had been reversed. A vendor market load-in had been moved back to eight, and beside it in the notes column, a date, showing that the ten o’clock time had been the confirmed one, confirmed by Marianne Callahan, confirmed with the vendors themselves.

The harbor lighting line simply read TBD, while the other version had listed a supplier and an install date and a checkmark.

Maggie set the schedule down flat.

“Mom,” she said. “This is a mess.”

Helen reached out and straightened the centerpiece a fraction, squared the silver bowl to the edge of the table, and when she spoke her voice had gone certain and final in a way Maggie knew all the way down to her toes.

“Someone had to do something,” Helen said. “She’s dismantling fifty years of the Stroll one email at a time, without consulting anyone, so yes, I did something.”

Noting that Helen hadn’t mentioned her best friend’s name once in the entire conversation, Maggie set the sailboat mug down on the counter beside the schedule.

She looked at her mother, now standing very upright over her pine cones in her good cashmere, and could not for the life of her decide which of the two women was being more impossible; Helen with her corrections, or Marianne with her bulldozing, and she opened her mouth to say something reasonable and calming and unhelpful.

Helen got there first.

“There’s a committee meeting this evening, as it happens.” She said it lightly, brightly, dusting a fleck of nothing from the tablecloth, a woman rolling a grenade across the floor and stepping neatly back from it. “Seven o’clock, at the Atheneum.”

“Great. Then I’m coming.”

“That’s really not necessary Margaret.”

“I’m coming, Mom,” Maggie insisted, waiting for her mother to open her mouth to argue, but incredibly she did not.

And there it was. Under the protest, under the pressed wool, the perfect festive candle arrangement and ‘everything is under control’, something in her mother’s shoulders came down half an inch.

Relief.

Helen would sooner have hung both ribbons on the tree again than admit it, but it was there, and Maggie saw it, and it caught her under the ribs.

She had never seen her mother look uncertain like this.

Or vulnerable even.

“Bring your backs up and get settled before dinner, then,” Helen declared, brisk again, brightness snapping back into place. “And do something with your hair after that ferry crossing. The committee will notice.”

Maggie duly went upstairs and dropped her bag on the floor of her old bedroom, readying to unpack for who knew how long.

She had come home to fix a broken committee, but was slowly beginning to wonder whether there was far more than just a committee to fix.

Chapter 5