Chapter 7 #2
Carla got up on the stage, took the microphone, looked at four hundred people, and burst into tears.
The room went very quiet.
“I’m so sorry,” Carla said into the microphone, crying. “I’m so sorry. It’s just been such a—the kids—” and she held the microphone out, helplessly, toward the edge of the stage.
Connor was standing on that side. Caroline was on the other.
He didn’t move. He looked at Caroline across the stage. It was a question. Your call.
Caroline went up the steps and took the microphone out of Carla’s hand, and hugged her, and sent her down the stairs to her husband. Then she turned around to face the room.
“Hi, everybody,” she said. “Carla’s having a very good time.”
Four hundred people laughed, too loudly, with relief.
“For those of you who don’t know,” Caroline said, “Carla Weiss has worked at the children’s hospital for twenty-two years. Every one of the kids on the fourth floor knows her name. She cries at the Snow Ball every year. It’s a tradition. We’d worry if she didn’t.”
More laughter, warmer. Carla, at the bottom of the steps, laughed through her tears and waved.
Caroline looked down at the first card. She knew what it said. It was the same first item it was every year.
“Our first item tonight,” she said, “is a private, after-hours tour of the Hadley’s holiday windows—”
She stopped.
Every year, this was where Connor came up onto the stage and set up the joke. It was a dumb joke. It was their joke. The room knew it. She could see some of them waiting for it, the regulars at the front tables, and then remembering, and looking away.
She looked at Connor at the side of the stage.
He was standing very still with his hands at his sides. He was not coming up. He was keeping her terms. No speeches. He would stand there all night if she wanted him to.
“Guided by the woman who built them,” Caroline said slowly. And then, before she could think better of it, she held the microphone out toward the side of the stage.
Connor looked at the microphone. Then at her.
He came up two steps, not all the way onto the stage. He took the microphone without touching her fingers. He did not look at the room. He looked at the card in her hand.
“I asked her,” he said, “what she thought the opening bid should be.”
His voice was rough. It came through the speakers a little too loud. The room held its breath.
Caroline leaned toward the microphone, not close to him, and said: “And I told him higher than whatever he was about to say.”
The room exploded.
It was the same joke. It was the same joke they had done for nine years, and four hundred people who had watched the video of him kissing another woman a hundred times laughed as if it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
Ed Lundgren slapped the table. Somebody at the back whistled.
And from table six, a hand went up, and a voice shouted a number, and then another hand went up at table twelve and shouted a bigger one.
Connor gave her back the microphone and stepped down off the stairs.
The window tour went for three times what it had gone for last year.
Caroline ran the rest of the auction on her own. She was good at it. She was funny and fast and she made the bankers bid against each other for a weekend at a ski house in the Poconos until they were both red in the face. She did not look at Connor once.
She did not need to. She knew exactly where he was.
* * *
The snow outside the Walnut Street doors had gone from pretty to serious, and by nine-thirty the band was playing and the dance floor was full.
Caroline was at the edge of the dance floor, talking to Patricia. Her mother-in-law was on the hospital board and had come in a silver gown and her pearls. She had not said one word to her son all night. Caroline had watched her walk past him twice as if he were a pillar.
“You two still work a room like a pair of pickpockets,” Patricia said, watching the dancers.
“That was for the hospital.”
“I know it was.” Patricia sipped her champagne. “I’m not blind, Caroline. I’m only saying I’ve never seen anybody else do it that well. Not even your father and mother. And they were very good.”
Caroline didn’t know what to say to that. Across the floor, her father was dancing with Carla Weiss, badly, and laughing. He had looked at Caroline three times tonight with a face so full of hope that she wanted to shake him.
Connor was standing by the bar with Ed Lundgren. He was not drinking. He was holding a glass of club soda and listening to Ed talk about football. Every few minutes, his eyes came across the room and found her, and then went away again.
“He’s not drinking,” Patricia said.
“I noticed.”
“Neither am I talking to him,” Patricia said. “In case you noticed that too.” She finished her champagne. “Excuse me. I see Sam Desai, and I need to give him a piece of my mind about his parking garage.”
She left. Caroline stood alone at the edge of the dance floor and let herself, for one minute, just watch the room she had made.
That was when Phil Bristow found them.
Phil Bristow was a partner at Bristow Kane, one of the two lead sponsors, and he had been drinking since six.
He was a big, happy, loud man who wore a Santa hat with his tuxedo every year.
Caroline had always liked him. Tonight, he had pulled a sprig of mistletoe out of one of the table centerpieces and tied it with a ribbon to the end of a long silver serving spoon.
He came across the floor holding it up in the air like a flag.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! Connor! Get over here!”
Connor turned around at the bar.
“Caroline!” Phil swung around and found her. “There she is! Come on! Come on, you two!”
He was between them now, in the middle of the dance floor, waving the spoon. The band was still playing. People nearby turned to look.
“Tradition!” Phil shouted, delighted with himself. “Tradition! Come on! Let’s fix it! Kiss and make up, you two, right here, under the mistletoe—”
Caroline stood frozen at the edge of the dance floor.
Around Phil, people laughed, and then stopped laughing, just as the atrium had stopped a week ago.
Somebody’s hand went to a pocket. A phone came up at the table beside her, and another one, and she understood, in one long cold second, what was about to happen.
There would be a video. There would be the two of them, and a drunk man with a spoon, and mistletoe, and her face.
Connor crossed the floor in about four steps.
He didn’t look at Caroline. He walked straight to Phil Bristow and reached up and took the silver spoon out of his hand, as you’d take something sharp away from a child.
He snapped the mistletoe off the end of it.
He dropped the sprig into a champagne bucket on the nearest table, where it sank under the ice.
“Not tonight, Phil,” he said quietly.
It was not loud. It did not have to be. Phil’s face went from red to white. The phones at the next table stopped halfway up, and went back down.
Connor handed Phil the empty spoon.
“Go get some coffee,” Connor said. “Ed’s going to take you.”
And Ed Lundgren, who had followed him from the bar, put a big arm around Phil’s shoulders and turned him around and walked him off the floor.
The band kept playing. The dancers kept dancing. It had taken maybe fifteen seconds.
Connor turned around and looked for her.
Caroline was already walking. She walked, not fast, off the edge of the dance floor, past the birch trees, past the covered perfume counter, to the staff door by the elevators.
She pushed it open and went through and let it close behind her.
Then she went down the back hallway and down the freight stairs and out through the heavy metal door onto the loading dock.
The cold hit her like a bucket of water.
* * *
It was snowing so hard she could barely see the other side of the alley.