Chapter 8 #2
She hadn’t looked at her phone in two hours. Neither had he. She had watched him take it out of his pocket once, while they were carrying the plexiglass, and put it face-down on a shelf in the basement. It was still down there.
“I’m starving,” Connor said.
“There’s fudge.”
He turned his head and looked at her.
“At the candy counter,” she said. “It’s under the glass. There’s peppermint and there’s chocolate walnut, and the peppermint is better, and I’m not going to argue about it.”
“The chocolate walnut is better.”
“You’ve been wrong about that for ten years.”
* * *
They ate it on the floor of the furniture department.
It was on the fourth floor, and it was the warmest place in the building, because the heat rose.
It was also the only place in Hadley’s with anything soft to sit on.
The display rooms stood in the dark in a long row, like little stage sets: a living room, a den, a bedroom, each with lamps and rugs and a Christmas tree of its own.
Caroline turned on one lamp in the den. It had a big red plaid couch and a thick rug and a fireplace that wasn’t real.
They did not sit on the couch. They sat on the rug in front of it, with a box of fudge between them, and she took off the rubber boots, and he took off his shoes, and they ate peppermint and chocolate walnut with their fingers.
He had brought two blankets from the bedding section. He gave her both of them. She gave one back.
For a while, neither of them said anything. It wasn’t a hard silence. It was the kind of silence that happens when two people are too tired to be careful.
“My mother came to see you,” Connor said at last.
Caroline looked at him.
“She told me,” he said. “Well. She left a voicemail. She said she bought you a scarf and told you about my father.” He was looking at the fake fire. “And that she wasn’t going to see me at Christmas, and I could call her when I figured out why.”
“Have you figured out why?”
“Some of it.” He broke a piece of fudge in half and didn’t eat it. “She told you he went out for milk.”
“Yes.”
“I waited for him.” He said it very simply.
“On the front steps of the house in Kensington. I had my coat on over my pajamas. My mother kept telling me to come in. I waited until midnight. I was sure he was coming back, because he’d said he’d be right back, and he always came back.
” He turned the half of fudge over in his fingers.
“And after that, every Christmas Eve, I hated the dark. That part right at the end, when everybody goes home and turns the lights off. I’d go to bed early so I didn’t have to see it. ”
Caroline sat very still.
“And then I met you,” Connor said, “and you made me come to the store every Christmas Eve at five o’clock to watch you turn off the tree.”
“Connor—”
“I loved it,” he said. “That’s what I’m trying to say.
I hated the lights going off my whole life, and then you’d hold my hand and we’d turn off the tree together, and you’d say merry Christmas, Hadley’s, to the empty store, like it was a person.
And it wasn’t waiting anymore. It was the opposite of waiting.
” He put the fudge down. “I never told you that. I never told you any of it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was easier not to.”
She didn’t say anything.
“And then last year,” he said, very low, “I didn’t come.
And I told you it was the Singapore call.
And there was a call. But I could have moved it.
I didn’t. I’d stopped coming to everything, and I didn’t even notice I’d stopped.
I just noticed it was easier.” He shut his eyes.
“That’s the whole year, Caroline. I kept doing the easy thing.
I kept doing it right up until I was standing under that light. ”
The heat ticked in the pipes. Somewhere below them, the building settled.
Caroline pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders. She thought about Patricia saying, My son thinks if he pays for the roof, he’s been home. She thought about the empty store on Christmas Eve last year, and turning off the tree by herself, and saying merry Christmas, Hadley’s to nobody.
She did not forgive him. She wanted to be very clear with herself about that, sitting there on the rug. Nothing he had said erased the light, or his hand in Brittany’s hair, or two months of she’d ask me about my day.
But she let him say it. And she heard it.
“Tell me about next year’s windows,” Connor said.
She blinked at him.
“You always start in January,” he said. “You’ve already started. I know you. You’ve got a sketchbook somewhere with next year in it.” He leaned back against the plaid couch. “Tell me.”
So she did.
She hadn’t meant to. She meant to say one sentence.
But he asked a question, and then another one, and then she was talking with her hands.
She told him about the idea she’d had in October, standing in the rain on Walnut Street, for a set of windows that told a story backward, from the end of Christmas night to the beginning.
She told him about the old carousel she’d found in a barn in Lancaster County that she wanted to buy and restore.
She told him about a little girl who’d written the store a letter asking why the skaters in window three never got to stop and rest.
He listened.
He didn’t look at his phone, because his phone was in the basement.
He didn’t look at the clock. He sat on the rug with his sleeves rolled up and fudge on his fingers and asked her what color the carousel horses were, and whether she could get the motor to run backward, and what she’d written back to the girl.
“I told her they rest on Christmas Day,” Caroline said. “When the store’s closed. I told her that’s what Christmas Day is for.”
Connor laughed, quietly.
“That’s a good answer,” he said. “That’s a really good answer.”