Chapter 9
They took the stairs down from the fourth floor, because the elevator was too slow, and neither of them said a word the whole way.
Caroline went first. She was still in the green velvet dress, with a long tear at the hem now from the window, and her old wool coat, and the dock crew’s rubber boots, which she had put back on because her shoes were somewhere in the window display.
Connor came behind her in his rolled-up shirtsleeves, breathing hard, wanting to say something on every landing and not saying it.
Luz was waiting at the top of the mezzanine stairs.
She looked at Caroline’s face. She looked at Connor behind her. She looked at the boots. Whatever she thought about any of it, she kept to herself.
“She’s still in there,” Luz said.
The door to Caroline’s office was open. The lights were on.
Brittany Vail sat in Caroline’s chair, behind Caroline’s desk.
She was dressed for the snow, in tall black boots and a white ski jacket and a knit hat with a fur pom-pom.
Her cheeks were pink from the cold. She had set a leather folder squarely in the middle of the desk, on top of Caroline’s Snow Ball seating charts.
And she had made herself a cup of coffee in Caroline’s coffee maker, which only worked if you hit it. She must have figured that out.
When she saw them in the doorway, she stood up.
“Good morning,” she said. “I’m sorry to come in like this. On a Sunday. In a snowstorm.”
She did not look sorry. She looked at Connor’s rolled-up sleeves, and at Caroline’s torn velvet dress, and at the two of them standing side by side in the doorway at eight o’clock in the morning. Something went across her face. It was fast, and it was ugly, and then it was gone.
“Get out from behind my desk,” Caroline said.
Brittany came out from behind the desk. She did not leave. She stood beside it, with one hand resting on the folder.
“Connor,” she said. “I’m sorry. I know you wanted to wait. But she deserves to see this before the board meets tomorrow. You said you’d tell her. You’ve had a month.”
Caroline turned and looked at her husband.
His face was the color of paper.
“Brittany,” he said. His voice was very low. “Take that folder and go.”
“I can’t do that.” Brittany’s voice was gentle and sad. “I have a duty to the board. So do you.” She turned the folder around on the desk so that it faced Caroline, and opened it. “I think you should read it, Caroline. I really do. You shouldn’t be the last person to know.”
* * *
Caroline walked to her own desk and looked down.
It was two pages. It was typed on Hadley’s board letterhead, with the old gold H at the top that her great-grandfather had drawn. It was dated November eighteenth.
HOLIDAY OPERATIONS — TRANSITION PLAN
She read the first paragraph. Then she read it again, because the words would not go in.
Following the close of the current holiday season, Caroline Bradshaw will step back from direction of the Hadley’s holiday floor. This change is made for her wellbeing and at her family’s request, in recognition of the extraordinary demands of the role over the past eight years.
Brittany Vail will assume the role of Holiday Director, effective January 5. Ms. Vail has participated in holiday planning for two seasons and will ensure continuity of the store’s holiday traditions, including the mistletoe lighting and the Walnut Street windows.
There was more. There was a paragraph about budgets and a paragraph about “a supportive announcement to staff after the new year.” There was a sentence about Caroline taking “a well-earned period of rest” and possibly “an advisory role, if she wishes.”
At the bottom of the second page there were two lines.
On the first line, in dark blue ink, was a signature she had seen ten thousand times. On birthday cards. On their marriage license. On the mortgage for the house. On a note stuck to the refrigerator the first year they were married that said went for bagels, back in 10, love you.
Connor Bradshaw, Chairman.
On the second line, much smaller, in shaky black pen, were two initials.
R.H.
Caroline put her hand flat on the desk.
The room was very quiet. Out on the mezzanine, somewhere, a radiator was knocking. Luz was standing in the doorway. Brittany stood by the desk with her hands folded in front of her, like a woman at a funeral.
At her family’s request.
“Caroline,” Connor said. “Let me explain.”
“The Holiday Director,” Caroline said. She did not look up. “Effective January fifth.”
“I never—”
“Including the mistletoe lighting.”
“He was going to tell you after Christmas,” Brittany said softly. “We agreed that would be kinder. With everything you had going on this season. We didn’t want you to have to carry it through the holidays.”
Caroline lifted her head and looked at her.
“We,” she said.
Brittany didn’t answer.
“Get out of my office,” Caroline said.
“Caroline, I know this is a shock—”
“Get out of my office. Get out of my store. If you are still in this building in two minutes, Luz is going to call the police, and I don’t care how long it takes them to get here through the snow. I’ll wait.”
“I’m calling now,” Luz said from the doorway, and took out her phone.
Brittany looked at Caroline for a long moment. Then she looked at Connor. He was not looking at her. He was looking at his wife.
Brittany picked up her gloves from the desk. She left the folder where it was.
“Keep it,” she said. “I have copies.” At the door, she stopped beside Luz and turned around. Her voice was still soft. But her eyes were not soft at all. “It’s already done, Caroline. It was done in November. The board votes on it tomorrow. I’m sorry you had to find out this way.”
Luz stepped out of the doorway so fast that Brittany had to walk past her sideways.
Caroline listened to her boots go down the mezzanine stairs and across the marble. She heard the loading dock door far below. Then Luz went after her, to make sure.
And then it was just the two of them in the little office, and the folder, and the knocking radiator.
* * *
“Tell me,” Caroline said.
Connor stood by her father’s old drafting table. He looked like a man who had been hit by a car and was still standing up out of habit.
“In October,” he said, “Brittany started telling me you were tired.”
Caroline didn’t move.
“Not all at once,” he said. “Little things. She’d sit in on a Hadley’s meeting, and she’d come back to the office and say, Caroline looks exhausted.
Or, I think this season’s really taking it out of her.
She said—” he stopped. “She said you told her at a planning meeting last spring that you didn’t know if you could do another season. ”
“I never said that.”
“I know. I mean, I know that now.”
“I never said that to her. I never said that to anybody. I’ve never said that in my life.”
“I know.”
“And you believed her.”
He closed his eyes. “She said you were too proud to ask for help. She said you’d run yourself into the ground before you’d admit you wanted out.
She said your father was worried about you.
” His voice cracked. “And it sounded like you. That was the thing. It sounded like you. You never ask for help. You’d never say you were tired. ”
“So you asked me,” Caroline said. “Right? You came home one night in October, and you sat down at the kitchen counter, and you asked me if I was tired.”
He didn’t answer.
“Connor. Did you ask me?”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because it was easier.” He opened his eyes.
They were wet. “Because asking you meant sitting down in the kitchen. And it meant hearing whatever the answer was. And I was hardly ever in the kitchen. So when Brittany brought me a plan, I read it at one in the morning, and it sounded kind, and it sounded like it would make your life easier, and I signed it. And I told myself I’d talk to you about it at Thanksgiving.
” He stopped. “And then I told myself after the lighting.”
Caroline looked down at the signature on the desk.
She had thought, in the stockroom, on the night of the lighting, that nothing could hurt her more than watching his hand go into Brittany’s hair.
She had been wrong.
The kiss had been nine seconds. The kiss had been a stupid, weak, terrible nine seconds under a light, with a crowd screaming.
This had been a month.
“You let her tell you who I was,” Caroline said.
He flinched as if she had hit him.
“She described me to you,” Caroline said, and her voice was shaking now, badly, and she didn’t try to stop it.
“In your office. At one in the morning. Over takeout. She told you what your wife was like. What I was feeling. What I wanted. And you didn’t come home and look at me to see if it was true.
You just believed her. And then the two of you sat there and decided what to do with my life. ”
“Yes,” he said. It was barely a sound.
“Did I look tired to you? In November? Did you look at me even once?”
“I didn’t look,” Connor said. “I didn’t look at you.”
She had to hold on to the edge of the desk.
“It’s my life,” she said. “This floor. The windows. The lighting. I have done it since I was twenty-two years old. I have done it every day for eight years. It is the only thing in this building that is mine, Connor. The only thing you didn’t pay for.
” She put her finger on the typed words.
At her family’s request. “And you gave it to her. You gave the thing that’s mine to the woman who—”
She couldn’t finish it.
“I’m going to stop it,” Connor said. His voice was rough and fast. “The vote. Tomorrow. It won’t happen. I’ll pull it. I’ll call every member of the board today. I’ll tear it up in front of them—”
“You signed it.”
“I know I signed it.”
“You don’t get to fix this one,” Caroline said.
“You don’t get to fix it, and make a phone call, and have it be over.
You signed my name away. You did it in November.
You did it the whole time I was building those windows.
” She took a breath that hurt. “You let me sit on a rug with you last night and tell you about next year.”