Chapter 10 #2
He was announcing it. He was standing under the clock, in front of three cameras, announcing her life.
Not because I say so, he had said, and he was saying so.
He had torn up a paper that decided her future, and he had done it by deciding her future, out loud, in front of everyone.
He had not called her. He had not asked her.
He did not know that she had said yes to Boston.
He did not know, because he had not asked.
She keyed her radio with a shaking hand. “Jenny. Cut to the choir.”
“I can’t,” Jenny whispered. “My boss is in the truck. He’s saying let it run. The phones are going crazy.”
Below, Connor had waited for the room to settle again. Now he looked down at the podium for a moment. When he looked up, his face had changed. It was softer, and rougher, and Caroline felt her stomach drop before he said a word.
“I want to tell you one more thing,” he said. “And then I’ll let you have your choirs.”
No, Caroline thought. No. Don’t.
“Ten years ago,” Connor said, “I was a guy with six trucks and a warehouse in South Philly that leaked when it rained. And one Saturday night in December, somebody called me and said Hadley’s had lost a truck.
The truck with the window figures in it.
And the window director was standing on the loading dock on Sansom Street, crying her eyes out, because she’d just gotten the job, and her whole first season was sitting in the wrong warehouse in Pennsauken. ”
A few people in the crowd laughed, warmly.
“So I went and got it,” Connor said. “And I drove it back myself. And then I stayed. I held the ladder while she built that corner window, right out there on Walnut Street. Till three o’clock in the morning.
She told me I didn’t know where left was.
” His voice cracked. The crowd laughed again, softer.
“And at three-thirty in the morning, we sat on the floor of that window and split a candy bar out of the vending machine, and I thought, that’s the one.
That’s her. I’m going to marry that girl. ”
Somewhere near the front, a woman said, “Oh,” out loud.
“And two nights ago,” Connor said, “in the snowstorm, the wind broke the glass in that same window. And we were the only two people in the building. And we fixed it. Together. The same window. All night.”
The atrium made a sound Caroline had never heard it make. It was a sigh. Nine hundred people sighed at once.
“I don’t deserve her,” Connor said. “I never did. I’m not up here to ask her for anything. I just wanted all of you to know who she is. She’s the woman who built that window. That’s all.” He stepped back from the microphone. “Merry Christmas. Thank you.”
He walked away from the podium.
And the atrium of Hadley’s went out of its mind.
People were on their feet. People were crying.
Rick Santos was openly sobbing into his Hadley’s scarf.
The Saint Anne’s girls’ choir, who did not understand any of it, started clapping because everyone else was.
On the second-floor balcony, somebody chanted Car-o-line!
Car-o-line! and it spread. Phones were up everywhere.
Every single one of them was pointed at the mezzanine.
At her.
Caroline stood on her red X at the rail and looked down at nine hundred people cheering for the most romantic thing they had ever seen, and she felt as if someone had opened her chest and taken something out.
“Caroline,” Luz said in her ear, very quietly. “‘Silent Night.’ You have to call ‘Silent Night.’”
Caroline keyed the radio.
“Lights down,” she said. Her voice came out perfectly steady. “Organ. Go.”
* * *
By the end of “Silent Night,” the clip was already on the internet.
By the time the crowd had cleared out, at eight-thirty, it had been seen more times than the kiss.
Luz showed her. Luz stood beside her in the back hallway behind the mezzanine and held out her phone without a word, because Luz was the person who showed Caroline things.
Somebody had cut the speech down to a minute.
She told me I didn’t know where left was.
I’m going to marry that girl. Under it, people had written thousands of things.
I’m SOBBING.
She HAS to take him back. She has to.
That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
THEY FIXED THE SAME WINDOW IN THE SNOWSTORM. I CAN’T.
Wait. They spent the night in the store together??? During the storm????
Okay so they’re definitely back together.
Going to Hadley’s tomorrow to see THE window.
Caroline gave the phone back.
“There are people out on the sidewalk right now,” Luz said carefully. “Taking pictures of window one. About fifty of them. A couple were kissing in front of it.”
“Okay,” Caroline said.
“Caroline—”
“Where is he?”
Luz looked at her.
“He’s in the stockroom,” Luz said. “He came up the back stairs. He asked me if you’d see him. I told him I’d ask.”
* * *
He was standing by the broken reindeer.
He had his hands in the pockets of the peacoat. When she came in and shut the door, he took them out. His face was pale and his eyes were bright, and he looked, for one second, like a man who thought he might have done something right.
Then he saw her face, and that went out of him.
“Caroline,” he said.
She stood with her back against the door.
For a long moment she couldn’t speak at all. There was too much. It was all jammed together in her throat, and if she let any of it out, all of it would come, and she would scream, and the choirs were still packing up on the other side of the wall.
So she spoke very quietly. That was the only way she could speak at all.