Chapter 14
At four fifty-eight on Christmas Eve, the last customer in Hadley’s was a man in a Flyers jacket buying a bottle of perfume for his wife.
He had no idea which one. He stood at the counter looking at forty bottles with the face of a man defusing a bomb.
Caroline, who had been walking the floor to close, stopped beside him and asked him three questions.
What does she wear to church? What does her kitchen smell like?
What color is her car? Then she picked up a small round bottle and put it in his hand.
“This one,” she said.
He looked at it. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He paid. The girl at the counter wrapped it in gold paper. He went out through the Walnut Street doors into the dark with his little gold box held against his chest like a baby bird, and Caroline locked the doors behind him, and it was five o’clock, and the season was over.
It happened the way it always did. The staff came out onto the atrium floor from every department.
People hugged. Somebody opened a bottle of cheap champagne and poured it into paper cups.
Homer the head elf, still in his green felt, made a speech that nobody could hear.
Jamal lifted Luz off the ground, and Luz threatened his life.
The two floor managers from Keystone Staffing shook Caroline’s hand and told her it was the best-run floor they’d ever worked, and Caroline thanked them and did not tell them whose idea they had been.
By five-forty, they were all gone.
Luz was the last. She stood at the staff door with her coat on and her reading glasses tucked in her pocket, and she looked at Caroline standing alone by the tree.
“You want me to stay?” Luz said.
“No. Go home. Your mother’s waiting.”
“My mother has been waiting since 1985. She’s good at it.” Luz didn’t move. “Your dad’s not coming?”
“He’s tired. He asked me to do it this year.” Caroline smiled. “Go on, Luz. Merry Christmas.”
Luz looked at her a moment longer. Then she crossed the marble and hugged Caroline hard, the way she’d hugged her on the loading dock the night of the Snow Ball.
“Whatever you decide,” Luz said into her shoulder. “About anything. You hear me?”
Caroline went still.
“I’m not stupid,” Luz said. “I’ve seen your face every time your phone rings with a six-one-seven number.” She let go. “Whatever you decide. Merry Christmas.”
And she went.
* * *
The atrium was very quiet.
The lights were already off on the balconies and in the departments.
The only light left in the building was the tree, forty feet of it, gold and white, standing at the end of the marble floor under the dome.
The mistletoe turned slowly above the gold star.
Through the glass of the dome, the sky was dark blue and full of slow, fat snowflakes.
Every Christmas Eve for thirty years, someone had stood right here after the last customer and turned off the tree.
For twenty-two years it had been her father.
He would stand at the switch panel behind the tree and say, Merry Christmas, Hadley’s, to the empty store, as if it could hear him.
Then, when Caroline took over the holiday floor, he had handed it to her.
And every year after that, Connor had stood beside her.
Last year, she had done it alone.
Caroline walked slowly across the marble to the tree. She stood in front of it with her hands in the pockets of her black dress and looked up into the lights.
She thought about Boston. About a small apartment in Back Bay with a fireplace. About January fifth, which was twelve days away.
She thought about taillights turning the corner onto Twelfth Street in the snow.
Somebody knocked on the glass.
* * *
It was the side door on Walnut Street, the small one beside the big brass doors that the staff used after hours. Caroline turned toward the sound. Through the glass, in the orange light of the streetlamp, she could see a dark shape standing in the snow.
She knew the shape.
She stood by the tree for a long moment. Then she walked across the floor and unlocked the side door and opened it.
Connor stood on the sidewalk in the old navy peacoat, with snow on his shoulders and snow in his hair. He had his hands at his sides. He had nothing in them.
“I’m not here to ask for anything,” he said. “I want to say that first.”
Caroline held the door.
“I know it’s Christmas Eve,” he said. “I know it’s five-forty-five and the store’s closed.
I know you do the tree.” His breath went up in a cloud.
“I came to say some things I should have said on the first Friday of December. In the front hall. When you asked me for the truth, and I only gave you part of it.” He swallowed.
“You don’t have to let me in. I can say it right here. And then I’ll go.”
The snow came down between them.
“You’re getting snow in the store,” Caroline said.
He looked down at his feet, on the threshold. Then back up at her.
She stepped back and let him in.
* * *
They did not sit down right away. They stood in front of the tree, a few feet apart, just as they had stood on opposite sides of Carla at the Snow Ball.
Connor took off his peacoat and held it over his arm and did not seem to know where to put it.
Caroline took it from him and hung it on the corner of the Santa chair.
“Say it,” she said.
He looked at the tree for a moment. When he looked at her again, his face was very tired and very steady.
“She wasn’t special,” he said.
Caroline didn’t move.
“That’s the first thing. I need you to know that. It’s worse than if she was.” He put his hands in his pockets. “It wasn’t that she was smart, or pretty, or that I fell for her. I didn’t. I never did. It was that she didn’t know me.”
“You said that. In the hall.”
“I said it. I didn’t say what it meant.” His voice went rough.
“You know me, Caroline. You know I can’t find left.
You know I’m scared of hospitals. You know I cried at the end of that dog movie and I made you swear to never tell anybody.
You know I hide in my study when I’m scared and call it work.
You’ve seen every stupid, small, frightened thing about me. For ten years.”
He took a breath.
“And Brittany didn’t know any of it. She thought I was the man on the business page.
And for two months, I got to be that man, every night, in that office, for somebody who thought he was wonderful.
” He looked right at her. “I liked being admired more than I liked being known. That’s the whole thing.
That’s the truth. It’s the smallest, ugliest thing I’ve ever said out loud. And it’s true.”
Caroline’s eyes were stinging. She held still.
“And the other thing,” Connor said. “The thing I didn’t say at all.”
“What?”
“I let you carry everything,” he said. “Because you always could.”
She stopped breathing.
“The house. My mother’s birthdays. Your father.
The store. Every holiday. Every dinner we were supposed to go to together that you went to alone.
You carried it, and you never dropped any of it, and I told myself that meant you were fine.
” He shook his head. “I told myself I was respecting you. That you were strong. That you didn’t need me hovering.
It wasn’t respect. It was the easiest thing in the world.
You were so good at carrying everything that I just—put it all down. And walked away. And let you.”
He stopped. The tree hummed.
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s what I came to say. I’m not asking you for anything. I just didn’t want you to go into Christmas thinking I still didn’t know.”
* * *
For a long time, neither of them said anything.
Then Caroline went and sat down on the steps of Santa’s little stage, in front of the big red chair, because her legs were not going to hold her up much longer. After a moment, Connor sat down too. Not beside her. On the other end of the step.
“I know it was you,” she said. “On the dock.”
He looked at the floor. “Jamal’s a terrible liar.”
“Jamal didn’t tell me anything. You wrote on the chalkboard. In capital letters.”
Connor closed his eyes and laughed very quietly. It was not a happy laugh.
“I didn’t even think about that,” he said.
“And Luz. And my father.”
“I asked them,” he said. “That’s all. I asked them what you needed. I should have asked you. But you weren’t—I didn’t think you’d—” He stopped. “I didn’t want to give you one more thing you’d have to carry. Even an answer.”
Caroline looked at the tree.
I didn’t want to give you one more thing you’d have to carry.
Twelve days. January fifth.
“I have to tell you something,” she said.
He turned his head.
“On Sunday,” she said. “The day of the plan. After I left my father’s house.
I called Joyce Bannerman.” She made herself keep looking at him.
“She’s the president of Everly’s. In Boston.
She came down on the train two weeks ago and watched me work all day.
And she offered me a job. Running their whole holiday season.
Vice president. My name on the door.” She took a breath.
“And on Sunday, on my father’s front step, I called her and said yes. ”
Connor did not move at all.
“I start January fifth,” Caroline said. “They have an apartment for me in Back Bay.”
The atrium was very quiet. Somewhere outside, far away, church bells were ringing.
“And I didn’t tell you,” she said, and her voice broke.
“I stood in that stockroom on Monday night, and I told you that you never ask, that you just decide. And I’d already decided.
I decided my whole life, and I didn’t tell you.
I told Stephanie. I didn’t even tell my father.
Or Luz. I didn’t tell you.” She pressed her hands together hard in her lap.
“So I don’t get to stand here and act like I’m better than you at that. I’m not.”
She waited for it.