Chapter 17
At twenty past six on the first Friday of December, the Hadley’s atrium held more people than the fire marshal liked, and Caroline Bradshaw was not pretending anything about it.
“He’s by the candy counter,” she said into her radio. “He’s looking at the third-floor balcony again.”
“I see him,” Luz said in her ear. “He’s writing something on his little pad. He looks like he’s going to cry.”
“Move the rope back two feet.”
“I moved the rope back two feet at four o’clock. I moved it back another foot at five-thirty. If I move it any more, the people on the third floor are going to be standing in housewares.”
“Then tell him that.”
“You tell him. You’re the chairman.”
Caroline laughed and let go of the radio button.
She was standing at the brass rail of the mezzanine, on the red X at the center, where she had stood for nine years.
Below her, the crowd filled the marble floor from the Walnut Street doors to the candy counter.
Kids sat on shoulders. Somebody’s grandmother had brought a folding stool.
Under the glass dome, the mistletoe turned slowly on its wire, the size of a car tire, bound in gold ribbon, above the gold star in the floor.
It was the thirty-first lighting.
She was not running it.
That was the strangest part, and the best. For the first time in nine years, the headset in her ear was only for listening.
Luz Ortega was running the lighting. Luz had been the holiday director of Hadley’s since March, when the board had voted her in, seven to nothing, on a motion made by its new chairman.
Luz had a new office on the mezzanine, right next to Caroline’s old one, and a new coffee maker that worked without being hit, which she said she did not trust.
Caroline’s office now was on the sixth floor, in the paneled room where the board used to meet.
She had taken the portrait of her great-grandfather down off the wall and hung it in the hallway, where he could frown at everyone equally.
And she had put up, in its place, a big framed photograph of the Walnut Street windows.
All six of them. Lit, at night, in the snow.
The board still met in the atrium. It always would.
* * *
“Coffee,” said a voice behind her.
Caroline turned around.
Connor stood at the top of the mezzanine stairs with a cardboard tray in his hands.
Four coffees. His overcoat was open and there was snow on his shoulders.
He had come straight from the river, from his own office, where he had been since seven that morning, running his own company.
He had gotten his hair cut. The gray at his temples had spread a little this year. She liked it.
“You’re early,” she said.
“I’m on time. The lighting’s at seven. On time is early.” He handed her a cup. Oat milk. “One for you. One for Luz. One for your father. One for my mother, who will say it’s too hot.”
“Where’s yours?”
“I drank it in the car. I was nervous.”
“Why are you nervous? You’re not doing anything.”
“I’m standing up here,” Connor said. “In front of nine hundred people. I get nervous.” He looked out over the rail at the crowd below, and for just a second something went across his face, and she saw it, and she knew what he was remembering.
Then he looked back at her, and it was gone, and he smiled.
He came and stood beside her at the rail.
Not behind her. Beside her. He had stood there, at the rail, beside her, at every single thing Hadley’s had done all year.
The spring windows. The summer sale. The board meeting in March, when Luz was voted in, and he’d sat in the back row with the staff.
The Everly’s partnership announcement in September, when Joyce had come down on the train and stood in this atrium and told the newspapers that the Hadley’s and Everly’s windows would trade places for one week every January, Philadelphia’s in Boston and Boston’s in Philadelphia.
Connor had stood at the back for that too, grinning like an idiot.
He had not once stood on the floor.
“Your dad’s already down there,” he said. “In the good seat. With my mother.”
Caroline looked down.
Richard Hadley was sitting on the bench beside the pipe organ, where he had sat for thirty-one lightings.
He had retired in June. He had given a speech at his own party that made everyone cry, and then he had gone to Scotland for three weeks with a walking stick and come back with a sunburn and twelve photographs of the same castle.
He was wearing his red bow tie with the green holly leaves. He was laughing at something.
Next to him on the organ bench, in her fur collar and her pearls, sat Patricia Bradshaw.
Patricia was not laughing. Patricia never laughed in public. But she was leaning very slightly toward Richard, the way you lean toward someone whose jokes you have started to like, and she had her gloved hand resting on the bench between them, not quite touching his.
“When did that happen?” Caroline said.
“The Fourth of July,” Connor said. “At our house. The barbecue. You were inside arguing with the caterer. He showed her his castle photographs.”
“All of them?”
“All twelve. Every one of them is the same castle, Caroline. She looked at every one.” Connor shook his head. “I’ve never seen my mother look at twelve of anything.”
* * *
Their house was on a narrow street in Bella Vista.
It was red brick, three stories, a hundred and forty years old, with a blue front door and a crooked chimney and a tiny back garden with a fig tree in it.
It needed a new roof. The upstairs bathroom had a pink tub.
The kitchen had been the worst room either of them had ever seen, and they had spent six weeks in February and March walking through open houses before they found it, and three more weeks arguing about what to do with that kitchen.
He had wanted to knock out the back wall. She had said no. He had said yes. She had said the wall was a hundred and forty years old and holding up the house. He had called an engineer. The engineer had said the wall could come out. Caroline had said that she didn’t care what an engineer said.
The wall came out.
The kitchen was bright now, and long, with a big old farm table in the middle of it that seated ten, and windows looking onto the fig tree.
It was the best room in the house. Caroline had admitted this out loud exactly once, on the Fourth of July, after two glasses of wine, and Connor had not let her forget it since.
They had sold the townhouse on Rittenhouse Square in April.
She had not cried when they sold it. She had thought she would.
She had stood in the empty front hall on the last day, with the garland hooks still on the banister, and waited for it.
It hadn’t come. Connor had come and stood beside her, and she had said, I thought I’d be sad, and he had said, you can be sad, it’s okay, and she had said, no, that’s the thing, I’m not.
The grandfather clock had come with them. That argument, she had won.
It stood now in the front hall of the house in Bella Vista, at the bottom of the stairs. And on the first night, the night they moved in, with the boxes still stacked to the ceiling and no curtains on any of the windows, Connor had wound it.
Then he had sat down on the bottom stair beside it, on the floor of a house they had picked out together, and pulled her down to sit beside him.
And he had said it.
He had not said it on a stage. He had not said it on Channel 6, or at a board meeting, or anywhere a single other person could hear. He had said it on the bottom stair of their house, at midnight, with the clock ticking beside them and the streetlight coming in through the bare windows.
You’re my home, he had said. Not this house.
You. I spent my whole life waiting on a front step for somebody to come back.
And you came back. I’m never going to make you wait for me again.
I’m going to come home to you every night for the rest of my life.
And when I’m old and stupid, and I forget where left is, you’re still going to be the first thing I look for in any room.
And Caroline, on the bottom stair, had said, I chose you.
In Boston, with everything in my hands. And I’ll choose you tomorrow.
And the day after that. You’re my husband, and you’re my best friend, and I’m going to love you until one of us is too old to climb these stairs, and then we’ll put a bed in that ridiculous kitchen.
He had laughed so hard he’d had to lie down on the hall floor.
* * *
“Your shirt,” Caroline said, “is a crime.”
Stephanie had come up the mezzanine stairs at six forty-five with Luz’s permission and a hot pretzel. She was wearing a brand-new pink T-shirt over her court suit. It said 31 on the front in huge white numbers. On the back, it said TEAM CAROLINE (STILL).
“It’s a tradition,” Stephanie said. “I’m making it a tradition. You can’t stop me. You’re only the chairman.”
“How many did you make?”
“Forty.” Stephanie bit her pretzel. “The gift-wrap ladies bought ten.”
Connor, beside Caroline at the rail, turned around and looked at the shirt. Stephanie looked back at him. It had taken a year, but Stephanie now looked at Connor the way she looked at a client she had decided was probably not guilty.
“Nice shirt, Stephanie,” he said.
“You’re not on the team,” Stephanie told him. “You’re the equipment manager.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You’ll take it,” Stephanie agreed. Then she leaned in close to Caroline, very casual, and lowered her voice. “Guess who I heard about.”
“Who?”
“My friend from law school knows a paralegal in Columbus. Or Cleveland. Or one of those.” Stephanie waved her pretzel.
“One of the ones in the middle. A woman named Brittany Vail just got her real estate license there. She’s selling condos.
Two-bedroom, one-bath. She’s on the billboard by the airport, apparently.
Big smile. The paralegal says her teeth are enormous. ”
Caroline thought about it for a second.