Chapter 17 #2
Then she found, a little to her surprise, that she didn’t feel anything at all about it. Not anger. Not satisfaction. Not even much curiosity. It was like hearing the weather in a city she’d never been to.
“Good for her,” Caroline said.
Stephanie stared at her. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I drove all the way here with that,” Stephanie said. “I was saving it.”
“It’s a very good pretzel,” Connor offered.
* * *
At six fifty-five, the house lights went to half.
The crowd roared. The children on the risers bounced.
The Saint Anne’s Children’s Choir was back this year, forty-some kids, and there was already a boy crying in the front row, and Caroline could hear Luz on the radio calmly handling it.
Down on the organ bench, Richard lifted both arms like a man at a ballgame.
Patricia put a gloved hand on his sleeve and pulled one of them back down.
Caroline put her hand on the rail.
After a moment, Connor put his hand next to hers. Not on top. Next to. Their fingers were just touching.
On the mezzanine, Luz Ortega stepped up to the microphone stand on the small red X that Caroline had taped beside the old one, the one that was now Luz’s X.
“Good evening, Philadelphia,” Luz said.
Her voice went out through the dome and filled it, and nine hundred people roared back, and Caroline felt it go through her the way it always had, from the soles of her feet up. It was different, hearing it from beside the microphone instead of into it. It was better. She didn’t know why.
“Welcome to Hadley’s,” Luz said. “Welcome to the thirty-first lighting of the mistletoe.”
She gave them the rules. She did it in her own way, which was drier and faster than Caroline’s, and the crowd laughed in different places.
At seven o’clock, the clock would strike.
The lights would go out. The spotlight would go looking.
If it found you, you kissed whoever you were with. Grandmothers on the cheek.
“And if you’re standing under there with your boss,” Luz said, “I don’t care. That’s your problem.”
The crowd howled. Caroline laughed so hard she had to hold on to the rail. Beside her, Connor made a sound that was half a laugh and half a groan and put his face briefly in his free hand.
“Thirty seconds,” Luz said. “Count it down with me.”
The whole building counted.
Ten. Nine. People on the balconies leaned on the rails.
Eight. Seven. Parents lifted their kids.
Six. Five. Caroline felt Connor’s fingers move against hers on the brass, and she turned her hand over, and he laced his fingers through hers.
Four. Three. Down on the floor, her father was counting at the top of his lungs. Two.
One.
The clock struck seven.
The first bell rang through the marble, low and huge, and the atrium went dark. There was only the tree, forty feet of gold at the end of the floor, and nine hundred people breathing.
Then the spotlight came on.
It came out of the booth on the third floor, hard and white, and began to search.
It slid across the balcony. It found a pair of teenagers, who screamed and ducked.
It found a man in a Santa hat, who bowed.
The crowd shouted directions. Left! Get the Santa!
Back! It wandered, teasing, the way it always had, the way it always would, across the floor and up the walls and across the glass of the dome, while the clock went on striking.
Four. Five.
The light did not go down toward the gold star.
It went up.
It came up off the floor, and up the marble wall, and it swung, slowly, across the whole width of the atrium, toward the mezzanine.
Six.
It stopped on Caroline and Connor.
For one second, in the hard white light, Caroline saw nothing at all. Only her husband’s hand was real, gripping hers, very hard.
Seven.
Down in the dark, nine hundred people realized who was standing in the light.
The roar that came up from the floor of Hadley’s was louder than anything Caroline had ever heard in that building.
Louder than the lighting a year ago. Louder than the Carols.
It came up off the marble and rolled up the walls and hit the dome and came back down.
People were on their feet on the balconies.
The gift-wrap ladies, in their pink shirts, were jumping up and down.
Down on the organ bench, Richard Hadley had both arms up in the air and was yelling something, and Patricia Bradshaw, beside him, was standing too. Patricia Bradshaw was clapping.
Somebody started the chant. It was Stephanie. Of course it was Stephanie.
“Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
The whole building took it up.
Caroline turned and looked at Luz.
Luz was standing at the microphone with her reading glasses on their chain and a sheet of paper in her hand.
She held it up, so Caroline could see. It was a cue sheet.
Caroline’s old cue sheet, typed, with all the times down the left side.
And beside the seven o’clock cue, in Luz’s small, square, stubborn handwriting, in red pen, was a note.
Hold spot on C.B. & C.B. — for as long as they want.
Luz lowered the sheet. She looked at Caroline over the tops of her glasses. She did not smile. Luz almost never smiled.
But her eyes did.
Caroline turned back to her husband.
He was looking at her in the white light.
He had not moved. His hand was still locked in hers, and his face was doing the thing it had done a year ago, under a different light, on a different spot, when he looked up and found her on the mezzanine.
Only it was the opposite of that. It was everything that look had not been.
It was the way he had looked at her from the top of a ladder at three o’clock in the morning, ten years ago, in the corner window.
He was waiting. He was still, after a whole year, waiting for her.
“Everybody’s watching,” Connor said. His voice was very low and very rough. She could barely hear it over the roar. “You don’t have to.”
“I know,” Caroline said.
She let go of the rail. She put her hands on either side of his face.
“That’s what I want,” she said. “I want them to watch.”
And she kissed him.
She kissed her husband on the mezzanine of her family’s store, in the white light, in front of the whole city.
She kissed him the way she had kissed him on the bottom stair of their house on the first night, and at the back of the atrium on the day of the board meeting, and in a hundred ordinary kitchens in between.
His arms went around her. Her hands went into his hair.
She felt him laugh against her mouth, and then stop laughing, and kiss her back like a man who had spent his whole life on a front step and finally, finally, somebody had come home.
The crowd went out of its mind.
The cheering went up, and up, and turned to whistles, and turned back to cheering again.
The kids on the risers were screaming. Somebody on the third-floor balcony was throwing paper snowflakes.
Down on the organ bench, her father was crying into his holly bow tie, and Patricia was handing him a handkerchief.
At the microphone, Luz stood with her arms folded and her cue sheet under one elbow, and let the spotlight hold, and hold, and hold.
Caroline did not count.
She did not count a single second. For the first time in all her years on this mezzanine, she did not keep time.
She stood in the light with her husband’s arms around her and her hands in his hair, and she kissed him in front of everyone she had ever known, for as long as she liked, and then a little longer.
When she finally lifted her head, Connor rested his forehead against hers. He was out of breath. So was she.
“I love you,” he said, right there, in the light, where anyone could hear.
“I love you,” Caroline said. “Now come home with me.”
“Every night,” he said. “Every night for the rest of my life.”
Behind them, the organ came in, loud and bright and a little late, playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” The atrium lights came back up gold. The spotlight went out. The Saint Anne’s Children’s Choir lifted their chins and sang.
And on the mezzanine of Hadley’s, in front of the brass clock and the forty-foot tree and the whole of Philadelphia, Caroline Bradshaw stood beside her husband with her hand in his, not behind him and not in front of him, and sang every word, in the store that was hers, beside the man who was hers, in a life they had built, on purpose, together, to last.