Christmas Stroll weekend arrived. The Stroll was Zoe’s favorite event of the year. Downtown was a holiday wonderland. Christmas trees, lit and decorated, lined Main Street; the shop windows were filled with elves and candy canes and glittering glass balls. On the Saturday of Stroll weekend, Main Street was closed to traffic so the crowds could walk up and down the cobblestones, listening to the Victorian carolers, sipping hot chocolate, and waiting for Santa to arrive on the ferry.
That year was especially busy for Zoe. She was catering a large party Saturday night at a home on India Street. The woman throwing the party, Ella Mangini, was one of Zoe’s favorite new clients. She had silver hair that she wore in a swinging bob and an irrepressible sense of fun. She drank a glass of champagne with Zoe in the kitchen before the guests arrived, wearing just her slip and fuzzy slippers. Ella was unmarried, though she intimated that she’d had many, many lovers. She was aghast when Zoe said that she hadn’t dated anyone seriously since the children were small.
“The kids are enough to fill my emotional life,” Zoe said. “The kids are, most of the time, too much.”
“But you’re so young!” Ella said. “What about your needs?”
Zoe upended the contents of her champagne flute into her mouth. Her needs? There had been the occasional one-night stand; there had been the front-desk clerk at the hotel in Cabo five nights in a row, which for Zoe had constituted a long-term relationship.
“What about them?” Zoe said.
After the party was over, Ella returned to the kitchen alone, though Zoe saw a man in a tuxedo standing just outside the door. Ella poured Zoe another glass of champagne, pressed two hundred and fifty dollars into her hand, and said, “The food was outstanding-you’re a genius, and I adore you. Now go out and enjoy. The night is but a pup!”
Zoe had walked down the friendship stairs of Ella Mangini’s house just as it started to snow. All around her Christmas lights were twinkling, and snowflakes were drifting from the sky. The champagne had created a fizzy bubble of possibility in her chest. The night is but a pup! Penny was sleeping at Annabel Wright’s house, and Hobby was at a basketball tournament in West Bridgewater. Zoe could go home to her deserted, freezing-cold cottage, or she could proceed downtown and join the celebration.
Once at her car, she removed her chef’s jacket. Underneath she wore a sparkly red T-shirt, a concession to the season. She fluffed her hair in the rearview mirror, put on red lipstick, and thought, Okay, here I go.
She wandered down Main Street and stopped in at the Club Car, because she heard the strains of the piano and she knew that the owner, Joe, was sure to buy her a drink.
Once she had wedged herself into the packed bar, though, she felt self-conscious. She had been single basically her entire adult life; she was no stranger to walking into a bar alone. But in recent years she had grown used to the comfortable presence of the Castles and the Randolphs; without them she felt stripped, vulnerable. The piano player was banging out “Hotel California,” and people were throwing back their heads and singing along. Zoe felt a pang of regret, because how wonderful would it be if she could just get a drink and join in? If she were anywhere else, she would do it, but this island was a fishbowl, and if the eyes and ears of Nantucket saw and heard her here alone on the Saturday of Christmas Stroll, drinking and singing, people would either feel sorry for her or suspect that she was up to no good.
Someone grabbed her arm, roughly, and she spun around and landed in an empty bar stool.
“Zoe.”
Zoe looked up, suspecting that the grabber was Joe, the owner, but as it turned out, it wasn’t Joe at all.
It was Jordan.
Jordan had her by the arm. Jordan was sitting on the stool next to hers. Jordan had a beer in front of him and a glass of water. He always drank the two things side by side so he wouldn’t get “carried away,” a habit that Zoe found absurd.
“Jordan?” she said. The last person she’d ever expected to see out at the Club Car on the Saturday of Stroll weekend was Jordan Randolph. He hadn’t set foot out of the house other than to go to work (and, she supposed, to dinner at the Castles’) in eight months.
Zoe scanned the seats next to Jordan, looking for Al Castle or Marnie Fellowes, his managing editor, or someone else who would help make sense of his presence here-but on Jordan’s other side was an attractive older woman wearing Botox, a fur coat, and a New Jersey accent, the unofficial uniform of Christmas Stroll.
Zoe squinted at him. The evening had been surreal enough thus far that she believed this might be a vision or a dream, like something out of A Christmas Carol, Jordan appearing next to her like the Ghost of Best Friends Past.
“I’m sorry,” Zoe said. “What are you doing here?”
He raised his hand and ordered her a glass of champagne. She waited for the drink to arrive, and then she raised the glass to him and said, “Happy Stroll.”
He didn’t respond. He raised his water glass and touched it to hers.
She said, “I’m curious enough to ask again: what are you doing here?”
He spun his glass of water, then drank it down until the ice rattled. “I thought getting out would make me feel better,” he said. “But I feel worse.”
Zoe nodded. She could see how this might be the case. She said, “Want to go for a walk?”
He pulled out his wallet and put a twenty on the bar, and Zoe took another pull off her flute of champagne, then followed him out. The piano player was just launching into “Daydream Believer,” which was an old favorite of Zoe’s, and she felt another pang of regret at leaving, but if the point of “going out” was to commune with other people and make a meaningful connection, then she could leave the song behind and walk up Main Street in the falling snow with her broken friend.
It was after that very short walk-less than two hundred yards to where Jordan had parked his new Land Rover (new since Ernie’s death, a kind of consolation prize for Ava, who had been asking for a new car for years, though now she drove the thing only to the cemetery to place flowers on Ernie’s grave)-that Jordan told Zoe the thing that had eluded her but that somehow explained everything.
He leaned against the driver’s side of the car, snow falling on the shoulders of his shearling jacket, snow falling in his dark curls, snow falling on the lenses of his glasses. She was tempted to take his glasses off and clean them on the hem of her shirt, but she was afraid that any sudden movement on her part might break the spell. Something was happening here, but she didn’t know what.
Jordan wiped his glasses himself, then he said, “I was at work.”
“Ah,” Zoe said. She thought he meant earlier that night, but his tone indicated that he was making some sort of confession. “You were at work? And then you decided to come out?” she prompted.
“No,” he said. “The night Ernie died. I wasn’t home.” His eyes locked on Zoe’s face. She saw the culpability; some of that, no doubt, he felt himself, but some of it must have been pressed on him. “I was at work.”
Zoe nodded slowly. He opened his mouth to speak, but she raised her hand. “You don’t have to explain,” she said. “I get it.” Zoe understood everything in that instant. She knew why Ava couldn’t talk to anyone, she knew why Jake was in lockdown, she knew it all, suddenly, with that one sentence: “I was at work.” She knew why the Randolph family was so lost.
Zoe reached out for him. It was the only thing she could think of to do. Jordan gathered her up in his arms and held her against him. They hugged fiercely, she breathed in the smell of him, she absorbed the shuddering of his sobs, she shushed him as she would have done with one of her kids. She was aware of his body, a man’s body up against hers after so much time. She felt the heat and the chemistry. “What about your needs?” Ella Mangini had asked. How easy it would be to get drawn in here, how easy to raise her face and kiss him! But Zoe was not that woman. She wasn’t going to capitalize on Jordan’s sadness. And she didn’t give him the words he so desperately needed to hear-though she did indeed believe them to be true-until ten or twelve minutes later, when she was back on India Street and safely tucked into her Karmann Ghia. It was only then that she texted those words to him: