Ava continues to teach music at the Nantucket Elementary School. She has a new beau, Scott Skyler, who is the assistant principal of the school. Both Margaret and I think very highly of Scott, and hope he will become a permanent part of our family. [Kelley deletes. Ava will kill him.] This year, Ava has volunteered weekly at Our Island Home, playing piano for the residents. Scott also volunteers there, serving meals to the elderly—so, as you can see, he has been a good influence on Ava! [Kelley deletes. He will revisit Ava’s paragraph later.]
PFC Bartholomew James Quinn, 1st Battalion, 9th Division, deployed to Sangin, Afghanistan, on 19 December 2014. His convoy—transporting forty-five troops to base—was announced missing by the DoD on 25 December 2014. We have little additional information, despite appeals to the nation’s top brass, including our commander in chief. [Kelley deletes this. Reaching out to the Oval Office was done discreetly.] Please keep our family, and especially Bart, in your prayers.
On behalf of the Quinn family and the Winter Street Inn, I wish you a safe and joyful holiday season. Peace on earth, good will toward men.
Kelley Quinn
Kelley reads the letter through again, and considers deleting the whole thing. Divorce, jail, MIA/POW: it reads like the CliffsNotes of a Dostoevsky novel.
His phone rings.
It’s Mitzi. She’s on Nantucket. She wants to come to the baby’s baptism.
Really? Kelley thinks. He nearly says, You are no longer a part of this family, Mitzi. Buzz off. But then he reads the last line of his letter. Peace on earth, good will toward men.
He tells her she can come to the baptism. She sounds grateful, although Kelley knows she would have showed up with or without his permission. Mitzi always does what she wants.
Kelley hangs up the phone and faces his computer. He presses Send. No regrets. In the spirit of Frances Quinn’s letters, this one tells it like it is. Good, bad, or indifferent, he has spoken from the heart.
MITZI
This year, the Holiday House Tour is on Lily Street, Mitzi’s favorite street on the entire island. There are five houses on the tour, each marked by luminarias placed out front. Thanks to the glowing lights and the quaintness of the shingled houses, it looks like a street in a fairy tale.
Mitzi brings George’s monogrammed flask to her lips. He wasn’t able to find the Casa Dragones—although he valiantly called all five liquor stores—and so she’s drinking Patron Anejo.
George says, “Here’s the first house. Number five.”
They wait in line for nearly fifteen minutes. Where have all these people come from? Where are they staying? They aren’t Nantucketers; Mitzi doesn’t recognize a soul, which is a relief. She doesn’t want her presence here to be a big deal; she hasn’t even called her best friend, Kai, out in Wauwinet. It’s a bizarre feeling, coming back to a place where she lived for so many years, but no longer lives and no longer belongs. And yet, how many times did she push Bart in his stroller down this very street? Two hundred? Five hundred? It was their preferred route into town—down to number 11 and then up Snake Alley, which brought them to Academy Hill. From there, it was a short, straight shot down Quince Street to Centre Street.
Another memory intrudes… Bart was once caught smoking weed on the steps at the top of Snake Alley with his friend Michael Bello. They were fifteen years old. Kelley had wanted to send Bart to Outward Bound that summer to get him “straightened out,” but Mitzi had objected. She would never have survived an entire summer with Bart away in Wyoming or Colorado.
What are you going to do when he goes to college? Kelley asked. By that point, Kelley had already raised three children with relative success, but Mitzi felt that the upbringing of the older three had been too traditional—Patrick was an overachiever, Kevin a slacker, and Ava, the youngest and only girl, the caretaker. Mitzi wanted to do things her way with Bart. There had been many, many heated discussions with Kelley about this, which had usually ended with Mitzi winning.
Until, of course, the end. Bart had barely graduated from high school, despite being incredibly gifted, and he had no interest in any more school. He refused to even apply to college. He spent the year after graduating living at home with Mitzi, Kelley, Kevin, and Ava. He smoked a lot of dope, crashed three cars, and according to Kevin, made all of his extra cash by stealing it.
At which point, Kelley stepped in. Over Mitzi’s very loud protests, Bart joined the Marines.
Mitzi drinks from the flask.
Number 5 Lily Street has a Christmas tree decorated entirely with teddy bear ornaments, and it smells of gingerbread-scented candles. Normally, both of these things would send Mitzi into paroxysms of delight, but this year it all seems so pointless. George is enjoying himself, though, so Mitzi tries to drum up some holiday spirit.
George points at the mantel. “Look, honey, Byers’ Choice carolers, just like yours!”
Mitzi blinks. She did have quite an impressive collection of Byers’ Choice carolers, but the Mitzi who used to take half a day to unpack and arrange the figurines on the sideboard of the inn is dead and gone. Mitzi left the carolers at the inn. Maybe Kelley put them out, maybe he didn’t. She doesn’t care.
The woman in front of George turns around. She’s a pretty, freckled redhead who looks a little bit like George’s ex-wife, Patti. “I love Byers’ Choice carolers!” she says. “I have all four display Santas at home: the traditional Santa, the Winter Wonderland Santa, the Deck the Halls Santa, and the Jingle Bells Santa.”
“Well,” George says, and Mitzi knows what’s coming. “I dress up as a pretty convincing Santa myself.”
The redhead squeals with delight. She sounds like a thirteen-year-old girl at a One Direction concert. “You do?”
“I was Santa for twelve years at the Winter Street Inn, here on the island,” George says. “And back in Lenox, I do half a dozen holiday events for the Lions Club, District 33Y. Maybe you’ve heard of the Lions? We hold an annual tree and wreath sale and host three pancake breakfasts, with all proceeds going to help the blind.”
“Good for you!” the redhead says. “Sounds like you’ve found a calling.”
George pats his prodigious midsection. “I guess you could say I’m built for it. But being Santa is just an avocation. My real career is as a milliner. I make fine hats for women.”
“No kidding!” the redhead says. “Just this afternoon I was thinking how much I’d like a new hat! I was dreaming of something in fur. So many of the women I saw in town were wearing fur coats.”
“I make the very hat you’re fantasizing about,” George says. “It’s fashioned from quality rabbit and chinchilla. It’s like something Lara in Doctor Zhivago might have worn.”
“Yes!” the redhead exclaims. Mitzi gazes at the birch logs stacked artfully in the fireplace and rolls her eyes. “That’s exactly what I’m after.”
“Here, take my card,” George says. “My hats are all available for purchase online. Now, I’m warning you, they’re something of an investment, but each one is crafted by hand. It’s something you’ll treasure for the rest of your life.”
The redhead beams as though George were handing her a winning lottery ticket. George asks the redhead where she’s from, and at that point, Mitzi tunes out. George loves nothing more than to chat with complete strangers, and as an innkeeper Mitzi used to be skilled at the art of small talk, but it’s another thing she now finds pointless. How can she possibly converse with anyone without telling him that her only child is missing-in-action somewhere in the Helmand province of Afghanistan? And yet, that’s a conversation killer, as Mitzi has learned; when she says Helmand, people tend to hear Hellmann’s, and think about mayonnaise. The nice cashier at the grocery store in Lenox always asks about Bart (“Any word from your boy?”), but the mean cashier once told Mitzi that he thought the war in Afghanistan was over a long time ago. When Mitzi went home and complained to George about the mean cashier, George suggested that she go out and “make some friends.” He suggested she volunteer at the women’s shelter, or join a gym.
He said, “What about yoga? You used to love yoga.”