Elin Hilderbrand - Winter Stroll

“Good memory,” Margaret says. This past summer, Margaret dragged Drake to a slideshow featuring the photographs of Cary Hazlegrove, in hopes that it would make Drake fall in love with Nantucket. He seems pretty smitten with the island right now. “The café has great chowder and they serve a BLT with too much bacon, which is exactly how I like it,” Margaret says.

They step in and Margaret makes her way past the movie line toward the bar. There are two empty seats on the end-perfect perfection!

But then Margaret stops. Also sitting at the bar is Mitzi, by herself, with a glass of wine in front of her.

Margaret does an about-face.

“Your special friend is here,” Margaret says, poking Drake in the ribs. Margaret understands why Mitzi came to Nantucket this weekend, but she draws the line at including Mitzi in her romantic lunch.

“Come on,” she says to Drake. “Let’s go to the Club Car.”

When she wakes up in their room at the Castle, George is gone. Mitzi’s head feels like it’s been bashed in with a brick, and the inside of her mouth is so dry it feels like it’s coated with sand. She reaches for the bottle of water next to the bed, but it’s empty. She will have to stand up.

Then, she remembers the fight.

It was her first full-blown screaming, yelling, and crying fight with George, a fight loud enough to bring the hotel’s night manager to their door to see if everything was okay.

It started when Mitzi stumbled home from the inn, dropped off out front by Kelley, and found George having a Scotch in the bar with the redhead from the Holiday House Tour. Mitzi had gone into the bar to get herself a nightcap that she didn’t need, but she had not expected to find her partner chatting up another woman. Rosemary, or whatever her name was. Mary Rose.

Mitzi managed to hold it together-sort of-in the public space of the bar. George looked extremely flustered when she tapped him on the shoulder, and he was quick to explain the enormous coincidence: Mary Rose was also staying at the hotel, and the two of them had ended up there for dinner.

“Since I didn’t hear from you,” George said.

Mitzi had skipped dinner-but for the past year, this was often how it went.

“How did you get home from the inn?” George asked. “Did you walk?”

“Kelley dropped me,” Mitzi admitted.

George nodded curtly, then called for his check. He made their excuses to Mary Rose and they marched down the hall to their room in silence. Once they were inside, Mitzi lost her temper.

She said, “Sorry to interrupt your little date.”

“It wasn’t a date,” George said. “I told you, we both happened to be having dinner at the bar. It was a coincidence.”

“You have now used the word ‘coincidence’ twice,” Mitzi said. “Which tells me it wasn’t a coincidence. I think a more honest way to describe what happened is that you and Mary Rose had so much fun chatting on the house tour that you decided to go to dinner together afterward.” Mitzi didn’t like how thick her voice sounded; she was slurring her words, which undermined the validity of the point she was trying to make.

“You were at the inn a long time,” George said. “And I didn’t hear from you.”

“Did you call me?” Mitzi asked. “Did you text me?”

“No,” George said. “No, I did not. Because I was trying to give you the time and space to do whatever it was you wanted to do at the inn.”

It was then that Mitzi had spun out of control. She screamed and cried and called George a fat, insensitive bastard. She told him he couldn’t understand her pain because he had never had children; she accused him of going out and seeking a fun time with a stranger because Mitzi wasn’t fun anymore and George was tired of living with someone so miserable.

George had said, “I love you, Mitzi. But it was enjoyable, I admit, to have a regular conversation. Mary Rose was nice to me. Do you know how long it’s been since you were nice to me?”

George might as well have poured lighter fluid on the hot coals of her anger. She screamed -with words, then unintelligible words, then she just made noise for the sake of making noise. Then… well, the truth is, she doesn’t remember anything else except for the knock on the door. The night manager.

George said to the man, “My lovely Mrs. Claus here has a son who is serving our country in Afghanistan, and we’ve had some bad news.”

The night manager said he of course understood and he asked if there was anything he could do. George assured him there was nothing anyone could do, but that they would quiet down. “Please accept our apologies,” George said. “I’m sure we’re disturbing the other guests. They probably think someone is being murdered in here.”

The night manager laughed uncertainly and George closed the door.

He then turned to Mitzi with that look on his face, the same look Kelley sometimes gave her which said: Well, I hope you’re happy. Now the whole world knows you’re crazy.

He’d said, in a voice she found patronizing, “Would you like me to draw you a bath, darling?”

“No,” she’d said tersely. She lay down on the bed. She was tired, too tired to even take off her shoes. “No, I don’t think so.”

Now, Mitzi is undressed-or, at least, stripped to her underwear and T-shirt-and George is gone. Mitzi swings her legs to the floor and hoists herself up. She staggers to the bathroom for water, and then she digs her phone out of her coat pocket. There is nothing from George.

She texts: Where are you?

As she waits for a response, she checks the room for a note. She finds nothing.

Bart Bart Bart Bart Bart.

Her phone dings. The text from George says: I’m at lunch on Main Street with Mary Rose.

Mitzi blinks. Does the text really say that? She can’t be sure; her headache is so bad she might have brain damage. She reads it again. George is at lunch with Mary Rose.

She texts back: Seriously?

He texts back: Yes, seriously. Finishing up. Should be back to room in 20 minutes.

Mitzi is filled with confused emotion. What she needs more than anything right now is a friend to either confirm that her anger is justified or talk her off the ledge. But Mitzi no longer has any friends. Those she had a year ago, she left behind here on Nantucket. She hasn’t made a single woman friend in Lenox. The girls who work at the millinery shop for George don’t speak English and all of the other women George knows in town are friends of his ex-wife, Patti.

Mitzi sits on her bed and brings up her email on her phone. Should she write to Gayle, she wonders, or Yasmin? She has never broached any topic with her pen pals other than their missing sons. But her issues with George are not unrelated. After some contemplation, she chooses Yasmin. Gayle has been happily married for thirty years and she’s a fundamentalist Christian; Mitzi isn’t sure if Gayle would understand that Mitzi left her husband after a twelve-year affair with their Santa Claus. Whereas Yasmin, living in Brooklyn, would have seen everything.

To: mamayasmin@yahoo.com

From: queenie229@gmail.com

Subject: Man trouble

Yasmin, hi-

I know I’ve shared with you that my partner’s name is George and that George is not Bart’s father. The truth is that I was married to Kelley Quinn, Bart’s father, for twenty-one years but for twelve of those years I was conducting a one-weekend-a-year affair at Christmastime with the man who served as our Santa Claus. That man is George. Last year, shortly before Bart deployed, I decided to leave Kelley for George, and I moved with George across the Commonwealth to Lenox, Massachusetts.