Beautiful Day (14 page)

“But Chance is in the wedding party,” Ann said.

“I don’t care,” Jim said. “Doesn’t matter.”

“She won’t come anyway,” Ann said. “We can look good for inviting her, we can look
like the bigger people, and she’ll decline.”

Jim had stared at Ann for a second. “I’m not quite sure what you’re trying to do here.”

What
was
Ann trying to do here? When Ann was very young, her mother had explained the reason
behind the spelling of her name: Ann was the saint; Anne with an “e” was the queen.
Ann had felt the burden of her nomenclature since then. She yearned to be queenly
rather than saintly. After all, no one liked a saint. Saints weren’t fun at parties;
saints weren’t good in bed. Saints were altar girls, as Ann had been. Saints devoted
themselves to a life of service. Ann had spent her entire adult life in service—first
to Jim and Stuart and the twins, then to the population of
Durham, North Carolina. Her acts of self-sacrifice bugged Jim and Olivia and her sons
to no end, and yet she couldn’t help herself. Her spirit yearned to do the selfless
thing, the right thing, the worthy, admirable thing.

Was inviting Helen Oppenheimer to the wedding just another example of Ann flaunting
her innate goodness?

She didn’t think so. Deep down, it felt like the opposite. Deep down, Ann despised
Helen Oppenheimer, hated her with a dense, black force. Helen Oppenheimer had seduced
Jim right out of his marriage to Ann, Helen had allowed herself to get pregnant, she
had forced Jim’s hand. Jim had divorced Ann and married Helen Oppenheimer. Helen Oppenheimer
had massacred Ann’s family as surely as if she’d entered the living room with an AK-47
and gunned them all down. She had turned the Graham family—once a paragon of the community—into
a mockery of a family.

And so admit it: the reason why Ann had written Helen Oppenheimer’s name on that list
was because she wanted to prove something. Jim had come back to Ann a scant three
years later. Jim had married Ann a second time, and this time they were far, far happier.
They treated their marriage with care; they were vigilant about guarding its sanctity.
Ann wanted Helen to see her renewed, nearly perfect union with Jim firsthand. Ann
wanted to force Helen to gaze upon them operating in unison on this happy occasion,
the marriage of their eldest son.

Ann wanted to gloat.

Jim had relented. He was powerless to overturn any of Ann’s decisions once she made
up her mind. He had said, “She’d
better
decline. The last person I want to see on Nantucket on July twentieth is Helen Oppenheimer.”

Ann had thought,
Well, then, you shouldn’t have climbed into bed with her, buster.

Even more shocking than issuing the invitation was Helen Oppenheimer accepting it.
For all of Ann’s big ideas about showing off to Helen, she had never believed for
one second that Helen would actually
come.
But she had responded yes. She was coming to Nantucket for the weekend, all the way
from Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she now lived with a man ten years younger than
herself. But she was coming alone.

“Shit!” Jim had shouted.

He’d said, “There’s still time to renege.”

“We can’t renege,” Ann had said, although she was tempted. God, just the thought of
Helen Oppenheimer among them all weekend long, and
alone,
was enough to make Ann physically ill. And she had no one to blame but herself.

“I’ll do it,” Jim said. “I’ll call and tell her you were temporarily insane.”

“No,” Ann said. “If she’s comfortable with it, then I’m comfortable with it.”

Jim had shaken his head and paced the room; she could see him doing battle in his
mind. He had created this insufferable situation, and in the thousands of times the
topic had arisen over the past fifteen years, he had never once denied the blame.

Finally, he’d taken Ann in his arms and said, “You’re amazing, you know that?”

Now here it was: showtime. Neither Ann nor Jim had been in contact with Helen about
her arrangements, but she had RSVP’d yes for the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, and
the brunch. They would see her tonight.

Ann wished like hell that Helen could see her and Jim right now: propped up against
the pillows of the bed, covered by just a white sheet, sipping champagne at eleven
o’clock in the morning.

“To Stuart,” Ann said.

“To Stuart and Jenna,” Jim said, and they clinked glasses.

Ann was experiencing typical mixed feelings about watching her oldest son marry. She
had known from the beginning that Stuart would be the first, not only because he was
the oldest but because he had always seemed like the marrying kind, sweet and devoted.
He had had a girlfriend in high school—darling Trisha Hamborsky—and then in college
and a few years after, a girlfriend named Crissy Pine, whom the family now referred
to (like Voldemort) as “She Who Shall Not Be Named.” Stuart had very nearly married
Crissy. Ann still rued the loss of her grandmother’s Tiffany-cut 2.5-carat diamond
ring, although over the years Ann had reminded herself that it was only a ring, a
physical object, which was a small price to pay for Stuart’s freedom and future happiness.
He and Jenna were a far superior match. Jenna was a wonderful young lady, if perhaps
a little liberal leaning with her devotion to Amnesty International and her extreme
eco-consciousness. (She had once scolded Ann for throwing away her cardboard coffee
cup from Starbucks.) Jenna would never have worn Grand-mère’s ring anyway, Stuart
had said. She would have called it a blood diamond.

Blood diamond? Ann had thought. Good grief.

“We’re losing our little boy,” Ann said to Jim.

“Now, now,” Jim said. He took Ann’s champagne flute from her hand and set it on the
night table next to his own. Then he came after Ann again.

She pretended to protest, but she couldn’t resist him. She didn’t want to think about
Helen Oppenheimer, or She Who Shall Not Be Named. Ann wasn’t going to let either of
them take anything away from her ever again. Ann was going to shine.

T
he mood in the backyard was funereal. At quarter to nine, Margot stood in her ersatz
pajamas—an old blue oxford shirt of Drum Sr.’s and a pair of cutoff gray sweatpants—holding
a cup of coffee that Rhonda had thoughtfully made at seven o’clock before she left
for her twelve-mile run. Margot was in her bare feet, they were all in their bare
feet—Margot, Jenna, the three kids, and her brother Nick. They were gathered in a
semicircle a safe distance away from where the men were clipping the ropes of the
swing. Ellie was crying.

The tent guys were young, handsome El Salvadorans. The one
named Hector clipped the ropes, and the wooden plank of the swing crashed to the ground.
Margot felt her heart drop.

Jenna hid her face in her hands. “Oh, God,” she said. “I can barely stand to watch.
This is all my fault.”

Nick was wearing nothing but a pair of red Hawaiian-print swim trunks. His hair was
overgrown and sunbleached, and his torso was tanned golden brown. He did have a
job,
right? He looked like he’d just spent two months in California surfing with Drum
Sr. He turned to Margot.

“I don’t know about this, Marge,” he said. “Marge” was his nickname for her, bestowed
in 1989 with the first season of
The Simpsons,
and Margot detested it, which only made Nick’s enjoyment of it more profound. “This
is Alfie we’re talking about. This tree should probably be listed in the historic
registry. It’s two hundred years old.”

“I know,” Margot snapped. She was impatient with Nick and everyone else who was lagging
behind; she had traveled this emotional highway yesterday. “It’s just one branch!
There’s no other way, believe me.”

Ellie sobbed into Margot’s leg. Margot watched Nick pick the swing up off the ground
and loop the rope around his arm. The plank of the swing was worn smooth. Margot was
forty years old, and the swing had been there as long as she could remember. Who had
put it up? She thought it might have been Pop-Pop; she would have to ask her father.
Forty percent chance of showers,
she thought. There was no doubt in Margot’s mind that now, because the branch was
coming down, there wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky all day tomorrow.

Hector and his associates indicated that they should all back up even farther. He
set up a stepladder, and one of the other guys brought out the chain saw.

“I can’t watch,” Jenna said.

It did seem morbid, all of them standing around, gawking like witnesses at an execution.
Margot reminded herself that it could be worse. Alfie might have been struck by lightning.
As it was, he would still stand guard over their property, still shade them; birds
would still sing from their unseen perches in his upper branches. They were only taking
off one limb—and Roger was right, that branch was hanging awfully low. It might have
snapped on its own with the next nor’easter.

There was a honking, and Margot turned to see a silver minivan pull into the driveway.

“It’s Kevin!” Jenna said. “Oh, thank God!”

Margot made a face. Their whole lives it had always been “Thank God for Kevin.” Kevin
was eleven months younger than Margot—an oops baby, Margot was certain, although neither
of her parents had ever admitted to it—but because Kevin was a boy, he had often been
treated as the oldest. And to boot, he had been born with the unflappable calm and
unquestioned authority of an elder statesman. He had been class president all through
high school, then had attended Penn, where he’d been the head of the Student Society
of Engineers. While in college, he had performed CPR on a man who collapsed on the
Thirtieth Street subway platform, and he’d saved the man’s life. Kevin had been awarded
a medal by the mayor of Philadelphia, Ed Rendell. Kevin Carmichael was, literally,
a lifesaver.

He unfolded himself from the minivan—he had no shame about driving the thing, despite
ruthless teasing from both Margot and Nick—and stood, all six feet six of him, in
the sun, grinning at them.

“We’re here!” he said. “The party can start!”

Beanie materialized at his side, all five foot two of her, and slid her arm around
Kevin’s middle so that the two of them could be frozen in everyone’s mind for a second,
posed like a photograph
captioned “Happily Married Couple,” before the three boys busted out of the back of
the car and all hell broke loose.

Kevin strode forward, shielding his eyes from the sun as he gazed at the tree and
the stepladder and Hector with the chain saw. “What’s going on here?” he asked.

God, his tone drove Margot
insane.
Was it normal, she wondered, to have your siblings grate on you like this? As much
as she was dreading the amputation of Alfie’s branch, she now wished it had already
happened, just so she didn’t have to stand by and watch Kevin weigh in on it. Kevin
was both an architect and a mechanical engineer; he had founded a company that fixed
structural problems in large buildings, important buildings—like the Coit Tower in
San Francisco. Like the White House.

“They have to cut that branch,” Margot said. “Otherwise the tent can’t go up.”

Kevin eyed the branch, then the upper branches of the tree, then the yard as a whole.
“Really?” he said.

“Really,” Margot said.

At that moment Roger appeared, holding his clipboard; Margot hadn’t heard his truck,
so he must have parked on the street. Plus, that was Roger’s way: he appeared, like
a genie, when you most needed him. He could explain to Kevin about the branch.

Margot turned her attention to Beanie and gave her sister-in-law a hug. Beanie had
looked exactly the same since she was fourteen years old, when she and her family
moved to Darien from the horse country of Virginia. Her brown hair was in a messy
bun, her face was an explosion of freckles, and she wore horn-rimmed glasses. She
never aged, never changed; her clothes were straight out of the 1983 L.L. Bean catalog—today,
a white polo shirt with the collar flipped up, a madras A-line skirt, and a pair of
well-worn boat shoes.

Beanie had probably worn this very same outfit on her first
date with Kevin in the ninth grade. He had taken her to see
Dead Poets Society
.

Beanie said, “You look great, Margot.”

Beanie was a true golden good person. It was her MO to start every conversation with
a compliment. Margot adored this about Beanie, even as she knew the compliment to
be a lie. She did
not
look great.

“I look like a dirt sandwich,” Margot said.

“Last night was fun?” Beanie said.

Margot raised her eyebrows. “Fun, fun!” she said. She thought briefly of her sunken
phone, Edge’s lost texts, and the reappearance of Griff. Oh, man. It was quite a story,
but Margot couldn’t confide it to anybody, not even Beanie.

The Carmichael boys—Brandon, Brian, and Brock—were racing around the yard, chasing
and tackling Drum Jr. and Carson. Ellie was perched above the fray on her uncle Nick’s
shoulders. Nick came over to kiss Beanie, and Margot turned her attention to Roger
and Kevin, who were deep in conversation. Then Kevin started speaking to Hector in
fluent Spanish—what a show-off!—and pointing up at the tree branches.