Beautiful Day (26 page)

“Is the wedding off?” Roger asked.

“I’m not sure,” Margot said.

“Okay,” Roger said. There was a pause and a suspicious sound of exhale. Was Roger
smoking? Had Jenna’s phone call been the thing that sent him right to Lucky Express
for a pack of Newports? “Will you let me know when you
are
sure?”

“Absolutely,” Margot said. “I will absolutely let you know.”

“Thank you,” Roger said. “I probably don’t need to add this, but… the sooner, the
better. Good-bye.”

Margot hung up the phone. She would never be able to fall back to sleep, so she made
a pot of coffee. She said to herself,
I won’t think about anything until I have my coffee and I can sit for a minute in
the sun.
She would have liked to sit on the swing, but the swing was down for now. She decided
instead to take her cup of coffee and the Notebook out to the bench that overlooked
the harbor, the same bench where her father had proposed to her mother in 1968. Margot
took in the view—Nantucket harbor scattered with sailboats, the white fence and trellis
dripping with New Dawn roses. She opened the Notebook.

Invitations, wedding dress, bridesmaid dresses, dyed-to-match pumps, pearls, rehearsal
dinner clambake menu (right down to the blueberry cobbler, but Margot hadn’t gotten
a single bite), tenting, dance floor, flowers, antique embroidered table linens, china,
crystal, silver, hors d’oeuvres, wine, dinner menus, cake, favors, hotel rooms, bands
versus DJs, song lists, schedule of dances, bridesmaid gifts, honeymoon locations.
There were many
references to their father, including the beautiful last page. And there were many
references to Margot. “Margot is the most competent woman you or I will ever know.
And to butcher the old song: ‘Anything I can do, she can do better.’ ” Margot had
read those lines hundreds of times; they were among her favorite lines in the Notebook.
But they missed a fine distinction: Margot could do the things that Beth could do,
but Margot could not be Beth. And what Jenna needed now, more than anything, was Beth.

Margot flipped through the pages to the end of the Notebook, where the ancillary material
was—the list of Beth’s cousins, the brochure for Caneel Bay in St. John, the name
and number of the landscaper to call should the perennial bed be trampled by the tent
guys, after all.

There was no mention of Cold Feet.

In composing the Notebook, their mother had left out a few things that were really
important.

Tell us what to do when we feel doubt,
Margot thought.
Tell us what to do when we feel anger. Tell us how to handle our sadness, Mom. We
are, every one of us, paralyzed with sadness because you aren’t here today, you weren’t
here yesterday, you won’t be here tomorrow.

When Jenna and Margot had first met with Roger, Margot had baldly stated the fact.
“We are a family without our mother.”

Roger had nodded in that unflappable way of his, like there was nothing they could
say that could shock him, like he had seen it all before.

Jenna had then triumphantly held up the Notebook. “But we have this!”

But this, Margot thought, as she closed the Notebook and headed back to the house,
wasn’t enough.

Margot poured a cup of coffee for Jenna and added half and half and three teaspoons
of sugar. Jenna, of course, drank it sweet and light, while Margot drank hers hot,
bitter, and black. Up in Margot’s room, Ellie was jumping on the bed, chanting, “Auntie
Jenna’s getting married today! Married today! Married today!”

Jenna’s spot in the bed was unoccupied.

Margot said, “Eleanor, stop that this instant. That bed is ancient, and you will break
it!”

Ellie launched herself off the bed and crashed onto the braided rug.

Margot said, “Well, now the whole house is awake.”

Ellie said, “Can I go up and see the boys?”

“No,” Margot said. “I need you to do something quiet. Get your iPod and go downstairs.”

“My iPod is boring,” Ellie said.

“I don’t care,” Margot said. “I have to talk to your Auntie Jenna.”

Ellie folded her arms across her chest. She was still in her bathing suit, still salt-and-sand
encrusted from yesterday’s trip to the beach. The Department of Social Services was
sure to arrive at any moment.

“I want to stay and listen,” Ellie said.

“It’s adult stuff,” Margot said. There was a part of her that believed Ellie
should
stay and listen. After all, Ellie would one day grow up to be a woman. It might not
be a bad idea for her to learn now, at the tender age of six, that the world was a
complicated place, that other people’s minds could not be read, their emotions could
not be predicted, that love was fleeting and capricious, that once you thought you’d
figured everything out,
something would happen to prove you wrong. Life was a mystery, and nobody knew what
happened when we died.

“I don’t care,” Ellie said. “I want to listen.”

“Downstairs,” Margot said.

“No,” Ellie said.

Margot closed her eyes. She was feeling the drinks from the night before, which brought
around thoughts of kissing Griff and her treachery and Edge’s impending arrival. Margot’s
hands trembled. She set her coffee down on the dresser and sighed. “Okay, go upstairs
with the boys, then.”

Ellie let out a whoop, then did a pirouette across the floor. Thank God for Mme Willette’s
ballet class; it was the only thing keeping Ellie from turning into a wild Indian.

Margot said, “Where did Auntie Jenna go?”

Ellie said, “Bathroom.”

Margot grabbed her coffee and lay back on the bed, propping herself up against the
pillows. The sheets were filled with sand.

What am I going to say?
she wondered.

When she’d sat next to Jenna on the front stairs the night before and asked why she
was crying, Jenna had told her she was calling the wedding off.

“What?”

“I’m not getting married,” Jenna said.

“Why not?” Margot said.

“Stuart lied to me,” Jenna said.

“He
lied
to you?” Margot said. That didn’t sound like Stuart. Stuart was as square a peg as
had ever lived. He hadn’t even wanted a bachelor party. What man didn’t want a bachelor
party? Drum Sr.’s bachelor party in Cabo had included more
people than had attended their wedding and had lasted longer than their honeymoon.

Jenna’s lower lip trembled, and she sucked it in the way she used to when she was
a little girl. “He was engaged before,” she said.

“What?”
Margot said.

“To Crissy Pine,” Jenna said. “His girlfriend from college. He was engaged to her
for
five weeks!
Helen told me, Helen who used to be his stepmother. The woman in the yellow dress
tonight.”

Margot’s brain felt like it was going to short-circuit. She didn’t know how to process
this information. “Five weeks isn’t very long, Jenna. Five weeks is nothing. It’s
negligible.”

“He lied to me!” Jenna said. “He was engaged before! He never
told me!
”

“You found this out from Helen?” Margot said. “Chance’s mother?”

“It was the first time I ever met her,” Jenna said. “She and Stuart aren’t close;
he was shocked his mother invited her. But nearly the first thing Helen said to me
was that she was glad things worked out for Stuart
this time.
And I must have made a confused face because then she said, ‘Well, you know about
his broken engagement to Crissy Pine?’ And I said no, and she leaned in conspiratorially,
like we were
girlfriends,
and she said, ‘Stuart was engaged to Crissy Pine for five weeks, and after he broke
it off, she refused to return his great-grandmother’s diamond ring.’ ” Jenna was in
full-blown tears now. “He gave her his
great-grandmother’s ring!
”

Margot blinked. Why couldn’t people keep their mouths shut? What did Helen think would
be gained by breaking this news to Jenna the evening before her wedding? Did it give
her some awful sense of accomplishment?

Margot said, “Helen is an iffy source. She might be lying. Or exaggerating.”

“I confronted Stuart!” Jenna said. “He admitted it was true. He proposed to Crissy,
he gave her his great-grandmother’s ring, he broke it off five weeks later, and she
was so mad that she never gave the ring back. She still has it!”

She sold it on eBay,
Margot thought.

She said, “Why didn’t he ever tell you?”

“He wanted to protect me, he said! He didn’t think I needed to know, he said! He knew
it was a mistake the second he asked Crissy, he said! He only proposed because she
was nagging him, and so he asked her to get her to stop.”

Oh, dear, thought Margot.

“I’m sure he
did
want to protect you,” Margot said. “As someone who knows you nearly better than anyone
else, I can say that you are a hard person to give bad news. You’re an idealist; you
believe in the goodness of your fellow man beyond the point where the rest of us would
have given up. Of course he didn’t want to tell you. Stuart has done nothing over
the course of your entire relationship except try to make you happy. He bought a hybrid
for you! He registered Democrat for you! Honey, trust me, this isn’t a deal breaker.”

Jenna sniffed.

“Jenna,” Margot said. “This
isn’t
a deal breaker.”

“The rest of Stuart’s family has always been so
weird
about Crissy,” Jenna said. “No one ever talks about her. There are family pictures
in the Graham house with Crissy in them, but Ann cut out black ovals and pasted them
over Crissy’s face!”

Margot couldn’t keep from smiling at this. She wondered if Drum’s mother, Greta, had
covered
her
face with black ovals—say, in the photos of Drum Jr.’s christening.

“It’s not funny!” Jenna said. “We bumped into her once, at
Newark airport. She was going one way on the moving sidewalk, and we were going the
other way, and she called out Stuart’s name and he turned and I turned, and she flipped
Stuart off. She gave him the
finger!
She was pretty—dark hair, pale skin, sort of Spanish looking—and I was like, Who
was that and what was THAT all about? Who on earth would flip Stuart the bird? My
wonderful, kind Stuart, the man everyone adores and admires? I said, ‘Um. Do you KNOW
that girl? ’ He clearly didn’t want to tell me, but then he admitted it was Crissy.
And I dragged him to the airport bar and we ordered margaritas and I demanded that
he tell me what exactly had happened with Crissy. And all he would say was that in
his mind he liked to pretend she had never existed.”

Margot nodded. If everyone told their stories about ex-boyfriends, ex-girlfriends,
ex-fiancés, ex-fiancées, ex-husbands, or ex-wives—or those they had to cross paths
with either physically or emotionally—there would be millions and millions of chapters.
It was a fraught topic, put mildly.

“You’ve had serious relationships before,” Margot said. “What about Jason? You
loved
Jason. You basically gave yourself an eating disorder and put yourself in the student
infirmary because of Jason. Have you ever admitted that to Stuart?”

“I didn’t have an eating disorder,” Jenna said.

“When he broke up with you the first time, you went on a hunger strike!” Margot said.
“Do I have to wake up Autumn to corroborate? You lived on toast and vodka.”

“Ever since Stuart proposed, you’ve been urging me to reconsider,” Jenna said. “You
told me everyone gets divorced. You told me that love dies.” Jenna blinked, tears
fell. Her makeup was a mess; there were black smudges on the skirt of her peach dress.
She had been using her dress as a Kleenex. “And you’re right!
Love does die, people do change, everyone is unfaithful, vows do get broken, betrayal
is real. Stuart Graham, who I thought was
beyond reproach,
lied to me about being engaged to someone else.”

“Stuart gets a pass on this one,” Margot said. “Forgive him.”

“That’s
my
decision,” Jenna said, “and I’ve made it. I am not marrying Stuart tomorrow.”

With that, she spun on the balls of her bare feet and walked inside.

Margot had remained planted on the step, her elbows on her knees. She took off her
silver heels and wiggled her toes. Jenna needed time to cool down and a chance to
come to her senses. She needed sleep.

The funny thing, Margot realized, was that she had won the argument.
Love dies.
But she didn’t like it one bit.

Jenna was taking a long time in the bathroom. Margot got out of bed and checked down
the hall. The bathroom was dark and unoccupied. No Jenna. Shit, Margot thought. She
really wanted to have a talk with her before the house sprang to life.

The door to Jenna’s room, which she was sharing with Finn and Autumn, was closed tight,
as were the doors to the master bedroom and Kevin’s room. Footsteps from upstairs—the
kids—but that was to be expected.

Margot headed back down to the kitchen; she needed more coffee. And she should eat
something. Maybe she and Jenna could walk down the street to the Bake Shop to pick
up doughnuts. They had time. Margot ran through the day’s schedule in her head. If
Jenna could find it in her heart to forgive Stuart for doing what any kind-but-flawed
groom-to-be might do (lie by
omission about a long-past, ill-advised, super-brief engagement), the following would
take place:

The bridesmaids and Jenna were due at RJ Miller for hair at eleven.

The caterers were coming at noon.

The florist was dropping off the bouquets at two.

The photographer was coming at three.

The musicians—two violinists and a cellist—were arriving at the church at four.

The Model A Ford, which was owned and driven by Roger’s son, Vince, was arriving at
the house at four thirty to pick up the girls. Then it was showtime. Church at 4:45.
The parents would be seated—Pauline first, then Ann and Jim.

The processional would begin at five o’clock. Roger had been eminently clear: he could
abide anything but a delayed start to the ceremony. If Jenna or anyone else in the
wedding party caused the musicians and the guests and Reverend Marlowe to wait, Roger
would levy a ten thousand dollar fine.