Beautiful Day (46 page)

The wedding was over.

“Forget the Marriott in Stamford,” Doug said. “I’m going to pack up my things, deal
with some issues at the office, and come back up here next weekend. In fact, I’m going
to stay all summer.”

“All
summer?
” Margot said. “You’re kidding me.”

“Not kidding,” he said. “I’ll go to the beach. I’ll golf at Sankaty. Why not? Edge
can take care of things at the office.”

Margot nodded once sharply, in a way that she hoped conveyed that she did not want
to talk about Edge. She was, however, insanely jealous at the thought of her father
spending the entire summer on Nantucket. Because despite how weird and difficult the
weekend had been, she didn’t want to leave the island. It physically pained her. As
the ferry lumbered toward Hyannis, her heart broke a third time.

Which reminded her.

“I’m going up,” Margot said. “Who’s coming with me? Ellie?”

Ellie shook her head.

“Come on, you said you would.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Boys?” Margot said.

“No!” In chorus.

She sighed and felt impending tears. Her mother had never had a problem getting Margot
and her siblings to do her bidding when they were this age. Margot and Kevin and Nick
hadn’t been allowed to rebel until they were teenagers.

But maybe that was revisionist history. Maybe Margot just liked to believe that she
had been an obedient daughter now because her mother was dead and Margot couldn’t
bear to
imagine that she’d given her mother a moment of trouble. Any which way, she wasn’t
going to fight with her children; she wasn’t going to force them upstairs.

She said, “Fine, then, I’ll go alone.”

Doug leaned back in his seat. “I’d go with you, honey, but I’m beat.”

Margot got out of the car and climbed to the upper deck. She felt better with the
air and the horizon, although Nantucket Sound was as flat as a mirror and the ferry
wasn’t rocking at all. Margot stood out in the sun, without SPF 90, without a hat.
What did it matter if she weighed five hundred pounds, what did it matter if she detonated
into five million freckles?

She pulled two pennies out of her wallet, and as the ferry passed Brant Point Lighthouse,
she tossed them into the sea. Her throw was lame; the pennies barely cleared the bottom
deck. If either of her brothers had been present, they would have told her she threw
like a girl. Margot checked to make sure no one had seen her. She heard footsteps.
Someone was coming up behind her.

Margot thought it was her father, who would forgive her a bad throw and a whole lot
more.

He sidled up next to her and rested his arms on the railing. Margot turned.

White visor.

Not her father.

Griff said, “Do you happen to have two pennies I could borrow?”

Margot felt like her heart was dropping off the side of the boat. She fished two more
pennies out of her wallet and handed them to Griffin Wheatley, Homecoming King.

Griff grinned. He said, “I figure you owe me at least that.” He took the pennies and
threw them so far they nearly landed on shore.

Margot said, “Very impressive.”

Griff said, “So they gave the job to Nanette Kim. I met her, you know, at the Starbucks
on the first floor of Tricom’s building. She approached me, actually. She went to
college with the woman that Jasper ditched when he married my wife. Anyway, Nanette
Kim was extremely cool and smart as hell. She deserved that job.”

As badly as Margot wanted to be let off the hook, she couldn’t let him do it. “
You
deserved that job,” she said. “They liked
you.
”

“Nanette Kim left after six weeks because it was a hostile environment for women and
minorities,” Griff said.

“I’ll point out,” Margot said, “that you’re neither a woman nor a minority.”

“But do you really think I would want to work at a place that is hostile toward women
and minorities?” Griff said. He ran his hand over what was now his very, very appealing
four-day scruff. “I wasn’t voted homecoming king for no reason. I’m a good guy, Margot.
And I think you did me a favor by signing me off.”

Margot shook her head. “I wasn’t a good guy, though, Griff. I mean, I
am
a good person, in my heart. But what I did was… despicable.”

“I’m happy at Blankstar,” Griff said. “Really happy. It’s the right place for me.”

“Good,” Margot said. “I kept checking on you, you know. I Googled you first thing
every morning until I found out you’d gotten a job.”

“Did you?” he said.

“I did.”

“You didn’t have to tell me the truth,” Griff said. “I never would have known. Never.”

“Yes,” Margot said. “I realize that.”

“So why did you?” Griff asked.

Why did she? Well, because she was her mother’s daughter and her father’s daughter,
and because she was the mother of three young and growing souls. She could feed them
takeout every night, she could leave them for hours with Kitty, the afternoon babysitter,
but ultimately the person who was responsible for installing their moral compass was
her. It was okay to mess up—to set a scorching-hot pan directly on a soft pine table
and mar it forever, to file for divorce when she was no longer in love and had exhausted
every hope, to become utterly infatuated with the wrong person and then commit what
was essentially a crime of passion—but she had to own it.

How to explain this to Griff? She couldn’t possibly.

“I don’t know why I told you,” she said.

Griff took her chin and turned her face toward him. “But I do know,” he said.

Margot thought he was going to kiss her. He was going to kiss her, and this painful,
difficult wedding weekend was going to get the kind of movie star ending that Margot
could never have dreamed of. But instead Griff let his hand drop to the railing, and
he stared out at the water.

“I don’t believe in love,” he said.

“Me either,” Margot said.

“And I’m never getting married again.”

“Me either,” Margot said.

Griff stood up straight and adjusted his visor. He looked at Margot, and she became
transfixed by his blue-and-green kaleidoscope eyes. It was a genetic anomaly, and
Margot wondered if
heterochromia iridum
came with any benefits. Did he see things differently? Did it lend him a sixth sense
that enabled him to guess people’s favorite lyrics? Did it allow him to be generous
of spirit even when he’d been wronged?

“I want you to call me,” Griff said. “Tonight, after you get home and settled, when
you’re climbing into bed, as late as you want. Okay? I’ll answer, I promise.”

Margot nodded. “I’ll tell you the stupid stuff,” she said.

“All of it,” he said.

“Okay,” Margot agreed.

As Griff walked away, he spun around. “Thanks for the pennies,” he said. He squinted
off the side of the boat. “You know, I can’t wait to come back here.”

Margot followed his gaze to the coastline of the island, the place where she had wandered
the beach as a soulful teenager, where she had partied with her brothers and sneaked
in the back doors of bars, where she had met Drum Sr., where she had discovered she
was pregnant, where her mother’s spirit shone like the sun on every surface. It was
the island where Margot wanted to rest her weary bones when this exquisite, tremendous,
and endlessly confounding life was through. It was home.

“Me either,” Margot said.

Ryan Graham (best man):
Wow, the wedding announcement states all the facts, but it actually tells you
nothing.

Nick Carmichael (brother of the bride):
Normally, I break hearts like it’s my cool second job. But this weekend, I had a
girl swiped right out from under me, which has never happened before. It took a minute
for me to realize that she hadn’t belonged to me in the first place. It felt like
she belonged to me because I have known her for so long—longer than Scott Walker,
by the way—but only by a couple of decades. Finn had always been Jenna’s little friend,
but then, this weekend, she became someone else. Had I fallen in
love
with her? Man, I don’t know if I would go that far, though I felt something crazy
and unfamiliar. But then I’ve heard weddings can do that. They can bring out the romantic
in anyone.

H. W. Graham (brother of the groom):
Her flight was at three o’clock and mine was at quarter to four so we decided to
go to the airport together. We had gotten a pretty good glow on at the brunch, and
since we had time at the airport, we sat at the bar and did a couple of tequila shots.
She had been saying the whole weekend that she knew guys like me and that I didn’t
have to worry, there were no strings attached. Once she got on her plane for Myrtle
Beach, I would never see or hear from her again. So it took a little convincing for
me to get her number. We can text, I said. I’ll hit you on Facebook, stuff like that.
Plus, I go to Pawleys all the time to golf (this wasn’t strictly true, though I had
been there once), so I can come see you. I can come to your restaurant. She said,
It’s a free country. Then her plane was called and I kissed her good-bye and I watched
her copper hair disappear through the gate at security, and I’m embarrassed to admit
what I did next. I got on my computer and MapQuested the distance between Raleigh
and Murrells Inlet. One hundred and
eighty-seven miles, three hours and thirty-four minutes. Piece of cake. I’m going
next weekend.

Carson Bain (nephew of the bride):
My mother says that as soon as we get back to New York I have to start seeing a tutor
three times a week!

Douglas Carmichael (father of the bride):
By my calculations, the wedding cost me between a hundred and seventy and a hundred
and eighty thousand dollars. If Beth were alive, she would
kill
me for telling you that. She would also insist that I add that it was worth every
penny. Which it was.

Roger (wedding planner):
We all know what Tolstoy wrote about happy families being alike but unhappy families
being unhappy in their own fashion. I am not Russian and I am not a novelist, and
a hundred and fifty years from now, no one will be quoting me—but that’s not going
to keep me from saying what I think. What I think is that every family is happy in
their own fashion, and every family is unhappy in their own fashion. Every family
is both functional and dysfunctional. The Carmichaels and the Grahams weren’t my easiest
clients, nor were they my most difficult—not by a long shot. But they stood out. The
first time Jenna and Margot came into my office and told me that they had lost their
mother but she had left a Notebook behind, I thought,
Now this is going to be interesting.
And it was.

The thing Beth Carmichael wanted for her daughter more than anything was a beautiful
day. I have to say, I have worked on over a hundred and seventy-five weddings—some
in the driving rain and wind, some in a fug of unbearable heat and humidity, one in
a blizzard (in April!)—and they have all, every single one of them, been beautiful
days.

But especially this one.

Jenna Carmichael Graham (newlywed):
Weddings are a big deal. You might think I would have realized this before
yesterday, but I didn’t. It was only as I stood on the altar of the church with Stuart
and my family and Stuart’s brothers and my best friends and Reverend Marlowe, and
I looked out at all the faces of the people I loved who loved me back and wished the
best for me, that I understood. Love is scary! Taking a vow to love someone through
sickness and health, for richer for poorer,
forsaking all others, until death do us part,
is the most terrifying experience a person can have. Why pretend any differently?