Beautiful Day (18 page)

“Can I get you a beer?” Margot asked.

“I…” Chance said. He swallowed. “I’m only nineteen.”

“Who cares?” H.W. shouted, momentarily animated by his favorite topic. H.W. had a
twangy accent straight out of
The Dukes of Hazzard
. “Grab a beer, Chancey, come on!”

Chance turned even pinker. Margot had never seen anyone with such unusual coloring.
It was almost a birth defect, perhaps indicating the murky circumstances of his conception.
And with this thought, Margot suddenly felt protective of Chance. Clearly he was a
darling, scrupulous kid. It wasn’t his fault that Jim Graham had made an atrocious
error in judgment.

“How about a Coke?” Margot asked.

Chance nodded. “A Coke would be great, thanks.” He tugged at the collar of his shirt.
“It’s, uh, kind of hot out here.”

“It is hot,” Margot agreed. “And look at you guys, all ready to go.” She stepped back
into the kitchen to grab Chance a Coke from the fridge and narrowly missed hitting
a woman holding a tray of empty vol-au-vents. At the breakfast nook, Autumn, Rhonda,
and Pauline were telling stories about the incompetent masseuses they had known; they
were getting along like a house
on fire. Jenna would be pleased about that, wherever she was. Probably upstairs, putting
on the showstopper backless peach dress.

Margot handed Chance the Coke. She said, “It’s nearly four thirty.”
Four thirty!
Margot wondered if Edge was on island yet. She got a Mexican jumping beans feeling
in her belly. “I’ve got to get cracking!”

H
e wanted to say that golf had calmed him. He had played with a couple about his age
named Charles and Margaret and their friend Richard, who was a decade younger and
had a very, very fine drive. Doug had a wonderful time chatting with them about the
elite courses they had all mutually played—Sand Hills in Nebraska, Jay Peak in Vermont,
and Old Head in Ireland. They spent four delightful hours of talking about nothing
but golf, and Doug couldn’t ask for a more appealing course than Sankaty Head on July
nineteenth. The sun illuminated the rolling greens, the Atlantic Ocean and Sesachacha
Pond, the red-and-white peppermint stick of Sankaty Lighthouse. Doug had joined his
companions for lunch at the turn; he drank a cold beer and ate chilled cucumber soup
and a lobster salad sandwich as they talked about the formidable prairie wind at Sand
Hills. After lunch, Doug went out and slew the back nine.

He’d enjoyed another celebratory beer after the eighteenth, and then, not wanting
to bother Pauline (which really meant not wanting to hear Pauline bitch about the
GPS—she could never get the damn thing to work, she took it personally, as if the
woman whose voice gave directions was an enemy of hers), he took a cab back to the
house. Even the cab ride had been relaxing. Doug put the windows down and gazed out
at the pretty cottages with their lovely gardens, their gray shingles and neat white
trim, their sturdy widow’s walks. He felt better than he had in months. Spending the
day by himself playing golf was just what he needed.

He had believed, during the fifteen minutes in the cab, that everything would correct
itself. He didn’t need to make any drastic changes. He had been frazzled the day before
with his own version of prewedding jitters. Nothing more.

But the second he entered the master bedroom—a bedroom he remembered his grandparents
sleeping in, then his parents, then him and Beth—and saw Pauline sitting at this grandmother’s
dressing table, fixing her hair, he thought,
Oh, no, no, no. This is all wrong.

She must have noticed his expression because she said, “You hate the suit.”

“The suit?” he said.

She stood up and yanked at the hem of her jacket. “I didn’t want anything too flashy.
They’re so conservative at the yacht club. All the old biddies with their pearls and
their Pappagallo flats.”

Doug looked at his wife in her blue suit. It was a tad matronly, true, reminiscent
of Barbara Bush or Margaret Thatcher, and Doug could never in a million years imagine
Beth wearing such a suit—but the suit wasn’t the problem. It was the woman inside
the suit.

“The suit looks fine,” he said.

“Then why the long face?” Pauline asked. “Did you hook your drives?”

Doug sat on the bed and removed his shoes. He had a house full of people downstairs
and more people coming to the yacht club. He had to get in the right frame of mind
to play host. He had to follow the advice he had glibly given so many of his clients:
fake it to make it.

“My drives were fine,” he said. Pauline said things like “Did you hook your drives”
to make it sound like she understood golf and cared about his game, but she didn’t.
He had never hooked a drive in all his life; he was a slicer. “I played pretty well,
actually.”

“What did you shoot?”

“A seventy-nine,” he said. He wasn’t sure why he fudged the number for Pauline’s sake;
he could have said he’d shot a 103, and she still would have said:

“That’s wonderful, honey.”

She sat next to him on the bed and started kneading the muscles in his shoulder. She
must have realized something was very wrong, because unsolicited touches from Pauline
were few and far between. But he wasn’t in the mood to be touched by Pauline. He might
never be in the mood again.

He stood up. “I have to get ready,” he said.

It was only the rehearsal, but as they stood in the vestibule of the church, it felt
like a big moment. Everyone else had processed before them—first Autumn on the arm
of one of the twins, then Rhonda and the tall, nearly albino half brother, then Kevin
and Beanie, who were standing in for Nick and Finn, who apparently were still at the
beach although they had each been texted and called forty times in the past hour,
then the other twin and Margot. Then Kevin and Beanie’s youngest son, Brock, as the
ring bearer, alongside Ellie, the flower girl.

Ellie was still in her bathing suit. Doug, who made a point never to interfere with
his kids’ parenting, had said to Margot, “Really? You brought her to
church
in a bathing suit?”

Margot had instantly gotten her hackles up, as Doug expected.

“I’m doing the best I can, Dad,” she said. “She refused to change. I think it’s a
reaction to the D-I-V-O-R-C-E.”

Really? Doug thought. Margot and Drum Sr. had been divorced for nearly two years.
That sounded suspiciously like an excuse.

Roger, the wedding planner, was the director of this particular pomp and circumstance,
despite the presence of the pastor of St. Paul’s and their pastor from home, Reverend
Marlowe, who were co-officiating. Roger had his clipboard and a number two pencil
behind his ear; he was wearing a pair of khaki shorts, Tevas, and a T-shirt from Santos
Rubbish Removal. Doug had an affinity for this fellow Roger that bordered on the fraternal.
He appreciated that sense and order and logic were prevailing in the planning of this
nuptial fete. Whatever Doug was paying the guy, it wasn’t enough.

Roger had an old-fashioned tape recorder that was playing Pachelbel’s Canon; tomorrow
there would be two violinists and a cellist. Pachelbel’s Canon was a piece of music
Beth had loved even more than Eric Clapton or Traffic. She had loved it so much that
she had asked Doug to play it over and over again in the days before she died. It
would ease her passage, she said. Naturally, it was also the piece she had suggested
for the processional, not realizing that as Doug stood, linked arm in arm with his
youngest child, he would be suffused with the memory of sitting at Beth’s bedside,
helplessly watching her die.

Tears stung Doug’s eyes, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. He took a few deep
breaths. Next to him, looking as soft and lovely as a rose petal, Jenna said, “Oh,
Daddy,” and from some unseen place, she pulled a pressed white handkerchief.

That did it: Doug started to cry. It was all too much—giving his baby girl away, the
confusion about Pauline, and his longing for Beth. She should be here.
She should be here, goddamn it!
In the seven years since her death, he had missed her desperately, but never as much
as he did right this instant. Her absence physically pained him. He realized then
that he had forgotten to read the last page of the Notebook, although he had decided,
while overlooking the eleventh green at Sankaty, that today would be the day to do
so. Now he was glad he hadn’t read it. He couldn’t handle it.

Doug blotted his face with the handkerchief, mopping up the tears that were now flowing
freely. He caught Roger looking at him with concern. Doug didn’t have an issue with
grown men crying; he saw it week in and week out at his office—a college president
had cried, an orthopedic surgeon had cried, a famous TV chef had cried. The loss of
love could undo anyone.

And so, when the music switched to Jeremiah Clarke’s Trumpet Voluntary and he and
Jenna took their first matched steps down the aisle, everyone who rose saw him weeping.

He didn’t try to stop himself.
Beth,
he thought.
Beth, look at our baby.

Because it was the rehearsal, the only people in attendance were the wedding party
and, seated in the front pew, Pauline, and Stuart’s parents, Ann and Jim Graham. Doug
figured he might as well get all the tender thoughts out of the way now; that way
tomorrow he might have half a chance of remaining composed.

He allowed himself to remember the first moment that Jenna was placed in his arms.
She had been the smallest of the four children at birth—a mere six pounds, twelve
ounces—and she fit comfortably in both his upturned palms. He remembered her eyes,
round and blue, and her head covered with baby chick fuzz.

“She’s a little darling,” Beth had said. “A precious sweetheart. She is our dessert.”

Jenna had been exactly that. The other three kids had been born in such rapid succession—Margot
first, Kevin eleven months later, Nick fourteen months after that—that they had all
blended together. Then seven years passed, and both Beth and Doug had assumed they
were done having children. The older three were too much to handle most of the time.
Margot was bossy, Kevin scrappy, Nick messy. Beth had relaxed on her birth control;
some nights she was simply too tired to put in her diaphragm, and most times their
lovemaking was too urgent, squeezed into rare moments of privacy, for Doug to remember
to pull out. They had gotten pregnant again, and they surprised themselves by feeling
happy about it. They had Jenna, a baby girl they could relax and enjoy; she was the
one they could spoil. And Jenna had given back every bit of their love. She had been
a snuggler and a kisser, and in many ways a uniting force among the children. In seventh
grade, Doug remembered, she had been learning calligraphy, and she had made a sign
that said:
Only family matters.
Beth had insisted that Doug take the sign to work and display it in his office. He
had hung it on the wall behind his desk. And then, when Beth died, he had brought
the sign home and put it on Beth’s nightstand.

Tears, tears. Doug couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes—not Pauline’s, not Kevin’s, not Margot’s.
He gazed straight ahead at the altar and the magnificent east and west Tiffany windows.
He could remember the weight of Jenna in his hands the first time he held her, and
now here she was firmly gripping his arm as though
she
were walking
him
down the aisle and not the other way around. This was going to be the next-to-last
time he held on to her. Right now, she was still his.

Reverend Marlowe was standing before them; they had come to the end of their journey.

Doug didn’t want to let her go.

Your father will be a cause for concern.

He kissed Jenna and gave Stuart a look.

You’re a lucky bastard,
he thought.

Take care of her,
he thought.
She is so precious to us.

And then he stepped aside.

Reverend Marlowe raised his hands and, in his melodious voice, said, “Dearly beloved.”