Beautiful Day (33 page)

Margot knew her brothers had been busy, too. Kevin had been trying to save the Coit
Tower, and Nick had just taken the job with the Nationals. They were, all three of
them, inconsolable about the idea of losing Beth, but they hadn’t been
right there
the way that Jenna had been. Jenna had taken a semester off from William and Mary
to go home and be with Beth. She moved back in at the same time that Beth went into
hospice.

“You know what?” Jenna said. She was gearing up now, her voice taking on a scary intensity
that Margot almost never saw. “For most of my life, I felt like I wasn’t even part
of the family. It was always the three of you and Mom and Dad. When we used to sit
at the dinner table, you all would be talking and arguing and I couldn’t understand
or keep up. The three of you would have parties or go on dates, and you would break
curfew and come home with beer on your breath. One of you ended up lost after a concert
at Madison Square Garden, and Mom was on the phone with the police all night.”

Me, Margot thought. The Rolling Stones, the summer between junior and senior year.

“Nick crashed the car and then he got caught growing those pot plants in the attic,
and Mom was certain Kevin was going to get Beanie pregnant. Mom and Dad were so consumed
with keeping track of the three of you that they forgot about me.”

“That’s not true…”

“It
is
true. Kevin broke his leg playing lacrosse, remember, and they left me at Finn’s
house for three whole days.”

“Well,” Margot said. “We were older.”

“And when you all moved out and moved on, we were like a
family again. But a different family. A family with me and Mom and Dad. We would sit
down to dinner and we might talk about you, but it was like talking about relatives
in Africa or China, you were so far away. Which was fine by me.”

Margot made a face. What was this? Decades-old resentment about birth order?

“At the end of Mom’s life, it was just the three of us again. I had a front-row seat
for her death and what it did to Dad.” Now her tears were flowing freely. “It was
horrible,
Margot. He loved her so much, he wanted to go with her. Hell, I wanted to go with
her.” Jenna yanked at her blond hair, which was still in some semblance of a bun.
“Love dies. I watched love die with my own eyes. She left, we all stayed. And that,
that,
Margot, was the worst of all.”

“You’re right,” Margot said. “Of course, you’re right.”

“And so now we have Finn and Nick, and Daddy and Pauline, and Jim and Ann Graham and
horrible Helen, and you and Drum Sr. And as if all of that didn’t make me skeptical
enough, Stuart lies to me about an enormous event in his life. Enormous!”

“But it’s not a deal breaker, Jenna,” Margot said. “When you said that he revealed
himself to be just like everyone else, you were right. He’s a
human being.
He was scared to tell you about Crissy Pine. He wanted to pretend like it never happened.
I’m not saying he wasn’t in the wrong. He was. You deserved to know. But do not cancel
the wedding over this. It isn’t worth it.”

“He gave her his great-grandmother’s ring!” Jenna said.

“Since when do you care about things like rings?” Margot asked. “I promise you there
are hundreds of thousands of diamond rings in this world that have been kept or stolen
or thrown out of car windows in anger.”

“I care because he gave it to
her
—something precious, a family heirloom. He loved her enough to give her that ring.”
Jenna sniffled. “I want him to love
me
that much.”

“He
does
love you that much!” Margot said. “He loves you more than that! He loves you enough
to have gone out and found a ring with ethically mined diamonds! He didn’t recycle
some fusty ring that belonged to his dead ancestor. He found a ring for you, one that
you could love and be proud of.”

Margot thought this was a point well made, and she let her words hang in the air for
a moment. Then she said, “I saw him this morning. He’s a mess.”

“I hope he is,” Jenna said.

“He is,” Margot said. “He looks god-awful. He said if you leave him, he will die—and
I don’t think that was hyperbole.”

Jenna started to cry again. “I love him so much! I’ve just spent the past twelve hours
trying to make myself
stop
loving him. And I can’t stop, I’ll never be able to stop, I’m going to love him for
the rest of my life! But he lied to me! It’s like he’s suddenly become a completely
different person—a person who was engaged and chose to hide it from me.”

Margot knew enough not to speak. They both stood at the window, the same one Kevin
had pried open so that they could all toss handfuls of their mother’s ashes out over
the island she adored. The breeze coming in the window was the only thing that was
keeping Margot from fainting.

She pulled Rhonda’s cell phone out of her pocket and handed it to Jenna. “Call Roger,”
she said. “Call Roger and tell him it’s definitely off.”

“Okay,” Jenna said. She accepted the phone and stared at the face of it for a second,
and Margot thought,
She won’t be able to
do it.
She loves Stuart, and they will end up having a marriage like Beth and Doug’s—a marriage
that will be a fortress for all of them. Margot’s perfect instincts told her so.

But this time, it seemed, Margot’s instincts were wrong. Jenna dialed the number and
held the phone to her ear. Margot had the urge to grab the phone from her sister’s
hand and talk to Roger herself.
The wedding is on,
Margot would say.
Jenna is just scared. She’s just scared is all.

Anyone who had listened to that laundry list of marital disasters would have been
scared.

“Hello?” Jenna said.

Margot thought,
Oh, honey, please don’t. It’s not a deal breaker. Stuart is just like everyone else,
but you and Stuart, as a couple, are different. You two are going to make it.

She thought,
Mom? Help me?

“Stuart?” Jenna said. “I love you, Stuart. You jerk, I love you!”

Finn Sullivan-Walker (bridesmaid):
She hates me. Jenna Carmichael, who has been my best friend since we were eating
graham crackers, drinking apple juice, and watching
Barney
, hates me. I went to the salon with Autumn and Rhonda at eleven o’clock. Just the
three of us because Margot and Jenna were AWOL. I asked Autumn if she had heard from
Jenna, and she pretended to think about it, then she admitted that no, she hadn’t
talked to Jenna since the party the night before. Autumn went
back to the groomsmen’s house with H.W., where they had wild, drunken sex, which she
then described in lurid, pornographic detail to Rhonda, who lapped it up.
Tell me more, tell me more, was it love at first sight?
I thought maybe Autumn was being bitchy to me because she was jealous—she hooked
up with Nick herself at Jenna’s graduation from college a bunch of years ago. I tried
not to care about Autumn or Rhonda or even Jenna. If being with Nick means losing
Jenna, then I guess I’ll have to live with that, because my feelings for Nick are
overwhelming. It’s like they’ve existed forever but I’ve only allowed myself to acknowledge
them this weekend.

I was in the chair having my hair twisted into a chignon when Jenna and Margot walked
in. Everyone in the place started to applaud.
The prodigal bride!
Frankly, I didn’t understand Jenna’s disappearing act. She’s not usually one for
drama.

I, on the other hand, am a magnet for drama. My mother always told me I was so flighty
and so hard to please that she was sure I would end up married at least four times.
She told me that on my wedding day, and I think that was what jinxed me.

When Jenna got to the salon, I thought she might apologize or try to make things right,
but she didn’t come anywhere close to my chair. She didn’t look in my direction. I
thought,
Fine. I don’t care. I won’t be your stupid bridesmaid, I won’t wear the god-awful
green dress, I’ll go home and you never have to see or talk to me again. Find another
best friend, make Autumn your best friend even though she’s a documented superslut.
Make Rhonda your best friend or buddy up with Francie or Chelsea or Hilly or any one
of the “womyn” you teach with at Little Minds. I won’t stand up for you, my spot will
be blank, my place at the head table empty.

A hand on my shoulder. The stylist.

“Honey,” she said. “Why are you crying?”

Beanie (sister-in-law of the bride):
I was left in charge of six kids for most of the morning, and whereas normally they’re
a breeze to watch—they all hang out together and make up their own games, they only
come to me when they’re hungry—it’s no surprise that something went awry. Brock, my
youngest, is serving as the ring bearer, and hence Kevin was appointed “Lord of the
Rings.” He was in charge of holding on to Stuart’s platinum band and Jenna’s platinum
band embedded with fourteen ethically mined diamonds, to represent the number of months
they were together before Stuart proposed. The rings were side by side on our dresser
in chocolate velvet boxes. The boxes appeared to be untouched, but when Kevin opened
them at two thirty this afternoon—two and a half hours before the ceremony—he found
that the box with Jenna’s ring was empty.

Autumn (bridesmaid):
H.W. is a grown-up frat boy asshole, which makes him exactly my type. He likes to
drink a beer with a shot of Jameson, which I could have predicted the second I laid
eyes on him. He’s a Carolina fan; he has a tattoo of a panther on his ankle. He works
as a salesman for a liquor distributor in Raleigh, meaning he hangs out with bar owners
and gets free tickets to everything. He plays poker every week with a group of guys
he went to NC State with, and the best vacation he’s ever taken, he says, was to Cancún,
which he won for having the most lucrative Patrón accounts in his region. He had a
girlfriend for a while but she got too clingy so he broke up with her via text message
while he was in Cancún, at which point she stalked him and tried to hack into his
Facebook account. All he wants this weekend is lots of sex and someone to drink and
dance with. I promised him that, come Sunday at 3 p.m., he would never see or hear
from me again.

Nick (brother of the bride):
I never get myself into situations
I can’t handle; that is a Nick Carmichael trademark. But I think Margot might actually
be right this time. I think I might be in over my head. Can I have a mulligan, please?

T
he photographer was due at three, and Doug knew that meant he had to be dressed in
his tuxedo at two forty-five. And he had to see Jenna.

She was getting dressed with the girls. Outside Doug’s bedroom door, he could hear
the chatter, the talk of foundation garments and false eyelashes. Music was playing,
Bob Seger’s “Katmandu,” which had been another of Beth’s favorite songs, and he wondered
if the getting-ready music had been prescribed in the Notebook, or if this was a song
Jenna normally listened to.

He stood on the quiet side of the door, hesitant to open it.

Pauline was also getting ready, again sitting at his grandmother’s dressing table
where she didn’t belong, spritzing herself with a perfume that, for the past five
years, had been making Doug sneeze. It was called Illuminum White Gardenia; Pauline
always wore it on special occasions. It was expensive, she bought it at Bendel’s,
and Doug was allergic to it. Pauline had never noticed this last fact, however.

The perfume was one more thing he would be happy to bid good-bye.

“What color am I wearing?” Pauline said.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t turn your head,” Pauline said. Doug obeyed; he stared
at his hand on the glass doorknob. It was the hand of an old man, he feared. “Tell
me what color I’m wearing.”

Blue, he thought. But no, that had been the night before. What color was the dress
she had picked for the wedding? Certainly she had told him sixteen times, and possibly
even modeled the dress for him.

“I don’t know,” he admitted.

“Because you don’t look at me,” Pauline said. “Or when you look at me, you see right
through me.”

“Pauline,” he said.

“Cinnamon,” she said. “I’m wearing cinnamon.”

He turned to her. The dress was long and lacy—and yes, the color of cinnamon. He might
have called it brown. It seemed a bit autumnal for a hot day in July, although the
color looked nice with her dark hair.

“You look lovely, Pauline,” he said.

She laughed unhappily, and Doug twisted the glass knob and opened the door.

The hallway was a frenzy of green. Rhonda, Autumn, Finn, Margot. Margot kissed him
just as the song changed to Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Teach Your Children.”
You, who were on the road, must have a code, that you can live by.

Definitely Beth’s song list, he thought.

Margot said, “You look great, Daddy.”

“Thanks,” he said. “So do you. I’m looking for your sister.”

Beanie appeared in the hallway in a pink polo shirt and denim skirt with a stricken
look on her face. “Margot?” she said. “Can I talk to you a second?”

“Sure,” Margot said. She turned to her father. “Jenna is in the attic, getting dressed.”

“In the
attic?
” he said. “Where are the kids?”

“We shooed them out,” Margot said. “She wanted her own space.”

“Okay,” he said, and up to the attic he headed.

“I’m coming up the stairs!” he called. There was no door to the attic. “I hope you’re
decent!”

“I’m dressed,” Jenna said. “I don’t know about decent.”

Doug laughed.

He ascended the final three steps and entered the sweltering, cavernous attic with
its nine unmade bunk beds. The room most closely resembled a cabin at sleepaway camp.
For some reason, there were feathers all over the floor, as though a goose had gotten
caught in the ceiling fan.