Beautiful Day (45 page)

“It certainly wasn’t
your
place to tell her!” Ann said. “I don’t think you realize what kind of fiasco you
caused. Jenna nearly canceled the wedding. She nearly
left
him!”

Helen sniffed. “Well, it’s better that it’s out in the open,” she said. “Stuart didn’t
want to get married with
that
skeleton in his closet.” Helen’s red dress made her look like a she-devil. Evil incarnate.

“What do you even know about it?” Ann asked. “Stuart isn’t your son.”

“I heard the whole story from Jim,” Helen said. “I do ask him about the other kids;
I always have. We are all one family, Ann, like it or not.”

Ann was rendered speechless. She squared herself in front of Helen. “You know what,
Helen?”

Helen sipped her champagne. Her eyes were now fixed on Skip Lafferty, who was deep
in conversation with Kevin Carmichael. Skip’s hand was resting on Kevin’s shoulder,
and it was for this reason that Ann noticed Skip’s wedding band.

He’s married!
she thought.

“What?” Helen said.

“I should never have invited you to this wedding,” Ann said. “I don’t know why I did.
I guess I wanted to prove that I was the bigger person, I wanted to show myself that
I had moved beyond what happened twenty years ago. I could offer an olive branch,
I could invite you here. But the fact of the matter is, we are
not
all one family. You destroyed
my
family. You’re responsible for the worst catastrophe of my life.”

“Y’all can blame me,” Helen said, “but I wasn’t acting alone. I didn’t get pregnant
alone.”

“I have made my peace with Jim,” Ann said. “But I find that I simply cannot make peace
with you.”

“I could never believe you took Jim back,” Helen said. “It seemed pitiful to me. You’re
a smart woman, Ann, and halfway attractive. You wield actual power in certain circles.
You could have met someone else. You could have done better.”

“That’s where you and I differ,” Ann said. “For me, there is no one better. My life
has always been about loving Jim.”

Helen opened her mouth to speak, but Ann was done listening. Ann walked away, leaving
Helen and her lipstick-smudged teeth. Ann tapped Skip Lafferty on the shoulder, interrupting
his conversation with Kevin Carmichael.

“I need to warn you about Helen,” Ann said. She leaned in closer to Skip’s ear. “She’s
a pit viper.”

Skip smiled at Ann uncertainly; he might not have heard what she said over the strains
of “The Entertainer,” but Ann didn’t care. Another woman might have repeated herself,
another
woman might have screamed at Helen, or called her a bitch or a whore, another woman
might have made a snarky comment about the bright colors Helen had worn all weekend
and the way they echoed the natural bright colors of poisonous snakes, and venomous
frogs, fish, and spiders, another woman might have thrown a drink or accidentally
“spilled” a plate of cheesy grits all over Helen’s red patent leather platform sandals.
Another woman might have heard the phrase “halfway attractive” and made a scene, but
not Ann. Saint Ann, Catholic schoolgirl Ann, state senator Ann. Ann had gotten the
chance today to say what she’d wanted to say, and that was enough.

Jim approached her and took her in his arms. “You okay?” he said.

“Wonderful,” Ann said.

“I would marry you again, you know,” Jim said. “Again and again and again, every day
of our lives I would marry you, Annie.”

The band launched into “Ain’t Misbehavin’.”

“Let’s dance,” Ann said.

A
ll she had left to survive was the brunch. Then, at three o’clock, she would drive
the Land Rover up the ramp of the ferry, the wedding weekend would be over, and she
could get down to the business of putting her life back together.

Edge gone.

Griff gone.

Jenna married.

Her mother still dead.

Margot wouldn’t even be able to cry about these things in peace during the two-hour
boat ride as she had planned, because now her father was driving home with them.

Pauline had thrown the Notebook into the bonfire, and it had gone up in flames. Margot
had just accepted this as the final devastation of the weekend—until Jenna told them
that Stuart really
was
the Intelligent, Sensitive Groom Beth had predicted. Stuart had scanned the Notebook,
page by page, into his computer—so Beth’s words in Beth’s handwriting would be preserved
digitally forever. Doug would finally be able to read the last page of the Notebook.

Pauline had spent the night in the guest room with Rhonda, and at the crack of dawn,
she drove Doug’s Jaguar onto the early morning ferry. She was going home alone. Doug
was planning to stay at the Marriott in Stamford until he found a place in the city.

Splitsville.

Rhonda, however, had remained at the Carmichael house. She had gotten up early to
run, she’d made a pot of coffee, and by the time Margot and her twice-broken heart
stumbled downstairs, Rhonda was home, sweaty and breathless.

She had seemed sheepish. “I’m sorry about my mother,” she said.

Margot poured herself a cup of coffee, hot and black; the more bitter it tasted this
morning, the better. “It’s nobody’s fault,” Margot said. This had long been Doug’s
party line in regard to 95 percent of the divorces he saw. “Things happen, people
change, there’s no point placing blame.”

Rhonda nodded but looked unconvinced.

Margot said, “We should go out together sometime. Drinks or dinner or something. I’d
love to meet Raymond.”

“Would you?” Rhonda said, brightening. “How about Thursday night? Are you free Thursday
night? You could meet Raymond and me at Swine.”

Margot had been thinking of some vague future date, but she was charmed by Rhonda’s
enthusiasm. “I am free Thursday,” she said. “And I’ve been dying to go to Swine.”

It was a date, then. Margot hoped that by Thursday the excruciating pain she felt
about Edge and Rosalie, and, oddly, the even worse pain she felt from watching Griff
walk away, would have subsided to a point where she could be halfway decent company.
It seemed an awful irony that she and Rhonda would become friends now that their parents
were separating. And yet Margot was happy to have gotten at least one positive thing
from the weekend.

She grabbed a glass of champagne from the tray and stood in the buffet line with Ryan
and Jethro, who both looked beyond haggard. Waves of alcohol fumes emanated off of
Ryan that even the heady scent of Aventus couldn’t disguise.

Aventus. Damn Edge.

Ryan and Jethro told Margot they had stayed up until four in the morning doing Patrón
shots with the bandleader, whose
name was Ernie Sands. They had gotten into a long, discursive conversation about
Moby-Dick,
and Ryan had started calling Jethro “Daggoo.”

“Daggoo and I might come back to Nantucket next summer,” Ryan said.

Jethro said, “Yeah, we might get married ourselves.”

Margot clapped her hands and mustered what she hoped passed for enthusiasm, but the
thought of anyone else getting married—even people as ideally suited for each other
as Ryan and Jethro—depressed her.

Ryan said, “You look worse than I feel. We brought copies of the
Times
and the
News and Observer
so everyone could see the wedding announcements. You want to be the first one? We’re
sitting over there.”

“I would,” Margot said. “But I have to talk to my mother’s cousins. I’ve been putting
it off all weekend.”

Margot fixed a plate of things she didn’t normally allow herself to eat—fried chicken,
hash browns, and a big scoop of cheesy grits topped with barbecue. What did it matter
if she weighed five hundred pounds? No one had loved her when she was thin.

She sought out Everett and Kay Bailey, her mother’s favorite cousins. It was a sign
of devotion to her mother that Margot did this. She had always loved Ev and Kay, but
the whole “catching up” thing was the last way Margot wanted to spend her time at
this brunch.

They were, of course, delighted when Margot sat with them.

“Oh, what a wonderful surprise,” Kay said. “Here’s Margot! Where are the kids?”

“Back at the house,” Margot said. “With their cousins and a babysitter.”
Playing their iDevices,
she thought.
Eating cake for breakfast.

Margot hadn’t seen Ev and Kay since her mother’s funeral seven years earlier, so there
was a lot to discuss. Like her divorce from Drum Sr.

“He’s getting married again,” Margot said. “To a Pilates instructor named Lily.”
A woman I had never heard of until three days ago.
She ate a few huge forkfuls of barbecue and grits.

Was Margot dating anyone? “No, nobody special.”
Unless you count the fifteen months I spent in a nebulous haze of sex and unrequited
texting with my father’s law partner.

And how about work? It sounded as though she’d had quite the meteoric rise up through
the ranks at Miller-Sawtooth. “Work is good,” Margot said. “I love my job.” Work had
always been Margot’s ace in the hole. The rest of her life might be falling apart,
but work—promotion, esteem, salary—had always been gangbusters. Or at least it had
been until Griff. The first event of Griff was bad enough, but the reappearance of
Griff had been exponentially worse. She had liked Griff months ago and regretted her
actions, but over the course of the weekend, he had revealed himself to be even kinder,
funnier, cooler, and more genuine than he had seemed previously. And he had liked
her! He thought she was pretty! And smart! And tough and discerning! (The ultimate
compliments, in her line of work.) And she had picked him off like a sniper. She had
been ruthless and unethical; she had blown, blown,
blown
it!

Maybe the expression on her face gave away that work was a sore subject.

“Your dad seems good,” Ev said.

“Good?” Margot said. “Yep, he’s good.”
As long as he doesn’t end up as a permanent denizen on my pull-out couch.
More than anything, Margot hoped he didn’t default and go back to Pauline just because
he couldn’t face life as a singleton.

“And your brothers?” Kay asked.

“Kevin is Kevin,” Margot said. “Out slaying dragons, making the world a safer place
for humanity.” She and Ev and Kay all pivoted in their seats to observe Kevin and
Beanie, arm in arm at the bar—where, Margot knew, Kevin would order a light beer and
Beanie would get a V8 with nothing in it.

“And Nick,” Margot said. What the hell could she say about Nick that wouldn’t make
Ev and Kay’s hair stand on end? At that moment, he was dancing with Finn to “Am I
Blue?” The two of them looked like they had been welded together; Nick’s chin was
on Finn’s head, her face smushed into his chest, her eyes closed. Their feet were
barely shuffling. Margot watched them for a moment with awe and horror. They had spent
the night together in Jenna’s room—Autumn had once again repaired to the groomsmen’s
house with H.W., and Jenna and Stuart had spent their wedding night in the cottage
at the Cliffside Beach Club. No one had said a word about Nick and Finn cohabiting
in the family home—not her father, not Kevin, and not Margot herself. She wasn’t the
moral police, they were both consenting adults, infidelity wasn’t against the law.
But come on!

Jenna and Finn still weren’t speaking. They might never speak again, even if Nick
and Finn ended up getting married someday.

Married! Margot barked out an unhappy laugh. Ev and Kay smiled at her as if to ask
what was funny, and Margot rummaged for a neutral statement to make about Nick.

But at that moment, something happened. Margot saw a man enter the tent. Handsome
guy, broad shoulders, bowlegged walk. Margot’s mouth dropped open.

No way,
she thought.
Oh, my God, no way.

“Excuse me a second,” she said to Ev and Kay.

She bumbled with her chair and her drink, which she had wisely decided to bring with
her. She needed to get a better look.

Oh, my God, yes.

The man who had entered the tent was Scott Walker.

Inwardly, Margot squealed. She watched Scott Walker approach Nick and Finn on the
dance floor. The band continued to play, but Nick and Finn stopped dead and separated,
although Nick still had a hold of one of Finn’s sunburned arms.

Margot thought,
Jesus, Nick, let go!

She thought,
Scott is going to punch him.

Finn’s face was the face of someone who saw dead people. She looked
petrified.

There were words, spoken by Scott, but Margot couldn’t hear them over the strains
of “Everybody Loves My Baby.” Then Nick said something, and Margot hoped he was pulling
out the charms that had, heretofore in his life, kept him alive and out of prison.
Finn said nothing; she barely blinked.

Scott took Finn by the other arm. For a second, both Nick and Scott had a hold of
Finn like they were engaged in a tug-of-war, and Margot thought,
Everybody loves my baby, indeed!
She wanted to know why Finn had men fighting over her wimpy, lying, cheating ass.
It was neither fair nor just. Then Nick let go, and Scott led Finn out of the tent
and down by the dock, where they stood and talked. They were fifty yards away, but
still in full view of everyone.

Jenna appeared at Margot’s side.

Margot said, “I cannot believe this is happening. Can you believe this is happening?”

Jenna said, “I called him.”

The foghorn sounded. The ferry pushed forward off the dock. Margot and Doug sat in
the front seat of the Land Rover, and the three kids with their iDevices were in the
back. Ellie was wearing her flower girl dress; she had spilled Hawaiian Punch down
the front, and the back was covered with grass stains, but that hardly mattered now.