Beautiful Day (6 page)

She wouldn’t let herself think about that night, Picholine for dinner first, then
the unprecedented invitation to sleep over, then the ask, like a cold hand on her
throat. Griffin Wheatley, Homecoming King. She
couldn’t
think about it.

Maybe Edge was just busy. He had been preparing for court all week; he was taking
over something called the “shitshow Cranbrook case” for Margot’s father. Margot had
asked what that meant, but he hadn’t told her; he couldn’t tell her about any of his
cases—not only because it was privileged information, but because Edge didn’t want
Margot to accidentally slip up in front of her father.

The result of this was that Margot knew next to nothing about Edge’s work life or
how he spent his days. She almost preferred the way things had been with Drum Sr.
Drum Sr. had done nothing for work, but at least that nothing had been reported to
Margot in excruciating detail.
Going for run in park. Back from run. ATM, $80. Warren Miller film—off the hook! Thinking
about enchiladas for dinner—ok with u? Store. Sale on canned tomatoes, buying 3. Picking
up Ellie now. Walking. What is name of Peyton’s mom? And what is wrong with her face?
Margot used to sit in her office at Miller-Sawtooth, which was the most prestigious
executive search firm in the world, and receive these texts and think,
Don’t you understand that I am too busy for this piddly-shit?

Now, with Edge, Margot would kill for some piddly-shit. She would kill to know what
he had for breakfast. But he told her nothing. If he was feeling expressive, he would
text,
In court.
Or,
With Audrey,
who was his six-year-old daughter.

Margot checked her phone: nothing. It was quarter to six. Maybe Edge was in a meeting
with a new client; those could take a while. Maybe he was so busy preparing for court—with
his favorite paralegal,
Rosalie
—that he simply hadn’t had time to check his phone. But Edge checked his phone compulsively.
The
red light blinked, and he salivated as though the next text or e-mail was going to
offer him a million free dollars or a house on the beach in Tahiti. With clients,
he prided himself on responding within sixty seconds. But Margot he let languish for
days.

Most of Margot and Edge’s relationship had taken place via text, which had started
out seeming modern and sexy. They would go back and forth for hours—and unlike in
actual conversation, Margot could take her time to compose witty responses. She could
text things she was too shy to express in person.

But the texting now was frustrating beyond all comprehension. It made Margot want
to tear her hair out. It made her—late one night when she and Edge had been going
back and forth and then she texted
I miss u
and heard nothing back—throw her phone across the room, where it, thankfully, landed
in her laundry basket. She both hated the texting and was addicted to it. She despised
her phone—the seventy-two times a day she checked to see if Edge had texted were torturous—and
then if she did have a text from him, she went to absurd lengths to answer it, no
matter what she was doing. She had answered texts from him under the table in big
client meetings. She had stood up and left Ellie’s kindergarten play (
Stone Soup
) to text Edge from the school corridor. She had texted while driving, she had texted
him drunkenly from the bathroom while she was out with her girlfriends, she had texted
him from the treadmill at the gym. The texting with Edge was keeping her from being
present in her real life. It was awful, she had to stop, she had to control it somehow,
to keep it from destroying her.

Because now, on Thursday, July 18, instead of focusing on her sister’s bachelorette
party, which she, Margot, had organized and which was due to begin shortly, Margot
was thinking:
I texted him nineteen hours ago and he hasn’t responded. Why not? Where is he and
what is he doing? He isn’t thinking about me.

Margot remembered when she had stood in this very house waiting for the mail to arrive
because she was expecting a letter from her high school boyfriend, Grady Maclean.
That had been stressful in the same sort of way, except then all of Margot’s anxiety
had been focused on one moment of the day, and once she got a letter—Grady Maclean
had been pretty devoted for a fifteen-year-old boy—she didn’t have to sweat it out
until the following week.

At that moment, a text came into her phone, and Margot thought,
There he is, finally!
But when she checked, she saw it was a text from her father. Okay, that was absolutely
the worst: she had waited and waited for a text, and then a text came in, but from
the wrong person.

The text read:
Pauline isn’t coming to the wedding.

Margot stared at her phone. She thought,
WTF?
Her mind was whizzing now. This was family drama, exactly the type that was supposed
to happen at weddings. Pauline wasn’t coming!

Why did this news make Margot feel so buoyant? Was it because deep down she didn’t
like
Pauline, or was it because Margot was grateful for something to think about other
than Drum Sr. getting married to Lily the Pilates instructor or Edge’s nonresponse
to Drum Sr. marrying Lily the Pilates instructor, or… Griffin Wheatley, who was still
irritating a part of Margot’s mind. (He had looked
great
with the scruff on his face—like Tom Ford or James Denton. Margot had always seen
him within an hour of his last shave.)

Margot decided she was simply grateful for the distraction. She had nothing against
Pauline, Pauline was harmless, Pauline was devoted to their father. So then
why
wasn’t she coming to the wedding?

And what about Rhonda? Margot wondered. Would Rhonda still come to the wedding? Rhonda
Tonelli, Pauline’s daughter,
was serving as Jenna’s fourth bridesmaid. Jenna hadn’t wanted Rhonda, but their father
had asked (okay, begged), and since he was paying well into the six figures to make
this wedding happen, Jenna had acquiesced.

It would be much better if neither Pauline nor Rhonda came this weekend. Margot felt
a space open up in her chest where, apparently, anxiety about Pauline and Rhonda had
been residing like an undiagnosed tumor.

There would be an uneven number of bridesmaids and groomsmen. Roger might fret about
that, but who cared?

Maybe they could find someone to fill in for Rhonda. Jenna had a group of fellow teachers
from Little Minds coming.

Margot’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the side door. Margot spun around,
phone in hand. It was Roger.

“Roger!” Margot said. “I was just thinking about you.”

Roger blinked. Something was wrong. Had he already heard they might be down a bridesmaid?

“The tent guys have an issue with the tree,” he said.

“What tree?” Margot said. “You mean Alfie?”

Roger swallowed. He was uncomfortable, she knew, calling the tree by a person’s name.

“I thought we went over all of this,” Margot said. “I thought they could fit the tent
under Alfie.”

“They thought so too, Margot,” Roger said. “But that one branch has dropped since
we measured it in April. It’s dropped a lot.”

“Shoot,” Margot said. She didn’t have time to deal with another unforeseen snafu.
It was already six o’clock, she needed to unpack her suitcase and hang up her bridesmaid
dress, she needed to run to the store for groceries, feed her children, take a shower,
change, and she had hoped to open a bottle of
champagne here with Jenna and the girls before their dinner reservation at eight.
“I’m sure you guys will figure out what to do.”

“I’ll tell you what we need to do,” Roger said. “If you want the big tent to go up,
you are going to have to let them cut that branch.”

“Which branch?” Margot asked. She was relieved that the problem had a solution. Maybe.
She and Roger walked to the back door together and peered out at Alfie. Margot’s chest,
which had for a few short, sweet minutes been a wide-open breezeway, now felt like
it was clogging with cement. “Which branch are you talking about?
Not
the…”

“The branch with the swing,” Roger said.

Ellie was still on that swing, twisting then spinning out—just as Margot used to do.

“No,” Margot said.

“It’s the only way.”

“It can’t be the only way.”

“Look how low that branch is,” Roger said. “Compare it to the rest of the branches.
The tent guys have a chain saw; they can take it down in ten minutes. It’s really
not that big, compared to the rest of the tree. The tree will survive.”

“No,” Margot said. “That branch is… the swing is… they’re important. They’re not going
anywhere.”

Roger brought his hand to his mouth. He had been a smoker for thirty years, he’d told
Margot back in October, when she and Jenna first met him, but he’d quit cold turkey
after his brother-in-law died of lung cancer.

“Okay, then,” Roger said. “No tent.”

“No
tent?
” Margot said.

“Not the big one you and Jenna picked out,” he said. “It won’t fit. Now, I can ask
Ande if he can put up a smaller tent closer to
the edge of the bluff. That will cover the bar and dance floor, maybe the head table.
But everyone else will be exposed.”

“What are we going to do if it rains?” Margot asked.

“I think you know the answer to that,” Roger said. “You’re going to get wet.”

Margot couldn’t look at Roger because she couldn’t stand to see the stark truth on
his face. Roger had lived on Nantucket all his life. He had graduated from Nantucket
High School in 1972—which made him, Margot had realized, the same age as Edge. Fifty-nine.
He had worked for years as a carpenter and a caretaker, and then in 2000, a dot-com
bazillionaire had thrown the wedding-to-end-all-weddings at Galley Beach. There wasn’t
a dance floor big enough on the island, so the family had hired Roger to build one.
In this way, he had stumbled into the wedding business through the back door.

He wasn’t like any wedding planner Margot had ever met or imagined. He wasn’t anal
or super high-energy. He wasn’t stylish, young, or hip. He was no-nonsense, he was
reliable, he knew everybody you needed to know on the island. He exuded authority,
he showed up early, worked hard, got things done. He had been married for thirty-five
years to a woman named Rita; they had five children, all grown. Roger and Rita lived
in an unassuming house on Surfside Road. Roger used the apartment over the garage
as his office. Roger wrote everything down on a clipboard; he kept a pencil behind
his ear and a phone on his hip. He drove a pickup truck. When Jenna and Margot had
first met him, they’d thought,
This
is the most sought-after wedding planner on Nantucket? Now that they’d seen him in
action, they knew why. He could talk canapés and floral arrangements and price per
head with the best of them. But his company—if that was what it was—didn’t even have
a name. When he answered his phone, he said, “This is Roger.”

Roger was what they were paying for, and Roger was what they got. And now here was
Roger telling Margot that they had to cut down the branch that supported the tree
swing, or 150 guests would be without a tent.

They couldn’t go without a tent. So Margot would have to let them cut the branch.

She checked the weather for Saturday on her phone. This was the only thing she’d been
more compulsive about than checking for texts from Edge. The forecast for Saturday
was the same as it had been when she’d checked it from the ferry: partly cloudy skies,
high of 77 degrees, chance of showers 40 percent.

Forty percent. It bugged Margot. Forty percent could not be ignored.

“Cut the branch,” she said.

Roger nodded succinctly and headed outside.

Margot had fifty million things to do, but unable to do any of them, she sat at the
kitchen table. It was a rectangular table, made from soft pine. Along with everything
else in the house, it had been abused by the Carmichaels. The surface held ding marks,
streaks of pink Magic Marker, and a half-moon of black scorch that came from popcorn
made in a pot on a night when Doug and Beth had been out to dinner at the Ships Inn
and Margot had been left to babysit her siblings.

Margot remembered her mother being distraught about the scorch mark. “Oh, honey,”
she’d said. “You should have used a trivet. Or put down a dish towel. That mark will
never go away.”

At age fourteen, Margot had thought her mother was overreacting to make Margot feel
bad. She had stomped up to her room.

But her mother had been right. Twenty-six years later, the scorch mark was still there.
It made Margot wonder about permanence. She had just given the okay for the tent guys
to amputate Alfie, a tree that had grown in that spot for over two hundred
years. The tree had been there since colonial times; it had a majesty and a grace
that made Margot want to bow down. The branch would never grow back; a tree wasn’t
like a starfish, it didn’t regenerate new limbs. Margot wondered if twenty-five years
from now she would walk her grandchildren out to that tree and show them the place
where the branch had been sliced off and say, “We had to cut that branch down so we
could put up a tent for my sister Jenna’s wedding.”

Generations of their descendants would go without a tree swing in the name of this
decision.

Margot heard the whine of the chain saw. She covered her face with her hands.

Her mother hadn’t written anything about the tree swing in the notebook.

Cut Alfie’s branch?
Margot asked her.

The sound of the chain saw raised goose bumps. It felt as if the guy was about to
cut out Margot’s own heart.

She ran out the back door.

“Stop!” she cried.

The wedding was taking on a life of its own. It was the damnedest thing. A person
could plan for months down to the tiniest detail, a person could hire someone like
Roger and have a set of written blueprints such as their mother had left—and still
things would go wrong. Still the unexpected would happen.