Beautiful Day

MARGOT

Outside the Chicken Box, there was a line a million people long. Margot felt herself filling with despair. All the people in front of them were kids in their twenties, and Margot’s feet were beginning to hurt in her four-inch heels, and she couldn’t stop worrying that either Rhonda or Autumn was going to spill the beans about her and Edge.

What had she been thinking?

Autumn said, “This line is pretty long.”

“I know,” Margot said. She wondered if they should cut bait and go home. It was after eleven now, and they had a big weekend ahead of them. She had already lost Jenna and Finn; she was only sailing with half a crew. Her dress was blotched with pink stains; it looked like the dress had hives. And yet Margot still felt there was fun to be had, if they stuck it out. They would go inside and dance, goddamn it.

She said, “Let’s go to the back door. I know someone.”

“I’m game,” Autumn said.

They stepped through the sand-and-gravel parking lot to the back of the bar, past the Dumpster and a silver tower of empty kegs. Margot marched up the back steps in her stilettos and knocked on the door.

She turned to Rhonda and Autumn. “I used to…”

The door swung open, and a dark-skinned man with wire-rimmed glasses stood looking at them.

Margot said, “Pierre? It’s Margot. Margot Carmichael.”

Pierre smiled. “Margot.” He enveloped her in a bear hug. “I would recognize you anywhere.”

He would recognize her here, half drunk, trying to avoid the line out front. This was the only place she’d seen him, approximately once each year, since 1995, when they’d dated.

They had only gone out three times, then Margot had met Drum and dropped Pierre like a hot potato. She had felt badly about it until she learned that Pierre had had a girlfriend the whole time they were dating anyway.

He said, “You’re down for the weekend? Or all summer?”

“Just the weekend,” Margot said. “Some of us have to work.”

Pierre laughed. He said, “I work, girlfriend. Believe me, a full house every night is hard work.” He ushered them into the back room and pulled three Coronas out of a cooler. He said, “You ladies have fun!”

“Thanks!” Margot said. “My sister’s getting-”

But her words were drowned out by the sound of the band and the writhing mass of humanity gyrating on the dance floor.

Autumn said, “Whoo-hoo, SCORE, girl, this is awesome!”

It was awesome, in a way. Margot had just capitalized on her long-ago quasi-romance with the bar’s owner to get them inside. The band was playing “Champagne Supernova.” Margot swilled from her cold beer.

“Let’s dance!” Autumn said.

Margot said, “I have to go to the ladies’. I’ll meet you up there.”

Autumn grabbed Rhonda by the hand, and the two of them threaded their way through the crowd, toward the stage.

Margot wandered to the back of the bar, where there were three pool tables and the crowd was thinner. The Chicken Box used to be the place she came to dance every night of the summer. When she was only nineteen, she sneaked in using her cousin’s ID to see Dave Matthews play. She had seen Squeeze, and Hootie and the Blowfish, and an all-girl AC/DC tribute band called Hell’s Belles, and a funk band called Chucklehead who frequented the same coffee shop that she did back in New York. Margot couldn’t decide if being at the Box made her feel younger or older.

She stepped into the ladies’ room. The girls waiting in line in front of her were all in college, with long hair and bare midriffs and tight jeans. Even when Margot was young, she hadn’t dressed that way. She’d worn hippie skirts and tank tops, or surf dresses with bright, splashy flowers. Her hair had always been in a bun because invariably she would show up here straight from a beach party where she would have been thrown into the ocean by one of her drunk brothers or one of her drunk brothers’ drunk friends.

Yes, she felt a hundred years old. She mourned her youth and lost innocence. She thought, I’m a divorced mother of three with a fifty-nine-year-old lover.

Imagine!

From her stall, Margot listened to a girl out by the sinks, talking on her phone.

“You’ve got to get here. The band is off the chain! Come right now…”

Margot pulled her phone out of her bag. How she hated the damn thing. But she was feeling okay, she had survived the evening, or mostly. She would just check her texts, and then, regardless of whether or not there was a text from Edge, she would go out and dance.

She steeled herself. It didn’t really matter if there was a text from Edge; she would see him tomorrow night. They were going to spend the weekend in the same place, although not together. It would be stressful keeping their relationship hidden from Doug and everyone else. In their last conversation, which had taken place on Monday night at 11 p.m., Edge had said, “I’m worried you won’t be able to handle it.”

This had infuriated Margot. Would she not be able to handle it because she felt more for Edge than he did for her? Or because she wasn’t as emotionally mature as he was at fifty-nine, after three marriages and three divorces?

She said, “I’ll be fine.”

And he had said, cryptically, “Well, let’s hope so.”

She checked her phone.

And there, glowing like a single golden nugget among smooth gray river rocks, was his name.

Edge. Text message (2)

Not one message, but two! Margot’s heart suddenly had wings. She felt a surge of molten energy like a silver river that could not be mistaken for anything else: it was love. She had done the unthinkable and fallen in love with John Edgar Desvesnes III.

She wasn’t sure how she dropped the phone. One minute it was in her hands, and the next minute it was gone. The strap of her purse slipped, and she had her beer wedged between her elbow and her rib cage, and to keep her beer from falling, she had loosened her grip on her phone and it dropped. She reached out to catch it, but she was too late. It landed in the toilet with a splash.

Margot reached into the toilet to snatch it out. The phone had been submerged for less than one second. Less than one second! She tried to dry the face of the phone on the front of her stained silk dress, then she swabbed at it with a wad of bunched-up toilet paper. She pushed the button repeatedly, like a person performing CPR. But she knew it was no use. The phone was dead, cold, inert. The two text messages from Edge were lost.

What had he said? Oh, what had he said?

Margot shoved the lifeless phone in her purse. She exited the stall, washed her hands, and examined herself in the mirror. She should have sensed a disaster like this; everything about this night had gone wrong, starting when Jenna had realized the Notebook was missing.

Now Margot understood Jenna’s hysterical reaction: a person’s words, a personal message to you, lost forever. What could be more devastating?

Margot stepped out of the bathroom. She was going to find Rhonda and Autumn and tell them she was going home. Her spirit had been sapped; she was all done. Some nights had good karma, and some nights were cursed. Tonight was a fine example of the latter.

Margot fought her way through the crowd by the pool tables until she found her way blocked by a man in a striped polo shirt.

“Excuse me,” she said.

But the man didn’t move.

Margot looked up.

The man said, “Hey, Margot.”

Margot swallowed. It was Griffin Wheatley, Homecoming King.

He laughed. “You should see your face,” he said. “Am I really that bad? It’s my eyes, right? They still freak you out.”

“I never said they freaked me out,” Margot said. “Those were not my words.”

“You said they unsettled you.”

Unsettled. He was right; that was what she’d said. Maybe because everyone had always commented on the startling ice blue of Margot’s eyes, she was more deeply attuned to other people’s eyes. Griff’s eyes had been hard to stop looking at once she noticed them. The intense blue on the outside and green on the inside drew her in and made her feel like the earth was spinning the wrong direction.

“I have to go,” Margot said. She sounded rude, even to herself. “I’m sorry. I dropped my phone in the toilet, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”

“In the toilet?” Griff said. “Really?”

Margot nodded. She made a mental note not to tell anyone else she had dropped her phone in the toilet. It was disgusting.

“Let me see it,” he said.

“No, there’s nothing you can do.”

“Please,” he said, holding out his hands. “Let me see it.”

Margot dug the phone out of her purse. It was nice that he’d offered to help. That was one of the things her life was missing: someone to help. In her marriage to Drum Sr., she had been the one who had taken care of everything. And Edge was too busy putting out fires with his three ex-wives and four children; he didn’t have any spare time or energy to problem-solve for Margot, and for this very reason, Margot didn’t ask him.

Griff looked at the phone, shook it, pressed all the buttons in various combinations. “It’s dead,” he said.

“I know,” Margot said. It physically hurt to hear someone else say it. “I drowned it.”

“Well, can I buy you a drink?” Griff asked. “We can toast the passing of the phone.”

“No, thank you,” Margot said. “I’m leaving.”

“Oh, come on?” Griff said. “Just one drink? My buddies left, and the other women in this bar are far too young for me.”

Great, Margot thought. He was offering to buy her a drink because she was old.

Homecoming King. Just standing this close to him made her feel guilty. If he knew what she’d done to him and why she’d done it, he would never have offered to buy her a drink. Or he would have bought her a drink and thrown it in her face. That was what she deserved.

“I’m sorry, Griff,” Margot said, and she was sorry. Sorrysorrysorry. She took her phone back and crammed it into her purse. Even though it was useless, she liked having it tucked safely away.

“Come on,” he said. “I don’t want you to feel awkward about the other stuff… signing me off…”

Margot raised her palm. She couldn’t bear to stay another second.

“Not tonight,” Margot said. Not any night. She erupted in crazy-hysterical laughter. She was losing her mind. “I’m really sorry, Griff. I have to go.”

“I’d ask for your number,” he said, “but something tells me you wouldn’t answer when I called.”

She cackled some more, then clamped her mouth shut. She couldn’t encourage him.

“Just take my card,” he said. “And when you get a new phone, you can call me, how about that? There’s no reason why we can’t be friends.”

Margot stared at his card: Griffin Wheatley, V.P. Marketing, Blankstar. Friends? No, she couldn’t take it, but he was handing it to her, and she couldn’t not take it. She slipped it into her purse.

“I’m serious,” Griff said. “Call me. In fact, why don’t you call me tonight when you get home?”

“Tonight when I get home?” she said.

“From your land line,” he said. “I’ve heard homes on Nantucket are so quaint that they still have such things.”

“My land line?” she said. “What for?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. The one thing I miss about being married is having someone to talk to late at night. Someone to tell all the stupid stuff.”

“Oh,” Margot said.

He said, “I’m sure I sound like an idiot.”

“No,” Margot said. “You don’t. You sound perfectly sane, actually.” She wanted to say that she agreed with him-more times than she could count, she had lain alone in bed, wishing that Edge was the kind of boyfriend she could call up to talk to about the pointless minutiae of her day. But he wasn’t that kind of boyfriend; he wasn’t a boyfriend at all. However, confessing this to Griff would just be another double fault. She looked up at him. He was gazing at her with earnest blue-and-green Homecoming King goodness-and all Margot could think was that the final injustice of her night was that Griff was Griff and not someone else. Anybody else.

She said, “I’m not going to call you, Griff. I can’t, you know I can’t.”

He said, “You signed me off. Why not start over?”

She smiled sadly, then weaved through the bar traffic for the door.

The bouncer said, “Have a good night!”

Ha! Margot thought. It was far too late for that.

When Margot got home, the house was dark and quiet. Jenna must have sent Emma Wilton home. Margot checked on her children. The boys were two lumps in the attic bunk beds, and then Margot spied a third lump in another of the beds, an adult-sized lump, snoring loudly. She pulled back the covers to find the shaggy golden head of her brother Nick.

Nick!

Nick, in general, was completely useless except when it came to procuring tickets to baseball games. He was the in-house counsel for the Washington Nationals, he was a confirmed bachelor, he partied his ass off and ran through women the way Margot ran through sandwich bread. He had never offered a single emotional insight that Margot could recall, and yet at this instant she was tempted to wake him up and spill her guts. He might have some useful advice; it was possible she wasn’t giving him enough credit.

But no. Nick wasn’t the answer.

Downstairs, in her own room, she checked on Ellie, who was spread-eagled in the bed meant for them both. She was still in her clothes (since she had packed no pajamas) and had a smear of chocolate around her mouth from the Fudgsicles Margot had bought. She probably hadn’t brushed her teeth. On the dresser was a pile of twigs, stones, acorns, and three blue hardy geraniums, chopped off at the head. These were the flowers that Beth Carmichael had worried about the tent guys trampling. They had survived the tent guys, but not Ellie the hoarder, who had felt the need to add the flowers to her collection of backyard detritus.

Margot swept the stones and sticks and flowers into her palm, hoping that by morning Ellie would have forgotten about them and would not wake up wailing over her missing treasure. Margot checked Jenna’s room-lights out-and then headed downstairs. She tossed the handful of collected nature out the back screen door, poured herself a glass of water, and picked up the house phone.

She dialed the number; she had called it so often during the past few months that she had it memorized. It was late, she knew, but this couldn’t wait.

He picked up on the second ring. Of course he did.

“This is Roger.”

“Roger, Margot Carmichael,” she said. “The branch has to come down.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know it does. I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

“You have?” Margot said.

“You’re doing the right thing,” Roger said. “There is no other way.”

“No other way,” Margot repeated. “You’re sure?”

“I’ll see you bright and early,” Roger said.