Beautiful Day(125)

As badly as Margot wanted to be let off the hook, she couldn’t let him do it. “You deserved that job,” she said. “They liked you.”

“Nanette Kim left after six weeks because it was a hostile environment for women and minorities,” Griff said.

“I’ll point out,” Margot said, “that you’re neither a woman nor a minority.”

“But do you really think I would want to work at a place that is hostile toward women and minorities?” Griff said. He ran his hand over what was now his very, very appealing four-day scruff. “I wasn’t voted homecoming king for no reason. I’m a good guy, Margot. And I think you did me a favor by signing me off.”

Margot shook her head. “I wasn’t a good guy, though, Griff. I mean, I am a good person, in my heart. But what I did was… despicable.”

“I’m happy at Blankstar,” Griff said. “Really happy. It’s the right place for me.”

“Good,” Margot said. “I kept checking on you, you know. I Googled you first thing every morning until I found out you’d gotten a job.”

“Did you?” he said.

“I did.”

“You didn’t have to tell me the truth,” Griff said. “I never would have known. Never.”

“Yes,” Margot said. “I realize that.”

“So why did you?” Griff asked.

Why did she? Well, because she was her mother’s daughter and her father’s daughter, and because she was the mother of three young and growing souls. She could feed them takeout every night, she could leave them for hours with Kitty, the afternoon babysitter, but ultimately the person who was responsible for installing their moral compass was her. It was okay to mess up—to set a scorching-hot pan directly on a soft pine table and mar it forever, to file for divorce when she was no longer in love and had exhausted every hope, to become utterly infatuated with the wrong person and then commit what was essentially a crime of passion—but she had to own it.

How to explain this to Griff? She couldn’t possibly.

“I don’t know why I told you,” she said.

Griff took her chin and turned her face toward him. “But I do know,” he said.

Margot thought he was going to kiss her. He was going to kiss her, and this painful, difficult wedding weekend was going to get the kind of movie star ending that Margot could never have dreamed of. But instead Griff let his hand drop to the railing, and he stared out at the water.

“I don’t believe in love,” he said.

“Me either,” Margot said.

“And I’m never getting married again.”

“Me either,” Margot said.

Griff stood up straight and adjusted his visor. He looked at Margot, and she became transfixed by his blue-and-green kaleidoscope eyes. It was a genetic anomaly, and Margot wondered if heterochromia iridum came with any benefits. Did he see things differently? Did it lend him a sixth sense that enabled him to guess people’s favorite lyrics? Did it allow him to be generous of spirit even when he’d been wronged?

“I want you to call me,” Griff said. “Tonight, after you get home and settled, when you’re climbing into bed, as late as you want. Okay? I’ll answer, I promise.”

Margot nodded. “I’ll tell you the stupid stuff,” she said.

“All of it,” he said.

“Okay,” Margot agreed.

As Griff walked away, he spun around. “Thanks for the pennies,” he said. He squinted off the side of the boat. “You know, I can’t wait to come back here.”

Margot followed his gaze to the coastline of the island, the place where she had wandered the beach as a soulful teenager, where she had partied with her brothers and sneaked in the back doors of bars, where she had met Drum Sr., where she had discovered she was pregnant, where her mother’s spirit shone like the sun on every surface. It was the island where Margot wanted to rest her weary bones when this exquisite, tremendous, and endlessly confounding life was through. It was home.

“Me either,” Margot said.