Beautiful Day(29)

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.