Beautiful Day(30)

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.





OUTTAKES


Jim Graham (father of the groom): I am a man who has lived and learned. I married the right woman, but I didn’t know it, I married the wrong woman and I did know it, I married the right woman a second time. My advice to all four of my sons has been “Look before you leap.” This may be a cliché, but as with most clichés, it contains a hard kernel of truth. I like to think that advice was what kept Stuart from making a mistake several years ago. But he’s got the right idea now. Jenna is a beautiful girl and she brings out his best self. Really, what more can you ask?

H.W. (brother of the groom, groomsman): Open bar all weekend long.

Ann Graham (mother of the groom): I was born and raised in Alexandria, Virginia, I attended Duke University, I have served in the North Carolina General Assembly for twenty-four years. When Jim and I take vacations, we go to Savannah or the Outer Banks or Destin. Once to London, once on a cruise in the Greek islands. But I can’t tell you the last time I crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. It might have been New York City, 2001, when Jim and I went to the funeral of one of his fraternity brothers who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. It will be nice to head north this time for a happier occasion.

Jethro Arthur (boyfriend of the best man): Unlike Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket is no place for a black man. I told this to Ryan and his response was that Frederick Douglass spoke on the steps of the Nantucket Atheneum in 1841. Frederick Douglass? I said. That’s what you’ve got? Yes, he said. And you know who else spent time on Nantucket? Who? I said. Pip and Daggoo, he said. Pip and Daggoo? I said. You mean the characters from Moby-Dick? Yes! he said, all proud and excited, because literary references are usually my territory. I said, Pip and Daggoo are fictional black men, Ryan. They don’t count.





FRIDAY





ANN


There were only a few ills in life that a five-star hotel on a bright, sunny day couldn’t fix. This was what Ann Graham told herself at ten o’clock on Friday morning when she and Jim arrived at the White Elephant resort on Nantucket Island. Ann had personally seen to it that they would be able to check in right away; nothing would have driven her battier than having to sit around—possibly for hours—waiting for their room to be ready. And so, less than thirty minutes after arriving on Nantucket, Ann was standing on the balcony of their suite, overlooking the harbor, which was as picturesque as she had imagined. The sailboats, the ropes, the bobbing red and white buoys, the two blond teenagers in a rowboat with fishing poles, the lighthouse on the point. This was the real thing. This was East-Coast-Yankee-blue-blood-privilege-and-elitism at its very finest.

Jim came up behind her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Should we order up champagne and get naked?”

Ann willed herself not to shrug him off. He was being funny; he wanted her to relax. He did not want her to become the woman she was dangerously close to becoming: a woman who alternately expressed bitterness and hysteria because her son was getting married in a place where she exerted no influence.

The groom’s side of the family, Ann had learned over the past thirteen months, were second-class citizens when it came to the planning and execution of the wedding ritual in America. Maybe it was different in some far-flung tribe in Papua New Guinea or Zambia, and if so, Ann would gladly move there. She was the mother of three sons. She would have to endure this humbling social position at least twice—with Stuart now, and later with H.W. She had no idea what would happen with Ryan.

She and Jim weren’t even throwing the rehearsal dinner, which it was customary, in the wedding ritual in America, for the groom’s parents to do. Jenna had insisted on holding the rehearsal dinner at the Nantucket Yacht Club—apparently this was a suggestion drawn straight from the blueprints her deceased mother had left behind. The Carmichaels had been members of the yacht club since forever; Ann and Jim couldn’t have paid if they’d wanted to. They had, initially, offered to do just that, however—Doug Carmichael could let the Grahams know the cost of the yacht club party, and Jim would write Doug a check to cover it. Doug had graciously refused the offer, and Ann was glad, not because of the expense—she and Jim could easily have afforded it—but because if Ann was going to host a party, she wanted to put her stamp on it. She wanted to pick the location and the flowers and the menu. If the rehearsal dinner had to be held at the Carmichaels’ club, she agreed that the Carmichaels should pay. After Ann’s insistence that she and Jim do something, Jenna had suggested that the Grahams host the Sunday brunch. This felt like a consolation prize to Ann. The Sunday brunch? Half the guests would skip the damn thing because of early departing flights or boats, and the other half would show up exhausted and hung over. Ann nearly rejected the Sunday brunch idea, but then she realized that doing so would make her seem like a spoiled child who hadn’t gotten her way, rather than the six-term North Carolina state senator, devout Catholic, and mother of three that she was. So she said yes and made up her mind that the Sunday brunch was going to be the best part of the whole weekend. Ann had arranged for the White Elephant to set up a tent on the lawn facing the water, and under this tent would be a little piece of the Tar Heel State. The menu would include barbecue flown in from Bullock’s in Durham, as well as two kinds of grits, hush puppies, collard greens, coleslaw, buttermilk biscuits, and pecan pie. Ann had asked the head bartender at the White Elephant, a guy named Beau who actually hailed from Charleston and had worked at Husk, to make ten gallons of sweet tea and order Kentucky bourbon for juleps and whiskey sours. Ann had hired a Dixieland band, who would wear straw boaters and candy-striped vests. They would show Stuart’s new family some genteel southern hospitality.