Beautiful Day(7)

“I’m sure she looks lovely in Beth’s dress,” Doug said.

“You know,” Pauline said, “I thought it was a good thing that you were widowed instead of divorced. I was glad there wasn’t an ex-wife I had to see at family functions or that you were paying alimony to. But guess what? Beth is more intrusive than any ex-wife could have been.”

“Intrusive?” Doug said. “Define intrusive.”

“She’s everywhere. Especially with this wedding. She is a palpable presence in the room. She is an untouchable standard by which the rest of us have to be judged. She has taken on sainthood. Saint Beth, the dead mother, whose memory grows more burnished every day.”

“Enough,” Doug said.

“I just can’t compete,” Pauline said. “I’ll never come first, not with the kids, not with you. You are, all of you Carmichaels, obsessed with her.”

Doug thought that hearing such words might anger him, but he merely found them validating. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t think you should come to Nantucket this weekend.”

“What?” Pauline said.

“I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t want you to come to Nantucket this weekend. It’s my daughter’s wedding, and I think it would be best if I went alone.” Doug heard Pauline inhale, but he didn’t wait around for what she was going to say. He left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

Down the stairs, through the kitchen. His cell phone was on the counter. He snatched it up and saw the two meager lamb chops sitting in a pool of bloody juices.

He wasn’t going to eat them. He was going out for pizza.





THE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 6


The Wedding Party


I assume you will ask Margot to be your Matron of Honor. The two of you have such a close relationship, and whereas at times I worried about the large age gap between you and the older three, I think that in Margot’s case, it was for the best. She was your sister, yes, but she was also a surrogate mother at times, or something between a sister and a mother, whatever that role might be called. Remember how she did your makeup for the ninth-grade dance? You wanted green eye shadow and she gave you green eye shadow, somehow making it look pretty good. And remember how she drove you down to William & Mary your sophomore year so that Daddy and I could celebrate our thirtieth anniversary on Nantucket? Margot is the most capable woman you or I will ever know. And to butcher the old song: Anything I can do, she can do better.

I assume you will also ask Finn. The two of you have been inseparable since birth. I used to call you my “twins.” Not sure that Mary Lou Sullivan appreciated that, but the two of you were adorable together. The matching French braids, the playground rhymes you used to sing with the hand clapping. Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac, all dressed in black, black, black.

As far as your brothers are concerned, I would ask Kevin to do a reading, and ask Nick to serve as an usher, assuming your Intelligent, Sensitive Groom-to-Be doesn’t have nine brothers or sixteen guys who served in his platoon who can’t be ignored. Kevin has that wonderful orator’s voice. I swear he is the spiritual descendant of Lincoln or Daniel Webster. And Nick will charm all the ladies as he escorts them to their seats. Obviously.

The other person who would be terrific as an usher is Drum Sr. Of course if Margot is your Matron of Honor, she might need Drum to watch the boys.

And then there’s your father, but we’ll talk about him later.





MARGOT


It felt so good to be back in the house of her childhood summers that Margot forgot about everything else for a minute.

The house was two and a half blocks off Main Street, on the side of Orange Street that overlooked the harbor. It had been bought by Margot’s great-great-great-grandfather in 1873, only twenty-seven years after the Great Fire destroyed most of downtown. The house had five bedrooms, plus an attic that Margot’s grandparents had filled with four sets of bunk beds and one lazy ceiling fan. It was shambling now, although in its heyday it had been quite grand. There were still certain antiques around—an apothecary chest with thirty-six tiny drawers, grandfather and grandmother clocks that announced the hour in unison, gilded mirrors, Eastlake twin beds and a matching dresser in the boys’ bedroom upstairs—and there were fine rugs, all of them now faded by the sun and each permanently embedded with twenty pounds of sand. There was a formal dining room with a table seating sixteen where no one ever ate, although Margot remembered doing decoupage projects with her grandmother at that table on rainy days. One year, Nick and Kevin found turtles at Miacomet Pond and decided the turtles should race the length of the table. Margot remembered one of the turtles veering off the side of the table and crashing to the ground, where it lay upside down, its feet pedaling desperately through the air.