Elin Hilderbrand - Beautiful Day

Griff said, “It means you’re stalking me.”

Margot smiled. The guy was charming, there was no denying that.

She said, “I was dropping my father off.”

Griff said, “I just finished my first round. We teed off at six this morning, and I think I was still drunk.”

“Nice,” Margot said.

“I stayed at the Box until close,” Griff said. “Drowning my sorrows after you rejected me.”

“I didn’t reject you,” Margot said. Then she realized she needed to be careful about her wording. “I was just tired, and the thing with my phone bummed me out. I needed to get out of there.”

“You can make it up to me now,” Griff said. “Come on.”

“Come on where?” Margot asked.

“Have a drink with me at the bar,” he said.

“It’s ten thirty,” Margot said. “In the morning.”

“So?” he said. “You’re on vacation, right? This is your sister’s wedding weekend, right? You can’t tell me there isn’t a part of you that’s dying for a drink. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t love an opportunity to vent your frustration with your family to a friendly acquaintance.”

“I don’t feel any frustration with my family,” Margot said.

“Now you’re lying to me.”

Margot smiled at this. “So what if I am? I can’t just drink my morning away. My kids want to go to the beach. They’re at home, waiting.”

“Drum… Carter… and Ellie?”

Margot was flabbergasted.

“Carson,” she said. “But wow, good memory.” She recalled having asked Griff about his children at his first interview; his children were similar in ages to her own, but she would never have been able to come up with their names. And Griff, in turn, had asked about Margot’s kids, which wasn’t really standard protocol-she was interviewing him, not the other way around-but she had told him their names and ages. That he remembered was astonishing. If pressed, Edge probably wouldn’t be able to produce any name but Ellie’s, because she was the one in Audrey’s ballet class. Margot mentioned the boys all the time, but Edge never seemed to be listening.

“Well, I’m not a man who would deny three kids the company of their mother,” Griff said. “You should go, although I wish you’d stay.”

“I can’t stay,” Margot said.

“But I’m getting to you, right?” Griff said. “Just admit it, you’re starting to like me.”

“I like you just fine, Griff.”

“I mean, like me like me. Come on, I’m nice,” he said.

Margot allowed herself a glance at him. He was nice. If things were different, if she didn’t have a horrifying history with him, she would be willing, possibly even eager, to go for a drink with him. He was attractive and smart and personable, and he’d remembered her children’s names. But she had wronged him. And how.

“I have to go,” she said.

“What are you up to tonight?” he asked.

“Rehearsal at the church at five o’clock. Rehearsal dinner, six o’clock at the yacht club.”

“I’ll be at the Boarding House tonight,” he said.

“You’ll like it there,” Margot said. “The food is terrific.”

“Come meet me,” Griff said.

“I’ll be too busy getting frustrated with my family,” Margot said. “But thanks for the invite.”

“Tell me something,” Griff said. “Do you have a date for this wedding?”

Margot blinked. It was none of his goddamned business if she had a date or not. Then she considered the question. Did she have a date for the wedding? Edge would be in attendance-tonight and tomorrow and Sunday-but Margot wouldn’t be able to kiss him or hold his hand or claim him as anything more than a friend of her father’s. Margot had asked Edge if they might be able to dance together to just one song, and Edge had said he didn’t think that was a good idea.

“Not really,” Margot said.

“Not really?” Griff said.

“No,” Margot said.

Griff looked off into the green distance, then crouched down by Margot’s window so that his face was right by her face and her stomach did a funny, inside-out flippy thing. His blue-and-green eyes were spellbinding. What was going on here? This was very bad.

In a low voice, he said, “I don’t believe in love anymore, and I’m never getting married again… but I’m free tomorrow if you need me.” He held up his palms. “Just saying.”

Margot couldn’t tell if the guy was earnestly pursuing her or if he was batting her around like a cat with a mouse because she’d signed him off. She, with her perfect instincts, could not tell.

She said, “Okay, thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.”

Autumn Donahue (bridesmaid): Fingers, Mademoiselle. Toes, Black cherry chutney. I needed something edgy to offset the grasshopper green.

Rhonda Tonelli (bridesmaid): Fingers, French. Toes, French. Some people get one color on their fingers and another on their toes, but I think that looks tacky.

Douglas Carmichael (father of the bride): The green on sixteen gave me trouble, but overall, I was happy with my short game. I shot an 80. After a few drinks tonight, I will tell anyone who asks that I shot a 79.

Pauline Tonelli (stepmother of the bride): I’m wearing blue tonight, nothing flashy, just a St. John suit I got at Bergdorf’s that does a good job of camouflaging my midsection. I let the nail technician at the salon talk me into a color for my fingers called “Merino Cool,” which is a sort of purplish gray. Very au courant, she said. They can barely keep it stocked, she said. I think it looks like the color my nails will turn naturally after I’m dead.

Kevin Carmichael (brother of the bride): Tree branch lifted! I can’t believe Margot was going to let them chop it off.

Nick Carmichael (brother of the bride): I think Finn has gotten hotter since she got married. I’ve seen this happen before. Women get married, they get hotter. Then they have kids, and… (motion with finger indicating downward spiral). Then���some of them-bounce back. These are the ones who have affairs with their personal trainers… or some lucky guy who happens to be in the right place at the right time.

Readings

When Daddy and I were in our late twenties, there was one six-month period when we attended eight weddings, and it nearly bankrupted us. I was a bridesmaid in three, and your father was an usher in two. At nearly every one of these weddings, the readings were Corinthians 13 and a selection from Kahlil Gibran���s The Prophet.

I beg you, avoid these choices. If you use Corinthians 13, you will hear a collective groan.

I am, as you know, a fan of song lyrics. You are the only one of my children who inherited my taste in music. Your sister and brothers listened to the punk stuff-the Dead Kennedys, the Violent Femmes, the Sex Pistols, Iggy and the Stooges, the Ramones-oh, how I wearied of the Ramones! But you were a Rolling Stones fan from a young age, you loved Springsteen, Clapton, and Steppenwolf, especially “Magic Carpet Ride.” Remember Halloween in sixth grade when all your friends dressed up like Courtney Love or the girl in the bumblebee costume from the Blind Melon video, and you went as Janis Joplin? They made fun of you, and you came home from trick-or-treating a little weepy, but I explained that you couldn’t help it. You were my daughter.

This is a long way of saying that song lyrics often make good readings. Try the Beatles. No one has ever gone wrong with the Beatles.

When Margot pulled into the driveway at a quarter to five with her three sand-encrusted children in the backseat, she let out a shriek of awe and amazement. The backyard of their house had been transformed into a wedding wonderland.

“Look!” she said to her kids.

No response. When she turned around, she saw all three kids absorbed in their iDevices. She couldn’t complain, however. It had been a magical afternoon at the beach, the exact kind of afternoon Margot remembered having as a child. Drum Jr. and Carson had boogie-boarded with their cousins like fiends all afternoon; Margot could barely get them out of the water to eat their sandwiches from Henry Jr.’s. Ellie had collected shells in a bucket, and then she sat on the shoreline and constructed an elaborate sandcastle. Margot, who was exhausted, drifted off to sleep under the umbrella. When she awoke, Beanie was sitting with Ellie, helping her mosaic the walls of the castle with shells. Margot watched them, and though she felt a twinge of guilt, she knew that Beanie loved spending time with Ellie because Beanie had only boys, and a little girl was a treat for her. Furthermore, Margot didn’t want to sit in the sand; she had never been the kind of mother who got down on her hands and knees to play with the kids, and if she left the shady confines of the umbrella, there would be the issue of freckles. Margot was vain and lazy; she wasn’t as nurturing as Beanie, perhaps, but she reminded herself that her own mother had never been a castle builder, either. Beth used to sit in her striped canvas chair and needlepoint and dole out pretzel rods and Hawaiian Punch from the thermos.

Margot had enjoyed the beach immensely, even as she spooled the conversation with her father and the conversation with Griff through her mind. She decided that it was a blessing she’d sunk her phone because it freed her from worrying about whether or not there would be any texts from Edge. And she wouldn’t worry herself about what the text from Edge last night had said. She would ask him tonight when she saw him at the yacht club.

It was only as Margot got out of the car and took in the staging for the wedding that she appreciated what a very special day tomorrow would be. She and Jenna had been talking about the backyard wedding for over a year, but that didn’t prepare Margot for the excitement she felt now.

The tree branch had been lifted so that the ropes were barely visible. And under the tree was the large, circular center-pole tent, which was bigger in square footage than the Manhattan apartment where Jenna and Stuart would live. Inside, the tent was decorated with ivy, entwined branches, and white fairy lights. There were hanging baskets of limelight hydrangeas and hanging glass bowls filled with sand and one ivory pillar candle. There were fifteen tables, ten of which were swathed in the antique linen tablecloths, embroidered at the edges with green ivy, that their grandmother had used at her wedding, and five were the replica tablecloths that Margot and Jenna had hired an exceptional Irish seamstress in Brooklyn to make. Margot could barely tell the difference. She and Jenna had set the new tablecloths out in the sun for three weeks to get them to age properly. The Irish seamstress, Mary Siobhan, had also made 150 matching green linen napkins, which were tied with strands of real ivy. The centerpieces were white and limelight hydrangeas and the pink climbing roses, cut from the house, nestled into large glass jars encased in a mesh of woven twigs. The bone-white china was set over dark rattan chargers, and Roger had found 120 Waterford goblets in the Lismore pattern, which was the pattern Beth and Doug had collected, and Stuart and Jenna would now collect. The overall effect was one of simplicity and beauty; the white and the green evoked the house and the yard, and the entwined branches and wooden baskets evoked Alfie. The pink of the climbing roses was the softest of accent colors. All of this had been her mother’s vision, and Margot had doubted it; she had cursed the grasshopper green dress, but now she saw how the green dresses and Jenna’s white dress would all make perfect aesthetic sense once they were under this tent.

“You’re a genius,” Margot whispered.

She peered up into the funneled pinnacle of the tent, where she imagined her mother’s spirit residing. She heard someone clear his throat, and she turned to see Roger enter the tent.

“It looks beautiful,” Margot said.

He moved a fork in one of the place settings a fraction of an inch. “I’ve done a lot of weddings,” he said. “But this is one of the prettiest. I always say to my wife that there is no accounting for taste. But you girls knocked it out of the park here.”

“Oh,” Margot said. Why was it always in the face of kind words that she felt like crying? “It wasn’t us.”

When she entered the kitchen, Margot was met with chaos. There were people everywhere. Margot’s kids and the Carmichael boys were still in their wet bathing suits, tracking sand with each step.

“I thought I told you to go to the outdoor shower!” Margot said.