Elin Hilderbrand - Beautiful Day

“No, you didn’t,” Ellie said.

Margot allowed that maybe she had forgotten that instruction, but didn’t her kids know they should always head to the outdoor shower after the beach?

“Go now,” Margot said. “Be fast.”

Autumn, Rhonda, and Pauline were sitting in the breakfast nook, eating crackers with smoked bluefish pâté. The people from the catering company were trying to work around them, moving between the kitchen island, where they were prepping food, to the dining room, which was serving as a staging area, to their refrigerated truck out in the street.

Then Margot noticed a new face.

“Stuart!” she cried.

Stuart was standing just outside the screen door with three other men, who were all wearing coats and ties.

Margot stepped out to greet them.

“Hey, Margot,” Stuart said.

He looked terrible. He was pale, and he had bruise-colored circles under his eyes, and he’d gotten a haircut that was too short. He worked ridiculously hard in a stressful industry. He was a food and beverage analyst for Morgan Stanley; he never took time off. He had gone twelve months without a vacation to take today off, and the next two weeks for his honeymoon to St. John. It looked like he hadn’t left his office in twelve months-or rather, it looked like he had left it only once, to visit a really incompetent barber.

And yet there lived in Stuart a kindness so pure that it caused Margot to marvel. He wasn’t flashy, he wasn’t slaying the market like Finn’s husband, Scott Walker, he would never buy a thousand-dollar suit, he would never, probably, own a car as nice as her father’s Jaguar, but Stuart was devoted to Jenna. He sent her flowers at the school “just because,” he lit candles for her bath, he stood at the finish line with hot tea and a muffin whenever she ran a race in Central Park. In the five seconds that Margot spent taking in the sight of him, she felt badly for all the times she’d tried to talk Jenna out of marrying him.

“You remember my brothers,” Stuart said. “H.W. and Ryan, and… Chance.”

Margot studied the other three men. H.W. and Ryan were identical twins, impossible to tell apart until they opened their mouths. H.W. was an overgrown frat boy, and Ryan was gay. Margot deplored stereotyping, but she knew right away that the one who was better dressed was Ryan. Ryan came over to kiss Margot’s cheek. He smelled divine; he was wearing Aventus, Margot’s favorite scent, which she had bought for Edge but he had not, to her knowledge, even opened.

“How are you, Margot?” Ryan asked. “Tell me everything.”

Margot laughed. “Oh, believe me, you don’t want to know everything.”

Ryan slid an arm around her waist and leaned her back into a dip. He was one of those men whose every move was smooth and elegant. “I’ve been bragging about how lucky I am to be escorting the maid of honor.”

Ryan was Stuart’s best man. Margot wondered if it had been difficult for Stuart to pick between his brothers, but Jenna said they had shot rock-paper-scissors for it.

H.W. raised his beer bottle in Margot’s general direction. “Hey,” he said.

Margot smiled. H.W. was paired up with Autumn. They would have sex before the weekend was over, Margot was sure of it.

Margot had seen the twins on numerous occasions-at Stuart’s thirtieth birthday celebration at Gramercy Tavern, and then more recently at the engagement party in a private room at MoMA. But Margot had never met this other brother. Chance. Whereas the other three Graham brothers were square jawed and dark haired and built like hale and hearty tobacco farmers, Chance was tall and lean and had strawberry hair. Really, his hair was nearly pink, and he had a matching pinkish skin tone. One of these things is not like the others. Chance was Stuart’s half brother, the product of an affair Stuart’s father had in the nineties. He was nineteen years old, a sophomore at Sewanee, the University of the South, a math whiz, apparently, a good kid if a bit socially awkward.

Well, yeah, Margot thought. It was bad enough that he was a love child, the product of a midlife crisis, but then someone-Stuart’s father? the other woman?-had thought it would be acceptable to name him “Chance.” No wonder the kid was socially awkward. The other woman-Margot had never learned her name-had been married to Stuart’s father for a few years, then they had split, and Stuart’s father married Stuart’s mother a second time. It was the kind of story that people had a hard time believing, except for the Carmichael children, who had been hearing bizarre divorce-and-marriage stories their whole lives.

Jenna found the story of Stuart’s parents romantic.

Margot thought, Yeah, romantic-except for the living, breathing, six-foot-four reminder of when things had not been so romantic.

But this was a wedding, what had happened in the past could not be undone, and so everyone would simply have to roll with it-smile, chitchat-and then gossip about the darker reality later.

“Hi, Chance,” Margot said. Oh, how she would love to rename him something normal, like Dennis or Patrick. “I’m Margot Carmichael, Jenna’s sister.”

“Nice to meet you,” Chance said. He had an elegant southern accent; he sounded-and looked-just like Ashley Wilkes from Gone with the Wind. He gripped Margot’s hand and gave it a nice, strong shake. Margot’s line of work caused her to evaluate everyone’s handshake and eye contact. Eight, she thought. Not bad.

“Can I get you a beer?” Margot asked.

“I…” Chance said. He swallowed. “I’m only nineteen.”

“Who cares?” H.W. shouted, momentarily animated by his favorite topic. H.W. had a twangy accent straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard. “Grab a beer, Chancey, come on!”

Chance turned even pinker. Margot had never seen anyone with such unusual coloring. It was almost a birth defect, perhaps indicating the murky circumstances of his conception. And with this thought, Margot suddenly felt protective of Chance. Clearly he was a darling, scrupulous kid. It wasn’t his fault that Jim Graham had made an atrocious error in judgment.

“How about a Coke?” Margot asked.

Chance nodded. “A Coke would be great, thanks.” He tugged at the collar of his shirt. “It’s, uh, kind of hot out here.”

“It is hot,” Margot agreed. “And look at you guys, all ready to go.” She stepped back into the kitchen to grab Chance a Coke from the fridge and narrowly missed hitting a woman holding a tray of empty vol-au-vents. At the breakfast nook, Autumn, Rhonda, and Pauline were telling stories about the incompetent masseuses they had known; they were getting along like a house on fire. Jenna would be pleased about that, wherever she was. Probably upstairs, putting on the showstopper backless peach dress.

Margot handed Chance the Coke. She said, “It’s nearly four thirty.” Four thirty! Margot wondered if Edge was on island yet. She got a Mexican jumping beans feeling in her belly. “I’ve got to get cracking!”

The Dress

You should feel no compunction or sense of duty to wear my dress; however, it is available to you. I fear you might find it too “traditional”-as I watch you now, you are twenty-one years old and you primarily wear clothes you sew yourself or that you get at Goodwill. I’m guessing it’s a phase. It was for me, too. I wore the same prairie skirt for five weeks in the spring of 1970.

The dress will fit you, or nearly. You seem to be losing weight. I’d like to believe that’s because you’re away from the dining hall food of college, but I fear it’s because of me.

My mother and I bought the dress at Priscilla of Boston, which was where every bride on the East Coast wanted to buy her dress back in those days, much like Vera Wang now. My mother and I argued because I wanted a dress with a straight skirt, whereas my mother thought I should choose something fuller. You don’t want everyone staring at your behind, she said. But guess what? I did!

The dress has been professionally cleaned and is hanging up in the far left of my cedar closet. If you need to get it altered, go to Monica at Pinpoint Bridal on West 84th Street.

I have to stop writing. I am growing too sad thinking about how captivating you will look in that dress, and how seeing you wear it might undo your father.

I am crying now, but they are tears of love.

He wanted to say that golf had calmed him. He had played with a couple about his age named Charles and Margaret and their friend Richard, who was a decade younger and had a very, very fine drive. Doug had a wonderful time chatting with them about the elite courses they had all mutually played-Sand Hills in Nebraska, Jay Peak in Vermont, and Old Head in Ireland. They spent four delightful hours of talking about nothing but golf, and Doug couldn’t ask for a more appealing course than Sankaty Head on July nineteenth. The sun illuminated the rolling greens, the Atlantic Ocean and Sesachacha Pond, the red-and-white peppermint stick of Sankaty Lighthouse. Doug had joined his companions for lunch at the turn; he drank a cold beer and ate chilled cucumber soup and a lobster salad sandwich as they talked about the formidable prairie wind at Sand Hills. After lunch, Doug went out and slew the back nine.

He’d enjoyed another celebratory beer after the eighteenth, and then, not wanting to bother Pauline (which really meant not wanting to hear Pauline bitch about the GPS-she could never get the damn thing to work, she took it personally, as if the woman whose voice gave directions was an enemy of hers), he took a cab back to the house. Even the cab ride had been relaxing. Doug put the windows down and gazed out at the pretty cottages with their lovely gardens, their gray shingles and neat white trim, their sturdy widow’s walks. He felt better than he had in months. Spending the day by himself playing golf was just what he needed.

He had believed, during the fifteen minutes in the cab, that everything would correct itself. He didn’t need to make any drastic changes. He had been frazzled the day before with his own version of prewedding jitters. Nothing more.

But the second he entered the master bedroom-a bedroom he remembered his grandparents sleeping in, then his parents, then him and Beth-and saw Pauline sitting at this grandmother’s dressing table, fixing her hair, he thought, Oh, no, no, no. This is all wrong.

She must have noticed his expression because she said, “You hate the suit.”

“The suit?” he said.

She stood up and yanked at the hem of her jacket. “I didn’t want anything too flashy. They’re so conservative at the yacht club. All the old biddies with their pearls and their Pappagallo flats.”

Doug looked at his wife in her blue suit. It was a tad matronly, true, reminiscent of Barbara Bush or Margaret Thatcher, and Doug could never in a million years imagine Beth wearing such a suit-but the suit wasn’t the problem. It was the woman inside the suit.

“The suit looks fine,” he said.

“Then why the long face?” Pauline asked. “Did you hook your drives?”

Doug sat on the bed and removed his shoes. He had a house full of people downstairs and more people coming to the yacht club. He had to get in the right frame of mind to play host. He had to follow the advice he had glibly given so many of his clients: fake it to make it.

“My drives were fine,” he said. Pauline said things like “Did you hook your drives” to make it sound like she understood golf and cared about his game, but she didn’t. He had never hooked a drive in all his life; he was a slicer. “I played pretty well, actually.”

“What did you shoot?”

“A seventy-nine,” he said. He wasn’t sure why he fudged the number for Pauline’s sake; he could have said he’d shot a 103, and she still would have said:

“That’s wonderful, honey.”

She sat next to him on the bed and started kneading the muscles in his shoulder. She must have realized something was very wrong, because unsolicited touches from Pauline were few and far between. But he wasn’t in the mood to be touched by Pauline. He might never be in the mood again.

He stood up. “I have to get ready,” he said.

It was only the rehearsal, but as they stood in the vestibule of the church, it felt like a big moment. Everyone else had processed before them-first Autumn on the arm of one of the twins, then Rhonda and the tall, nearly albino half brother, then Kevin and Beanie, who were standing in for Nick and Finn, who apparently were still at the beach although they had each been texted and called forty times in the past hour, then the other twin and Margot. Then Kevin and Beanie’s youngest son, Brock, as the ring bearer, alongside Ellie, the flower girl.