Elin Hilderbrand - Beautiful Day

After Ellie got off the phone with her father, she stomped into the house, and Margot trailed her at a discreet distance. From the middle drawer in the bottom row of the thirty-six tiny drawers of the apothecary chest, Ellie pulled out a plastic change purse, this one indistinguishable from the many plastic change purses that she carried in her many pocketbooks and handbags, all of them crammed with shit.

Hoarder, Margot thought. My fault. Because I divorced her father and she’s afraid of giving up anything else.

From the change purse, Ellie pulled out Jenna’s wedding band.

“Am I in trouble?” she asked.

Margot clenched the ring in her palm and sighed. A fifteen-thousand-dollar ring stuffed into one of the drawers of the apothecary chest, where they might not have found it for twenty years, when it would have magically appeared like a prize in a game show. Margot wanted to believe that Ellie would have handed it over of her own volition. But maybe not. Maybe it was a secret she wanted to keep safe. The poor child. “No,” Margot said. “In fact, I have an idea. Follow me.”

“Margot!” a voice called out. “We’re waiting for you!” Margot glanced out the back screen door. Somehow Abigail Pease had lassoed Autumn, Finn, and a freshly made-up Rhonda, who were all standing in a line in the backyard, holding their bouquets. Off to the side stood Jenna and their father, with Kevin and Nick.

“One second,” Margot said.

“No, not one second, Margot,” Roger said. “We need you now.”

“Sorry,” Margot said. She led Ellie by the hand out the side door. She had spent all weekend being a daughter and a sister-and now, finally, she was going to take time to be a mother. She opened the tailgate of her Land Rover and brought out the white cardboard box from E.A.T. bakery. She lifted the hideous bow-and-paper-plate hat out of the box.

“Would you like to wear this when you walk down the aisle?” Margot asked.

“Oh, yes, Mommy!” Ellie said. She jumped up and down and her sandals crunched in the gravel and she clapped her hands. She looked less like a world-weary teenager-before-her-time and more like a six-year-old girl. “Yes, yes, yes!”

Margot placed the hat on Ellie’s head and tied the ribbon under her chin.

“Very fetching,” she said, and she kissed her daughter’s nose.

Seating Arrangements

The key to seating: Everyone should feel included and important. You want each of your guests to have a friendly face at his or her table, although surprising mix-and-matches have been known to work, such as my cousin Everett and my college roommate Kay, who have now been married for seventeen years. Yes, they met at our wedding.

With the exception of divorce, infidelity, or a long-standing Hatfield-McCoy feud, anyone can be seated with anyone. Give them enough alcohol and they will enjoy themselves.

I do have strong feelings about the “Head Table.” If a bridesmaid or groomsman is married or has brought a date, I believe the spouse/date should be included at the Head Table. This is a controversial stance. If your brother Nick serves as groomsman (per my suggestion on page 6), and he chooses to bring a stripper named Ricki whom he met in Atlantic City the week before as his date, should Ricki be granted a seat at the Head Table? Should Ricki be included in all of the Head Table photos?

Yes.

The reason I say this is because when your late uncle David married your aunt Lorna in Dallas the year before your father and I got married, your father served as best man and was seated at the Head Table, and I was seated across the room with Lorna’s elderly aunts and her deaf, flatulent uncles. There wasn’t enough alcohol in the state of Texas to make me enjoy myself at that wedding.

The wedding was on! Ann didn’t have many details about how Stuart’s gaffe had been fixed. All she knew was that Margot had found Jenna, Jenna had called Stuart, and they had made amends over the She Who Shall Not Be Named crisis. Or at least temporary amends, amends enough to proceed with the wedding. Ann knew from experience that Stuart and Jenna would revisit the topic of Crissy Pine again, and probably again.

Ann had butterflies as she ascended the steps of St. Paul’s Church. It was beginning!

As luck would have it, the first person Ann saw in the sanctuary was Helen. Helen was wearing fuchsia, which was just another word for the hottest pink the eye could handle-and a fascinator with pink feathers.

Really? Ann thought. A fascinator? This wasn’t a royal wedding, it wasn’t Westminster Abbey, Helen wasn’t British; she was from Roanoke, Virginia. The fascinator wasn’t fascinating; it was absurd. Ann felt embarrassed on Helen’s behalf. The pink of the dress was an assault on the senses. Ann had a hard time looking at the spectacle that was Helen, but she had a hard time not looking at the spectacle that was Helen.

Ann waited in the vestibule for all the guests to be seated, including the Lewises and the Cohens and the Shelbys in the middle pews of the groom’s side. Then the music stopped momentarily and started up again, a new song. Ryan appeared at Ann’s elbow.

“You look beautiful,” he whispered.

Ann beamed. She would never say she had a favorite son, but she was very glad that she had a son who could be counted on to constantly lift her spirits, like Ryan.

“Thank you,” she said. “So do you.”

Pauline was escorted down the aisle by Jenna’s brother, Nick. Ann waited for Pauline to be seated in the front pew on the left, and then she and Ryan stepped forward. All the assembled wedding guests turned to watch them, and this felt good to Ann. She was an important person here, the mother of the groom, and her dress was sensational if she did say so herself. It was a long sheath with cap sleeves in a beautiful shade of turquoise silk that gently ombréd into jade green around her knees. The only jewelry she wore was her dazzling new strand of pearls. She carried a small silver clutch purse that contained her lipstick and a package of tissues. She smiled at the wedding guests who turned to admire her, whether she knew them or not. She couldn’t help but remember when she had been the bride and had walked down the aisle at Duke Chapel to a lineup that included Jim, his fraternity brothers, and Ann’s roommates from Craven Quad. Jim had been grinning, and sweating out the shots of bourbon that he and said fraternity brothers had done only moments before the wedding. They had been so young, so innocent, and unaware that any roadblocks might lie ahead.

The second time they got married, it was just the two of them and the three boys, no trip down the aisle, but that hadn’t mattered. They were older and wiser, and they were resolved. Nothing would take them down again.

Ann knew she should be basking in the moment, but she was distracted by the fuchsia. Helen’s dress was another one-shouldered number that was inappropriate on a woman her age. But the problem wasn’t the dress. The problem was that the scrutiny wasn’t mutual. As Ann passed Helen’s pew, Helen was looking at her cell phone. She was… texting. Texting in church, during a wedding! What Ann wanted, what she required, was Helen’s attention on her.

Look at me, Ann thought. My son is getting married. I am the last to be seated. Look at me, goddamn it.

But no, nothing. Helen was determined to act as though Ann wasn’t even present on Nantucket this weekend. To Helen, Ann might have been a complete stranger.

Ann kissed Ryan-beautiful, elegant Ryan, whose attention she never needed to seek-and sat next to Jim, who reached instantly for her hand. By the time Ann had left the groomsmen’s house and made it back to the hotel, Jim was in the room. He had spent the night sleeping in the rental car, he said, and he had the backache to prove it. He had just emerged from the shower when Ann walked in, and his lower half was wrapped in a white towel. Ann had never been able to resist him in a towel or otherwise, and so she had jumped into his arms and he held her as though they’d been separated for twelve years instead of twelve hours. They said nothing, there was no reason to speak when they could read each other’s minds: he was sorry, she was sorry, they had been drinking, it was an emotionally charged situation and they had to deal with it as best they could. He kissed her and slid his hands up her very cute red gingham skirt and she kicked off the painful Jack Rogers sandals and they made love on the grand expanse of their hotel bed, despite his aching back.

It was as Ann was getting dressed that Jim handed her the long, slim box from Hamilton Hill jewelers.

“What is this?” she said.

“Open it,” he said. “It’s your son’s wedding day. You did such a good job with him, Annie, even when I wasn’t around…”

“Hush,” Ann said. “We did a good job with him.”

“Open it,” Jim said.

Ann opened the box, her heart knocking. If the box was from Hamilton Hill, Jim had bought this at home, planning all the while to give it to her today. And she had kicked him out!

It was a strand of pearls-a choker, which was her preferred length. And it had a sparkling diamond rondelle. Ann gasped as she fingered it.

“Do you recognize the stone?” he said.

She thought for a moment that it might be the stone from her grandmother’s ring, the one Crissy Pine had walked off with. Had Jim contacted Thaddeus Pine again and brokered a deal to get the diamond back? But when she looked more closely, she realized it was the diamond from her engagement ring. Her first engagement ring.

“Full circle,” Jim said. “I love you, Ann.”

It had been a romantic moment, more romantic by far than the day Ann had walked down the aisle to Jim thirty-three years earlier. It was more romantic because they had fought for each other, and they had survived.

The Registry, Part II: The Dining Room

I am finding that dying has its advantages. The biggest advantage is that everything is put into perspective. When you were twelve years old in seventh grade, you brought home a sign that you wrote in calligraphy that said, “Only Family Matters.��� Your father and I were struck by this lovely sentiment, and I insisted your father take the sign to his office, which he did. He’s told me he looks at the sign each day and that even as he works dismantling other families, he gives thanks for ours, crazy and imperfect though it may be.

I am here now to tell you that you were wrong. Family is not the only thing that matters. There are other things: Pachelbel’s Canon in D matters, and fresh-picked corn on the cob, and true friends, and the sound of the ocean, and the poems of William Carlos Williams, and the constellations in the sky, and random acts of kindness, and a garden on the day when all its flowers are at their peak. Fluffy pancakes matter and crisp clean sheets and the guitar riff in “Layla,” and the way clouds look when you are above them in an airplane. Preserving the coral reef matters, and the thirty-four paintings of Johannes Vermeer matter, and kissing matters.

Whether or not you register for china, crystal, and silver does not matter. Whether or not you have a full set of Tiffany dessert forks on Thanksgiving does not matter. If you want to register for these things, by all means, go ahead. My Waterford pattern is Lismore, one of the oldest. I do remember one time when I had a harrowing day at the hospital, and Nick had a Rube Goldberg project due and needed my help, and Kevin was playing Quiet Riot at top decibel in his bedroom, and Margot was tying up the house phone, and you had been plunked by the babysitter in front of the TV for five hours, and I came home and took one of my Lismore goblets out of the cabinet. I wanted to smash it against the wall. But instead I filled it with cold white wine and for ten or so minutes I sat in the quiet of the formal living room all by myself and I drank the cold wine out of that beautiful glass crafted by some lovely Irishman, and I felt better.

It was probably the wine, not the glass, but you get my meaning. I will remember the impressive heft of the glass in my hand, and the way the cut of the crystal caught the day’s last rays of sunlight, but I will not miss that glass the way I will miss the sound of the ocean, or the taste of fresh-picked corn.

They changed the order at the last minute, at Jenna’s request. Finn first, Rhonda second, Autumn third, Margot last, followed by Brock and Ellie. Margot knew that Jenna wanted Finn as far away from her as possible.