Elin Hilderbrand: Beautiful Day

But the texting now was frustrating beyond all comprehension. It made Margot want to tear her hair out. It made her-late one night when she and Edge had been going back and forth and then she texted I miss u and heard nothing back-throw her phone across the room, where it, thankfully, landed in her laundry basket. She both hated the texting and was addicted to it. She despised her phone-the seventy-two times a day she checked to see if Edge had texted were torturous-and then if she did have a text from him, she went to absurd lengths to answer it, no matter what she was doing. She had answered texts from him under the table in big client meetings. She had stood up and left Ellie’s kindergarten play ( Stone Soup ) to text Edge from the school corridor. She had texted while driving, she had texted him drunkenly from the bathroom while she was out with her girlfriends, she had texted him from the treadmill at the gym. The texting with Edge was keeping her from being present in her real life. It was awful, she had to stop, she had to control it somehow, to keep it from destroying her.

Because now, on Thursday, July 18, instead of focusing on her sister’s bachelorette party, which she, Margot, had organized and which was due to begin shortly, Margot was thinking: I texted him nineteen hours ago and he hasn’t responded. Why not? Where is he and what is he doing? He isn’t thinking about me.

Margot remembered when she had stood in this very house waiting for the mail to arrive because she was expecting a letter from her high school boyfriend, Grady Maclean. That had been stressful in the same sort of way, except then all of Margot’s anxiety had been focused on one moment of the day, and once she got a letter-Grady Maclean had been pretty devoted for a fifteen-year-old boy-she didn’t have to sweat it out until the following week.

At that moment, a text came into her phone, and Margot thought, There he is, finally! But when she checked, she saw it was a text from her father. Okay, that was absolutely the worst: she had waited and waited for a text, and then a text came in, but from the wrong person.

The text read: Pauline isn’t coming to the wedding.

Margot stared at her phone. She thought, WTF? Her mind was whizzing now. This was family drama, exactly the type that was supposed to happen at weddings. Pauline wasn’t coming!

Why did this news make Margot feel so buoyant? Was it because deep down she didn’t like Pauline, or was it because Margot was grateful for something to think about other than Drum Sr. getting married to Lily the Pilates instructor or Edge’s nonresponse to Drum Sr. marrying Lily the Pilates instructor, or… Griffin Wheatley, who was still irritating a part of Margot’s mind. (He had looked great with the scruff on his face-like Tom Ford or James Denton. Margot had always seen him within an hour of his last shave.)

Margot decided she was simply grateful for the distraction. She had nothing against Pauline, Pauline was harmless, Pauline was devoted to their father. So then why wasn’t she coming to the wedding?

And what about Rhonda? Margot wondered. Would Rhonda still come to the wedding? Rhonda Tonelli, Pauline’s daughter, was serving as Jenna’s fourth bridesmaid. Jenna hadn’t wanted Rhonda, but their father had asked (okay, begged), and since he was paying well into the six figures to make this wedding happen, Jenna had acquiesced.

It would be much better if neither Pauline nor Rhonda came this weekend. Margot felt a space open up in her chest where, apparently, anxiety about Pauline and Rhonda had been residing like an undiagnosed tumor.

There would be an uneven number of bridesmaids and groomsmen. Roger might fret about that, but who cared?

Maybe they could find someone to fill in for Rhonda. Jenna had a group of fellow teachers from Little Minds coming.

Margot’s thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the side door. Margot spun around, phone in hand. It was Roger.

“Roger!” Margot said. “I was just thinking about you.”

Roger blinked. Something was wrong. Had he already heard they might be down a bridesmaid?

“The tent guys have an issue with the tree,” he said.

“What tree?” Margot said. “You mean Alfie?”

Roger swallowed. He was uncomfortable, she knew, calling the tree by a person’s name.

“I thought we went over all of this,” Margot said. “I thought they could fit the tent under Alfie.”

“They thought so too, Margot,” Roger said. “But that one branch has dropped since we measured it in April. It’s dropped a lot.”

“Shoot,” Margot said. She didn’t have time to deal with another unforeseen snafu. It was already six o’clock, she needed to unpack her suitcase and hang up her bridesmaid dress, she needed to run to the store for groceries, feed her children, take a shower, change, and she had hoped to open a bottle of champagne here with Jenna and the girls before their dinner reservation at eight. “I’m sure you guys will figure out what to do.”

“I’ll tell you what we need to do,” Roger said. “If you want the big tent to go up, you are going to have to let them cut that branch.”

“Which branch?” Margot asked. She was relieved that the problem had a solution. Maybe. She and Roger walked to the back door together and peered out at Alfie. Margot’s chest, which had for a few short, sweet minutes been a wide-open breezeway, now felt like it was clogging with cement. “Which branch are you talking about? Not the…”

“The branch with the swing,” Roger said.

Ellie was still on that swing, twisting then spinning out-just as Margot used to do.

“No,” Margot said.

“It’s the only way.”

“It can’t be the only way.”

“Look how low that branch is,” Roger said. “Compare it to the rest of the branches. The tent guys have a chain saw; they can take it down in ten minutes. It’s really not that big, compared to the rest of the tree. The tree will survive.”

“No,” Margot said. “That branch is… the swing is… they’re important. They’re not going anywhere.”

Roger brought his hand to his mouth. He had been a smoker for thirty years, he’d told Margot back in October, when she and Jenna first met him, but he’d quit cold turkey after his brother-in-law died of lung cancer.

“Okay, then,” Roger said. “No tent.”

“No tent? ” Margot said.

“Not the big one you and Jenna picked out,” he said. “It won’t fit. Now, I can ask Ande if he can put up a smaller tent closer to the edge of the bluff. That will cover the bar and dance floor, maybe the head table. But everyone else will be exposed.”

“What are we going to do if it rains?” Margot asked.

“I think you know the answer to that,” Roger said. “You’re going to get wet.”

Margot couldn’t look at Roger because she couldn’t stand to see the stark truth on his face. Roger had lived on Nantucket all his life. He had graduated from Nantucket High School in 1972-which made him, Margot had realized, the same age as Edge. Fifty-nine. He had worked for years as a carpenter and a caretaker, and then in 2000, a dot-com bazillionaire had thrown the wedding-to-end-all-weddings at Galley Beach. There wasn’t a dance floor big enough on the island, so the family had hired Roger to build one. In this way, he had stumbled into the wedding business through the back door.

He wasn’t like any wedding planner Margot had ever met or imagined. He wasn’t anal or super high-energy. He wasn’t stylish, young, or hip. He was no-nonsense, he was reliable, he knew everybody you needed to know on the island. He exuded authority, he showed up early, worked hard, got things done. He had been married for thirty-five years to a woman named Rita; they had five children, all grown. Roger and Rita lived in an unassuming house on Surfside Road. Roger used the apartment over the garage as his office. Roger wrote everything down on a clipboard; he kept a pencil behind his ear and a phone on his hip. He drove a pickup truck. When Jenna and Margot had first met him, they’d thought, This is the most sought-after wedding planner on Nantucket? Now that they’d seen him in action, they knew why. He could talk canapés and floral arrangements and price per head with the best of them. But his company-if that was what it was-didn’t even have a name. When he answered his phone, he said, “This is Roger.”