Margot smiled. “Thank God for Kevin,” she said.
She knew she sounded like sour grapes, and Jenna kindly ignored her.
Margot heard the back screen door slam, and she turned, expecting to see Finn or Autumn emerging-but the person who came through the door was her father. And behind her father, Pauline.
“Daddy!” Margot said.
Doug Carmichael was dressed in green golf pants and a pale pink polo shirt and the belt that Beth had needlepointed for him over the course of an entire summer at Cisco Beach. The outfit said “professional man ready for a day of good lies and fast greens,” but his face said something else.
For the first time in her life, Margot thought, her father looked old. He was a tall, lean man, bald except for a tonsure of silver hair, but today his shoulders were sloping forward, and his hair looked nearly white. His face held the same hangdog expression that he’d worn for the two years after Beth died, and it broke Margot’s heart to see it now.
As he approached, Margot held her arms out for a hug, and they embraced, and Margot squeezed extra hard. He still felt solid and strong, thank God.
“Hi, sweetie,” he said.
“You made it,” Margot said. “Is everything okay?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t, he had to move on to Beanie and Nick-and Jenna, whom he picked clear off the ground. Margot felt a crotchety old jealousy. How many times had she wished that she was the little sister instead of the big sister, the youngest instead of the oldest? She never got coddled; she never got picked up. Jenna was the Carmichaels’ answer to Franny Glass, Amy March, Tracy Partridge. She was the doll and the princess. Margot used to comfort herself with the knowledge that she had been their mother’s confidante, her right hand. In the weeks before Beth died, before things got really bad and hospice and morphine were involved, she had said to Margot, “You’ll have to take care of things, honey. This family will need to lean on you.”
Margot had promised she would take care of things. And she had, hadn’t she?
“Hello, Margot.”
Margot snapped out of her self-indulgent bubble to see Pauline standing before her. Usually, Pauline was breezy and officious, as though Margot were a woman at a cocktail party whom Pauline knew she had to greet and give five minutes of small talk before moving on to mingle. And Margot liked things that way. She had never discussed anything personal with Pauline. On the occasion of Doug and Pauline’s wedding at City Hall in Manhattan, Margot had kissed Pauline on the cheek and said congratulations. She had meant to say, “Welcome to the family,” but she couldn’t form the sentence. She always referred to Pauline as “my father’s wife,” never “my stepmother.”
Something about Pauline’s demeanor and her tone of voice was different now. It was apologetic, nearly obsequious.
Pauline isn’t coming to the wedding.
Margot realized that Doug and Pauline must have had a fight, a fight big enough to warrant the sending of that text. She had never once considered that her father and Pauline were a couple, who might have problems. At their age, Margot assumed, the drama would be all dried up. She didn’t like thinking about their intimate life-sexual or emotional.
“Hi, Pauline,” Margot said. She gave Pauline a hug, smelled her familiar perfume, wondered if Doug had wanted Pauline to stay home, or if Pauline had been the one who hadn’t wanted to come. She wondered what the issue had been.
“What’s going on here?” Doug asked.
At that second, Margot felt the weight of the late night and the drinks. The weekend had only just begun, and she was already exhausted. She didn’t want to explain about the tree to anyone else, she would let Kevin explain it; she needed to go upstairs and lie down, just fifteen minutes and she would be fine.
But once she headed upstairs to the relative peace of her bedroom, she felt ill at ease. It was a well-known fact that once you left the room-or in this case the yard-the rest of the family would start talking about you. Margot lay across her bed, feeling as though her head was filled with pea gravel. She could hear the voices and laughter coming from the yard, and she thought, really, this was the best part of any wedding, not the ceremony or the cake or the dancing but the downtime when they were all together without the lights shining on them. Her mother, if she had been alive, would be snapping pictures, asking the kids to pose, deadheading flowers, pulling weeds. Her mother would have had a platter of bacon and eggs ready, a pitcher of juice, and boxes of doughnuts from the Nantucket Bake Shop.
The problem, Margot realized, with having had a wonderful mother was that it was impossible to live up to the standards she had set.
Margot couldn’t sleep. She knew they were all down in the yard, calling her a tree killer.
She stood up, and seeing that the door to Jenna’s bedroom was open and the room was empty, she walked through and stepped out onto the deck. From this vantage point, she could see everything. Nick had his arms wrapped around both Finn and Autumn. Okay, that was dangerous: Autumn and Nick had had a not-so-secret fling during the weekend of Jenna’s college graduation eight years earlier. (They had nearly broken the bed at the Williamsburg Inn; everyone had heard them, including Margot and Drum Sr., and in the morning over the breakfast buffet, Drum Sr. had given Nick a high five.)
Next Margot’s attention was drawn to Pauline and Jenna, who were standing apart from everyone, alone. They seemed to be engaged in the kind of deep conversation that Margot studiously avoided having with Pauline. Pauline was doing most of the talking, and Margot wondered what she was saying. Then Pauline pulled the Notebook out of her enormous handbag and handed it to Jenna, and Jenna and Pauline hugged, and Margot thought, Ohhhhhhh. Pauline had the Notebook. And Margot thought, Ohhhhhhhhhhh. Oh, boy. Had Pauline taken the Notebook from the dinner on Wednesday night? Had she absconded with it? Maybe that was what the fight with Doug was about. He had banned her from the wedding. Or she had said she didn’t want to come.
Margot was flushed with high emotion. She wondered if Pauline had read the Notebook. She bristled at the thought. Pauline had only met their mother once or twice, a thousand years earlier. The Notebook was none of Pauline’s business.
Jenna accepted the Notebook graciously, then hugged it to her chest. She didn’t seem the least bit ruffled by the exchange. She was their mother reincarnated. She had probably thanked Pauline for returning it, instead of asking why she had taken it in the first place, which was what Margot would have done.
At that moment, heads swiveled, and Margot knew someone had just entered the yard, but she couldn’t tell who. It was Rhonda, back from her half marathon. Pauline ran toward her daughter, and in the middle of the Carmichael chaos, the two Tonellis embraced, and Pauline’s shoulders heaved. She was sobbing. Doug took no notice of this, nor did Nick or Kevin or Beanie or any of the kids-they were either oblivious, or too consumed with Alfie’s branch, or willfully ignoring the teary scene. Rhonda wisely shepherded Pauline inside. A moment later, Margot could hear them in the kitchen. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, only the sounds of their voices. If Margot had moved to the staircase, she would have been able to hear every word of their conversation, and while it was tempting to eavesdrop, Margot refrained. When it came to weddings, all people were not created equally. There were insiders, and there were outsiders. There were people like Finn, who had been Jenna’s friend since diapers, and then there was a couple attending whom Stuart and Jenna had just met in their premarital counseling. Jenna admitted they barely knew the couple, but she felt like they would be friends going forward, and she wanted to include them. Edge was coming to the wedding, but there were law school friends of Doug’s coming who had never even met Jenna. Pauline and Rhonda must have felt like outsiders, too, although Pauline was Doug’s wife and Rhonda was a bridesmaid. Or maybe they didn’t feel like outsiders, but neither did they feel like insiders. They were family… but not family. It was no secret that Pauline didn’t like the Nantucket house; she only let Doug visit the island once or twice a summer. Pauline found the house dusty and moldy and decrepit; she didn’t appreciate its charm, she hadn’t bothered to learn its nooks and crannies, she hadn’t experienced it as a summer haven for decades the way the rest of the Carmichaels had. Maybe she sensed that although the house was the ancestral abode of Doug’s family, it had really been Beth’s home. Beth had planted the perennial bed and cultivated the climbing roses; Beth had chosen the artwork and sewn the slipcovers. Pauline wouldn’t give two hoots about Alfie’s branch or the swing, but at the same time, she yearned for a connection. She wanted to be a Carmichael. She must have thought the Notebook would provide a secret clue, the elusive key to understanding. How do I fit in here? How do I become one of them? What Margot knew and Pauline must have figured out was that the membership was closed; Pauline had arrived too late in the game. The Carmichaels were incapable of forming any meaningful new memories because the old memories-the ones with Beth in them-were too precious to replace.