“Intrusive?” Doug said. “Define intrusive.”
“She’s everywhere. Especially with this wedding. She is a palpable presence in the room. She is an untouchable standard by which the rest of us have to be judged. She has taken on sainthood. Saint Beth, the dead mother, whose memory grows more burnished every day.”
“Enough,” Doug said.
“I just can’t compete,” Pauline said. “I’ll never come first, not with the kids, not with you. You are, all of you Carmichaels, obsessed with her.”
Doug thought that hearing such words might anger him, but he merely found them validating. “Listen,” he said. “I don’t think you should come to Nantucket this weekend.”
“What?” Pauline said.
“I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I don’t want you to come to Nantucket this weekend. It’s my daughter’s wedding, and I think it would be best if I went alone.” Doug heard Pauline inhale, but he didn’t wait around for what she was going to say. He left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
Down the stairs, through the kitchen. His cell phone was on the counter. He snatched it up and saw the two meager lamb chops sitting in a pool of bloody juices.
He wasn’t going to eat them. He was going out for pizza.
THE NOTEBOOK, PAGE 6
The Wedding Party
I assume you will ask Margot to be your Matron of Honor. The two of you have such a close relationship, and whereas at times I worried about the large age gap between you and the older three, I think that in Margot’s case, it was for the best. She was your sister, yes, but she was also a surrogate mother at times, or something between a sister and a mother, whatever that role might be called. Remember how she did your makeup for the ninth-grade dance? You wanted green eye shadow and she gave you green eye shadow, somehow making it look pretty good. And remember how she drove you down to William & Mary your sophomore year so that Daddy and I could celebrate our thirtieth anniversary on Nantucket? Margot is the most capable woman you or I will ever know. And to butcher the old song: Anything I can do, she can do better.
I assume you will also ask Finn. The two of you have been inseparable since birth. I used to call you my “twins.” Not sure that Mary Lou Sullivan appreciated that, but the two of you were adorable together. The matching French braids, the playground rhymes you used to sing with the hand clapping. Miss Mary Mac Mac Mac, all dressed in black, black, black.
As far as your brothers are concerned, I would ask Kevin to do a reading, and ask Nick to serve as an usher, assuming your Intelligent, Sensitive Groom-to-Be doesn’t have nine brothers or sixteen guys who served in his platoon who can’t be ignored. Kevin has that wonderful orator’s voice. I swear he is the spiritual descendant of Lincoln or Daniel Webster. And Nick will charm all the ladies as he escorts them to their seats. Obviously.
The other person who would be terrific as an usher is Drum Sr. Of course if Margot is your Matron of Honor, she might need Drum to watch the boys.
And then there’s your father, but we’ll talk about him later.
MARGOT
It felt so good to be back in the house of her childhood summers that Margot forgot about everything else for a minute.
The house was two and a half blocks off Main Street, on the side of Orange Street that overlooked the harbor. It had been bought by Margot’s great-great-great-grandfather in 1873, only twenty-seven years after the Great Fire destroyed most of downtown. The house had five bedrooms, plus an attic that Margot’s grandparents had filled with four sets of bunk beds and one lazy ceiling fan. It was shambling now, although in its heyday it had been quite grand. There were still certain antiques around-an apothecary chest with thirty-six tiny drawers, grandfather and grandmother clocks that announced the hour in unison, gilded mirrors, Eastlake twin beds and a matching dresser in the boys’ bedroom upstairs-and there were fine rugs, all of them now faded by the sun and each permanently embedded with twenty pounds of sand. There was a formal dining room with a table seating sixteen where no one ever ate, although Margot remembered doing decoupage projects with her grandmother at that table on rainy days. One year, Nick and Kevin found turtles at Miacomet Pond and decided the turtles should race the length of the table. Margot remembered one of the turtles veering off the side of the table and crashing to the ground, where it lay upside down, its feet pedaling desperately through the air.
In the kitchen hung a set of four original Roy Bailey paintings that might have been valuable, but they were coated in bacon grease and splattered oil from their father’s famous cornmeal onion rings. At one point, Margot’s mother had said, “Yes, this was a lovely house until we got a hold of it. Now it is merely a useful house, and a well-loved house.”
Margot was shocked at how well loved. She felt euphoric at the sight of the dusty brick of the kitchen floor, the old wooden countertops scarred by 140 years of knives coarsely chopping garden tomatoes, the sound of the screen door slamming as her children ran out back to the green lawn, the seventy-foot oak tree named Alfie-after Alfred Coates Hamilton, the original owner of the house-and the wooden swing that hung from Alfie’s lowest branch.
Margot had lived in the city all her adult life. She loved Manhattan-but not like this. Her adoration of Nantucket was matched only by her adoration of her children. She wanted to be buried here, in the shade of Alfie’s leaves, if possible. She would have to write that down somewhere.
No sooner had Margot entered the house and allowed herself those sixty seconds of appreciation than crisis struck. Jenna stood in front of Margot, holding open her Mielie bag, handmade by a woman in Cape Town, South Africa. Jenna was sobbing.
“What?” Margot said. She had certainly expected tears from Jenna this weekend. Jenna was an idealist, and the world was constantly falling short. But so soon? Ten minutes after their arrival? “What is it?”
“The Notebook!” Jenna said. “It’s gone!”
Margot peered into the depths of Jenna’s bag-there was her wallet made from hemp, the handkerchief Jenna used like a character from a Merchant Ivory film because, unlike Kleenex, handkerchiefs could be washed and reused, her Aveeno lip balm, the package of Dramamine, and her cell phone. There was no Notebook.
“Maybe you put it somewhere else,” Margot said.
“I keep it here,” Jenna said. “Right here in my bag. You know I keep it right here.”
Yes, Margot did know that; she had seen Jenna remove and return the Notebook from that bag a hundred times. Jenna was the kind of person who had a place for everything, and her place for the Notebook was in that bag.
Margot laid her hands on Jenna’s shoulders. “Calm down,” she said. “Let’s think. When was the last time you remember having it?”
Instead of this question focusing Jenna, it caused her to become more scattered. She cast around the kitchen, her eyes frantic. Jenna was the kindest, most nurturing soul Margot knew; the students and parents at the Little Minds school adored her. As the youngest by such a large span of years-there were eight plus years between Jenna and Nick-Jenna had been raised in the warm bath of their parents’ love. Her childhood and adolescence had involved little conflict. The downside to this was that Jenna wasn’t great with crises.
“Think,” Margot said. “Stop and think. Did you have it on the boat?”
“No,” Jenna said. “I haven’t seen it at all today. I had it last night at… Locanda Verde.” Her face dissolved.