Beautiful Day by Elin Hilderbrand

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.”
    Roger was what they were paying for, and Roger was what they got. And now here was
     Roger telling Margot that they had to cut down the branch that supported the tree
     swing, or 150 guests would be without a tent.
    They couldn’t go without a tent. So Margot would have to let them cut the branch.
    She checked the weather for Saturday on her phone. This was the only thing she’d been
     more compulsive about than checking for texts from Edge. The forecast for Saturday
     was the same as it had been when she’d checked it from the ferry: partly cloudy skies,
     high of 77 degrees, chance of showers 40 percent.
    Forty percent. It bugged Margot. Forty percent could not be ignored.
    “Cut the branch,” she said.
    Roger nodded succinctly and headed outside.
    Margot had fifty million things to do, but unable to do any of them, she sat at the
     kitchen table. It was a rectangular table, made from soft pine. Along with everything
     else in the house, it had been abused by the Carmichaels. The surface held ding marks,
     streaks of pink Magic Marker, and a half-moon of black scorch that came from popcorn
     made in a pot on a night when Doug and Beth had been out to dinner at the Ships Inn
     and Margot had been left to babysit her siblings.
    Margot remembered her mother being distraught about the scorch mark. “Oh, honey,”
     she’d said. “You should have used a trivet. Or put down a dish towel. That mark will
     never go away.”
    At age fourteen, Margot had thought her mother was overreacting to make Margot feel
     bad. She had stomped up to her room.
    But her mother had been right. Twenty-six years later, the scorch mark was still there.
     It made Margot wonder about permanence. She had just given the okay for the tent guys
     to amputate Alfie, a tree that had grown in that spot for over two hundredyears. The tree had been there since colonial times; it had a majesty and a grace
     that made Margot want to bow down. The branch would never grow back; a tree wasn’t
     like a starfish, it didn’t regenerate new limbs. Margot wondered if twenty-five years
     from now she would walk her