The Matchmaker

Dabney

Dabney couldn’t believe it. She blinked twice, thinking she no longer had the eyes of a girl or even a young woman, thinking she hadn’t been feeling well lately, and was this a trick of her mind? Twenty-seven years later? Subject line: Hello.

Dabney Kimball Beech, who had served as the director of the Nantucket Island Chamber of Commerce for twenty-two years, was in her second-floor office, overlooking historic, cobblestoned Main Street. It was late April, the Friday morning of Daffodil Weekend, Dabney’s second-most-important weekend of the year, and the forecast was a springtime fantasy. It was sixty degrees and sunny today and would be sixty-four and sunny on Saturday and Sunday.

Dabney had just checked the weather for the fifth time that day, the five thousandth time that week (the year before, Daffodil Weekend had been ruined by a late-season snowstorm), when the e-mail from Clendenin Hughes appeared in her in-box.

Subject line: Hello.

“Oh my God,” Dabney said.

Dabney never swore, and rarely took the Lord’s name in vain (thanks to cayenne pepper administered to her ten-year-old tongue by her devoutly Catholic grandmother for saying the word jeez). That she did so now was enough to get the attention of Nina Mobley, Dabney’s assistant for eighteen of the past twenty-two years.

“What?” Nina said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Dabney said quickly. Nina Mobley was Dabney’s closest friend, but Dabney could never tell her that an e-mail from Clendenin Hughes had just popped onto her screen.

Dabney gnawed on one of her pearls, as was her habit when she was deeply concentrating, and now she nearly bit clear through it. She was aware that millions of people across the world were receiving e-mails at that moment, a good percentage of them probably upsetting, a smaller but still substantial percentage probably shocking. But she wondered if anyone anywhere on the planet was receiving an e-mail as upsetting and shocking as this one.

She stared at the screen, blinked, clenched the pearl between her teeth. It was grainy, which was how one judged authenticity. Hello. Hello? Not a word for twenty-seven years-and then this. An e-mail at work. Hello. When Clen had left for Thailand, e-mail hadn’t existed. How had he gotten her address? Dabney laughed. He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; finding her e-mail address wouldn’t have presented much of a challenge.

Hello.

Dabney’s finger tapped the mouse lightly, a tease. Would she open the e-mail? What would it say? What could it possibly say after twenty-seven years of silence?

Hello.

Dabney could not open the e-mail. She, who never smoked and rarely drank hard liquor, wanted a cigarette and a shot of bourbon. The only thing that would have stunned her more than this was an e-mail from her mother.

Her mother was dead.

Hello.

Dabney felt like she was being electrocuted right down to her bone marrow.

Nina was at her own computer, sucking on her gold cross, a bad habit that had traveled by osmosis across the four feet between their desks.

Nina said, “Dabney, really, what is it?”

Dabney let her pearls fall from her mouth; they thumped against her chest like they were made of lead. She had not been feeling right for weeks, maybe as long as a month, and now her body was really going haywire. The e-mail from Clendenin Hughes.

Dabney forced a smile at Nina. “The weather this weekend is going to be perfect!” she said. “We are going to have guaranteed sun.”

“After last year,” Nina said, “we deserve it.”

Dabney said, “I’m going to run to the pharmacy for a frappe. Do you want anything?”

Nina furrowed her brow. “Frappe?” She glanced at the wall calendar, theirs each year courtesy of Nantucket Auto Body. “Is it that time of the month again already?”

Dabney wished she weren’t so predictable, but of course predictability was her trademark. She got a frappe only once a month, the day before her period was due, which was still ten days off.

“I just feel like it today for some reason,” Dabney said. “Do you want anything?”

“No, thank you,” Nina said. She gave Dabney an extra beat of her attention. “You okay?”

Dabney swallowed. “I’m fine,” she said.

Outside, the atmosphere was festive. After four cold, punishing months, spring had arrived on Nantucket. Main Street was teeming with people wearing yellow. Dabney spied the Levinsons (Couple #28), whom she had introduced ten years earlier. Larry had been a widower with twins at Yale and Stanford, Marguerite a never-married headmistress at a prestigious girls’ boarding school. Larry wore a yellow cashmere sweater and a pair of kelly-green corduroy pants, and Marguerite was in a yellow poplin blazer; she held the leash of their golden retriever, Uncle Frank. Dabney adored all dogs, and especially Uncle Frank, and Larry and Marguerite were one of “her couples,” married only because she had introduced them. Dabney knew she should stop and talk; she should rub Uncle Frank under the muzzle until he sang for her. But she couldn’t fake it right now. She crossed the street to Nantucket Pharmacy, but did not go inside. She headed down Main Street, through the A &P parking lot, to the Straight Wharf. At the end of the Straight Wharf, she gazed at the harbor. There was Jack Copper, working on his charter fishing boat; in another few weeks, summer would arrive in all its crazy glory. Jack waved, and Dabney, of course, waved back. She knew everyone on this island, but there was no one in the world she could tell about this e-mail. It was Dabney’s to grapple with alone.

Hello.

Dabney could see the Steamship, low in the water, rounding Brant Point. In the next hour, the Chamber office would be inundated with visitors, and Dabney had left Nina all alone. Furthermore, she had left the office without “signing out” on the “log,” which was the one thing Vaughan Oglethorpe, president of the board of directors of the Chamber, absolutely required. Dabney needed to turn around right this second and go back to the office and do the job that she had been doing perfectly for the past two decades.

Subject line: Hello.

Three hours later, she opened it. She hadn’t planned on opening it at all, but the urge to do so mounted until it was physically painful. Dabney’s back and lower abdomen ached; knowledge of this e-mail was tearing her up inside.

Dear Dabney,

I wanted to let you know that I am on my way back to Nantucket for an indefinite period of time. I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slow recovering from it. Furthermore, it’s monsoon season, and my enthusiasm for writing about this part of the world has dwindled. I’ve given the Times my notice. I never did get assigned to the Singapore desk. I was close several years ago, but-as ever-I pissed off the wrong person simply by speaking my mind. Singapore will remain a dream deferred. (Big sigh.) I’ve decided that the best thing is for me to come home.

I have respected your long-ago mandate to “never contact [you] again.” More than a quarter century has passed, Cupe. I hope that “never” has an expiration date and that you will forgive me this e-mail. I didn’t want to show up on the island without giving you advance warning, and I didn’t want you to hear the news from anyone else. I will be caretaking the house of Trevor and Anna Jones, 436 Polpis Road, living in their guest cottage.

I am afraid of both saying too much and not saying enough. First and foremost, I want you to know how sorry I am for the way things ended. They didn’t have to be that way, but I categorized it a long time ago as an IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION: I could not stay, and you could not go. Not a day has gone by-honestly, Cupe, not an hour-when I have not thought of you. When I left, I took a part of you with me, and I have treasured that part these many years.

I am not the same person you knew-not physically, not mentally, not emotionally. But, of course, I am ever the same.

I would very much like to see you, although I realize this is almost too much to hope for.

I am writing this from my layover at LAX. If all goes well, I should be back on Nantucket tomorrow morning.

436 Polpis Road, cottage in the back.

Ever yours, Clen

Dabney read the e-mail again, to make sure her addled brain had understood.

Tomorrow morning.

Couple #1: Phil and Ginger (née O’Brien) Bruschelli, married twenty-nine years

Ginger: It would have been presumptuous of me to call myself Dabney’s best friend, because even in 1981, freshman year, Dabney was the most popular girl in the school. When I say “popular,” you might be thinking she was blond, or a cheerleader, or that she lived in a big house on Centre Street. No, no, no-she had straight thick brown hair cut into a bob, and she always, always wore a headband. She had big brown eyes, a few freckles, and a smile like the sun coming out. She was about five-three and she had a cute little body, but she never showed it off. She wore either cable-knit sweaters and kilts or a beat-up pair of Levi’s and an oversize men’s oxford shirt. She had the shirt in four colors: white, blue, pink, and peach. She always wore penny loafers, and she always wore a strand of pearls and pearl earrings. That was Dabney.

Dabney Kimball was the most popular girl in the school because she was genuinely kind to everyone. She was kind to Jeffrey Jackson, who had a port-wine stain on his face; she was kind to Henry Granger, who started wearing wingtips and carrying a briefcase in second grade. She included everyone in planning events like Homecoming floats and December Delight. She had grown up an only child raised by her father, Lieutenant Kimball, who was a police officer. Her mother was…well, no one knew exactly what had happened to her mother. A couple of different stories had circulated, as gossip does, but all we knew for sure was that Dabney no longer had a mother, which made us love her even more.

Dabney was also smarter than everyone else at Nantucket High School, except for Clendenin Hughes, who was what our English teacher, Mr. Kane, called a “hundred-year genius.” Dabney was probably a ninety-nine-year genius.

Freshman year, Dabney and I were fledglings on the yearbook committee. The committee was mostly upperclassmen-it was, actually, all upperclassmen, except for the two of us. Dabney felt that, despite our lowly status, freshmen should be represented just like the other three classes, and that no one was going to look out for us if we didn’t look out for ourselves. So that winter, Dabney and I hung out a lot. We would go to yearbook meetings every Tuesday and Thursday after school, and when we were finished, we would watch the boys’ varsity basketball team.

I had a huge, horrible crush on Phil Bruschelli. Phil was a sophomore, and in the varsity games he mostly sat on the bench. If the team was ahead by more than twenty points, Phil would go in for a few minutes. One such time when this happened, I grabbed Dabney’s arm in excitement.

I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was what I’ll now call amused recognition. She said, “You like him. You like Phil.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. Because even though Dabney and I were practically best friends, my crush on Phil wasn’t a secret I was willing to share.

“Yes,” she said. “You do. I can see it. You’re all…pink.”

“Of course I’m pink,” I said. “It’s a hundred degrees in here and I’m Irish.”

“Not your face, silly,” Dabney said. “Your, I don’t know, your aura is rosy.”

“My aura?” I said. “Rosy?”

After the game, Dabney insisted that I wait with her in the hallway outside the boys’ locker room. Her father was coming to pick her up, she said.

“Why aren’t you walking?” I asked. Dabney lived right across the street from the school.

“Just wait with me,” Dabney said. And then she pushed my hair back off my shoulders and flipped up the collar of my IZOD shirt. She was so close to me I could have counted her freckles.

I said, “How come you don’t have a boyfriend? You’re so pretty and everyone likes you.”

She said, “I do have a boyfriend. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

I wanted to ask her whom she meant, but at that instant Phil Bruschelli walked out of the locker room, all six foot three of him. His dark hair was still damp from the shower and he was wearing a dark-brown shearling jacket. I nearly fainted away, he was so cute.

Dabney stepped into his path. “Hey there, Phil.”

Phil stopped. “Hey, Dabney.”

Dabney said, “Nice that you got a little playing time today. Varsity game, you must be psyched.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. Coach says I have to pay my dues. Wait until next year.”

Dabney pulled me close to her side. “You know Ginger, right, Phil? Ginger O’Brien? We’re doing yearbook together.”

Phil smiled at me. My vision blurred. I teetered. Smile! I thought. Smile back! But it felt like I was going to cry instead.

Phil said, “You serve at church, right? You’re an altar girl?”

I felt flames of embarrassment licking my cheeks. Rosy indeed. I nodded, and then made a chirping noise like a sparrow. Who wanted to be recognized as an altar girl? And yet, I was an altar girl, and I had been since I was ten years old. It wasn’t exactly a secret.

Phil said, “My mother makes me go to Mass once a month, and I see you there whenever I go.”

“I’m not surprised you noticed Ginger,” Dabney said. “She’s gorgeous.” With that, Dabney hooked her arm around my neck and kissed my scorching-hot cheek. “See ya, gotta go! My dad is here!”

She bounded out the door to the back parking lot, but her father wasn’t waiting. Lieutenant Kimball drove a squad car, which I would have noticed. There were no cars waiting. Dabney was walking home, abandoning me at a time when I needed her to prop me up. I decided I would never forgive her.

But then Phil asked if I liked basketball and I said yes, and he asked if I wanted to come watch him play for the JV team the following afternoon, and I said sure. He said he would have a lot more playing time in that game, and I said, Okay, great. And he said, Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, don’t forget me! And I felt like a flock of birds had startled in my chest.

Phil and I have been married for twenty-nine years and we have four beautiful sons, the youngest of whom plays power forward for Villanova University.

Rosy indeed.

Dabney left the Chamber office at four-thirty as usual. All preparations for Daffodil Weekend were in place; Dabney could have organized it in her sleep-thank goodness-because her afternoon had been consumed with rereading Clen’s e-mail and then obsessing about it.

I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slow recovering from it.

What kind of loss? Dabney wondered. Had he lost a good friend, a lover? Dabney had lost her father from a heart attack a decade earlier, and her beloved chocolate Lab, Henry, had died at the age of seventeen, just before Christmas. But neither of these losses compared with the loss of Clendenin.

Not a day has gone by-honestly, Cupe, not an hour-when I have not thought of you.

She would be lying if she said that she had not thought of him, too. The love of her life, her perfect match, her Meant to Be. The father of her child. How it had pained her to break off contact. But years and years later, Dabney was stunned by the wisdom and maturity of her decision.

The only way I am going to survive is with a clean break. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, Clendenin Tabor Hughes, do me the favor of never contacting me again.

He had been so, so angry. He had called Dabney in the middle of the night, and over the staticky, time-delayed phone line, they had screamed at each other for the first time in their relationship, often stepping on each other’s words until Clen ended the call by saying, We all make choices, and slamming down the phone. But he had let her do things her way. He had not contacted her.

IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION: I could not stay, and you could not go.

That was about the size of it.

Despite this, Dabney had thought Clendenin might appear at the hospital when she gave birth. She had thought he might materialize in the back of the church on the afternoon she married Box and, just like in the movies, interrupt the priest at the critical moment. She had thought he might attend Agnes’s first piano recital, or show up at Dabney’s fortieth birthday party, at the Whaling Museum. She had thought he might come back to the island when his mother, Helen, died-but Helen Hughes had been cremated and there was no service.

Dabney had always thought he might come back.

If all goes well, I should be back on Nantucket tomorrow morning.

Dabney walked home from work, wishing it were a weekday so that she would have the house to herself, time and space to think. Dabney’s husband, John Boxmiller Beech-Box, to his familiars-held an endowed chair in economics at Harvard and spent four nights a week in Cambridge, teaching. Box was fourteen years older than Dabney, sixty-two now, his hair gone completely white. He was a brilliant scholar, he was witty at dinner parties, he had nurtured Dabney’s intellect and saved her in a million ways. Not least of all, he had saved her from the memories of Clendenin Hughes decades earlier. Box had adopted Agnes when Agnes was only three years old. He had been awkward with her at first-he had never wanted children of his own-but as Agnes grew, Box enjoyed teaching her how to play chess and quizzing her about European capital cities. He groomed her to go to Harvard and was disappointed when she chose Dartmouth instead, but he was the one who had driven back and forth to Hanover-sometimes through ferocious snowstorms-because Dabney wouldn’t leave the island unless her life depended on it.

Tomorrow morning. It was Friday, which meant that Box was at their house on Charter Street. He would be Dabney’s escort all through the festivities of Daffodil Weekend, although he was slower now after his knee replacement, and he had a hard time with the name of anyone he hadn’t known for twenty years. Box would be working, and therefore distracted, but if Dabney knocked on the door of his study, he would set down his pen and turn down the Mozart and he would listen as Dabney spoke the words he had surely been dreading for more than twenty years.

I’ve had an e-mail from Clendenin Hughes. He’s coming back to Nantucket for an indefinite period of time. He’s arriving tomorrow morning.

What would Box say? Dabney couldn’t imagine. She had been honest with Box since the day she’d met him, but she decided, while walking home, that she wouldn’t tell him about Clen. She revised history so that she had deleted the e-mail without reading it, and then she deleted it from her deleted file, which meant it was gone, so gone that it was as if it had never existed in the first place.

Couple #8: Albert Maku and Corrine Dubois, married twenty-two years

Albert: Dabney Kimball was the first person I met at Harvard. She was sitting on the side steps of Grays Hall, crying her eyes out. All the other freshmen were carrying their trunks and boxes across Harvard Yard with their good-looking, well-dressed parents and their rambunctious brothers and sisters in tow. I watched people hug and scream-happy reunion!-they had gone to Camp Wyonegonic together, they had been bitter lacrosse rivals, one at Gilman, one at Calvert Hall, they had sailed together from Newport to Bermuda, they had skied in Gstaad-it just got more and more absurd, and I could not listen a second longer without feeling woefully displaced. I was from Plettenberg Bay, South Africa-my father a truck driver, my mother the head of housekeeping at a tourist hotel, my tuition at Harvard paid by a scholarship through the United Church of Christ. I did not belong in Grays Hall, at Harvard, in Cambridge, in America. I slipped out the side door with the intention of escape-back to the T-station, back to Logan Airport, back to Cape Town.

But then I saw Dabney crying, and I thought, Now, look, Albert, there is someone else at Harvard who seems as miserable as you. I sat down on the hot step and offered her a handkerchief. My mother had sent me half a world away, to the planet’s most prestigious university, armed with little more than a dozen white pressed handkerchiefs.

The first white handkerchief won me my first friend. Dabney accepted it, and unceremoniously blew her nose. She did not seem surprised by my presence, despite the fact that I was six foot six and weighed 165 pounds and had skin the same purple-black color as the plums sold by the fruit vendor in Harvard Square.

When she finished blowing her nose, she folded the handkerchief into a neat, damp square and laid it on her dungaree-covered knee.

“I’ll launder this before I give it back,” she said. “I’m Dabney Kimball.”

“Albert,” I said. “Albert Maku, from Plettenberg Bay, South Africa.” And then, as a flourish, I said, “Ngiyajabula ukukwazi,” which means, “It’s nice to meet you,” in Zulu.

She burst into tears again. I thought maybe the Zulu had frightened her and I made a mental note not to use this tactic ever again when introducing myself to someone in America.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Are you lonely? Are you scared?”

She looked at me and nodded.

I said, “Yes, me too.”

Later, we walked to Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. This was a famous burger place mentioned in the freshman handbook. We ordered burgers with onions and chili sauce and cheese and pickles and fried eggs, and we ordered fries with gravy, and as I ate I thought happily that this was American food, and I loved it.

Dabney Kimball had been born and raised on Nantucket Island, which was sixty miles away on land and another thirty over the sea. She told me she was the fifth generation of her family to be born on the island, and I understood that for an American, this was an accomplishment. Her great-great-great-grandfather had traveled to Nantucket when he was only newly graduated from Harvard himself.

Dabney didn’t like to leave the island, because of something that had happened when she was a child, she said.

“Oh, really?” I said. “What?”

I thought maybe she had been mugged or had been in a highway accident, but she pressed her lips together and I realized I had probably overstepped the bounds of our brand-new friendship by asking.

“There is no university on Nantucket,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have matriculated there.” She picked at the last remaining fries, swimming in gravy. “It’s a phobia. I leave the island and I panic. I only feel safe when I’m on that island. It’s my home.”

I told her my home was Plettenberg Bay, and that I had not, until two days earlier, ever been out of South Africa. But Plettenberg Bay wasn’t an island, and I had traveled around the country quite a bit with the choir of my church youth group-to Cape Town, Knysna, Stellenbosch, and Franschhoek, to Jo-burg and Pretoria, the capital, and to the fine beaches of Durban. Compared to Dabney, I felt worldly.

“Also,” she said, “I’m in love with a boy named Clendenin Hughes. He goes to Yale, and I’m afraid I’m going to lose him.”

Ah, she had me there. At that time, I knew nothing about love.

Dabney and I remained friends for all four years at Harvard. She went home to Nantucket each weekend and over the span of each school vacation, and every time she left for home, she invited me to come with her. I had an idea of Nantucket as a white place, an expensive place, an elitist place, and despite the fact that someone as fine as Dabney lived there, I felt that a painfully lean, dirt-poor African boy with purple-black skin on a church scholarship would not be welcomed, and I always said no.

But then finally, during spring break of senior year, when I had been accepted at medical school at Columbia Physicians and Surgeons, and I had a pocket full of money from working as a bellman at the Charles Hotel, and my self-confidence was plumped not only by my future as a doctor and ample pocket cash but by the realization that I had become sort of American (I enjoyed movies with the actor Mickey Rourke, I drank the occasional beer at the Rathskeller), I said that yes, I would go.

Dabney drove, at that time, a 1972 Chevy Nova, which I folded myself into for the ride to Hyannis, where we would catch the ferry to Nantucket.

Dabney said, “And guess what? My friend Corinne Dubois is coming, too.”

I didn’t want Dabney to sense my disappointment. I craved Dabney’s attention; I didn’t like the idea of being rendered mute while Dabney gabbed with her girlfriend, this Corinne Dubois.

“She’s great, wonderful, beautiful, smart, you’ll love her,” Dabney said. “She’s about to graduate from MIT with a degree in astrophysics.”

We picked up Corinne Dubois outside the Museum of Science on Edward Land Boulevard. She had curly, copper-colored hair. She wore long silver earrings and a long peasant skirt and dark round sunglasses. I noted these things in an instant and I was not particularly overcome except by thinking that Corinne Dubois did not look like a person about to graduate from MIT with a degree in astrophysics. But when she climbed into the car, I smelled her perfume, and something stirred in me. She slammed the door and pushed her sunglasses on top of her head and I introduced myself.

“Albert Maku,” I said, offering my hand.

She shook it mightily. “Corinne Dubois,” she said. “Lovely to meet you, Albert.”

Her eyes were green, and they were smiling at me. And although I had not known what love was, I felt it then.

Dabney noticed. She looked at me and said, “Albert, you’re rosy.”

And I thought, How does a man with the blue-black skin of a plum look rosy?

But I knew she was right.

Dabney Kimball Beech was descended from a long line of strong women, with one exception.

Dabney had been named after her great-great-great-grandmother, Dabney Margaret Wright, married to Warren Wright, who had served as captain of the whaling ship Lexington and had died during his second trip at sea. Dabney had three sons, the youngest of whom, David Warren Wright, married Alice Booker. Alice was a Quaker; her parents had been abolitionists in Pennsylvania and had helped fugitive slaves. Alice gave birth to two girls, and the elder girl, Winford Dabney Wright, married Nantucket’s only attorney, Richard Kimball. Winford was a suffragette. Winford gave birth to one son, Richard Kimball, Jr., called Skip, who dropped out of Harvard and scandalously married an Irish chambermaid named Agnes Bernadette Shea. Agnes Bernadette Shea was Dabney’s beloved grandmother. Agnes gave birth to David Wright Kimball, Dabney’s father, who fought in the Americans’ first efforts in Vietnam, then came home and served as one of Nantucket’s four policemen. He married a Nantucket summer girl named Patricia Beale Benson.

Patty Benson, Dabney’s mother, represented the weak link in the genealogy. She left Nantucket when Dabney was eight years old and never returned.

When Dabney discovered she was pregnant (and really, if one wanted to talk about scandal, there was no greater scandal in the year 1988 than Dabney Kimball’s becoming pregnant out of wedlock), she had wished for a son. To have a daughter after growing up without a mother seemed a challenge beyond Dabney’s capabilities. But when a baby girl was set in Dabney’s arms, the love specific to all new mothers overtook her. She named the baby Agnes Bernadette after her grammie and decided that the only way to ameliorate the pain of her mother’s abandonment was to do right herself. She would be a mother first, a mother forever.

As Dabney approached her house on Charter Street, she saw Agnes’s Prius in the driveway.

Agnes! Dabney’s spirits soared. Agnes had come home for Daffodil Weekend! Agnes had surprised her, which meant, Dabney assumed, that all was forgiven.

Dabney didn’t want to think about the misunderstanding at Christmas. It had been the worst misunderstanding since, well…since the only other real conflict Dabney and her daughter had ever had, back when Agnes was sixteen and Dabney had explained who her real father was. Compared to that hurricane, the blowup at Christmas had been minor.

Dabney stepped in through the mudroom door.

“Agnes?” she cried out.

Agnes was in the kitchen, eating a sandwich at the counter. She looked skinny to Dabney. Her jeans were hanging off her hips. And-even more shocking-she had cut her hair!

“Eeeek!” Dabney said. She reached out and touched Agnes’s shorn head. All that beautiful, straight dark hair, the hair that had reached down to Agnes’s nearly missing behind, had been chopped off. She looked like a boy.

“I know, right?” Agnes said. “It’s so different, I feel like someone else. Yesterday morning in the mirror, I didn’t even recognize myself.”

Dabney pressed her lips closed against the fifty annoying mom questions that threatened to escape: When did you cut it? Why did you cut it? Oh, honey, why?

Agnes took a bite of chicken salad sandwich and Dabney thought, Yes, eat, eat! She thought this was her punishment for never going to visit her daughter in New York, despite at least two hundred invitations to do so. Her daughter had come home looking like a cross between Twiggy in the 1966 Rolling Stone shoot and a teenage boy newly released from juvie.

Agnes swallowed and said, “CJ convinced me to do it.”

CJ, of course.

Dabney hugged her daughter. “How is CJ?” she asked.

“Great!” Agnes said. “He’s here. He came with me.”

“Did he?” Dabney sounded excited and happy, even to her own ears. “Where is he?”

“He went for a run,” Agnes said.

“Oh, good!” Dabney said. To her, the “oh, good” sounded okay. It sounded like, Oh, good for CJ, out enjoying this glorious spring weather! What she meant was, Oh, good, she didn’t have to deal with CJ right this second.

Dabney took a cleansing breath and renewed her vow not to be critical of CJ. Charles Jacob Pippin was forty-four years old to Agnes’s twenty-six; he was only four years younger than Dabney. But, as Box had pointed out, Dabney had no room to complain about the age difference because Box was fourteen years older than Dabney and it had rarely, if ever, been an issue. CJ was divorced from a woman named Annabelle, who-he was eager to mention-now lived in Boca Raton, heedlessly spending the million dollars a year CJ paid her in alimony. CJ was a sports agent in New York; his client list included nine New York Giants and four prominent Yankees, as well as some top-ranked tennis players and golfers. CJ had met Agnes the preceding September at the annual benefit for the Morningside Heights Boys & Girls Club, where Agnes was the executive director. CJ had written a large check to the club, and then he had danced with Agnes in the Waldorf ballroom all night long. The following Monday, a box containing two dozen brand-new basketballs had arrived at the club, followed on Tuesday by a slew of new art supplies. On Wednesday, Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz called the club to see if he could come in to sign autographs for the kids; at first, Agnes had thought it was a prank call. On Thursday, a huge bouquet of flowers arrived for Agnes, along with an invitation for her to have dinner with CJ at Nougatine on Friday.

It was a wooing straight out of the movies, and Dabney couldn’t blame Agnes for succumbing. What twenty-six-year-old could resist? CJ was smart, successful, and sophisticated-he could talk about everything from Frank Lloyd Wright to the World Wrestling Federation. Since they had started dating, CJ had taken Agnes on trips to Nashville, Las Vegas, and Italy, where they drove down the Amalfi coast in a rented Ferrari.

Box, who was impressed by no one, thought CJ was the greatest thing since sliced bread. CJ golfed, he understood economic theory, he was a Republican. In Box’s mind, it was a two-for-one deal: a beau for Agnes, a friend for him.

The fight at Christmas had started when Agnes asked her mother if she and CJ were a perfect match.

Dabney’s heart had seized. She was “Cupe” for Cupid; she was Nantucket’s matchmaker, with forty-two couples to her credit, all of them still together. Dabney could tell if a couple was a perfect match just by looking at them. She saw either a rosy glow or an olive-green haze. However, Dabney didn’t like to offer her opinion on couples she didn’t fix up herself. It was pointless. People were going to make their own decisions regardless of Dabney’s predictions. Hot, passionate love-and even worse, lust-were the enemies of reason and good sense.

Dabney said, “Oh, honey, I have no idea.”

Agnes said, “Mom, please. Please tell me.”

Dabney thought about Agnes and CJ. For Christmas, CJ had given Agnes a pair of Christian Louboutin heels, a new iPad, and a gold Cartier love bracelet, which he dramatically locked onto her wrist. This final gift, especially, underscored CJ’s controlling nature. He liked Agnes to watch what she ate, and he liked her to exercise at least once a day, preferably twice. He disapproved of Agnes’s girlfriends; he thought they were “a danger to the relationship” because they met for cocktails and went to clubs in the Meatpacking District on the weekends. Now, Dabney suspected, most of the friends had fallen away. When CJ and Agnes walked together, CJ pulled her along like she was a recalcitrant child.

CJ was always charming with Dabney, but charming in a way that verged on ingratiating. He liked to reference that fact that he and Dabney were practically the same age. They had both grown up in the eighties, the era of the J. Geils Band and Ghostbusters; they were both in high school when the Union Carbide disaster killed half a million people in India. Dabney didn’t like that CJ had changed his name after his divorce; his first wife, Annabelle, and everyone else in his life at that time, had called him Charlie. Dabney was alarmed when CJ said he didn’t like dogs (“too dirty,”) and that he never wanted to have children. Agnes loved children; that was why she worked at the Boys & Girls Club. Now, Agnes had started saying that she didn’t care if she had children or not. Dabney wasn’t sure how to explain it reasonably, but she sensed something rotten, possibly even sinister, under CJ’s charismatic facade.

When Dabney looked at Agnes and CJ, she saw a haze that was the gray-green of clouds before a thunderstorm. Normally, when Dabney saw a miasma that bad, the couple split right away.

Dabney saw no choice but to tell Agnes the truth. A mother first, a mother forever.

“No,” she’d said. “You are not a perfect match.”

Agnes had packed her suitcase and left that very afternoon, a day and a half early, ignoring their usual day-after-Christmas tradition of prime-rib sandwiches and board games. She had left without taking any of her gifts; Dabney had been forced to pack them up and mail them to New York.

Box had been confused when he emerged from his study. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What happened? Why did they leave?” Agnes had left without saying goodbye to Box, and Dabney knew she had done so because she didn’t want Box to have the chance to try to persuade her to stay.

Dabney had sighed. “I told Agnes something she didn’t want to hear.”

Box lifted his square, black-framed glasses so that they rested in his snowy-white hair. He was a gifted and esteemed man, but there were times when Dabney wished she would be spared the lecture. Box thought her matchmaking was frivolous and silly on a good day, and abominably meddlesome in the private affairs of others the rest of the time. “What?” he asked. “What did you tell her?”

“I’d like to keep that between her and me,” Dabney said.

“Dabney.” His eyes were a piercing blue, clear and cold, exacting.

“She asked if I thought she and CJ were a perfect match.”

Box raised his chin a fraction of an inch. “Certainly you didn’t offer your opinion?”

Dabney didn’t answer. Her feet were together and her hands were clasped in front of her kilt. She was the errant student facing the headmaster. Box was her husband, she reminded herself. They were equals.

Box’s visage turned a florid pink. “Certainly you did offer your opinion. Otherwise she wouldn’t have run off.”

“Run off,” Dabney said. It was a bad habit of hers to repeat the phrases Box used that she found asinine. Like “run off." That was Professor Beech trying to sound not only Harvard-like but British. Heroines in Edwardian literature “ran off.” Agnes had climbed into her Prius and absconded without noise or toxic emissions.

“Rude of them not to say goodbye,” Box said. “I would have expected more from CJ. You just don’t stay in a man’s house, and then up and leave without a word.”

“You were working, darling,” Dabney said. “The closed door is very intimidating, as I’ve told you hundreds of times. I’m sure they didn’t want to disrupt you.”

“They wouldn’t have been disrupting me,” Box said. “I was only reading. And there is nothing intimidating about a closed door. All they had to do was knock.”

“It’s my fault,” Dabney said. The day after Christmas and the day after the day after Christmas were now ruined.

Box breathed audibly. He wanted to say something punishing, perhaps, but like the perfect gentleman he was, he refrained. He knew that Agnes’s departure was punishment enough.

The weather for Daffodil Weekend would be perfect, but that was it; everything else about Dabney’s life was disheveled and topsy-turvy. Her daughter had come home-that was good-but she had brought CJ with her, and that was bad. And Clendenin Hughes would be arriving on Nantucket the next morning. Dabney did not feel well-her abdomen was tender, her back was sore, she was fatigued. On top of everything else, she probably had Lyme disease!

Dabney dealt with her mixed bag of circumstances the way she had dealt with everything else in her forty-eight years: she used forbearance. She began by calling Ted Field’s office and scheduling an appointment for Monday morning. Ted Field, the doctor of choice on the island, was wildly popular and always overbooked. But Dabney knew she would get an appointment because decades earlier, at her own wedding, Dabney had introduced Ted Field’s receptionist, Genevieve Lefebvre, to her husband, Brian (Couple #17). They had been married twenty-one years and had five daughters.

“What’s the matter?” Genevieve asked. “You sick?”

“Not quite right,” Dabney said. “Maybe Lyme. I don’t know. Maybe old age.”

“Oh, hush. You look the same as you did when you were seventeen,” Genevieve said. “The doc can see you at nine.”

That accomplished, Dabney felt marginally better. Maybe Lyme. Maybe just stress.

She was able to grit her teeth and make it through the rest of the day. She greeted CJ warmly, then sent him and Agnes out to pick up the blanket of daffodils and the daffodil wreath that would festoon the Impala in the Antique Car Parade the next day. She called Nina and apologized for being distracted in the office and for needlessly snapping at her.

(When Dabney had returned to the Chamber of Commerce without a strawberry frappe from the pharmacy, Nina had squinted at her in confusion. “So where did you go, then?”

And Dabney said, “You need glasses, Nina.”

Nina had recoiled as though Dabney had smacked her across the nose with a newspaper, and Dabney felt like a terrible, cranky friend.)

Now, Dabney said, “I really don’t feel well. I’m coming down with something, I think.”

“Get rest tonight, sister,” Nina said. “Tomorrow is showtime.”

Dabney put the finishing touches on the tailgate picnic for the next day, although she had prepared most of it in advance. Dabney made the same picnic every year because, just like Thanksgiving and Christmas, Daffodil Weekend was all about tradition. The ribbon sandwiches were the highlight of her picnic-crustless Pepperidge Farm white bread with a layer of egg salad (yellow), a layer of scallion cream cheese (green), and a layer of maraschino cherry cream cheese (pink). Agnes and Box teased her both for making the ribbon sandwiches and for enjoying them. It was WASP cuisine at its very essence, they said. Why not serve Velveeta on Triscuits while she was at it? Or a dish of pickled cauliflower? Dabney ignored the taunts; their aversion simply left more ribbon sandwiches for her, and for Peter Genevra, superintendent of the water company, who stopped at her picnic every year to wolf down half a dozen.

Dabney also made a bourbon-glazed spiral-cut ham, a loaf of braided honey-curry bread, poached asparagus with hollandaise sauce, and a tortellini salad with herbed mayonnaise. She served lemon tarts from the Nantucket Bake Shop. She bought a bottle of Taittinger champagne for herself and Agnes, good white Bordeaux for Box, and a twelve-pack of Stella Artois to offer those who stopped to visit.

As Dabney was cutting the crusts from the Pepperidge Farm loaf, Box entered the kitchen. He had arrived that morning while she was at work; she hadn’t seen him since Monday at 7:00 a.m., when she’d dropped him at the airport as she did every Monday morning.

“Hello, dear,” he said, and he kissed her chastely on the cheek. His greeting alone summed up the way things were between them. Pleasant, civilized, sexless. He called her “darling,” or occasionally “dear.” When they were dating and first married, Dabney used to long for Thursday afternoons because back then, Box would leave Harvard when his last class was over at three, and he would often make it to the island by five. Dabney would meet his plane or his boat and they would head straight home to make love. Now, Box stayed in his faculty apartment on Thursday nights. He worked until seven or eight and then went out to dinner with colleagues. He tried to convince Dabney to come to Cambridge on Thursday evenings. There were so many new restaurants, they could attend the reading series at the Coop or go to the Symphony. But Dabney always declined. Box knew that asking Dabney to come to Cambridge was like asking her to scuba dive without an oxygen tank in Marianas Trench. She believed, in her own mind, that she simply would not survive.

Box grew weary at her refusal to travel, and Dabney grew aggravated at him for trying to prod her into it. I never pretended to be anyone else! she had shouted at him a few years back. The shouting had been startling to them both-theirs was not a marriage where emotions ran hot-and the discussion died there. Box stayed in Cambridge on Thursday nights, and Dabney stayed on Nantucket.

Now, as usual, Dabney said, “How was your week?”

“Good,” Box said. “My Turkish editor called. They’re picking up the new edition.”

“Oh, wonderful,” Dabney said. In addition to holding an endowed chair, Box had authored the macroeconomics textbook used by more than four hundred universities across the country. It had been translated into twenty-four languages. Box wrote an updated edition every three years; the amount of income this generated was nauseating. Box made somewhere between three and four million dollars a year off the textbook; his salary from Harvard was a mere three hundred thousand. The money meant little to Box and even less to Dabney, other than that they never had to worry about it. Their house on Charter Street was historically preserved in its every element, and they had slowly and carefully filled it with antiques and art. It would pass to Agnes. Dabney was the proud owner of a 1966 tomato-red Chevy Impala with a white vinyl top, which was something of a money pit, but she treasured it. Box drove a battered Jeep Wrangler on Nantucket and an Audi RS 4 on the mainland. They never took vacations, because of Dabney, although Box went to London for two weeks every June to teach at the School of Economics, and he attended a conference in November that switched locations-San Diego, Amsterdam, Honolulu. They anonymously donated a hundred thousand dollars each year to the Morningside Heights Boys & Girls Club, where Agnes worked, and a hundred thousand to the Nantucket Cottage Hospital. And that was the extent of their spending.

Dabney wondered if Clendenin Hughes knew she had married a celebrated and esteemed economist. She presumed he did. One could find out anything on the Internet now. Was Clen jealous? Of course, Clen had won a Pulitzer; Dabney had discovered this by reading the alumni notes in her high school newsletter. She had felt a surge of pride for him, followed by annoyance. She had thought, For what he gave up, he’d better have won a Pulitzer!

She wanted to stop thinking about Clendenin Hughes.

“How was your week?” Box asked. “I take it you’re all aflutter for the weekend? Can you give me the rundown again?”

“Dinner tonight at the Club Car,” Dabney said. “I made the reservation for two, but we’ll have to bump it to four, since Agnes and CJ are here.” She paused, thinking about how Box and CJ would fight for the check. That was another thing about CJ: he always had to pay for everything, otherwise he became downright sullen. “Parade at noon tomorrow, and picnic at one.”

“Collapse in exhausted heap by five,” Box said.

Dabney said, “I have an appointment with Ted Field at nine o’clock Monday morning.”

“Really?” Box said. “Are you not well?”

Dabney stared at the perfect squares of white bread on the cutting board. Those squares were her life-or like her life had been until the e-mail arrived that morning. “Not well,” she confirmed. “I’m thinking maybe Lyme.”

Box said, “Have you been bitten by a tick?”

“Not that I know of,” Dabney said. The last time Dabney had walked in the moors was the preceding fall, with their dog, Henry. Just thinking of Henry made Dabney weepy.

“It’s not like you to get sick,” Box said. “I can’t even remember the last time you had a cold.”

“I know,” Dabney said. Her voice was filled with impending tears. It was also not like Dabney to get dramatic or emotional. She knew that doing so now was making Box uncomfortable.

“I would offer to stay on Monday,” Box said. “But…”

“You can’t,” Dabney said. Mondays at one, Box taught a seminar on Tobin to twelve handpicked seniors; it was his favorite class.

“I suppose I could ask Miranda to cover it,” Box said.

Ah, yes, Miranda. Thirty-five-year-old Australian economics prodigy Miranda Gilbert, with the naughty-librarian glasses and the enchanting accent. She had been Box’s teaching and research assistant for the past four years. Dabney had always been a little jealous of Miranda. But Box would never keep a secret from Dabney as she was now doing. She should just tell him: Clendenin Hughes would be arriving on Nantucket tomorrow. So what? To not tell him turned it into a bigger deal than it was. To not tell him made it seem like Dabney was affected by it.

Dabney was affected by it.

“How is Miranda?” Dabney asked.

“Miranda?” Box plucked a maraschino cherry from the jar and ate it, then grimaced. “She’s fine. Dr. Bartelby is getting ready to propose, I guess.”

Dr. Bartelby, Miranda’s boyfriend, was an internist at Mass General. Dr. Bartelby (whose Christian name was Christian) and Miranda had come to visit the Beeches on Nantucket the past three summers. “He told her he’s getting ready to propose? That takes all the fun out of it.”

“I’m not sure how it works these days,” Box said. “But I do believe Miranda is about to join the married ranks.”

A wave of dizziness overcame Dabney and she steadied herself against the counter.

“Are you all right?” Box asked. He put a hand on her lower back, but even that light touch hurt.

She had to make the ribbon sandwiches before the bread dried out. And the asparagus needed to be trimmed and roasted. Agnes and CJ would be home soon with the daffodils for the car. Decorating the Impala on Friday evening was one of Dabney’s favorite parts of the weekend. But all Dabney could do was stagger through the kitchen and into the library, where she collapsed on the sofa. Box covered her with an afghan crocheted by her beloved grammie, the first Agnes Bernadette. Dabney felt like she was going to die.

Forbearance: her ancestors had endured much worse, Dabney knew. Her great-great-great-grandmother, Dabney Margaret Wright, had come to Nantucket from Beacon Hill, leaving behind home, furnishings, and society. She and their three sons had moved into a house on Lily Street while Warren sailed off to hunt whales. He had been gone for eighteen months on his first trip, then home for six months-and he never returned from his second trip. Dabney Wright had made the best of a tragic situation: she joined the congregation of the Summer Street Church, and befriended other women who had been widowed by the sea. She had not complained, at least not in Dabney’s imagination. She had kept a stiff upper lip.

And Dabney, too, would persevere. After Dabney recovered from her spell, she assembled the ribbon sandwiches and wrapped them in wax paper. She roasted the asparagus. Agnes and CJ took charge of bedecking the Impala: a daffodil wreath on the grille and a blanket of daffodils laid across the wide trunk. Dabney showered and put on her navy and yellow Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress. It was one of the dresses Patty Benson had left hanging in her closet when she abandoned her husband and daughter. Dabney didn’t attach sentimental value to things, or at least she didn’t in this case. She wore her mother’s dresses all the time because she liked them, and they fit.

Dabney tried to make a reasonable effort at dinner at the Club Car, despite the fact that she wished she were in bed with a bowl of soup and a Jane Austen novel. Instead, she ordered the lamb chops, as she always did, and Box selected an excellent Australian Shiraz to go with them. One sip of the wine set Dabney’s head spinning.

She said, “You know, Box was teaching at Harvard when I was a student there, but I never took one of his classes.”

Agnes stared at her mother. She had ordered the crab cake, but she hadn’t taken a single bite. “Yes, Mommy, we know.”

CJ smiled at Dabney. He was wearing a navy blazer and a sumptuously patterned Robert Graham shirt. Before they left the house, Box had admired CJ’s chocolate suede Gucci loafers and then said to Dabney, “You should get me a pair like that!” Dabney had to admit, CJ presented well, he smelled good, and he had a nice head of wavy salt-and-pepper hair and straight white teeth. Too white, like maybe he treated them. But that wasn’t a reason to dislike the man. CJ had ordered the lamb chops, medium rare, just like Dabney had, and this reminded Dabney of a time the autumn before when he had ordered exactly the same thing as she had. It was as if he was copying her in an attempt to be found agreeable.

CJ said, “If I remember correctly, you were an art history major? You wrote your thesis on Matisse?”

“We named our dog, Henry, after him,” Agnes said softly.

CJ, who did not care for dogs (“too dirty”), didn’t respond to this. He said to Dabney, “You should go see the Matisse chapel in Nice.”

It wasn’t likely that Dabney would ever make it to France, but she gave him credit for trying.

“My favorite painting is La Danse,” Dabney said. “It’s at MOMA, but I’ve never seen it.”

CJ said, “The director at MOMA is a friend of mine. So if you ever decide to come to New York, I’ll set something up.”

Dabney drank her wine. She didn’t touch her lamb chops. She had absolutely no appetite.

She imagined Clendenin Hughes walking into the dining room of the Club Car, throwing Dabney over his shoulder, and carrying her out. Then she indulged in a moment of deep self-pity. She had lived a calm and peaceful existence, a happy and productive existence-until this morning.

She drank her wine.

Between dinner and dessert, champagne arrived at the table, and not just champagne but a bottle of Cristal. Dabney blinked. Both she and Agnes were fond of champagne, but it gave Box a headache, and, as wealthy as he was, he would never have spent three hundred dollars on a bottle of Cristal.

They all sat silently as the server uncorked the bottle and filled four flutes. Dabney was confused. She gave their server-a severe-looking woman in a white dinner jacket-a beseeching look, but the woman’s face was as implacable as a guard at Buckingham Palace.

Suddenly, CJ cleared his throat and stood up, raising his glass. “Agnes and I have an announcement to make.”

Oh no, Dabney thought. Nononononononono.

Agnes smiled shyly and raised her left hand so that Dabney could see the diamond-Tiffany cut, platinum setting, bright and sparkling perfection. Dabney urged happy excitement onto her face.

“Agnes has agreed to be my wife,” CJ said.

Dabney uttered a cry of horror, which they all mistook for delight. She alone was able to see the green fog emanating from Agnes and CJ like toxic radiation.

“How wonderful!” Dabney said.

Box stood to embrace Agnes and then CJ, and Dabney, realizing that this was an appropriate response, followed suit. She held Agnes’s hand-the same hand Agnes had pressed into clay as a kindergartner, the same hand Dabney had high-fived when Agnes had scored a 1400 on her SATs-and admired the ring.

“What a beautiful ring!” Dabney said. This, at least, was true. CJ had nailed the ring-simple, classic, timeless. The stone was enormous. Dabney guessed three carats, or nearly.

But the ghoul-green haze enveloping Agnes could only signify some future catastrophe-CJ would cheat on Agnes with one of the Giants cheerleaders, or an intern in his office. Or he would do something worse. Dabney wouldn’t wait to find out. She would, somehow, figure out a way to save her daughter.

On Saturday morning, Dabney felt even worse than usual, thanks to too much Shiraz, the cataclysmic news of “the engagement,” and Clen’s looming arrival. Despite this, she donned her usual Daffodil Parade clothes-yellow oxford shirt, jeans, navy blazer, penny loafers, and her beautiful straw Peter Beaton hat with the navy grosgrain ribbon. She had her clipboard, which listed the 120 entries for the Antique Car Parade. The sun was shining, the air was actually balmy; Dabney felt warm in her blazer and considered removing it, but she knew she would be chilly once she was riding out to Sconset in the Impala with the top down.

Main Street was a swarm of festive humanity. Everyone wore yellow and green to celebrate the three million daffodils blooming on Nantucket. There were children with daffodils painted on their faces and daffodils wound around the handlebars of their bikes. There were dogs with daffodil collars. Every single person seemed to want Dabney’s attention. In years past, she had handled this situation with grace and aplomb. She used to love knowing everyone and having everyone know her. She used to trade inside jokes with the town administrator and the garbage collector, the bookstore owner, the woman who owned the lingerie store, Andrea Kapenash, wife of the police chief, Mr. Berber, the fifth-grade teacher who had been Agnes’s favorite, a certain summer resident who sat on the board of the New York Stock Exchange, and a different summer resident who anchored the six o’clock news in Boston. This was a cross section of humanity who had one thing in common…they all loved Nantucket Island. But in this contest, Dabney was the undisputed frontrunner. She loved Nantucket more than anyone else had ever loved Nantucket. She knew her devotion was unusual, possibly even unhealthy, but on a day like today, it didn’t matter. Today she was among like-minded people.

Dabney chatted with everyone who crossed her path, but she felt like she was speaking in an automated voice, like the voice that played on the Chamber of Commerce voice mail when one called after business hours. Yes, it was magnificent about the weather, no, she couldn’t remember a nicer day, no, she couldn’t believe another year had passed, yes, she was ready for summer, she was always ready for summer. Good to see you, she said, but her words clinked like counterfeit coins. Could everyone tell? Dabney yearned to grab someone by the arm-even the channel 5 news anchor-and spill her guts. I don’t feel well at all, there’s something wrong with me, Clendenin Hughes is coming back to Nantucket today, he might even be here as we speak, and my husband doesn’t know. My daughter announced last night that she is engaged to a man who seems like the Second Coming, but whom I alone know to be unsuitable. And there is nothing I can do or say. Here I am, Nantucket’s matchmaker, ostensibly a romance expert, and yet my life is unraveling. Nothing is as it should be.

Can you help? Can you help me?

Dabney bumped into Vaughan Oglethorpe, the Chamber board president, her boss, who stood out like a sore thumb in his black shirt, black tie, and black suit. Vaughan was the island’s only undertaker, and he could cast a pall over the sunniest of days. His hair was whiter than when Dabney had last seen him, and his nose more beaky; he was starting to resemble the national bird. He was as tall and lanky as ever, but more hunched in the shoulders; he looked like Lurch from The Addams Family, or like some other benevolent monster. Perfect for an undertaker.

“Dabney,” he said. The lugubrious voice, too, suited his profession. Vaughan had known Dabney her entire life-he had been an old beau of Dabney’s mother, Patty Benson-and he liked to take credit for all of Dabney’s successes on the job.

“Hello, Vaughan,” she said. “How do you like this weather?”

Vaughan stroked his bony chin, his expression dour. He smelled like embalming fluid; often when Dabney stood this close to him, she held her breath. She looked down at her loafers.

“What a turnout!” he boomed suddenly. “You’ve done it again, Dabney! Good work!”

“Thank you, sir,” Dabney said.

“No!” he shouted. “Great work!”

As usual, Box drove the Impala in the parade while Dabney rode shotgun. This smarted a little, as it did every year. The Impala was Dabney’s car; Box drove it exactly once a year, in this parade. Why didn’t Dabney drive and Box ride shotgun? This, after all, was Dabney’s festival. But Agnes and Nina Mobley and even Box himself thought it looked better if he drove. Dabney should be free to wave at the crowds like she was passing royalty.

Fine, Dabney said. Fine, whatever.

Agnes and CJ sat in the back, exuding the smugness of the newly engaged. Dabney wanted to scowl, but she couldn’t. All eyes were on her. She had to smile. She had to beam. She put a hand on top of her straw hat to keep it from blowing away.

Once they had parked in Sconset, under giant elms showing off their new spring leaves, Dabney poured herself and Agnes a glass of champagne. Dabney wasn’t one to seek solace in alcohol, but circumstances were piling up against her so rapidly that she saw no alternative. She took a nice, long sip of champagne, which sparkled against her tongue. Any second now, she would relax.

She set out the picnic on a card table covered with her yellow linen tablecloth, used only this one day a year.

She realized that she had forgotten to pick up the lemon tarts from the Nantucket Bake Shop.

“Oh my gosh!” she said. “I forgot the tarts!”

Box was uncorking the white Bordeaux. He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “No one ever eats them anyway.”

Dabney stared at her husband. Forbearance, she thought. But emotion overcame Dabney’s sturdy genes: her eyes filled with hot tears. She turned away from Box, and from Agnes and CJ, who now seemed like some hideous two-headed monster, and all the others who were starting to mill on the street. She couldn’t let anyone see her crying about the forgotten tarts. She felt like Clarissa Dalloway, who decided that she would get the flowers for the dinner party herself. This picnic, with the ham, and the asparagus, and the ribbon sandwiches that everyone felt comfortable ridiculing, was Dabney’s picnic. It was an expression of her very self, and yet here was John Boxmiller Beech, the brilliant and celebrated economist, telling her it didn’t matter. Which was the equivalent of saying that she, Dabney, didn’t matter.

She stumbled down the street, wishing she were alone, wishing she were anonymous, wishing-for the first time in her forty-eight years-that she were not stuck on this island where every last person thought he knew her, but where in reality no one knew her.

Oh, something was wrong.

Dabney’s vision was blurred by tears, and by drinking champagne on an empty stomach. She knew she should return to the car and eat a ribbon sandwich. There was a big crowd around the 1948 woodie wagon, which had won Best Car three times in the past decade; this year they had done a Wizard of Oz theme. The police chief, Ed Kapenash, was dressed as the Scarecrow.

Dabney didn’t stop, didn’t turn around, she just kept going. Clarissa Dalloway had survived, but someone at her dinner party had committed suicide. Was that right? And then of course Virginia Woolf had done herself in. She’d walked into the River Ouse with rocks in her pockets.

Dabney felt unsteady on her feet. Her hand was shaking so badly that champagne spilled onto the cuff of her yellow oxford.

She saw him waiting at the corner of Main and Chapel Streets. He was straddling a ten-speed bicycle, the same one he had ridden everywhere as a teenager because there had been no money to buy him a car. He used to ride that bike whenever he met Dabney to be alone. They used to meet in the Quaker Cemetery, they would meet at the old, abandoned NHA property called Greater Light, and they would meet at the high school football field. Their song growing up had been Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” not only because Dabney had brown eyes but because of the line about making love in the green grass behind the stadium. That line had been written for her and Clen.

She knew it was him even though he in no way resembled the twenty-two-year-old she had last seen at Steamship Wharf in 1987. He was bigger-seventy or eighty pounds heavier at least-and he had a mustache and a beard. He was a grown-up, a man.

He was wearing a red T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of black Chuck Taylors. Twenty-seven years later and he still wore Chuck Taylors? In high school they had been the only thing he would spend money on. He had owned five pairs.

Something else was different about him, something off balance. It took Dabney another second to realize that Clen had only one arm. She blinked, thinking it was a trick of the light, or the champagne. But what she saw was real: his left arm was a stump. There was the sleeve of his red T-shirt, and nothing below it.

I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slowly recovering from it.

He had lost his arm.

Dabney’s vision grew dark at the edges, but there was still color-the red of Clen’s T-shirt and the green glen and weak tea of his Scottish hazel eyes. I could not stay, and you could not go. She couldn’t speak. Nina Mobley would be looking for her, as it was time to judge the picnics. It doesn’t matter, nobody ever eats them anyway. Clen! She wanted, at least, to say his name, just his name, but even that was beyond her. She was in the power of some other force; something had her by the back of the neck and was pushing her down. I hope that “never” has an expiration date. She wanted to ride away on his handlebars. Any second now, she would relax. He was there. It was him.

She did not stop for him. She walked on. Even if she could have spoken, what would she have said? She was unprepared. She wasn’t feeling well. Around the corner, hidden by hedges, she tried to breathe, but found she could not breathe. She heard the sound of breaking glass and realized the champagne flute had dropped to the road and shattered. There was wind in her ears. Her knees gave way.

Blackness.

Silence.

Couple #30: Dr. Gary Donegal and Lance Farley, partners ten years

Dr. Donegal: I started seeing Dabney in 1978, my first year on Nantucket. Dabney was, in fact, my first patient. She was twelve years old; her mother had left the family four years earlier, and Dabney’s father, who was a policeman, was worried about Dabney’s emotional well-being as she entered adolescence. Dabney refused to leave the island; she was convinced that if she left Nantucket, she would die. Or something worse.

“Something worse?” I said.

Officer Kimball then explained to me that the last time Dabney had been off Nantucket was in December 1974, when her mother, Patty Benson, took Dabney to Boston to see The Nutcracker. They had orchestra seats for the evening performance of the ballet and a suite at the Park Plaza afterward. Patty, Officer Kimball said, had come from money and was used to doing things this way. She was also spoiled, selfish, and entitled, he said. A summer person, he said-as if this were the explanation for her unpleasant qualities. He then went on to tell me that Patty Benson had left the Park Plaza Hotel in the middle of the night and had never returned.

“Never returned?” I said.

“Never returned,” he said. He knew Patty hadn’t met with foul play because she had given the hotel’s concierge Officer Kimball’s phone number and a twenty-dollar tip to call and tell him to come to Boston to collect their daughter.

When Dabney awoke in the suite in the Park Plaza, Patty was gone. The concierge sent up one of the chambermaids to stay with Dabney until her father arrived.

Dabney never saw or heard from her mother again. Eventually, Officer Kimball hired a detective and discovered that Patty Benson was living in Texas, working as a flight attendant on the private jet of some oil millionaire.

I realized I had my work cut out for me with Dabney. The refusal to leave Nantucket was a natural response to having lost her mother, to being left behind in a hotel room like an empty shopping bag, or a half-eaten club sandwich.

Dabney was happy enough to talk about her mother. Her mother had grown up spending summers in a big old house on Hoicks Hollow Road. The Benson family had belonged to the Sankaty Beach Club; her mother used to say that tan skin was healthy skin. Her mother liked black-and-white movies with singing and dancing, liked lobster tails on Christmas Eve, and did not care for her husband’s Wharf Rat tattoo. Her mother read to Dabney every night before bed and some nights fell asleep in Dabney’s bed; she promised that Dabney could get her ears pierced on her twelfth birthday, but that the only acceptable earrings were pearls.

Dabney wouldn’t talk about The Nutcracker trip or waking up in the hotel alone or the fact that her mother had not contacted her in two, then three, then four years.

I had seen my share of obsessive-compulsive disorder and agoraphobia and paranoia, but I had never seen a combination of the three the way they presented in Dabney. I am, perhaps, making things sound worse for her than they were. She was an exceptional child, and as she grew into a teenager, she only became more exceptional. She was lovely to look at, intelligent, clear-eyed, perceptive, kind, poised, articulate, and funny. But when it came to leaving Nantucket, she had a blind spot. She wouldn’t leave the island unless her life depended on it, she said.

I met with her twice a month. We tried antianxiety medications, none of which proved very effective, but we finally made enough progress that when she was accepted to Harvard, she said she would go.

Even I was surprised by this.

She said, “I told you that I wouldn’t leave the island unless my life depended on it, and now my life depends on it. Am I supposed to stay here and wait tables? Work as a nanny? I have to go to college, Dr. Donegal. I’m smart.”

I agreed with her wholeheartedly: she was smart. I was sure that when she got to Harvard, she would realize there was nothing to fear. No one else would disappear.

This didn’t end up being quite true. Her boyfriend, Clendenin Hughes, went to Yale and became engrossed in his studies and his life there. Dabney traveled once to New Haven to see him, and it ended badly. Officer Kimball was working double shifts that weekend, and hence I was dispatched to go get her.

It was on the ride from New Haven back to the Cape, eight years after our therapy started, that I finally got Dabney to talk. She started with things I knew: she was fatally in love with Clendenin Hughes-“fatally” meaning she was pretty sure the love would kill her, or the fact that he didn’t love her the way she loved him would kill her. He wanted to go places and see things, and she couldn’t, and he didn’t understand, and she couldn’t explain. New Haven had changed Clen, she said. I told her that going new places did sometimes change a person, new experiences shaped us, and Dabney said that she liked who she was and was determined to stay that way. She had not been changed by Cambridge, and I suggested that was because she hadn’t truly let Cambridge into her heart. She didn’t respond to this, and the next time she spoke, she told me that the night her mother left, she told Dabney that she was woefully unhappy with her life. She was no longer in love with Dabney’s father; she had been blinded, she said, by the romantic notion of a war hero. She used to love Nantucket as a summer haven, but living there year-round had spoiled it for her. She hated it now with every cell of her body. She felt like a coyote in a trap, she said. She would chew off her own leg to escape.

Dabney said, “When I looked at my mother, she was sitting in a cloud of green smoke. I knew she was leaving, and the thing was, I also knew it was for the best. My father and I were Nantucketers to the core, and my mother hated us for it.”

I was just about to reassure Dabney that her mother did not hate her, but that she, Dabney, was in some sense the coyote’s leg. She was that which her mother had sacrificed in the name of freedom.

But before I could articulate this, Dabney asked me a surprising question.

She said, “Dr. Donegal, have you ever been in love?”

I stopped seeing Dabney as a patient after she graduated from college, although she never truly left my sights. I heard about Clendenin’s exodus to Southeast Asia and Dabney’s pregnancy, and a few years later I heard about her marriage to the Harvard economist, and when I bumped into Dabney and her daughter and said economist one morning having breakfast at the Jared Coffin House, I told her how happy I was for her. Then, a few months later, Dabney called me. At first I suspected marital trouble, or grief counseling because her father had just died of a heart attack, but what Dabney said was, “There’s someone I want you to meet. When can you come for dinner?”

The person she wanted me to meet was a man named Lance Farley, who had recently bought an antiques store in town and who had just joined the Chamber of Commerce. It was clear from the moment I shook hands with Lance Farley what Dabney was up to. I, of course, knew about Dabney’s reputation as a matchmaker, about her supposed “supernatural intuition” when it came to romance. I had heard about her many successes and how she saw either a rosy aura or a green fog. I remembered the story about her mother on the night that she left. But still, I put as much stock in Dabney’s matchmaking as I did in the answers on a Ouija board.

But as we drank gin and tonics in the Beeches’ secluded, grassy backyard and then dined on grilled swordfish and Bartlett Farm tomatoes and homemade peach pie, and as Lance and I discovered a shared love for Bach and the early novels of Philip Roth, and the northern coast of Morocco, I admitted to myself that maybe even after eight years of spelunking in the hidden recesses of someone’s brain, there were still things to be discovered. Maybe Dabney did have a supernatural intuition about romantic matters.

Who was I to say she didn’t?

Box

Dabney fainted on Main Street in Sconset. Box hadn’t even noticed that she was missing; he had been too busy pouring a glass of Montrachet and fixing a ham sandwich. Nina Mobley had come looking for Dabney; the judging of the tailgate picnics was about to begin, and they couldn’t start without Dabney. Box had waved a casual hand at the mayhem around him. “I’m sure she’s here somewhere.” Dabney was the most popular woman on the island. She knew everyone and everyone knew her. She was probably off talking to Mr. So-and-So about the window boxes of his house on Fair Street, or she’d bumped into Peter Genevra from the water company and was feeding him marshmallow-and-Easter-egg sandwiches.

But fifteen minutes later, Dabney still hadn’t turned up. Nina was antsy. Should she start the judging without her?

“Judge without Dabney?” Box said. “Is that even an option?”

“Not really,” Nina admitted. “I need her.”

Box nodded. Dabney and Nina were best friends, but Dabney was the dominant one of the pair. She was Mary Tyler Moore to Nina’s Rhoda, the Lucy to her Ethel.

An instant later, the son of the fire chief-Box recognized the youth but couldn’t recall his name-approached to tell Box that Dabney had fainted in the street, and the paramedics were tending to her now.

It was as Box threaded his way through the crowd on Main Street that he saw the man on the bicycle.

Box took a stutter step; his right knee had been replaced the year before and still wasn’t 100 percent reliable. Box hated himself for looking again, but something about the man struck Box. Big guy, bearded like a lumberjack, one arm.

The man raised his good arm, not in greeting, Box thought, but as an acknowledgment. I’m here.

Clendenin Hughes? Was that possible? Box was terrible with names but far better with faces. He had looked up Hughes several times on the Internet and had even read a few of his pieces, including the series on Myanmar, which had won him the Pulitzer. Furthermore, the man looked just like Agnes; it was uncanny. That was him, Box was almost certain.

Had Dabney seen Hughes, then? Was that why she’d fainted? Her old lover. Agnes’s father. It had been more than twenty-five years since Hughes had left Nantucket. He lived overseas, in Southeast Asia somewhere. As Box understood it, Clendenin Hughes was a man who needed political unrest and foreign women and espionage plots to keep his gears turning.

As Box understood it, Hughes no longer had any connection to the island.

And yet, there he was.

Clendenin turned the bike around-skillfully, considering he had only one arm-and pedaled away.

One arm?

Box hurried to the rotary. He was sixty-two years old, way past the point in his life where he should feel threatened or jealous. But something gnawed at him. He quickened his step, to tend to Dabney.

Box took Dabney home and put her to bed with three aspirin and a glass of water. Daffodil Weekend had gotten the best of her this year. She had allowed herself to stress out over a pagan celebration.

As her eyes fluttered closed, he thought to ask her about Clendenin Hughes. But he didn’t want to upset her-or himself-any further.

Box had met Dabney twenty-four years earlier at the Sankaty Head Golf Club during a Harvard alumni event. Box was attending at the request of the development office; they liked certain faculty members to show up at such events and glad-hand. Box had been to Nantucket once before, in the late seventies, when he and a few buddies from Harvard had hiked out the slender, sandy arm of Coatue and slept on the beach in tents. He had hardly been to the beach since then.

The event at Sankaty consisted mostly of captains of industry with golfing tans and their Nantucket Lightship basket-toting wives drinking scotch and eating pigs in a blanket, but suddenly Box found himself talking to a girl who had graduated from Radcliffe only four years earlier, a girl born and raised on Nantucket named Dabney Kimball. She had studied art history, but her roommate had taken Econ 10, so Dabney knew who Box was. Soon she was offering to take him on a tour of the island the following day.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” he said. She was wearing a madras headband in her brown hair and her face had a fresh-scrubbed look. Box would never have called himself an insightful person even back then, but he had been able to tell that underneath Dabney’s simple, pretty package lay hidden treasure.

She said, “Oh, please? It would be such an honor. I love showing the island off. I’m an ambassador of sorts.”

“But surely you have other plans?” he said. She was young enough to spend her Sundays playing boccie on the beach, or sailing around the harbor while lying across the front of her boyfriend’s sloop.

“I have a two-year-old daughter,” she said. “But my grandmother watches her on Sundays, so I’m free all day.”

A two-year-old? Box thought. If she had graduated four years earlier, she would have been twenty-six. If she had a two-year-old, she would have gotten pregnant at twenty-three. Very few Radcliffe women had children right out of college. They all went to law school now, business school, medical school-or, in the case of art-history majors, they spent years doing graduate studies in Florence or Vienna. Box checked Dabney’s hand for a ring, but her fingers were bare. She wore no jewelry except for a strand of pearls and matching pearl earrings.

“Okay,” Box said. He was agreeing to the tour without even wanting one. “Thank you. I’d like that.”

Agnes stayed home with Dabney on Sunday morning while Box and CJ golfed at Miacomet. When Box got home, Agnes said, “I’m worried about her, Daddy. What if I called in to work this week and stayed here with her?”

“You know your mother won’t let you do that,” Box said. “She’s not going to stay home from work, and she wouldn’t want you to either. Think about the kids.”

Agnes was the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club in Morningside Heights, a job that paid next to nothing but that gave her enormous satisfaction. It was a job that, quite frankly, scared Box and Dabney. Their daughter sometimes stayed at the club until eight or nine at night with a handful of kids who had no one at home to feed them or put them to bed. Box wrote Agnes a sizable check each month to pay for her rent on the Upper West Side and a car service home whenever she left the club after dark. He suspected, however, that Agnes was too modest to use the car service regularly. He suspected that Agnes took the subway.

While they were golfing, CJ had admitted that Agnes’s job unnerved him as well, and said that after they were married he was going to encourage her to work for a different nonprofit, preferably one in midtown. Box had agreed that this was a good idea.

“The kids aren’t more important to me than my own mother,” Agnes said.

“Your mother will be fine,” Box said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Box said. “She has an appointment with Dr. Field in the morning. It’s probably just Lyme disease. Three weeks of antibiotics, she’ll be as good as new.”

“Okay,” Agnes said. “CJ has a client negotiation in the morning, so we’ll leave tonight.”

“I’ll take care of your mother,” Box said. “I promise.”

On their tour of the island nearly a quarter of century earlier, Dabney had driven Box to Quaise and Quidnet, to Madaket and Madequecham, to Shimmo and Shawkemo in her battered 1972 Chevy Nova. It wasn’t the car he’d expected a young lady like her to drive; she seemed like someone who would be more comfortable in a Saab convertible or a Volkswagen Jetta, but then she explained that she had been raised by her father-a Vietnam vet and a Nantucket policeman-and he had turned her into a motorhead. This term, coming out of Dabney’s wholesome mouth, made Box throw back his head and laugh. But Dabney was dead serious. She had purchased the Nova with her own money, and she wanted to trade it in for a Camaro. Her dream was to someday own a Corvette Stingray split-window with matching numbers in Bermuda blue. She was a devoted Chevy girl, she said.

She was sorry that the Nova didn’t have four-wheel drive only because that meant she couldn’t take him up the beach to her favorite spot, Great Point.

“That’s okay,” Box had said. He didn’t tell her that the tour had already run so far over his time limit that he’d missed the ferry he had booked back to the mainland.

She said, “I’ll take you to my second-favorite spot. And we can eat. I made lunch.”

Her second-favorite spot was Polpis Harbor, where she parked overlooking the sparkling water and the scattering of sails. Dabney pulled a wicker basket out of the Nova’s trunk. She had made fried chicken, macaroni salad, and strawberry pie. She handed Box an icy cold root beer, which was the most delicious thing he could remember tasting in his forty years.

Up until that point, Box had been a confirmed bachelor. He had dated dozens of women-most of them very smart, some of them very pretty, and one or two who were both. But Box had always imagined love as a musical note, and so far nobody had struck the right one. But the note resonated loud and clear that afternoon at Polpis Harbor with Dabney. It was a sweet, thrumming sound that nearly knocked him off his feet. He, who had never really given a thought to anyone’s feelings but his own, wanted to know her. She seemed ripe for the picking; he loved her pert, freckled nose. But he also knew he should proceed cautiously.

“Tell me about your daughter,” he said.

By Tuesday afternoon, Box had a phone call from Ted Field.

He said, “The tick panel was clean. It’s not Lyme, not babesiosis, not tularemia, thank God. Her symptoms are pretty wide-ranging and not inconsistent with a tick-borne disease, so I put her on a course of antibiotics anyway, just to be safe.”

“Okay,” Box said. “Thank you.”

“Her white blood cell count was high,” the doctor said. “She might want to go to Boston to get that checked out.”

“You know my wife,” Box said. “What are the chances she’ll go to Boston?”

“Slim to none. I know because I suggested it to her. I just don’t want to miss anything more serious.”

“Do you think it’s something more serious?” Box asked.

“Possibly?” Ted Field said. “Or it may be as simple as a wheat allergy. Gluten is the new bogeyman.”

Box hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment. Something more serious? Dabney never got sick. In his heart, Box believed that Dabney was suffering from stress. Anyone watching her work would have thought she was in charge of running a ten-billion-dollar multinational company: she took her job that seriously. And then there was the specter of the man on the bicycle. Clendenin Hughes-or maybe not. Maybe Box had been mistaken.

He picked up the phone to call Dabney at the Chamber. It had been so long since he’d called her at work that he had forgotten the number. Oh-3543, of course. There had been years and years when he had phoned Dabney at work every single day-to check in, to ask about the weather, to find out the score of Agnes’s field hockey game, to tell her he loved her. But possibly just as many years had passed since he’d grown too busy to call every day. He had classes, students, office hours, graduate assistants and department meetings to manage, his textbook to write and revise, articles to critique and publish, associate professors to advise, the crumbling markets in Europe to analyze and comment on (he appeared as a guest on CNBC two or three times a year). He’d also been receiving phone calls from the Department of the Treasury, which, although flattering, required intricate, time-consuming problem solving. He routinely complained that he needed four extra hours in each day. He started secretly to resent having to travel to Nantucket every weekend, and so he’d recently asked Dabney how she would feel if he spent one weekend a month immersed in work in Cambridge.

She had said, “Oh. That would be fine. I guess.”

She had said this with equanimity, but Box-although not gifted when it came to reading minds-figured out that it would not be fine. Or maybe it would be fine? Dabney was as self-sufficient and independent a woman as Box had ever known, and over the years, their union had settled into a comfortable arrangement. They were like a Venn diagram. She lived her life and he didn’t interfere-and vice versa. The space where they overlapped had grown more and more slender over the years. He assumed that this was normal, as was his waning sex drive. His nonexistent sex drive. He had considered going to a doctor and getting a pill, but that struck him as embarrassing, and beneath him. Dabney wasn’t complaining, anyway. Box figured that he and his wife had simply settled into the well-feathered nest of middle age.

Nina Mobley answered on the first ring. “Nantucket Chamber of Commerce.”

“Hello, Nina, it’s Box,” he said. “Is my wife there?”

“I’m sorry,” Nina said. “Who is this?”

“Box,” he said, feeling mildly annoyed. Though it had been aeons since he’d called. “John Boxmiller Beech. Dabney’s husband.”

“Box?” she said. “Is everything all right?”

“Nina,” Box said. “Is my wife there, please?”

Dabney came on the phone. “Is everything okay?”

“Yes, yes,” Box said. “ I just had a call from Ted Field, who told me you passed the tick test but that he put you on antibiotics anyway.”

“He did. But I’m not taking them. I feel much better.”

“If he prescribed them,” Box said, “then you’d better take them.”

“I feel much better,” Dabney repeated. “Why did he call you anyway? I’m the patient. You’re not my father. He shouldn’t have called you.”

Box was tempted to agree with her, patient confidentiality and whatnot. But he and Ted Field had rowed together at Harvard a million years earlier; they were friends. Box wondered if Ted had called because there really might be something more serious going on.

“He said your white blood count was high, and that you should probably go to Boston to get it checked out.”

“Not going to happen,” Dabney said.

“Or it might be a wheat allergy. Perhaps you should stop eating bread?”

“Box,” Dabney said. “I feel much better.”

He had been married to the woman for twenty-four years; he realized that no one told her what to do-but he did not like being dismissed.

“You’ll never guess who I saw at the Daffodil Parade when I was headed to find you. Can you guess?”

“Who?” Dabney said.

“I saw Clendenin Hughes!” The mock joy in his voice was grating even to his ears. “He was riding a bicycle!”

Dabney laughed without sounding at all amused. Maybe she thought he was kidding around, or maybe she thought he was being cruel.

“I have to go, darling,” she said. “I have work to do.”

Box had spent a year courting Dabney before they slept together. She had been keen about giving him the tour of the island and making the picnic-but as soon as he’d kissed her, after taking his first bite of her strawberry pie, she’d inched backward.

He’d said, “I’m sorry, is this not what you want?”

She had welled up with tears and that had made her even more fetching-her big brown eyes shining. “I want to want it,” she said.

At the time, he had not understood what that meant. He was an economist: he dealt in absolutes. But her inscrutable answer doubled his ardor. He decided he would do whatever it took to capture Dabney Kimball’s heart.

What he eventually learned was that Dabney Kimball’s heart was missing. It had been pillaged by Clendenin Hughes, a boy she had loved since she was a teenager. Hughes was Agnes’s father, although by the time Hughes found out that a child existed, he had already embarked on a new life overseas. Hughes had wanted Dabney to move to Thailand, but she couldn’t, because of the confines of her psyche. Instead, she decided to raise Agnes without one word or dollar from Hughes. Dabney convinced herself that she would be better off if she never heard from Clendenin Hughes again. And she hadn’t. But the fact of the matter was that Hughes had taken the tender, beating center of Dabney with him.

For most of that year, Box spent his weekends on Nantucket at the Brass Lantern Inn. He paid a month at a time for a room with a queen canopied bed and a chintz armchair, where he graded student papers. He grew accustomed to the smells of cinnamon-scented candles and the cheddar scones served at breakfast. The proprietor of the inn, Mrs. Annapale, discovered that Box was on the island in pursuit of Dabney Kimball. Mrs. Annapale had known Dabney since she was born and believed her to be a lost cause-not because of Clendenin Hughes but because the girl’s mother had abandoned her in a fancy hotel room when she was only eight years old.

“And you know,” Mrs. Annapale said, “people are never quite right after something like that happens.”

Box had triumphed solely because of his persistence. He showed up in the bitter cold of January and in the windy gray of March. He brought peonies and potted orchids for Dabney and stuffed animals and storybooks for Agnes. He read to Agnes, despite having no experience with children. He brought bottles of single-malt scotch for Officer Kimball and cannoli from the North End of Boston for Dabney’s grandmother, who soon allowed him to call her Grammie instead of “Mrs. Kimball.” He had won over the daughter, the father, and the grandmother, but Dabney remained just out of reach.

Then, in June, Box left to teach for the first time at the London School of Economics, and he missed three consecutive weekends on Nantucket. When he finally returned to the Brass Lantern, he found Dabney waiting for him in his room, sitting on his queen canopied bed.

She said, “I was afraid you’d never come back.”

They made love for the first time that night. Box knew it had been a long while since Dabney had been with a man, and he knew the only man she had ever been with was Clendenin Hughes. Clendenin Hughes was sex to Dabney, and as much as Box wanted to set out to change her mind in a swift, masterful conquering, he proceeded slowly and gently. And she didn’t shy away. She cried out in pleasure, and then she asked him to do it all again the next morning.

He proposed over cheddar scones.

That had been twenty-five years earlier. John Boxmiller Beech was an economist, his area of expertise was guns and butter, supply and demand. He was the first to admit, he knew nothing about the mysteries of the human heart.

Nina Mobley, married seven years, divorced seven years

I am negative proof. I am the one Dabney tried to warn. But did I listen?

I had been working at the Chamber of Commerce as Dabney’s assistant for two years when I started dating George Mobley. I had lived on Nantucket my entire life and I had known George forever. He was five years ahead of me in school, but his sister was only a year ahead of me, and his father was a scalloper who also ran the island’s most popular fish market, where my mother was a faithful patron. (Like all good, old-school Catholics, we ate baked scrod every Friday.) I knew the Mobleys, everyone knew the Mobleys, but I never gave George a thought. I knew he had gone to Plymouth State, and studied statistics, but then he headed down to Islamorada to work on a fishing charter. He had ended up a fisherman like his father, but a far more glamorous kind-sailfish, marlin, fish you hang on the wall.

Then George’s father died in spectacularly tragic fashion-he was thrown off the bow of his boat during a storm, his leg caught in the ropes, and he drowned. George came back to the island for the funeral, which I attended with my mother, and at the reception afterward I started talking to George. It was the deep freeze of January, but George was a golden tan color from his year of fishing on blue water. He had a kind of celebrity, being the bereaved. I was honored that George would talk to me.

I never asked for Dabney’s opinion of George Mobley, and she didn’t offer it. George would stop by the office on Friday afternoons to take me to the Anglers’ Club for appetizers. He had moved back to Nantucket to take care of his mother and sister. Dabney was always her friendly self, saying, “Don’t you two look cute! Have fun now!”

But when George proposed, Dabney chewed on her pearls for a long time, instead of jumping up to congratulate me. And I thought, Oh boy, I know what that means.

Dabney spent the next six months hinting that I should cancel the wedding. But I was in love. I told Dabney that I didn’t care about the green fog. I would not be talked out of marrying George.

At the Methodist church, as Dabney, who was serving as my maid of honor, arranged the hem of my dress, she said, “Nina, my darling, I’m going to tell you this now while I still can. I don’t think George is the man for you. I think you should run out the back door. In fact, I’ll go with you. We can go to Murray’s for a bottle of rum and get drunk instead. We can go dancing at the Chicken Box.”

I looked down at Dabney and laughed nervously. I knew Dabney was right-and not because Dabney had been blessed with a sixth sense, but because I felt it inside myself.

“Well,” I said. “It’s too late now.”

George and I bought a house on Hooper Farm Road. In a span of seven years, I had five children: two sons, then a daughter, then twin sons. George’s mother and unmarried sister lived down the street, so I was able to continue working at the Chamber. I had to work-we needed the money and I needed the time out of the house for my sanity. Things were crazy but I was happy enough, and I was tickled to prove Dabney wrong. The green haze had been an illusion, caused by Dabney’s own prejudice.

But then things went south with our finances. After doing a little digging, I discovered that George was a regular at Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods, he had a bookie in Vegas, he had gambled away all our savings, and the kids’ college funds. He had taken out a line of credit on our house and after three missed payments, the bank repossessed it. George and I and the kids were forced to move in with George’s mother and sister. I lasted for fourteen months, then I found a year-round rental and left George.

“You were right,” I said to Dabney. “I never should have married him.”

“You have the kids,” Dabney said.

I hid my face in my hands.

It was amazing to me that I could know someone my whole life, I could live with him for nine years, sleep next to him in bed every night, give birth to five of his progeny, hold his hand during the Lord’s Prayer at Mass, high-five him when our eldest son got his first base hit, believe every word that came out of his mouth-including the made-up reasons for his trips off-island every Sunday-and still not know him at all. The only thing being married to George Mobley had taught me was that other people are a mystery. And the people who lie and keep secrets are always the people you’d least expect.

Dabney

She lasted three days without giving in.

Box returned to Harvard for the end of his semester: he had exams, graduation, then the class reunions, including his own fortieth.

Dabney lied to Ted Field, and to Box, and to Nina, telling them she felt better. She did not feel better. She felt worse. She was exhausted, she had no appetite, and she had pains all through her middle-shooting pains as well as a general ache. But this wasn’t something antibiotics could cure. She had been infected by Clen’s return.

Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about him: Clen wearing Chuck Taylors like a teenager, Clen riding his bike like a teenager, Clen with one arm. I have suffered a pretty serious loss…

Dabney had loved Clendenin Hughes since she was fourteen years old, when he told their English teacher, Mr. Kane, that Flannery O’Connor wrote like an angry, lonely woman. Dabney could picture Clen in his jeans and his flannel shirt and his ratty Chuck Taylors, his hair too long, the inflamed pimples on his temple, his knee constantly jogging up and down because his body held energy that could not be contained. He had been on the island for only a couple of weeks at the time of his parry with Mr. Kane. Mr. Kane had said to Clen, And how do you know what an angry, lonely woman sounds like? And Clen had said, I live with one. The rest of the class laughed, but his answer had struck Dabney as painfully honest. Then and there, she decided she was his.

Dabney had been matchmaking since the ninth grade, but what nobody knew was that the first couple she had set up was herself, with Clen. On the day he spoke out in Mr. Kane’s English class, Dabney’s field of vision had turned pink. She had thought there was something wrong with her, possibly a migraine, but as days passed, she realized that the pink appeared only when she was in Clen’s presence-and so it became clear that the pink meant she had fallen madly and forever in love. The second time she saw this pink it was surrounding Ginger O’Brien as Ginger watched Phil Bruschelli play basketball in the high school gym. Ginger and Phil had been married for twenty-nine years. All the couples Dabney had set up had been bathed in luscious pink and all were still together-perfect matches, forty-two of them.

How had she been wrong about Clen?

Did the magic of it not apply to her own self, perhaps?

It had started out well. Dabney had pursued Clen’s friendship; she initiated conversations, first about books and then later about more personal things. In December of that year, a surprise early snowfall came to Nantucket, and Dabney invited Clen to go tobogganing. He had kissed her at the top of the hill at Dead Horse Valley, and that was that. They had been together for nine years before Clen left for Thailand-all through high school, through four years of long-distance while Dabney was at Harvard and Clen at Yale, and then back together on Nantucket for a year, both of them living with their respective parents, Dabney managing a T-shirt shop in town, Clen writing for the Nantucket Standard.

That final year had been difficult. Dabney finally felt safe and content, home and at peace on her island, but Clen had been restless and angry, still the boy whose energy could not be contained.

Had Dabney thought their relationship would last? She hadn’t been able to imagine the alternative.

But it had not lasted, no, not at all. Clen had left for Thailand, and there had followed twenty-seven years of silence. And yet something had lasted because Dabney couldn’t stop thinking about the man. It was absurd! Dabney was furious with herself. No one else could control her. She would not go to Clen today, or tomorrow. She would not go to him, ever. But certainly he knew where she lived? Everyone on Nantucket knew that Dabney Kimball Beech lived in the fish lots, on Charter Street. He could look her up in the phone book; she was plainly listed. Furthermore, he could come walking into the Chamber whenever he pleased.

It was for this reason, or so she told herself, that Dabney left work on the third afternoon and drove out the Polpis Road. She would see Clen, say hello and goodbye, and leave. If she bumped into him on the street, it would be awkward, but at least the initial contact would be out of the way.

However, as she approached the mailbox marked 432, she hit the gas rather than the brake, and sped right past. She kept going-past Sesachacha Pond, past Sankaty Head Golf Course, through the village of Sconset, until she was back on the Milestone Road heading west. The top was down on the Impala and she howled into the open sky. She felt like she had won some kind of game or contest. Clendenin Hughes wanted to see her! But she would not go!

She tossed and turned that night with the knowledge that Clendenin Hughes was on the island, in his bed. She knew he was thinking of her.

She got up several times to peer out the window to see if he was standing in the street in front of her house. He had never seen her Impala. When he’d left, three cars ago, she was still driving the Nova.

So many years had passed. She knew from reading about him when he won the Pulitzer that he had never married or had other children.

She thought about taking a sleeping pill. Box had some in the medicine cabinet left over from his knee replacement, but instead Dabney lay wide-eyed in bed. She was too antsy to read-even Jane Austen wouldn’t soothe her-and she had no appetite. She felt the velvet dark of four o’clock change into the birdsong hour of five o’clock, which slid into the first pearly light of six o’clock. She went downstairs and made coffee. She put on clothes for her power walk-her gray yoga pants and a crimson T-shirt emblazoned with a white H. (Box kept her outfitted like a faculty wife, though she had been to campus only twice since she’d graduated.) She slipped on her headband, drank her coffee standing up, and tied her sneakers. She set out onto the streets of Nantucket an hour earlier than normal, which wasn’t like her, but that stood to reason as she was not feeling at all herself.

She arrived back at the house at quarter past seven, energized. She ate a piece of whole grain toast with blueberry jam and half a banana. Tomorrow, she would eat the other half of the banana over her shredded wheat. Everything was fine, normal.

It was only in the shower that she started to cry. The weight of the sleepless night and the enormous burden of the situation poured over her. She got out of the shower, threw on her yoga pants and a T-shirt, and, with her hair still wet, she climbed into her car.

He was sitting on the porch of the cottage in a granny rocker, smoking a cigarette, with a gun across his lap like a character in a John Wayne Western. His beard made him look like a hermit, or a serial killer.

When Dabney stepped out of the car, he didn’t seem at all surprised. He dropped the cigarette into a jar of water at his feet and it hissed upon extinguishing.

“Hey, Cupe,” he said.

Hey, Cupe.

His voice. She had not accounted for how hearing his voice would affect her. She feared she might cry, then she realized that crying was far too mild a reaction. She would do something else. She would melt, or turn into a pillar of salt, or spontaneously combust. What happened to a person placed in a situation like this? Box might try to turn this into a formula: if one started with the amount Dabney had loved Clen, then took its derivative and divided it by twenty-seven years, one would certainly end with only a small decimal of 1 percent. Dabney should feel nothing, or practically nothing. She should be able to say, Hey, Beast-because in their long-ago life, that had been their private nomenclature, Cupe and Beast-and shake Clen’s hand or give him a gentle hug because of his arm, and say, So, how have you been?

Dabney briefly closed her eyes: pink. Pink was normally a cause for celebration. But not today.

Clen descended the porch steps and stood before her, and she was funneled into the green glen and weak tea of his Scottish hazel eyes. He was older, and bigger, and lopsided, but the sound of his voice and the beauty of his eyes threatened to bring Dabney to her knees. Their love had been a castle, the castle had been reduced to rubble, and Dabney had cleared the rubble away teaspoon by teaspoon for more than a quarter century until she was sure there was nothing left but a barren clearing inside her.

Why then this rush of feeling, a molten stream of pure silver desire, and a golden glinting of what she feared was love. It had been so many years since she’d felt love like this-love she had known only with Clendenin, love she had forsaken but that she had secretly hoped and prayed would return-that she barely recognized it.

Love.

She couldn’t speak. It was just as it had been when she saw him in Sconset on his bicycle. She could not get air. Was she going to faint again? She did not feel well. The return of Clendenin Hughes was killing her.

“You came,” he said.

His voice.

She broke. Sobbing, tears, she felt raw, exposed, and human. Before the e-mail had arrived in her in-box (subject line: Hello), it had been months since Dabney had cried. The death of their dog, Henry. And before that it had been years-tears of joy, Agnes’s graduation from high school, again from college.

“You are still so beautiful,” Clen said. “Exactly as I pictured you. You look just as you did when you stood on the wharf as my ferry pulled away.”

“Stop it!” Dabney screamed. She was shocked at the volume and pitch of her voice, shocked that her voice worked at all. But really, how dare he start out by conjuring the worst day of her life! He had been standing at the railing of the Steamship on a blindingly blue September day. He had waved at Dabney, shouting out, I love you, Cupe! I love you! Dabney had been unable to shout or wave back. She had stood still as a post, mute with sorrow and fear and regret-and anger at herself for the weakness and failings of her psyche. She could not go with him. She felt as perhaps the first Dabney-Dabney Margaret Wright-had felt when she stood in nearly the same spot and watched her husband, Warren, set sail on the whaling ship Lexington.

Dabney Margaret Wright would never see her husband again.

Dabney Kimball had seen pink with Clendenin for so many years that she had been convinced they would end up together. But watching him disappear toward the horizon shook her confidence. She thought, I will never see Clendenin Hughes again.

Yet, here he was.

He moved to embrace her. She batted at him, pummeled his chest-still being careful of his missing arm; weird how Dabney could be afraid of something that wasn’t there-but Clen pulled her in with his one strong arm, brought her close. She could smell him, he smelled the same, and he was still the same relentless bastard. He would not quit until the world saw things his way.

“Let go of me!” Dabney said.

“No,” he said. “I will not let go. I waited far too long for this moment. I have wanted nothing more in this life than to hold you again.”

“Stop!” Dabney said.

“Just relax,” Clen said. “You can walk away and never come back, but please just give me a moment to hold you and give you one kiss.”

Dabney succumbed. She hugged him fiercely around the middle and inhaled his scent and felt a rush of desire so strong it made her dizzy, and she wobbled. She felt Clen’s mouth in the part of her hair, and the warmth of this was unbearable. She raised her face to him and then they were kissing. It was insane, reckless kissing, kissing like Dabney had never known-but that wasn’t quite true. It was kissing like Dabney had known only with Clendenin when they were teenagers, when the wonder of kissing had first entered their lives. Their mouths, lips, tongues were searching, hungry, aching. It was that kind of kissing, so old it was new again, and with the kissing came desire so intense it hurt. He was instantly hard against her leg. She remembered sex with him, how desperate and mind-altering it had been, how it had felt like the earth was tilting, how she had howled with the first shuddering orgasms of her young body, and how he had placed the side of his hand into her mouth for her to bite so that her cries would be stifled. He would later show her the teeth marks and they would climb onto their bikes and ride to the pharmacy for strawberry frappes, Clen grinning like a fool, Dabney sweetly sore and tender against her bicycle seat.

So many things she had not allowed herself to remember.

She pulled away and there was a sucking sound, like a vacuum seal being broken. The sun went behind the clouds.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can,” he said. He was short of breath. “You just did.”

“That was…I don’t know what that was.”

He growled a laugh. Beast. She had called him Beast because of his size, and his unruly dark hair, and his noises, and the ferocity that surfaced in him when he got riled. When she was first getting to know him, he reminded her of a character from a fairy tale-not an animal per se, but not quite human, either. He had arrived on Nantucket wounded from his life before, in Attleboro. His alcoholic father had drunk himself to death at the kitchen table. Clen had been wild and strange, and the smartest person Dabney had ever known.

“I’m married,” she said.

“I don’t care,” he said.

No, of course he wouldn’t care. He had bucked against convention and authority and the rules the entire time Dabney had known him. She assumed this was still true. He had graduated as valedictorian of their high school class, but had barely escaped being expelled for losing his temper with their history teacher, Mr. Druby, over the philosophical stands of Malcolm X. Clen had used profanity in his outrage, and he had called Mr. Druby an ignoramus (which Dabney had thought sounded like some kind of dinosaur), and it was only the ensuing wrath of Clen’s mother, Helen Hughes (for everyone, including the principal, was afraid of Helen Hughes), that had saved Clen.

“I don’t care if you don’t care,” Dabney said. “I care. Box is a good man.”

“The economist,” Clen said with derision.

“Yes.”

He was studying her. She couldn’t meet his eyes; it was too dangerous. Green glen and weak tea, Scottish hazel, the most mesmerizing eyes she had ever seen. Dabney knew this because they were also Agnes’s eyes.

Oh, God, Agnes.

Dabney said, “I have to go.”

“Come inside,” he said. “See my place.”

“No,” she said.

“Just come look,” he said. “Then you can leave. It’s a step up from the shack behind the Lobster Trap.”

The shack where Clen used to live with his mother, who waited tables at the restaurant. Dabney had lost her virginity in that shack, at Christmastime of her junior year in high school, while Helen Hughes had been off-island, shopping.

She didn’t exactly agree, but she found herself following Clen up the steps to the porch of the cottage.

“What’s with the gun?” she said.

“BB gun,” he said. “I’ve been shooting one-handed at the crows.”

Inside, the cottage was like a very large five-star hotel room, done up in a rustic beach theme. King bed with Frette linens, honey onyx marble in the bathroom. There was a well-appointed galley kitchen and a long pine table where a computer hummed. Legal pads and pens and newspapers were strewn about, anchored down by half-a-dozen dirty coffee cups. There was also a highball glass containing a scant inch of what Dabney knew was bourbon.

He told her that the cottage and the main house belonged to a wealthy Washington family who came to Nantucket only the first three weeks of August, and then again for a week at Thanksgiving, when Joe Biden was a regular guest at dinner. The main house had six bedrooms, Clen said, a gourmet kitchen, and a swimming pool. The family was allowing Clen to live rent-free because he had won a Pulitzer and because he had agreed to do the simple caretaking duties he could physically handle during the eleven months the big house lay fallow. This basically meant that Clen was to make sure the house didn’t burn to the ground or get robbed. He was to make sure the thermostat stayed at sixty-five degrees so that the pipes didn’t freeze.

“I want you to come back tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll make you lunch.”

She said, “I can’t come back.”

“Yes, you can.”

“I’m married, Clen.”

“I saw your husband, the professor, on the street in Sconset, you know. He was hurrying after you, I supposed.”

“Yes,” Dabney said. “I fainted.”

“Fainted?” Clen said. “Because of me?”

“Well, seeing you didn’t help.”

“But you came here today, to see me. And if you came today, you can come tomorrow.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because!” she said.

“Because why?”

“Will you stop?” she said.

“No. I will not stop. I returned to Nantucket for you. Because I haven’t stopped loving you for one second.”

It was her turn to growl, but her growl sounded like the final bleat of a lamb about to be slaughtered. “I don’t believe you.”

“I dated one other woman,” Clen said. “Her name was Mi Linh, Vietnamese woman, beautiful.”

Dabney flinched.

“Our relationship lasted five years,” he said. “We lived together in Hanoi. At the Chinese New Year, I bought her a strand of pearls. She wore the pearls to dinner at the Hotel Metropole. They looked fine on her, but I asked her to take them off. I asked her never to wear them again.” He coughed, and even his coughing was familiar. He had started smoking the day he got to New Haven. Dabney hated herself for holding on to all these details. “She threw them in Hoan Kiem Lake. An offering for the turtle.”

“Lovely,” Dabney said.

“I was glad to see the pearls disappear,” he said. “Pearls were you. Mi Linh wasn’t you, and never would be. We broke up a few weeks later.”

Dabney let the last words of that story float away on the air.

“Why now?’ she said.

Coughing. Deep breath. “My arm.”

She nodded. “What happened?”

“If you come back tomorrow,” Clen said, “I’ll tell you.”

She opened her mouth to say, I’m not coming back tomorrow, but she saw little point in continuing the verbal tug-of-war with him. She turned to go.

“I’m going to make you take your words back,” he said.

“What words?” she said.

A beat of silence. She made the mistake of meeting his eyes. Weak legs. But no. Forbearance.

“You know what words,” he said.

And then, suddenly, she did know.

“Goodbye, Clen,” she said.

Dabney called Nina at home and asked her to come into the office right away, even though it was barely eight thirty. Across the street, the newspaper van was unloading at the Hub, but aside from that, Main Street was quiet.

Nina climbed the stairs heavily, then perched on the edge of her desk, her expression that of a person about to jump off a building. “Am I being fired?” she asked.

“What?” Dabney said. “No. Gosh, no. Why would you ever think that?”

“In eighteen years, you have never asked me to come in early,” Nina said.

This was true. If there had been a need to come to work early, Dabney had been the one to do it.

“I’m not firing you, Nina,” Dabney said. “I would never fire you.” Nina accepted the cup of coffee that Dabney had gotten her from the pharmacy. She took the white plastic top off the cup and blew. Normally, Dabney brought Nina a cup of ice, too, but today she was so nervous that it had slipped her mind. It hadn’t occurred to Dabney that Nina might be nervous, too.

“What is it, then?” Nina said. She squinted at Dabney as if maybe the answer were written in small print on Dabney’s forehead.

Dabney began to pace the small office. She knew every inch of it by heart: the wall of brochures of each of the Chamber members, the towering stacks of Chamber guides, the photographs of Ram Pasture at sunset and Great Point Lighthouse, taken by Abigail Pease, the frayed oriental rug that Dabney had rescued from her father’s house on Prospect Street, the two desks that had been salvaged from the old police station. She and Nina referred to them as their Dragnet desks. Dabney worked at her father’s old desk; she remembered sitting at it as a girl as her father processed paperwork for a DUI, or joked with Shannon, the pretty, blond dispatcher. The Chamber office was her home, but it offered her zero comfort right now.

Dabney said, “We’ve worked together for so long that you probably think you know everything about me.”

“Almost everything,” Nina said.

“Almost everything,” Dabney said. “However, I’m pretty sure what I say next will shock you.” Dabney sipped her coffee. Diana at the pharmacy made Dabney’s coffee perfectly-cream, six sugars, two dashes of cinnamon-every single morning. But today, this also offered zero comfort.

“What?” Nina asked. “What will shock me?”

Was Dabney really going to say it? She had been taught the lyrics to “American Pie” by an Irish chambermaid named May at the Park Plaza Hotel decades earlier. Singing it always calmed Dabney’s nerves. Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

“Clendenin Hughes has come back to the island,” Dabney said.

Nina spilled coffee down the front of her blouse. This, Dabney had predicted. She handed Nina a wad of napkins.

“It gets worse,” Dabney said. “I went to see him this morning. As in, a little while ago.”

“Oh my gosh golly, golly gosh,” Nina said. There were long seconds of processing this; Dabney watched Nina work through her shock. “Well.” Pause. “Really.” Pause. “Of course you went to see him.” Pause. “How could you not?”

Dabney and Nina had not been friends when Dabney and Clen split, but you didn’t work across from someone for eighteen years and not tell her all the secrets of your heart.

Nina said, “And did you…”

Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry. “I kissed him,” Dabney whispered.

“You did?” Nina said. She did some deep Lamaze-type breathing, which she usually saved for phone conversations with her ex-husband, George. “Wow. Wowowowow. This is big. This is huge. Do you remember five or six years ago when I asked you…”

“Of course I remember,” Dabney said.

If Clendenin Hughes ever came back to Nantucket, Nina had asked, what would you do?

And Dabney had said, I will stand on my head and spit in my shoe.

“So now what?” Nina asked.

“He asked me to go over there tomorrow,” Dabney said. “He said he would make me lunch.”

“More likely he wants to eat you for lunch,” Nina said.

“Nina!”

“I think you should go,” Nina said. “It’s not like we’re talking about some cute waiter from the Boarding House. We’re talking about Clendenin Hughes. Your first true love.”

My only true love, Dabney thought. Then she hated herself.

“I can’t do it,” Dabney said. “I won’t do it.”

“I hate to break this to you, Dabney,” Nina said. “But you’re not the first person in the history of the world to think about having a love affair. I almost did it myself.”

“You did not!” Dabney said.

“With Jack Copper,” Nina said. “I was at the Anglers’ Club one night when George was off-island, gambling, although I didn’t know that at the time. Jack and I were talking and drinking, and drinking and talking-and then I said I had to leave and he said he’d walk me to my car. He kissed me good night in the parking lot and…it could have gone further. He wanted it to, and so did I. But I stopped it.”

Dabney exhaled. “Because you are a good and faithful person.”

“I’ve always regretted it,” Nina said.

“Have you?” Dabney said.

“I have,” Nina said. “Sometimes you regret the things you do, but they’re over and done. Regretting the things you didn’t do is tougher, because they’re still out there…haunting you. The what-ifs.”

Dabney considered this for a second. It was true: Clendenin Hughes had haunted her all these years. Not going to Bangkok haunted her. The what-may-have-been haunted her.

Nina said, “I have to say, I’m relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“I really thought you were going to fire me. Or tell me something awful, like you were dying.”

My only true love. Dabney felt like she was dying. Her insides were in an agonizing knot. She reached for her pearls and started gnawing. Then the office phone rang and Dabney and Nina both sat down at their desks for business as usual.

Before she answered the phone, Dabney said, “You won’t say a word about this, right?”

Nina said, “I’m insulted that you had to ask.”

The following day at eleven thirty, an e-mail popped up in Dabney’s in-box from Clendenin Hughes. Subject line: Are you coming to lunch?

Dabney clicked on the e-mail, but there was nothing else to read.

She deleted the e-mail, then deleted it from her deleted file.

The following Monday, she saw Clendenin’s bicycle on Main Street. It was leaning up against a tree right in Dabney’s line of vision. If Clen knew how her desk was positioned in the office, he would have realized that she couldn’t look out her window without seeing the bicycle.

Dabney stood up and stretched.

She said to Nina, “Do you mind if I open the window?”

“Be my guest,” Nina said.

Dabney threw up the sash and peered out to get a closer look. Was it Clen’s bicycle? Silver ten-speed with the ratty tape unraveling from the curved handlebars. A relic. Definitely Clen’s bicycle.

“It’s balmy,” Nina said.

“Huh?” Dabney said.

He had left it there on purpose, she decided. To taunt her.

She sat back down at her desk. She had packed herself a lovely BLT on toasted Portuguese bread for lunch, using the first hothouse tomatoes from Bartlett Farm. But she couldn’t eat a thing. She still felt awful. In the morning, she decided, she would start the course of antibiotics that Dr. Field had prescribed.

She said, “I’m going to run some errands.”

“Errands?” Nina said.

“I’m going to light a candle at church,” Dabney said.

Nina squinted at her. “What?”

“For my father’s birthday.”

“Your father’s birthday was last week,” Nina said.

“I know,” Dabney said. “And I forgot to light a candle. And I need some thread from the sewing center.”

“Thread?” Nina said.

“My Bermuda bag is missing a button,” Dabney said.

“You don’t know how to sew a button,” Nina said. “Bring it to me. I’ll do it.”

Dabney signed out on the log, writing “errands.” “I’ll be right back,” she said.

When Dabney got down to the street, she headed straight for Clen’s bicycle. He hadn’t even bothered to lock it up; he was still living in Nantucket 1987. Anyone might steal it. Dabney considered climbing on it herself and pedaling away.

Then she realized how difficult it would be to lock up a bike with only one arm, and she felt awful.

She looked around. Where was he? He had parked in front of the pharmacy. Was he at the lunch counter, having a strawberry frappe? She poked her head in.

Diana, a stunning West Indian with her head wrapped in a hot-pink bandanna, saw Dabney and waved. “Hey, lady!”

The hot pink caught Dabney’s eye. Pink pink pink. But Clen wasn’t at the counter. Dabney felt a stab of disappointment.

Dabney waved and said, “Hello, lovey, goodbye, lovey, I have to dash!”

“Busy lady!” Diana said.

Dabney hurried down the street to the Hub. Clen and his newspapers; of course, of course he was at the Hub. Dabney straightened her headband. The day was balmy, and she feared she was perspiring. Just the walk down the street had left her winded and a little dizzy. Tomorrow, the antibiotics.

Dabney stepped into the Hub, one of her favorite spots in town, with its smell of newsprint and penny candy. Greeting cards, magazines, fake Nantucket Lightship baskets, buckets of seashells and starfish, Christmas ornaments, saltwater taffy.

No Clen.

She left the Hub and stood on the corner. Where was he? She had been so strong, she had deleted his e-mail, she had not driven back out the Polpis Road, she had not given in to temptation, but it had taken nothing more than seeing the bicycle to start her chasing him.

And what would she do when she found him? What would she say?

She would say: I want you to leave. There’s no reason for you to be here. You said you came back for me, but your mere presence on this island is making me…ill. Ill, Clen. I can’t handle it. I’m sorry, I do realize it’s a free country, but you have to go.

She gazed down Federal Street.

Post office? Was he mailing a letter back to Vietnam, to beautiful Mi Linh?

Dabney was jealous of Mi Linh, a woman who had thrown a perfectly good strand of pearls into a lake for a turtle. Surely that had been a joke?

Dabney headed to Saint Mary’s to light a candle for her father. Her father had never really liked Clendenin; her father had found him smug. Her father used to say, That boy is too smart for his own good.

Dabney walked up the ramp of the church, holding on to the hand railing. She was sweating. One place she was certain not to see Clendenin Hughes was the Catholic church.

Cool, dim, quiet, peaceful: the inside of the church was a salve. Dabney inserted two dollar bills into the collection box and said a prayer for her father. Then, something she had never, ever done before: she fed the box two more dollars and said a prayer for her mother.

Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

She emerged from the church feeling calm, light, and virtuous.

When she headed back up Main Street, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

Clen’s bicycle was gone.

Exasperating!

That night, she couldn’t sleep.

The following night, no sleep.

The third night, at two o’clock in the morning, she called Box. He answered the phone on the eleventh ring. Anyone in her right mind would have realized the poor man was asleep and hung up.

“Professor Beech,” he said. He must have thought the call was a drunk student who had mustered the courage to complain about a grade.

“Do you love me?” Dabney asked.

“What?” Box said. “Dabney? What is it? What’s wrong?”

“Do you love me?” she said.

“Yes. Of course I love you.”

“Don’t ‘of course’ me,” Dabney said. “Tell me something real. Tell me how you really feel.”

“What on earth is wrong with you? Did you have a dream?”

“We aren’t close anymore,” Dabney said. “You’re always working! We never have sex anymore.”

“Sex?” Box said, as though he’d never heard the word before. “You do realize that I have to administer final exams to three hundred students in the morning, right?”

“I don’t give a hoot about your three hundred students!” Dabney said. “I want to know if you love me. If you desire me.”

There was a pause. Then a sigh. “Yes, darling, I love you. You are my heart’s desire.”

“Am I?” Dabney said.

“Yes, Dabney. You are.”

“Okay,” Dabney said, but she was not placated.

“Good night,” Box said.

Dabney hung up.

She woke up in the morning exhausted and anxious, which was not good, because it was the day that she and Nina were interviewing job candidates. They had enough money in their budget to hire two information assistants and pay them twenty dollars an hour to answer the phones, which would start ringing nonstop the Thursday before Memorial Day.

One of the assistants would be Celerie Truman, who had worked at the Chamber the summer before. Celerie-pronounced like the underappreciated vegetable-was the most enthusiastic information assistant Dabney had hired in twenty-two years. Celerie had been a cheerleader at the University of Minnesota and had discovered Nantucket through her college roommate. She was the kind of peppy individual who could shout cheers in a stadium of sixty thousand people while wearing shorts and a halter top in minus-thirty-degree weather. And she had turned out to be a magnificent ambassador for Nantucket. Certain visitors had stopped by the Chamber office just to meet Celerie because she had been so helpful on the phone.

Dabney was relieved to have someone as knowledgeable and on the ball as Celerie back in the office. No training necessary. Celerie was a disciple of the Dabney Way of Doing Things. By the end of last summer, she had even started coming to work wearing a strand of pearls.

They had to hire only one other person. Nina had placed a classified ad, and this had garnered the usual hundred applicants. Nina, through years of experience, had winnowed the list of potential candidates down to three of the most promising for herself and Dabney to interview.

“The first guy is twenty-six years old, between years of dental school at Penn. He started coming to Nantucket when he was ten. His parents own a house in Pocomo, so he’ll live with them.”

“Dental school,” Dabney said, yawning. The lack of sleep had left ugly black circles under her eyes, and she thought her skin was turning a funny color. “That’s a first.” She checked with Nina for confirmation. “Right? We’ve never had a dental student?”

“Law school, medical school, Rhodes scholar, the guy writing his doctoral dissertation on the Betty Ford Clinic after having been there three times, the wacky woman who was writing the Broadway musical…”

“Ruthie,” Dabney said. “She brought the worst-smelling lunches.”

Nina held up her hand. “Let’s not talk about it.”

“A dental student sounds good,” Dabney said. “Clean, hygienic. Not like the guy from Denmark who never bathed.”

“Franzie,” Nina said. “Let’s not talk about him, either.”

“What’s this kid’s name?” Dabney asked.

“Riley Alsopp,” Nina said.

Dabney had been hiring information assistants for twenty-two years and her instincts were spot-on; despite smelly lunches and body odor, Dabney had never actually had to fire anyone. As soon as she met Riley Alsopp and noted his excellent handshake and heard his pleasant speaking voice and took in his brilliant smile, and his needlepoint belt featuring hammerhead sharks (“My mother made it for me”) and the copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest under his arm (“I’ve decided to go back and read the classics this summer”), Dabney’s mood instantly improved. She knew there would be no reason to interview any other candidates. When they were finished with Riley, she could go home and take a nap.

She sat Riley Alsopp down, brought him a cold bottle of water, admired his thick brown hair and his tapered fingers and his battered boat shoes, and asked the standard first question.

“Why do you want to work at the Chamber of Commerce, Riley?”

She closed her eyes for a second and thought: Please do not say, “Because I want to work in town.” Please do not say, “Because it seems easy.” Please do not say, “Because I worked as a waiter at the Languedoc last summer and I got caught stealing from the till.” Please, please, please do not say, “Because Celerie Truman is my girlfriend and we thought it would be fun to work together.”

He took a breath and laughed a little. “I guess there’s only one reason. Because I love Nantucket.”

Dabney beamed at Nina and Nina squinted back at Dabney and gave a nearly imperceptible nod. Dabney knew what Nina was thinking: We have interviewed scores of candidates together and only a handful have ever given us this simple, perfect answer.

Dabney said, “You’re hired!”

“Really?” Riley said. “Just like that? I memorized all these facts and statistics about the island. Don’t you want to hear them?”

“Nope,” Dabney said. “I trust you. But I do have two questions: when can you start and when do you have to leave?”

“I can start tomorrow,” Riley said. “And I go back to dental school on September fifteenth, so I can work until the twelfth or so.”

“Wonderful!” Dabney said. What a bonus! Most information assistants said they could work until Labor Day, but then their grandmother would die sometime around the twentieth of August, and either Dabney or Nina got stuck answering the phone for the remainder of the summer.

They all agreed that Riley would start work the following Monday, he would bring two forms of ID for his W-2, and he would meet Celerie.

As Riley Alsopp was walking toward the door, he stopped at Dabney’s desk and picked up a framed photograph of Agnes.

“Is this your daughter?” he asked. “Or, wait…your sister?”

Dabney tried not to let any gloating show on her face. People always mistook her and Agnes for sisters.

“My daughter, Agnes.”

Riley Alsopp stared at the photograph. It was an artsy black-and-white shot of Agnes standing at the top of Main Street in the snow. She wore a white knit hat and gloves, and her long, dark hair cascaded over her white ski parka. “She’s beautiful,” Riley said. “Like, really beautiful.”

Dabney studied Riley for a moment, and something inside her unfolded. “Thank you,” she said. She, of course, thought Agnes was the loveliest creature ever to grace the earth, but Dabney was always surprised when other people called Agnes beautiful. Dabney sometimes felt almost jealous, believing Agnes was hers alone to appreciate. But Dabney was pleased by Riley Alsopp’s compliment. She could tell that it was genuine.

“Do you have a girlfriend?” Dabney asked. As soon as she asked, she realized the question was inappropriate and absolutely none of her business.

“I’m free as a bird,” Riley said. “The only two females in my life are my mother and my chocolate Lab, Sadie.”

His mother and his chocolate Lab, Sadie? What a doll! It took everything Dabney had not to swoon.

Box

He stood at the lectern and read aloud the standard exam procedure while Miranda Gilbert passed out blue books to the squirming, anxious Econ 10 students. Box was dreadfully old-fashioned, he knew; nearly everyone else at Harvard administered exams via the Internet, but Box refused. Next year, he would have to capitulate. Next year, he supposed, the company that made blue books would be out of business.

He yawned, more loudly than he meant to, into the microphone. One of the students in the back row called out, “Late night, Professor Beech?”

A muted chuckle rippled through the room. Miranda turned to offer him a sympathetic smile, and Box said, “You all fail,” which roused genuine laughter.

He had not been able to fall back asleep after the phone call from Dabney.

Tell me something real, she had said. Tell me how you really feel.

He had really felt annoyed, and unamused. Two o’clock in the morning! Had she been drinking? he wondered. The call was entirely out of character. Dabney had never, ever, not once in twenty-four years of marriage, done anything like that.

We’re not close anymore. We don’t have sex anymore. I want to know if you love me. If you desire me.

Normally, after the Econ 10 exam, Box took Miranda to lunch; it was the only time during the semester that he did so. He liked to keep their relationship professional; this was really the best way, especially since they spent so much time together. It was always Miranda who tried to forge something like a friendship. She occasionally coaxed Box out to see a movie, which he agreed to only when the solitude was getting to him. They dined together with colleagues, but never alone, except for this one lunch. Box didn’t want people to talk, although he assumed people talked anyway. Miranda was a very beautiful woman, smart as a wizard, and she’d worked for him for four years, demonstrating her loyalty, patience, and steadfastness. Box could recognize all her enticing qualities without feeling anything romantic. His only mistress was his work, his reputation, his career. But it was helpful to have boundaries.

The phone call from Dabney was bothering him so much that he decided it was best, all the way around, if he passed on lunch with Miranda.

“I’m afraid the chap in row thirty-five was correct,” Box said. “I didn’t sleep well last night. I have to forego our usual lunch, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.”

“No apology necessary,” Miranda said, though her rich, plummy voice was clipped. He had hurt her feelings, he supposed. It seemed that where the women in his life were concerned, he could do nothing right.

Dabney

Thursday morning, there was an e-mail in her in-box from Clendenin Hughes. Subject line: ?

Dabney clicked on it, thinking, ?!???!!

It said: Meet me tonight at 9:00, Quaker Cemetery.

“Oh my God!” Dabney said, then she clapped her hand over her mouth. Again, the Lord’s name in vain! All the virtue she felt after lighting the candles on Monday evaporated.

“What?” Nina said. She squinted at Dabney and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Is it Clen?”

Dabney nodded. It was a relief to have someone to tell. Keeping it bottled up inside wasn’t healthy. “He wants me to meet him at the Quaker Cemetery tonight,” she said.

“That’s spooky,” Nina said. “Will you go?”

“No,” Dabney said. “No way.”

On Thursday nights Dabney always stayed home for Sandwich and a Movie, and this Thursday, she decided, would be no different. She picked up a Cubano from Foood For Here & There, arranged it on a plate with some potato chips, fixed herself a glass of ice water with lemon, and switched on the TV in the den. She noticed that Love Story was playing on TMC, starting five minutes hence. Love Story was Dabney’s favorite movie of all time; that had been true even before she went to Harvard. One year, Dabney had dressed up as Jennifer Cavalleri for Halloween, which basically meant she wore what she usually wore-a red turtleneck, headband, and pearls-and carried a copy of Love Story, the novel, as a clue to her identity.

Dabney could have recited the script line-for-line: there was Jenny calling Oliver “Preppie,” there were Oliver and Jenny in Widener Library, there they were driving up to Ipswich to meet the coldhearted father, there were the hockey games and the scene where Jenny is beautifully tanned on the sailboat. Jenny wants to go to Paris, but there will be no Paris. The reason she can’t get pregnant is that she’s sick, she has leukemia, she is going to die.

Dabney sneaked into the kitchen during a commercial to put her plate into the dishwasher and get a bar of dark chocolate. She glanced at the clock. It was 8:45.

Dabney returned to the den to watch the end of the movie, but she couldn’t get comfortable. She had been taking antibiotics for three days, but she still felt lousy. And she was distracted. It was 8:48, then 8:50.

He would be there. She knew he would be there. They used to meet at the Quaker Cemetery all the time in high school. That’s spooky, Nina had said. What was spooky was that Agnes had been conceived in the Quaker Cemetery, Dabney was sure of it.

She put on her spring coat and left the house. She decided to take Box’s Wagoneer rather than the Impala. The Impala was the most recognizable car on the island.

She drove by the Quaker Cemetery at a few minutes after nine. She slowed down, her eyes scanning the southeast corner for the gravestone of Alice Booker Wright, Dabney’s great-great-grandmother, which had been their usual meeting place.

She saw the outline of him-a hulking, dark figure sitting on Alice’s grave.

He waved at her with his right arm.

She hit the gas.

She drove back through the streets of town thinking, Go back, go see him, kiss him again. Oh how she longed to kiss him again. She remembered the smell of the cut grass in that cemetery and the squish of mud under their feet and the rough-hewn edge of Alice’s headstone rubbing against Dabney’s back, the taste of Clen’s neck, his voice, his eyes, his knee bouncing up and down, his feet shod in Chuck Taylors, how he loved them, he was stubborn, he wouldn’t stop wearing them no matter how old he got. Desire presented in Dabney like mercury in her veins. Go back to him!

But no, she wouldn’t. She pulled into her driveway and hurried back into the house, short of breath. She had left the TV on, and the final scene of the movie was playing: Oliver sitting alone in the snow.

The phone rang, startling her. Would Clen be brazen enough to call the house? Then she realized that the phone call was from Agnes. Agnes called every Thursday night at nine thirty because she knew her mother would be home for Sandwich and a Movie. Thank God that Dabney had come back! If Dabney hadn’t answered, Agnes might have grown worried and called Box, and then there would have been some explaining to do.

“Darling!” Dabney said.

“Mommy?”

Dabney said, “Honey, are you okay?” Did she dare hope there was trouble in paradise, Agnes’s engagement to CJ on the rocks? Oh how Dabney would inwardly rejoice!

“It’s my job,” Agnes said. “I found out yesterday that we didn’t get funding from National for the summer. The club is shutting down until the school year starts back up.” With these words, she started to cry.

“Oh, honey,” Dabney said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I knew it was iffy,” Agnes said. “I should have mentally prepared myself.”

“So what will you do all summer?” Dabney asked. She had a dreary picture in her head of Agnes working as a temp in CJ’s office, fetching coffee, answering the phone.

“I’m coming home,” Agnes said.

“What?” Dabney said. “To Nantucket?”

“Yes, Nantucket. I don’t hate it as much as you think, Mom.”

“I didn’t think you hated it,” Dabney said. However, Agnes didn’t love Nantucket the way Dabney did. She hadn’t been home for the summer since her freshman year in college. Agnes had inherited Clendenin’s taste for globetrotting. There had been trips to France and Italy in high school, then a summer in Ireland, then a summer working at a camp for disadvantaged children in the Bronx, which had eventually led her to her current job. “I just thought you might want to stay in the city with CJ.”

“He wants me to stay,” she said. “But Manhattan stinks in the summer. I’d much rather be at the beach. I can work as a counselor at Island Adventures; I already talked to Dave Patterson. I can plan the wedding. And I can hang out with you and Dad.”

Agnes was coming home for the summer! Dabney felt light-headed.

“CJ is really busy,” Agnes said. “He has to negotiate contracts before training camp starts for his football players, and one of his clients for the Yankees, I can’t tell you who, is in the process of being traded to San Diego. But I’m trying to get him to come up on weekends when he can.”

“Weekends,” Dabney repeated. She would spend a summer’s worth of weekends with CJ? When Dabney closed her eyes, she saw a thick, olive-green fog. Agnes’s coming home was the best surprise Dabney could have hoped for. Dabney could save Agnes. And Agnes, quite possibly, could save Dabney.

Clendenin

He couldn’t cut a steak, he couldn’t tie his shoes, and he couldn’t button the cuffs of his shirt. A grocery cart was okay, but not a grocery basket. Childproof pill bottle, forget about it. Chopping a tomato was difficult but not impossible; he hadn’t yet tried to shuck corn. Typing was a slow and arduous process, so he wrote everything longhand now, then read it into a special program on his computer. He had a hard time folding his laundry, and uncorking a bottle of wine.

He could shave, but he had always hated shaving anyway, so he’d let his beard grow in for four months, two weeks, three days-the amount of time that had passed since he’d lost his arm.

Transactions like paying the pizza guy from his wallet and then accepting the hot box was a complicated dance that frustrated Clen and embarrassed the deliveryman. It was his left arm that was gone, so shaking hands was still okay.

He probably shouldn’t hold a baby, but there were no babies in his life.

He could crack an egg, flip an omelet, ride his bicycle, and swim. And he could smoke, thanks to the invention of the Bic. Lighting a match was a trick from his past.

Usually when dusk descended, which happened later and later as June approached, Clen stood on his porch and took aim at the crows with his BB gun-he was getting pretty good-and then he smoked a cigarette and dropped the butt into the mayonnaise jar half filled with water at his feet. It was a nasty habit he’d picked up overseas; it had been impossible to live in Bangkok, and later Hanoi, and later still Siem Reap, and not smoke. He had thought he would give it up when he returned, but he had given up so much already that he couldn’t quit the cigarettes.

He either made himself something to eat (an omelet, fried rice) or he called something in, hence the awkward relationship with the pizza-delivery guy, although Benny knew him now.

And then, when it was fully dark, Clen climbed into the car left at his disposal-he had gotten a special driver’s license, valid as long as he wore his prosthetic, which he never did-and he drove into town, past the house on Charter Street where Dabney lived.

If he had told anyone he did this, they would have thought him a stalker, a creep, a man hopelessly mired in the past. He didn’t feel like any of those things. He drove past Dabney’s house because he liked to see the lights on and think of her inside-tossing a salad or sticking fresh flowers in a vase of water, or reading Jane Austen in bed.

He knew she was married. He knew there was next to no chance that she would leave the economist just because Clen had decided to come back. But he loved her in a way that could not be ignored, and so he was determined to try. The kiss in front of his cottage had been the kiss of a lifetime. If he got nothing else, he would be happy with that.

In every dream he’d had since being back on Nantucket, he had both his arms. It was because of Dabney. She returned him to his whole self.

Clen had found out about the baby in a letter from Dabney, the sort penned on a thin, light-blue airmail envelope-from the outside, identical in appearance to the three letters Dabney had sent that had preceded Clen’s arrival in Bangkok, those saying how much she loved and missed him. The letter about her pregnancy had reached Clen after he returned to Bangkok from a grueling three-week assignment in Pattaya, which was a more disturbing, derelict, and soulless place than Clen could have imagined existed. He had been overseas for slightly less than two months, enough time for him to have gotten a hang of the way things worked, but also to have become disenchanted.

I don’t know how to say this, Dabney had written. So I’ll just say it: I’m pregnant.

And then later in the letter: I want nothing from you. I considered terminating but I can’t bring myself to do it. I am due in May.

May, he thought. Meaning that Dabney had gotten pregnant in August, a few weeks before he left. They had had frequent, clinging, urgent sex in those final days, and Clen had not always used a condom. One night in the Quaker Cemetery came to mind.

Their parting had gone more smoothly than he’d imagined. When the job offer came from the Southeast Asia desk of the New York Times, he had thought Dabney would…flip out, cry, scream, beg him not to go, threaten suicide or murder. But she had been resigned, even happy for him. She had smiled, and said, I’m so proud of you. You have to accept, Clen. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. She had been so even-keeled about it that he’d thought, momentarily, that she had decided to go with him.

No, she said. I’m staying here.

So what you’re saying is we’re breaking up?

She said, We are a perfect match. No matter what happens, we’re going to end up together.

And you really believe that? he said.

Let’s wait, she said. And see what happens.

It was the mature thing to say, but he couldn’t help feeling injured by it. This was stranger still because it was him leaving. The two of them with their Ivy League degrees had spent the past year on Nantucket working jobs that were beneath them. Clen had been itching to go someplace bigger, more important, someplace where news was actually happening. He had been thinking of New York. A relationship with Dabney would have been plausible from New York-back every weekend or every other. But Bangkok?

He had waved goodbye to her from the Steamship, yelling her name and telling her he loved her until she was out of sight. Then, he had retched over the side of the boat.

Upon receiving Dabney’s letter, Clen borrowed a thousand dollars against his future salary and bought her a plane ticket. He called her from a sweltering Western Union office, believing that now that Dabney was pregnant, she would have to come. He was far more excited about the prospect of seeing Dabney than about having a baby. What did that even mean, having a baby? He wasn’t sure, but he had not expected Dabney to say what she said, which was, I will not come there. I’m going to have this baby alone.

What? he said.

The only way I will survive this, she said.

He didn’t understand. What? He was shouting, despite the queue of Australian backpackers behind him, listening to his every word.

Is if you promise never to contact me again. Cold turkey. Never contact me again. Please respect my wishes. Please.

We can make it work here, he said. I’ll rent a bigger place, and hire a woman to help you with the baby!

Clen, she said. Please.

Please what? He was ready to pull his hair out in frustration. Just come, Cupe. I bought you a plane ticket.

I can’t! she said. I’m not sure you get it, or that you’ve ever gotten it. I can’t do it, I’m too afraid, and afraid isn’t even the right word. Clen could hear her breathing; he could tell she was trying not to cry. I’m sorry, Clen. I just can’t.

Okay, he said. Fine. You win. You win, Dabney! I’ll quit my job. I’ll come home.

No, she said. Absolutely not.

What? he said.

Do you think I want you to end up like my mother? If you come back to live here on Nantucket, you will have a small life, a lot smaller than the life you’re going to have overseas anyway. And you’ll hate me, and you’ll resent our child, and you’ll take off in the middle of the night and I’ll never see you again. She paused. No, she said. No way. I don’t want you to come home.

I won’t do that. You know I won’t do that.

What I know, Dabney said, is that you won’t be happy here, writing for the Nantucket Standard. You’re too talented. You’re the hundred-year genius, just like Mr. Kane used to say. You need to face the facts.

What facts? You’re pregnant with my child.

It isn’t going to work either way. It isn’t going to work!

I thought you said we were a perfect match, destined to end up together!

Well, I was wrong, Dabney said. I was terribly, horribly, awfully wrong. I have been right about everyone else, but wrong about us. There is only one solution, one way I’m going to survive, and that is if you let me go. Just please let me go.

I can’t let you go, he said. I love you!

Silence.

What? he said. I leave, and suddenly you don’t love me?

She said something too softly for him to hear. He imagined her words like raindrops falling somewhere into the South Pacific.

I didn’t catch that, he said.

Not suddenly, she said.

There was suggestive coughing from one of the Australians in line and Clen waved a desperate hand over his head, as if to say, I’m drowning here, buddy. Please let me try to save myself. This was the conversation of his life, he realized that. He also knew it might end up costing as much as the plane ticket he had just purchased.

Tell me you don’t love me, he said.

I don’t love you.

You’re lying, he said. You know it and I know it. You’re lying, Cupe.

You will find someone else, she said. And so will I.

As anyone who has ever been in love would know, those words blew him to bits, as though he had stepped on a land mine, or a booby trap set by guerrilla forces. It was the worst pain he had ever sustained. Worse than being hit by his drunk father, worse than waking up and finding his father dead at the kitchen table and then having to knock on his mother’s bedroom door and tell her the news.

Okay, he said. Fine. Cold turkey. Not another word. You understand that, Cupe? Not. Another. Word.

He was calling her bluff, or so he’d thought.

The only way I’m going to survive is with a clean break, she said. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, please, do me the favor of never contacting me again.

Dabney.

Silence.

Dabney!

He would have thought she’d hung up but he could still hear her breathing.

Fine, he said.

Silence.

If that’s what you want, he said.

Silence.

We all make choices, he said.

He had always been smarter than everyone else, and he’d thought that might help him, but in this case it didn’t matter. Possibly, it made things worse. What he imagined as the finely calibrated gears of his mind were thrown practically into reverse, so that anything he tried to do-track down a source in Surat Thani, or kick-start his motorbike, or cook rice-ended up a disaster.

In May, he learned that Dabney had given birth to a baby girl and named her Agnes Bernadette, after her grandmother. He couldn’t count the number of times-when he was riding in the stinking hot third-class berth of a train, or slogging through rice paddies, or meandering through the markets looking for ripe mangoes but being offered teenaged girls-when the name had popped into his head like a chiming bell.

Agnes Bernadette.

He had heard from Agnes herself only once, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. Dabney had finally told Agnes about her true paternity and Agnes, unbeknownst to Dabney, had sent a letter to Clen in care of the New York Times. The letter had been forwarded to Clen, who at that time was living in Hanoi, in a good flat in the French Quarter. He had just won the Pulitzer and he had an offer for a book deal; for the one and only time in his life, he had been flush with cash, and there had finally been talk of transferring him to the Singapore desk, which had become his sole professional aspiration. Clen and his girlfriend, Mi Linh, drank a lot of champagne and ate dinner twice a week at the Hotel Metropole. They spent weekends at a resort in the cool hills of Sapa; Clen rented a junk and they sailed the emerald waters of Halong Bay.

Agnes’s letter had been straightforward: she now knew that Clendenin was her real father and she wanted to meet him; her mother, however, could never find out. Agnes was spending the summer in France. Could Clendenin meet her in France?

Clen had chewed on his answer for as long as he dared. The worst thing, he realized, would be not to respond at all. He wanted very much to buy a ticket to Paris and meet Agnes there. The whole idea of it was cinematic. He understood from the tone of her letter that Agnes didn’t need him to be a father; she had the economist for that. She did, however, require a connection. She was sixteen years old, on the verge of becoming a woman, trying to accrue self-awareness, and she wanted to fill in the missing link. Which was him.

What Clen couldn’t swallow was this meeting taking place without Dabney’s knowledge. He assumed that, seventeen years later, Dabney had made some sort of peace with his absence. She had married, she ran the Chamber of Commerce, and she had, he could only assume, a happy life. If he went behind her back and met Agnes in Paris and she found out about it-well, that wasn’t something Clendenin could risk.

Clen had written back to Agnes and tried to explain all this. The letter he’d sent had been ten pages long. It was an atonement of sorts, because that many years later he had come to understand that Dabney’s telling him she didn’t love him was the ultimate act of love. She hadn’t wanted him even to consider coming home because she knew he would be unhappy, unfulfilled. Not returning to your mother, and by circumstance, you, is the great shame of my life. I offer no excuse other than I was young and selfish, and I believed myself to be destined for great things. In the years since I’ve left Nantucket, I have seen sights both sublime and horrific, and I have tried to uncover truths and bring light and sense to this often misunderstood part of the world. But although I have never met you, I have always been aware that my greatest accomplishment is that I fathered a child. You.

Clen had both anticipated and dreaded a response. If he and Agnes started a secret correspondence, Dabney would be devastated as well. There was no good way for a relationship between them to proceed, and yet he wanted it to. He wanted it to.

But it was a moot point. Agnes never wrote back.

He couldn’t reel in a fish, or dig a grave, or change a tire. He couldn’t shuffle a deck of cards or deal a hand of poker. He would never be able to help Dabney fasten her pearls. This last thing bothered Clen more than he thought it might.

But he wasn’t disheartened, yet. He had the kiss, which redoubled his determination. He was going to keep trying. He was going to make Dabney take those words back, and admit that she had never meant them in the first place.

Couple #40: Tammy Block and Flynn Sheehan, married three years

Tammy: I am the match Dabney doesn’t like to talk about.

We’d all like our lives to be nice and neat. High school, college, marriage, kids, job, church, community, two-week vacations in Aruba or Tuscany-and then watch your kids, and then their kids, follow suit. Some people have lives like that, and some don’t.

I dropped out of Fairleigh Dickinson University (we all called it “Fairly Ridiculous”)-or, rather, I failed out-after three semesters. I just couldn’t handle the reading, it put me to sleep, plus I was drinking every night and smoking a lot of dope. I married a guy I met at a biker bar, a guy I barely knew. We drove to Atlantic City and got hitched, then we moved up to Rhode Island because my new husband was going to work as a fry cook for a buddy opening a fish restaurant. I got pregnant, had a son, then a year later, another son. My new husband left me for one of the waitresses at the fish restaurant and then those two ran off and I never saw a single support check.

I needed a way to make a living while being a full-time mom-at that point, I was qualified to be either a prostitute or work the register at the CITGO-and seeing that these were piss-poor options, I went for my real estate license.

I had a talent for selling houses, and my secret weapon was that which had served me well my whole life-apathy. You want the house? Great. You don’t want the house? Someone else will.

I landed on Nantucket ten years ago the way many people land here, I suppose-I came for a vacation and decided I never wanted to leave. I sold my Victorian on Prospect Street in Providence for three times what I paid for it, banked the profit, and rented a cute three-quarter house on School Street. (Three-quarter house meant two windows to the right of the front door and one window to the left. I was crazy for architectural terminology.)

Dabney Kimball Beech lived one block over, on Charter. I used to see her out walking every morning, and I have to tell you, she didn’t seem like anyone I would want to be friends with. It was the headband that put me off, I think, and the pearls. Who wore pearls at seven o’clock in the morning to go power walking? I quickly learned that Dabney was the director of the Chamber of Commerce and that she was quite beloved around the island. When I interviewed for an associate-broker position at Congdon & Coleman Real Estate and I mentioned I lived on School Street, the man interviewing me said, “Oh, you’re neighbors with Dabney Kimball.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “If Nantucket elected a president, she would win by a landslide.”

I decided it would be wise, as a Realtor brand-new to town, to meet Dabney Kimball, so I strategized to be out watering my front flower bed at seven in the morning when she walked past.

I thought she might ignore me, but she stopped and literally beamed at me. And that was my introduction to the magic of Dabney Kimball Beech.

She said, “Hey there! You just moved in a few weeks ago! I’ve been dying to meet you. I’m Dabney.”

I said, “I’m Tammy Block.” We shook hands.

She said, “You’re the newest Realtor at Congdon & Coleman.”

I had only had the job for twelve hours. How could she have known?

I said, “Yes, that’s right.”

She said, “And I’ve seen your boys waiting at the bus stop. They’re so handsome.”

I smiled proudly because who can resist compliments about one’s children? But then I grew wary. This was probably just lip service.

Dabney said, “Today is Tuesday. I’m alone tonight. Come over for some wine, will you?”

I did go for “some wine.” We finished two bottles, along with a dish of smoked almonds and some really good French cheese and savory crackers and quince paste, which I had never tasted or even heard of before, but which was delicious. Things were like that at Dabney’s house-refined and lovely and eclectic, but not fussy. She made me feel completely at ease, even after I learned that her husband was some kind of famous economist who taught at Harvard, and Dabney herself had gone to Harvard. Usually when I was in the presence of educated people, I felt embarrassed about my pathetic three semesters at Fairly Ridiculous, but I did not feel that way around Dabney.

She asked me if I was married. I said, Long divorced.

She got a twinkle in her eye and told me she was something of a matchmaker. Forty-two couples to her credit, all of them still together.

I laughed and said, “Oh dear God, don’t even try. I don’t need a husband, or even a boyfriend. What I need is a plumber to fix the toilet in the boys’ bathroom. It runs incessantly.”

The very next day, Flynn Sheehan was standing at the top of my friendship stairs. I caught my breath. He had the most arresting blue eyes I had ever seen.

He said, “Dabney Kimball sent me?”

I thought, She has sent me a husband. And boy, was she spot-on. Just looking at Flynn Sheehan gave me butterflies.

He said, “Something about needing a toilet fixed?”

I laughed, then introduced myself and welcomed Flynn Sheehan inside. I was glad I had just come from work and was still wearing a dress, heels, and makeup. I led Flynn Sheehan up the stairs.

He said, “How long have you been renting the Reillys’ house?”

I said, “Three weeks.”

He said, “I basically grew up in this house. Kevin Reilly was my best friend. He was killed in Iraq in ninety-one.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s why I came on such short notice. Kevin’s parents aren’t exactly known for their upkeep of this place…”

“Oh,” I said. “The place is fine. It’s charming. I love everything about it, except the running toilet.”

Flynn stopped at the top of the stairs. He was looking at marks made on the doorjamb, pencil marks and initials I hadn’t even noticed.

He pointed to a mark near his waist. “This is Kevin, age five, and me age five. Kev at ten, at twelve, me at thirteen, Kev at fifteen.”

I studied the marks: FS 2/10/77. KR 8/29/83.

Flynn pointed to the highest mark, at about his present height. “This was the last time we did it, right before he left. He had me by half an inch.”

I looked where Flynn pointed. FS 3/30/91. KR 3/30/91.

Flynn blinked. “He was like a brother to me.”

I didn’t know what to say but I felt my heart doing funny things, things it hadn’t done in a long time.

Then I noticed his wedding ring, and I thought: Story of my life.

Flynn fixed the toilet in thirty seconds, and when I tried to pay him, he waved me away. He was the most attractive man I’d seen in years and he had shown me the softest part of his heart within three minutes of meeting me. But he was married.

At the door, he handed me his card. FLYNN SHEEHAN PLUMBING. The address was a P.O. box. I found myself wanting to know where he lived. I would drive by his house and try to catch a glimpse of his pretty wife.

He said, “If you need anything, and I mean anything, even if it’s not plumbing, I want you to call me.”

I felt myself redden. I wondered what he meant by that.

Then he said, “The Reillys are my people. If anything goes wrong with the house, they would want me to take care of it.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

Flynn descended the friendship stairs and strode out to his truck, whistling.

“Goodbye!” I called after him. “Thank you!”

A day later, when I saw Dabney, she said, “So, you met Flynn?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you for sending him.”

Dabney gazed at me. She had dark brown eyes, but they seemed to send out gold sparks at times. “So what did you think?”

“He fixed the toilet in half a minute. I probably could have done it myself if I’d bothered to give it a try.”

“No,” she said. “I mean, what did you think about Flynn?”

“Nice guy,” I said.

“You’re rosy,” she said. She jumped up and down like a little kid, then she snapped her fingers. “I knew it! I knew it! You’re rosy!”

“Rosy?” I said.

“You liked him.”

“Dabney,” I said. “He’s married.”

Dabney’s face fell and I felt like I had just toppled her ice-cream cone.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

I learned something quickly about Nantucket. Although it was a small island, you could go months without seeing someone. I went six months without seeing Flynn Sheehan. Indeed, I went for days and weeks without thinking about him. And then he would pop into my mind-most often when I walked up the stairs and saw the hash marks on the doorjamb-and I would hope and pray that the kitchen faucet would leak, or the light would go out in the refrigerator.

Then one night I happened into American Seasons for a celebratory drink. I had just sold my first house, a fixer-upper on Pilgrim Road, listed at $1.2 million. The listing broker had to get home to his family, but my boys were at football practice until seven, so I had a couple of free hours. I didn’t think anyone would be at the bar at American Seasons at five o’clock-but I was wrong. When I walked in, Flynn Sheehan was sitting there alone, with a tall beer in front of him.

I said, “Flynn, hi! Tammy Block, I’m the one who rents the…”

“Reilly house,” he said. He gave me a sort of half smile, and I thought my heart would stop. “Like I could ever forget you.”

I have gone on long enough, and the story from here takes a bad turn. Some people had neat and orderly lives, and some people’s lives were messy and morally ambiguous. I have lived the latter. Did Flynn and I have an affair? Yes. It pains and embarrasses me to confess that. Did Amy Sheehan-who was, in anyone’s objective opinion, a miserable woman-discover the affair by looking at Flynn’s cell phone records and spread the news of my slutty debauchery all over the island? Yes. Was I ready to pack up my belongings, uproot the kids, and move off the island? Yes.

There were only two reasons I didn’t do this. One was: I loved Flynn Sheehan with every fiber of my being. After Amy smeared our names like blood all over every street in town, he had a difficult choice to make. He could try to repair his marriage and salvage his family, or he could leave. He called me up at eleven o’clock on the night the news broke and said, “I left her, Tammy. I love you.”

The other reason I didn’t leave Nantucket was because of Dabney Kimball Beech. As soon as she heard the news, she knocked on my front door. I ignored her. I didn’t want to hear her lecture. Surely anyone with a life as perfect as Dabney’s would never understand adultery-even though, technically, she was the one who had set me up with Flynn.

When I didn’t answer the front door, she knocked on the back door. When I didn’t answer the back door, she started tapping on my windows. I had to hide in my powder room, where she couldn’t see me. But she was relentless, and finally I gave up. I let her in the back door and waited for the beatings to begin.

She hugged me. Then she sat down at my kitchen table. She said, “I am going to hold your hand until you stop crying.”

I cried for quite a while. I cried and cried. When I finally stopped to blow my nose, I said, “Why did you send him to me when you knew he was married?”

“Because,” Dabney said, “you two are a perfect match. You’re meant to be together.”

Dabney was right. Flynn divorced Amy and married me on the beach in Madaket with only our children and Dabney and John Boxmiller Beech in attendance. There are still people on this island who won’t speak to me, who won’t meet my eye in the supermarket, who wouldn’t give me a referral for a sale if I were the last Realtor left on Nantucket. But I have Dabney-and she is not the person she appears to be.

She is so much more.

Dabney

She was beside herself with excitement. Agnes’s Prius was due to arrive on the five o’clock ferry. It wasn’t just a weekend visit; it wasn’t a few days at Christmas. She was really staying the entire summer!

Unfortunately, Box was going to miss Agnes by a matter of hours. He had come to Nantucket for the weekend, but that morning Dabney had delivered him to the airport. He would go back to Boston tonight, and fly to London in the morning. He would be gone two weeks.

“I feel like we never see each other anymore,” Dabney said.

“The lives we lead,” Box said.

Dabney clung to Box tightly, which he seemed to resist, and when she raised her face, he kissed the tip of her nose like she was a child.

“Please, no more histrionics,” he said. “It doesn’t become you.”

“Histrionics,” Dabney said. “That sounds like a newfangled major at Harvard.”

“I was referring to the middle-of-the-night phone call last week,” he said.

“I know what you were referring to,” she said. “I was trying to amuse you.”

“Waking me up in the middle of the night to ask me questions you already know the answer to isn’t amusing.”

“I’m sorry,” Dabney said, although she had already apologized three separate times over the weekend.

He patted her shoulder. “I’m off,” he said.

He grabbed the handle of his carry-on and strode toward his gate.

“I love you, darling!” she called out after him, but this must have qualified as histrionics because he didn’t respond. He didn’t even turn around.

Dabney planned to leave the office at four thirty so she could get home before Agnes arrived, but just as she was packing up, her computer chirped. She checked the screen. E-mail from Clendenin Hughes. Subject line: Fried rice.

Delete it, she thought. Agnes was on her way. Delete it!

The lives we lead. She opened the e-mail. It said: Come to my cottage for dinner tonight. A crate arrived today with my wok in it. Please? 8:00.

She was tempted to respond: I can’t. I’m having dinner with Agnes.

His daughter.

She was tempted to respond: No. No way. But she feared that any response, even a negative one, would only encourage him.

She deleted the e-mail, then deleted it from her deleted file.

Dabney was standing in the driveway when the Prius pulled in. She was aghast to see CJ behind the wheel.

Agnes climbed out of the passenger side and ran to hug her mother. “I’m here!” she said. “I can’t believe all of my stuff fit in that tiny car!”

CJ greeted Dabney with his usual enthusiasm, like she was the only person in the world he wanted to see. He smelled wonderful. He said, “I didn’t want your daughter to have to do the drive alone.”

“Of course not,” Dabney said. She swallowed. “How long can you stay?”

“I’m flying back at nine o’clock tonight with my client, whisper whisper.” CJ winked at Dabney. “Private plane.”

Dabney hadn’t heard the client’s name-either she was losing her hearing on top of all her other maladies, or CJ hadn’t meant for Dabney to hear. She didn’t care; she was relieved that CJ wasn’t staying over.

“I have chicken marinating,” Dabney said.

“I took the liberty of making dinner reservations at Cru,” CJ said. “You’ll join us, I hope?”

Dabney faltered. Were they really hoping she would join them, or did they want to be alone? She felt a wave of exhaustion and weakness; the pain in her abdomen had returned with a vengeance. The antibiotics had done absolutely no good. She supposed her next step was to stop eating wheat. Goodbye to her morning cereal. Goodbye to her beloved BLTs. She might as well stop breathing.

“Please come, Mommy!” Agnes said. “You love oysters!”

Dabney adored Cru-it was chic, polished, and fun. That evening, the restaurant was offering nine kinds of oysters, and Dabney decided to order three of each.

“Great idea,” CJ said. “I’ll do that, too.”

Dabney and CJ’s oysters were presented on an iced platter roughly the circumference of a Goodyear tire. Dabney doctored her oysters the way she liked them-fresh lemon first, then horseradish, then half with a dab of cocktail and half with mignonette.

“Ah, now see,” CJ said. “I’m a purist. I eat them naked.”

The server had brought them a list of the oysters, which ran clockwise around her platter so that they could identify each one.

Dabney beamed. “It’s like a party game!”

CJ had ordered a drink called a Dirty Goose, which came in a martini glass, and he threw it back in one gulp, then spun his finger at the waiter, indicating he wanted another. There were hot rolls on the table. Dabney’s first challenge in not eating any wheat was to skip the rolls. She nudged the basket toward Agnes.

“Have a roll, darling. You’re far too thin.”

“I’m fine, Mom, thanks,” Agnes said.

“CJ, would you like a roll?” Dabney asked.

“No, thank you,” CJ said. “Agnes and I don’t eat carbs.”

“You don’t?” Dabney said. This was news to her. Agnes looked like she could use a big plate of fettuccine Alfredo every day for the next month, but she knew not to press the matter.

Dabney ate the Belon from Maine, then the Hama Hama from Washington State, then the Kumomoto from British Columbia, which was an all-time favorite of hers.

“Would you like one, Agnes?” she asked.

Agnes studied the platter. Of course she wanted one! Dabney and Box were oyster connoisseurs; it was one of their few extravagances. Box ordered twelve dozen Blue Points and twelve dozen Kumomotos for their annual Christmas party. Dabney made a homemade mignonette with crushed fresh raspberries. Agnes had grown up with oysters the way other children had grown up with Pepperidge Farm Goldfish.

“No, thank you,” Agnes said.

“Please, honey, help yourself. We can always order more. How about the Island Creek?”

CJ polished off his Dirty Goose and set the empty glass down so hard on the table that Dabney was surprised it didn’t break.

“No, thanks, Mom,” Agnes said.

“If Agnes wants an oyster,” CJ said, “she can have one of mine.” He lifted one dripping out of its shell and fed it to Agnes like she was a baby bird.

Dabney felt a combination of helplessness and anger rise in her throat. She ate a Wellfleet.

CJ said, “So, Dabney, you’ve succeeded in stealing my fiancée away from me this summer.”

French Kiss from Nova Scotia. Dabney accidentally took a hit of horseradish up her nose, and she reached for her water. “Pardon me?”

“I hope you’re happy.”

“I…?” Dabney looked to Agnes for help. Agnes’s eyes were wide and imploring. Dabney realized that she had been set up as some kind of fall guy. “Well, really, I…when Agnes told me about the funding issue at the club…”

“Agnes doesn’t have to work again, ever,” CJ said. “At the club, or anywhere else. I’m more than able to take care of her in the manner to which she’s been accustomed, and then some.”

“Right,” Dabney said. “I realize this…”

“But you wanted her here at home. I get it, your only daughter back in her childhood bedroom for the summer. Before she gets married and leaves you forever.”

“It’s not like that,” Dabney said. Agnes had now bowed her head; her chin was tucked to her chest. She wasn’t going to say a word in her own defense, or Dabney’s. She was afraid of CJ. Agnes, who had been sailing and water-skiing since she was five, who had flown to Europe by herself at the age of fifteen, and who routinely took the subway home from 125th Street at night in the dark, was afraid of CJ Pippin. She clearly hadn’t told him that it had been her idea to come home to Nantucket. It was she who wanted the beach and the familiar house and the comforting presence of her parents and a chance to work one last summer at her old job as an adventure counselor.

Suddenly their table was engulfed in a ghost-green miasma that was only too familiar to Dabney.

A third drink arrived for CJ, another Dirty Goose. He said, “I’m not going to tell Agnes she can’t go. But I’d really like her to come back to New York every weekend. And if not every weekend, then every other weekend.”

Dabney felt for a second like she and CJ were divorcing and discussing a custody arrangement.

“You can come here anytime,” Dabney said. “We have plenty of room.”

CJ snorted and took a healthy pull off his drink.

“I’m forty-four years old,” he said. He glanced at Agnes, who now had her hands clasped at her chest like a praying mantis. “I’m past the point where I want to stay in someone’s guest room. If I come back this summer, I’m going to want my own place with Agnes, so we have the necessary privacy. But it’s a little late to start looking, and I’m unsure of which weekends I would even be free enough to travel. My clients, Dabney, are really just kids-some of them only nineteen and twenty years old. I need to be available for them twenty-four/seven. Summer is a busy time, especially for my NFL players. I assume you’ve heard of Bantam Killjoy?”

Dabney had not heard of Bantam Killjoy. Was he talking about a person? Or a new video game?

Dabney shook her head.

“He was the number-one draft pick, wide receiver out of Oklahoma, nominated for the Heisman. Big media favorite because both his parents were killed in the Oklahoma City bombings when he was a baby.”

“It’s a really sad story,” Agnes said. “With a happy ending. But Bantam needs CJ’s guidance, almost like an older brother, or an uncle.”

“Yes, I’d imagine so,” Dabney said. “I’m sorry. I don’t follow college football except for the Harvard-Yale game.”

“Well, signing Bantam Killjoy was a big coup for me, and my main goal this summer is to make sure he gets to training camp. That will take precedence over coming back here, unfortunately. If Agnes wants to see me, she’ll have to come to New York.”

Dabney sucked down an East Beach Blonde from Rhode Island. CJ had made a big deal about ordering the oysters-again, just as Dabney had-but he had yet to eat a single one. The only oyster missing from his platter was the one he’d fed to Agnes. Dabney suspected that CJ didn’t even like oysters. He had ordered them only because Dabney had. And this, perhaps, got closer to what Dabney didn’t like about CJ. He reeked of insincerity; he did things just for show.

Dabney said, “Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” CJ said. “Let’s talk about ridiculous. Your daughter has been asking you for four years to come to New York, and for four years, you’ve said no…”

Dabney speared a Yaquina from Oregon, which was a tiny oyster, about the size of a quarter, but she almost couldn’t get it down. “As I’m sure Agnes has shared with you, I suffer from a bit of a phobia…”

CJ smacked his palm on the table. “You’re her mother and you’ve never come to see her.”

Agnes put her hand on CJ’s arm, but he brusquely shook it off. Did he hit her? Dabney suddenly wondered.

“And another thing,” he said. “Agnes told me that your crystal ball says we don’t belong together.”

“I don’t have a crystal ball,” Dabney said. “I wish I did.”

“Then I’m not sure what criteria you’re using to determine who’s a ‘perfect match.’”

“No criteria,” Dabney said.

“No crystal ball, no criteria,” CJ said. “I think your matchmaking is bullshit.”

“Well,” Dabney said, “you wouldn’t be alone in that opinion.” She sucked down a Wianno.

CJ pushed his platter of oysters at Agnes. “Here, honey,” he said. “You have them.”

Agnes gazed morosely at all the beautiful, fresh oysters, which were now swimming in slush.

“Or have a roll,” Dabney suggested again.

“We don’t eat carbs,” CJ said. “She’ll eat the oysters. Won’t you, baby?”

Their waiter came back to the table. “How are we doing?” he asked.

Dabney did not say, I hope my future son-in-law is drunk and NOT simply cruel, although I fear that’s the case. She did not say, Please bring me a glass of champagne or good white Bordeaux because I can’t make it another second without a drink. She did not say, He’s trying to make me feel like a bad mother, but I know what a bad mother is because I had one, and I am NOT a bad mother.

No, instead Dabney smiled at their server and thought, I have tried all nine oysters and they were delicious-sweet, creamy, briny, sublime. There is nothing more sublime than a cold, fresh oyster. She was slipping away, she could feel it, the green smoke was getting into her eyes and lungs.

“Everything’s fine,” she said. But it took effort.

As soon as the server sailed away, Dabney set her napkin on the table and said, “Excuse me, please.” She wasn’t feeling well, it was the green smoke, or it was the wheat allergy, perhaps, threatening to turn her insides to dust. The lives we lead, she thought.

“Darling?” Dabney said to Agnes. “I’m not feeling well. I think I just need air. I’ll meet you at home, okay?”

“Okay,” Agnes said. “Do you want us to go with you?”

“No, no,” Dabney said. She waved at CJ by way of goodbye and thought, Have a safe flight home with whisper whisper.

She hurried from the restaurant. She was lovesick, pure and simple.

She called Box as she walked up Main Street. He could hardly object; it was only seven thirty.

“Hello?” he said.

Dabney heard Mozart playing in the background and figured he was drinking a glass of white Bordeaux before he had dinner. Would he go out or cook for himself? Would he go out alone or with colleagues, or possibly with Miranda Gilbert? Dabney had been to his faculty apartment only twice in all the time he’d lived there, and she’d never spent the night.

“Darling?” she said.

“Yes? Dabney? Everything okay? Agnes arrived safely?”

“Safely,” Dabney said. “CJ drove her up.”

“Good man,” Box said.

“He’s not staying,” Dabney said. “Private plane back tonight with whisper whisper.”

“I’m sorry?” Box said.

“Apparently he’s developed an allergy to our house,” Dabney said. “Or he’s trying to punish me because I said he and Agnes aren’t a match. Or he’s trying to control Agnes.”

“Dabney,” Box said. “Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Dabney said. “I’m not really okay at all.” She realized she was verging on histrionics, but she couldn’t help herself. What should she do? Tell Box about Clendenin?

“You need to pull yourself together, darling,” Box said. “Perhaps call Dr. Donegal?”

Dr. Donegal, her therapist. Box thought she was going mad.

Well, she was going mad.

“I don’t want you to go tomorrow, darling,” Dabney said. “I want you to cancel London. Please. Come back to Nantucket. Agnes is here, and…I’m here.”

“Cancel London?” Box said. “I’m sorry, darling, did you just ask me to cancel London?”

“Yes,” Dabney said. “Please.”

“You do realize this has been set up for the better part of a year,” Box said. “They can’t just find another lecturer. And Jesus, Dabney, they pay me a king’s ransom.”

“We don’t need any more money,” Dabney said. “I think we can both agree on that.”

“The money is hardly the point,” Box said. “It’s my reputation and my word and everything else. And you are overreacting. Something is bothering you, but my coming back to Nantucket isn’t the answer.”

Dabney was quiet.

Box said, “I’ll be back in two weeks, darling.”

He wasn’t going to cancel London. There was nothing Dabney could say or do. His reputation, his word, his brilliant and esteemed career in economics was on the line.

“You’re right,” Dabney said. “Of course, you’re right.”

“Get some rest,” Box said. “You’re overtired is my guess. And you’re looking too thin. Good meals and sleep, darling. I’ll be back before you know it.” With that, Box hung up.

Dabney reached home but did not go inside. She was spinning. She had eaten nine oysters but she was still hungry. There was chicken marinating in the fridge; she could throw it on the grill. Go into the house and grill the chicken, she thought.

She checked her phone. Quarter to eight.

Please? 8:00.

The lives we lead.

She climbed into the Impala and drove out the Polpis Road.