The Matchmaker

Agnes

She was staying on Nantucket through the fall and maybe the winter.

She was staying on Nantucket until…

She called Manny Partida and asked for a leave of absence from the Morningside Heights Boys & Girls Club. It was decided that Wilder would take over at the helm while Agnes was gone. Agnes could work at the Island Adventures after-school program twenty hours a week. Dave Patterson was thrilled to have her.

CJ and his attorney pleaded down, as Agnes had known they would. He was sentenced to ninety days in jail and eighteen months’ probation. There was a restraining order in place. CJ wasn’t allowed within a hundred yards of Agnes for the next five years.

What would Agnes’s life be like in five years?

A week after Labor Day, Riley had to head back to dental school at Penn. Agnes drove him and Sadie to the airport. She couldn’t believe how sad she felt. The night she had spent with Riley eating cheeseburgers in his Jeep and then going on a wild-goose chase in search of Dabney seemed like aeons ago, and yet she hadn’t gotten enough of him somehow.

They stood in the crowded airport terminal. Everyone was leaving-heading back to Manhattan or Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, heading back to work or school, sweaters and real shoes, football games and Broadway openings. Summer was over. It happened every year, but this year it was hitting Agnes the hardest because the one thing about a Nantucket summer was that no one ever wanted it to end.

She was afraid she might cry.

“You saved my summer,” Agnes said. “Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for helping me find Clen. Thank you for loving my mother. Thank you for…being you.”

“Hey,” Riley said. He grabbed Agnes’s chin and she felt her heart spin in its socket. “You’re welcome.” He bent over and kissed her. They kissed and they kissed and they kissed-it felt like an entire summer’s worth of kissing-until his flight was called and he had to leave Agnes to board his plane, with Sadie barking in protest.

Clendenin

As soon as the night air got a chill, she started to careen away from him.

Careen away from him. The phrase came unbidden, borrowed from their ancient history together, one of their first dates-sledding, during an unexpected snowstorm in December 1980.

Clen and Dabney hadn’t so much as held hands in December 1980, but this was not to say that they didn’t have a relationship. Dabney had pursued Clen with an enthusiasm that he suspected was based in pity. He was the new kid, too much smarter than anyone else to have made any friends. Dabney approached him one day after English class and asked him if he’d ever read Cheever.

Was she teasing him?

Of course, he’d said. He had gobbled the red volume of stories the year before, on recommendation from the young, vivacious librarian, Eleanor, back in Attleboro. He now knew all about commuter trains, gin and tonics, and adultery.

Dabney had taken to engaging him in conversations about books-she liked Jane Austen, he preferred Chekhov and Kafka-and from there she probed a bit into his personal history. What was his affinity with the depressing Russians? Had he moved to Nantucket from a gulag? Clen was hesitant to talk about himself, but he let certain details escape: He lived with his mother, he said. He was an only child. His mother waited tables at the Lobster Trap. They lived in a cottage out behind the restaurant.

That must be fun! Dabney said. Do you ever get to eat free lobster?

Clen nodded. His mother brought home lobster for dinner every night, along with dried-out crab cakes and small potatoes coated with congealed butter that looked like beeswax. He was sick of lobster, although he did not say this.

Dabney took to sitting next to him in the cafeteria, and at study hall, where she doodled in the margins of his loose-leaf paper. The doodles became notes. The notes said things like, I am an only child, too. And, I have no mother.

He raised his eyebrows at that one. Wrote below, Is she dead?

I don’t know, Dabney wrote back. Probably not.

Clen wrote, My father died drinking.

To which she drew a face frowning, with two fat tears.

Clen had wanted her to know that he didn’t cry over his father’s death. He hadn’t felt sad, only relieved, because his father had been a very large man with an even larger drinking problem, and…well. Clen had been surprised when his mother cried, but not surprised when she said they were moving.

We need the ocean, she’d said.

Clen had wanted the city, Boston; he’d wanted a shot at going to Boston Latin or Buckingham Browne & Nichols, where he could really get an education, but his vote didn’t matter. Nantucket it was.

Do you hate it here? Dabney wrote.

He looked at her. On that particular afternoon, they were swaddled in the hush of the high school library and Dabney was wearing her headband, and a strand of pearls that he assumed were fake-or maybe not, because something about Dabney announced money, even though he knew her father was a policeman. She had a freckled nose and those big brown eyes, which seemed to shine a warm light on him.

No, he wrote back.

When the surprise early snow came, they were not boyfriend and girlfriend, but they were not nothing. The snow piled up outside and Dabney wrote in the margin of his paper, Dead Horse Valley, 4pm. Dress warmly. I’ll bring my toboggan.

Clen had done his fair share of sledding and other winter sports in Attleboro, but he hadn’t enjoyed them. He was big and heavy, clumsy on skates and skis. If it was snowing, he preferred to stay inside and read.

Okay, he said.

The after-school scene at Dead Horse Valley during the first snowfall of the year was frenetic, but most of the kids were younger. The other high school kids, Clen surmised, were probably hunkered down in someone’s den, drinking beer and smoking pot. Dabney was waiting right on the road, wearing navy snow pants and a bright pink parka and a pink hat with a white pom-pom on top. She held up the most beautiful toboggan Clen had ever seen. It was made of polished walnut and had a graceful bullnose at the front; secured to the base was a green quilted pad.

“It looks too nice to ride,” he said.

“My father and I have been using this toboggan since I was little,” she said. “We take good care of it.”

Clen nodded, and again thought, Money. There wasn’t a single piece of furniture in his rental cottage as nice as that toboggan.

Dabney manned the front and held the reins. “This is great,” she said. “You can push. We are going to fly!”

Clen wasn’t afraid of the speed, although the hill looked steep and bumpy and he wondered how the hell there could be a hill this steep on an island where the highest elevation was 108 feet. The other kids-the ten-year-olds and twelve-year-olds-were shooting down with high-pitched screams, some of them spilling halfway, some of them catching air off a bump and landing with a thud, then picking up even more speed. What frightened Clen was the athletic feat that was expected of him-to push the toboggan while running behind it and then to launch himself neatly onto the toboggan, tucking his legs on either side of Dabney. He didn’t think he could do it.

But for her, he would try.

He bent over and placed his gloved hands flat on the toboggan, and with his head down, he started running, pushing with all his might. Dabney whooped. Clen felt the momentum of the hill pulling him down. Inertia was real. He could not stop his legs from running. He would never be able to fling his legs up and get on behind her. Never.

No wonder the horse was dead, he thought.

He sent the toboggan down the hill while he stumbled behind it for a few steps before doing a spectacular face-plant into the snow. He raised his head to see Dabney flying indeed; the fancy toboggan might have been a magic carpet. She careened down the hill away from him, getting smaller and farther away, until she disappeared behind a stand of fir trees. He had lost her.

He had thought, When she gets back up to the top of this hill, I am going to kiss her. I am going to make her mine.

Thirty-some-odd years had passed, but there was an eerie similarity in Dabney’s tobogganing down the hill at Dead Horse Valley and the slide for the worse in her health, which had started in late September. Clen felt as helpless and inept and incapable as he had then. She was going. He could not go with her.

For days, she was bedridden. The pain, the pain! Agnes called Dr. Rohatgi. There was nothing he could do; this was how the disease progressed.

She was being eaten from the inside. That was how it felt, she said. Like thousands of tiny razor teeth. Her healthy cells were being attacked and colonized by the mutant, deformed, cancerous cells. There was pain medication, but many times Dabney cried out in the night. She cried for him, mostly, but also for Agnes, and for her mother.

Mama!

Clen tensed, believing he had misheard her. But then she said it again, in a voice that was much younger than her adult Dabney voice.

Mama!

There had been times in their growing up-high school and college-when they had talked about Dabney’s mother, Patty Benson, and what she had done. Dabney had consistently spoken with what Clen would have called “resigned indifference.” She wasn’t cut out to be a parent. Whatever. Lots of people aren’t. She didn’t smother me with a pillow or drown me in the bathtub, she walked away. She left me in capable hands. I am grateful for that. I’m sure she has her regrets, wherever she is.

Clen had puzzled over her attitude. He knew that Dabney had spent years in therapy with Dr. Donegal in order to achieve such insouciance. But really, wasn’t she angry? Clen himself was furious at his father, the empty bottles of Wild Turkey on the coffee table, the long hours at the bar after work and all weekend long when he should have been teaching Clen how to throw a spiral pass, or how to run skillfully behind a toboggan and then jump onto it. He had cared only about drinking, drinking, drinking until it killed him.

The ugly truth was a punch to the gut: Clen was no better than his father or Dabney’s mother. He was no better.

Mama!

Clen wiped Dabney’s forehead with a cool washcloth and watched her eyelids flutter closed.

There were still good days, days when Dabney got out of bed smiling and went for her walk, although slower, and then slower still. One day, Dabney came home and said, “Mr. Lawson asked if he could drive me home. I said no, and still he slowed all the way down and trailed me for the last quarter mile. Do I really look that bad?”

Clen kissed the tip of her nose. “No,” he said. “You look beautiful.”

He could feel sand running through the hourglass. There wasn’t enough time to tell her how beautiful she was-how much he loved her or how sorry, how hideously, awfully sorry, he was that he hadn’t come right home from Bangkok. He should have come right home!

He had wasted twenty-seven years!

Twenty-seven years, it seemed impossible. Where had they gone? It had taken him seven years to learn the country of Vietnam, to learn how to live with people who looked at him in fear and distrust. His language skills were poor; he had gotten by with French and broken English. The country was as hot as soup; the only place he had truly loved had been Dalat, in the hills. The Times had gotten him a room at the Dalat Palace and every morning he opened the wooden shutters and gazed out over the lake. Every night he drank a dozen bottles of ice-cold 333 and shot billiards in the stone-grotto bar. Best billiards table in Southeast Asia, he could attest. People would come and go-French, Australians, soldiers, doctors, entrepreneurs who said that communism wouldn’t hold. It was human nature for man to want to make his own money, it didn’t matter if he lived in Dalat or Detroit.

Clen could have been with Dabney all that time. He had smoked so many cigarettes, and eaten so many bowls of pho and so many banh mi prepared on the side of the road by a woman wearing a triangle hat, squatting by the grill, turning the meat, layering the meat on a freshly sliced baguette with carrots, mint, cilantro, cucumber, and the sauce of the gods.

He could have been with Dabney.

He’d spent five years with Mi Linh, but she wouldn’t come with him to Bangkok. Bangkok was a hole, she said. He was lucky to have gotten out of there after his first year. Why go back? She had been right, it was a hole, far worse the second time. And then, he’d lost his arm.

He did not rue the loss of his arm the way he rued all those years without Dabney.

While Dabney slept, he worked on a surprise for her. It was taking him hours and hours to interview and transcribe-and still it would be incomplete. He just didn’t have the resources. Agnes helped him where she could. Agnes assured him that what he was doing was awesome in the truest sense of the word. It is the best thing, she kept saying. It is the very best thing.

Dabney was well enough to go to the Cranberry Festival. She donned her cranberry cable-knit sweater and her matching kilt and she and Agnes and Clen drove out to the bogs in the Impala with the top down. The weather was spectacular-a sky so blue it was painful to look at, and mellow sunshine, a gift in mid-October.

“Days do not get any more beautiful than this one,” Dabney said. She had, for the first time, allowed Clen to drive the Impala. She hadn’t come out and said so, but she was too weak to drive-and she leaned her head back with her face in the sun.

She was asleep by the time they arrived at the bogs.

“What should we do?” Clen asked, once they had parked in the space reserved for them. EVENT JUDGE, the sign said, because Dabney was to judge the chutney and the muffins.

“Wake her up,” Agnes said. She climbed out of the backseat. “Here, I’ll do it.” She jostled Dabney’s shoulder. “Mommy! Mommy, we’re here.”

Dabney’s eyes flew open and she sat straight up, adjusting her sunglasses. “Okay!” she said. “I’m ready!”

The bogs were crowded with visitors. Dabney was thrilled to see so many people in attendance-parents and children and older, year-round residents, all of whom knew her by name. There were free balloons and face painting and half-a-dozen food booths-chutney, cookies, sauce, juice, muffins-all made from the fruit harvested a few hundred feet away. Clen tried samples of everything, even though he didn’t much care for cranberries.

Suddenly, Celerie appeared, her hair in one long braid down her back, her cheeks as red as apples. She was wearing a cranberry-colored wool dress and black tights. Headband and pearls. She was a younger, fair-haired version of Dabney. Clen had been warned about this, but still he chuckled when he saw her.

“The guest of honor!” Celerie said. She hugged Dabney so hard that Clen saw her wince. Dabney was fragile, everything hurt, brushing her teeth hurt, she’d told him, and folding a napkin hurt, and he was tempted to tell Celerie to take it easy, but Dabney just smiled with relief when Celerie let her go and said, “You’ve done a brilliant job!”

Celerie beamed. She turned to Clen. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Hughes.”

Clen bowed and said, “The honor is mine, Miss Truman.”

At the same time, they said, “Dabney has told me so much about you.”

Dabney sat at the judging table alongside Nina Mobley and Dr. Ted Field and Jordan Randolph, publisher of the Nantucket Standard. Tastes of this and that were placed before the judges, and Dabney made notes on her clipboard. Clen took a few steps back so that he could observe her in her element. He knew she wanted to give every participant a blue ribbon.

At one point, she raised her face and scanned the crowd. She was looking for him, he realized. He raised his arm and waved.

I’m here, Cupe. I’m right here.

After the festival, Clen, Dabney, and Agnes drove out to the airport to pick up Riley. He was staying for two nights to enjoy Nantucket in the fall; he had wanted to come earlier but he’d had a practical exam that morning.

Agnes was buzzing with excitement. When Clen pulled up in front of the airport, she jumped out of the backseat and said, “I’ll run in and get him.”

Dabney watched her as she hurried for the entrance.

“She’s rosy,” Dabney said. “Rosy like I’ve never seen.”

That night, Dabney cooked the four of them dinner in the gourmet kitchen of the Joneses’ big house. Clen lit logs in the enormous stone fireplace and they all hunkered down on the deep, soft sofa and chairs while Dabney ferried in platter after platter of delicacies-dates stuffed with blue cheese wrapped in bacon, Nantucket bay scallop ceviche, rosemary cashews. It was a feast already, and those were just the appetizers. Riley acted as bartender, pouring champagne for Agnes, filling Clen’s scotch, and making himself a series of increasingly stronger Dark and Stormys, which they all sampled, even Dabney. Riley talked about the rigors of dental school and Agnes told stories about the kids in her after-school program and Dabney checked to make sure everyone was eating and that everything was delicious.

She stopped on her way back into the kitchen and kissed Clen.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

There wasn’t enough time.

Dabney decided it was so nice by the fire that they should simply eat dinner there, like a picnic, rather than at the table. Dinner was beef Wellington with homemade mushroom duxelles, real foie gras, and homemade pastry, and a cheesy potato gratin and pan-roasted asparagus with toasted pine nuts and mustard-cream drizzle, and a salad with pears and dried cranberries and pumpernickel croutons.

“Mommy,” Agnes said. It was always “Mommy” now, Clen noticed, or maybe it had always been that way. What did Clen know? “You’ve outdone yourself.”

“I can barely move,” Riley said. He fell back into the cushions of the armchair. His plate was clean; he had gone back for seconds of everything, which had made Dabney fuss over him more, if that was even possible. “It was so delicious, boss.”

“I first made beef Wellington back in the spring of 1982,” Dabney said. “Before Clen and I went to the junior prom.”

“This one was even better,” Clen said.

Dabney tucked herself under Clen’s right arm, and he felt her smile against his chest. She had eaten next to nothing, but neither Clen nor Agnes had nudged her about it because it did no good. Dabney ate when she was hungry, which was about once every three days. That she had outdone herself was right. Clen knew that this was the last meal she would ever cook.

There was, no doubt, an elaborate and scrumptious dessert waiting somewhere within the confines of the Joneses’ enormous SubZero refrigerator, but none of them would partake in it tonight. Dabney fell fast asleep against Clen’s chest. Agnes and Riley rose to silently do the dishes while Clen sat and enjoyed the dying embers of the fire before carrying the ninety-six pounds of Dabney Kimball back to his cottage to bed.

Stop time, he prayed. Now. Stop it now.

Dabney

There was something she wanted, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask for it.

Agnes

By the end of October, her mother was in a wheelchair. She slept all the time now, and, at her request, she was staying at Clen’s cottage. Dabney weighed almost nothing. She was so thin, it was as though a part of her had been erased.

Agnes didn’t know what to do. She talked to Riley every night on the phone. Her mother was going to die. Christmas Stroll didn’t seem like a realistic goal. Agnes was going to have to call hospice, and soon.

Clendenin

November 6 was Dabney’s birthday. She was forty-nine.

He asked her what she wanted to do to celebrate, and she said that she wanted to order Cuban sandwiches from Foods for Here and There, and she wanted to watch Love Story with Clen and Agnes.

“No cake?” he said. Dabney liked proper pomp and circumstance when it came to birthdays: cake, candles, cards, and presents. That had been true when she was a teenager, and he’d assumed it still was.

Dabney shook her head. Just the sandwiches and the movie, she said.

He said, “Don’t you think Love Story might be too…maudlin?”

“It’s my favorite movie,” she said. “I’d like to see it one more time.”

Agnes arrived at his cottage, looking very, very sad. She and Clen had decided that afternoon to call hospice. They would let Dabney enjoy her birthday, and then hospice would come every day for as long as they were needed.

Dabney would not live to see fifty.

Before the sandwiches and the movie, Clen decided to give Dabney her surprise. She held it in her lap and turned it over, admiring the plaid wrapping paper in navy blue, Nantucket red, and Kelly green.

“I love this wrapping paper,” she said. “I wish every present I’d ever gotten had been wrapped in this paper.”

A good start, he thought. Agnes had picked out the paper.

Dabney touched the present some more, fingering its edges. Taking her time with the last present she would likely ever open.

“I think it’s a book!” she said.

“Open it, Mommy,” Agnes said.

Dabney opened it. The cover of the book was pink, a dusty-rose blush. And in black letters on the front it said, THE MATCHMAKER: DABNEY KIMBALL BEECH.

“Oh,” Dabney said.

She turned to the first page. Couple #1: Ginger (née O’Brien) and Phil 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.

And so on and so on-through Tammy Block and Flynn Sheehan, and Dr. Donegal, and the Levinsons, and Genevieve and Brian Lefebvre, and the failed story of Nina Mobley. Clen had managed to collect nineteen of the forty-two stories. He had done the interviews, and had edited each story to make it readable.

Dabney paged through the book, laughing and cooing, and saying, Yes, yes, I remember that! When she looked up at Clen, her eyes were shining with tears.

“I can’t believe you did this,” she said. “This is the most wonderful thing anyone has ever given me.”

“You have brought so much love into the world, Mommy,” Agnes said.

Clen said, “I thought it was important. Agnes will keep it. Her children will read it. And their children. They will know you through those stories.”

Dabney blinked. Tears dropped onto the pages. “Thank you,” she whispered.

Dabney

There was something she wanted. She was afraid to ask for it. Forbearance, she thought. She was running out of time.

It was the middle of the night, three or four in the morning, her birthday officially over. The present of the book had overwhelmed her. It was a living history, her life story really, that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren would read. They might think of her the way she thought about Dabney Margaret Wright and Winford Dabney Wright and all the other women who had preceded her. She was merely taking her place in line.

The Cuban sandwich had been delicious, and Love Story had been okay until the scene where Oliver tells his father that Jenny has died.

“Turn it off,” Dabney had said.

“Are you sure?” Clen said.

“Yes.” Dabney knew what was coming, and she couldn’t handle the sight of Oliver sitting alone in the snow.

Dying wasn’t sad, she thought. Leaving people behind was sad.

There was something she wanted. It was exactly 3:44 in the morning. Dabney slept much of the day away, but in the very late hours, so late they were early, sleep often eluded her. Forbearance. Her great-grandmother, Winford Dabney Wright, had stood on the corner of Main and Federal Streets eight hours a day for six weeks petitioning for a woman’s right to vote, talking and arguing with anyone who would listen. Dabney’s beloved grandmother, Agnes Bernadette, had changed sheets and scrubbed toilets six and a half days a week her first five years on the island. She had taken off Sunday mornings to attend Mass.

Dabney poked Clen in the ribs until he stirred.

“What?” he said. He always snapped out of sleeping sounding cogent, but Dabney knew he might not remember this conversation in the morning. She had to make sure he was really awake. She sat up and turned on the light. This took effort. Her insides were now jelly.

Clen sat up beside her, blinking. He checked the clock, and drank from his glass of water. “Dabney?” he said. “Do you need a pill?”

“No,” she said.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked. “Are you afraid?”

She shook her head. They had had some frankly terrifying conversations about what came next. What would happen when Dabney died? What would it be like? Dabney appreciated Clen’s candidness-We don’t know, Cupe. Nobody knows. And so, Dabney had decided to focus only on her time alive for right now. The death door was closed.

Her time alive.

She said, “I want to see Box.”

Clen was silent, as she figured he might be. She reached out and touched the stump of his left arm.

“I want you to call him and tell him to come.”

“Me?” Clen said. “Why me? You should call him. Or Agnes.”

“No,” Dabney said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. I want you to call.” Dabney reached for her ice water; her hand was barely strong enough to lift the glass. She took a pill. Clen would be the easiest person for Box to say no to, and so if he came, Dabney would know it was because he really wanted to. “I’d like you to call in the morning.”

Clen sighed, as she figured he might. But she had also thought he might refuse.

“All right,” he said.

Box

There wasn’t a free minute in any of his days. The semester was in full swing and he was teaching three classes-two seminars and the Macro class. Normally he let Miranda or one of the department TAs handle the bulk of the Macro class, but this year he did it himself. Busy, busy, busy. The braver or more compassionate of his colleagues sometimes asked how he was “doing.” They knew Miranda had migrated, and they had heard Dabney was sick, perhaps, but they didn’t know the rest, or at least he hoped they didn’t.

He didn’t teach on Fridays, so that was the day he hopped the Delta shuttle to Washington.

He was in the West Wing when the phone call came. His cell phone was silenced, but he felt incessant vibrations and checked once discreetly-an unfamiliar number. He would deal with it later.

But less than an hour later, an aide entered the room with a message slip for Box.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s urgent, apparently.”

Box saw the name Clendenin Hughes and bile rose in his throat-not only because he despised the man but because he assumed the call could mean only one thing.

Dead? Box thought. The day before had been Dabney’s birthday, and he had sent a dozen long-stemmed roses to the house. Pink roses, whereas usually on her birthday and their anniversary and Valentine’s Day, he sent red. But he couldn’t do red roses, the I love you rose, although he did, of course, love her; he loved her enough to move mountains. He ordered pink to make a small point. Things had changed. Dabney would notice. She was all about details.

He had texted Agnes to see if the roses had arrived and she’d responded that yes, they had, and although Dabney wasn’t home just then, she would tell Dabney the roses had come.

Agnes’s final text on the topic said, You are such a good man, Daddy.

Box was stuck back on wasn’t home just then. Not home to receive the roses and notice the change in color, making him wish he hadn’t sent the roses at all!

He had assumed Dabney was spending her birthday with the philistine boor-but now, as he eyed the message, he worried that what Agnes wasn’t telling him was that Dabney was in the hospital.

He nearly knocked his chair over as he stood up, thinking, She’s dead. My wife is dead. The Treasury secretary and his deputies snapped to attention.

“Professor?” the secretary said. “Is something wrong?”

Box said, “Please excuse me.”

An aide found him a quiet, empty cube of an office from which to make the call. Hughes picked up on the first ring.

He said, “She’s still alive. She insisted I call you. She wants to see you.”

Box was consumed with something beyond anger, beyond fury. But, also, relief. She was alive. Breathe, breathe. She was alive.

“How is she?” Box said. “Tell me the truth. How much time does she have?”

“Nobody knows for sure,” Hughes said. “Weeks, maybe a month? Maybe longer, maybe not. Agnes called hospice. They’re coming on Monday. We want to make sure she’s comfortable.”

“We,” Box said, involuntarily.

Hughes cleared his throat. “She wants to see you. She’s asking for you.”

“Yes,” Box said. “I hear you saying that.”

“She insisted I call you,” Hughes said. “Believe me, I didn’t dream this up.”

“No,” Box said. “I imagine not.”

She wanted to see him. Fury trumped relief, and hurt appeared out of nowhere. She wanted to see him now, after she had lied to him, cheated on him, such an awful word, such an incomprehensible concept. Dabney Kimball, a liar and a cheat. What had he done to deserve such ruthless public humiliation? She had lied to him again and again and again and again! She wanted to see him now, but there had been any number of times when she had wanted to see only Hughes.

He knew she hadn’t been to the salon! And yet it had been beneath him to question her.

She had made a fool of him! She had made a laughingstock of John Boxmiller Beech.

And why did she have Hughes call? Why not call herself? Why make Hughes do it? Agnes could have called. Why Hughes?

Box wasn’t good with interpersonal drama or motivations of the heart; he despised murky emotion, most of all in himself. He preferred to keep above it. But even so, a part of him understood what Dabney was doing. She was trying to bring him and Hughes together. It was matchmaking of the most twisted kind. This time, she would not have her way.

Box decided: he would not go to her.

Hospice, weeks, months, a lifetime going forward without Dabney. The bite of strawberry pie, the icy cold root beer, she wanted to want him but her heart was elsewhere, he had seen it even at their wedding reception in the backyard of her grandmother’s house on North Liberty Street, but he had ignored the shadow in her eyes because he was just so happy that she was Mrs. Dabney Kimball Beech.

It would be better if she never saw him again. She could remember him as he had been: dignified to the end, at least he could say that. If there were to be another meeting of the two of them, who knew what he would say or do. How could he hide his pain, his sorrow, his incredulity, and this other emotion, the one beyond anger and fury. He would never be able to hide his broken heart from her, that was certain, and he didn’t want her to die holding herself responsible for it.

He would not go.

Clen

She told him she wanted to spend her final time at home, and by home she meant the house on Charter Street.

I love you, she had said. And I have valued and treasured the time I’ve had with you in this cottage, but this cottage isn’t my home. She swallowed. I want to go home and if you want to be with me, which I hope you do, then I’ll have to ask you, humbly, to come with me to Charter Street.

Clen bristled. Now, at the end, she was asking difficult things of him. She expected him to spend time in the house she had bought and lived in for twenty-four years with the economist. He would, what? Sleep there? In the guest quarters?

And yet he understood that this cottage wasn’t her home, it wasn’t even his home, and it was too small for nurses and hospice workers to move around in comfortably. She had to go back.

“I don’t want to let you go,” he said. He felt dangerously close to tears, but he had promised her he wouldn’t cry, and so he poured a bourbon instead, and then he called Agnes and told her they were coming.

Agnes

So many people wanted to visit that Agnes had to draw up a schedule: two people a day for ten minutes apiece. Dabney was propped up in bed, pearls on, headband in place. She could sometimes hold together a conversation, sometimes not.

Morphine. She said it made her feel like a dragonfly on the surface of a pond.

“I took you to Jewel Pond a dozen times the summer you were three,” Dabney said. “It was hard to get to, and more than once I got the Nova stuck in the sand, but you liked to throw rocks there, and we used to look for turtles. In the sun, it did look like a jewel. Like an emerald some days, a sapphire others. Do you remember it?”

Agnes said that she did, but she didn’t. She liked the picture Dabney painted: Agnes and Dabney alone at a secluded pond, Agnes wading in to her ankles to throw rocks while Dabney watched from her towel under the red-and-white-striped umbrella. Agnes taking a nap facedown on the towel while Dabney rubbed her back and read a Jane Austen novel.

Agnes and her mother, suspended alone in a happy, peaceful bubble. If Agnes had been three, then Box had been in the picture. He had been her “father,” he had adopted her in the months after he and Dabney were married. But he had been working, traveling, speaking, teaching, writing.

Agnes had held only one grudge against her mother, a ten-year-old grudge that was really the grudge of a lifetime: Dabney had waited sixteen years to tell Agnes who her real father was. Sixteen years. It had always seemed an egregious misstep on Dabney’s part. Agnes should have known much earlier; she should have grown up knowing. She remembered a comment made by Mrs. Annapale, her Sunday-school teacher, who had owned the bed-and-breakfast where Box had stayed while he was courting Dabney. Mrs. Annapale had said of Box, “He stayed with me every weekend until your mother agreed to marry him. Your mother used to bring you sometimes, too. Such a sweet baby you were!”

And Agnes had thought, Huh?

When Agnes recounted this conversation to her mother, her mother had looked very worried for an instant, then she mentioned that Mrs. Annapale was getting older and might soon be mixing up Mary Magdalene with the Virgin Mary.

That had been a lie, or almost a lie. Not telling Agnes about Clendenin had been a lie of omission, a willful deception of the very worst kind.

Or so Agnes had believed until now-today, this past summer, since Agnes had met Clendenin. Now, her feelings had changed. She understood now, in a way she hadn’t before, just how gone Clendenin had been for Dabney. He had been on the other side of the world. The only way Dabney had survived was to pretend that he no longer existed. Agnes also understood how profoundly Dabney loved the man, and had continued to love him over all that time. The combination of the love and the hurt was powerful enough to keep Dabney from telling Agnes the truth. Plus, Box had been there to step in, a real father in every aspect but blood. What, Dabney had asked-calmly in the face of Agnes’s near hysteria at the age of sixteen-does it matter? Clendenin Hughes was just a name; his parentage was a matter solely of biology. He had never been Agnes’s father, Dabney had said ten years earlier, and he never would be.

But he was something now. Agnes wasn’t sure exactly what. At the very least he was someone else who loved her mother. In this he was a comrade, a teammate, possibly even a friend.

One evening as the light was fading-darkness came early in the fall-Agnes sat watching Dabney breathe as she slept and she said, “I forgive you, Mommy.”

Tammy Block came to visit, and Marguerite Levinson came with her golden retriever, Uncle Frank. Genevieve Lefebvre came, and Vaughan Oglethorpe came, smelling of embalming fluid. And every third or fourth day, Celerie came to discuss strategies for the future of the Chamber.

Nina Mobley came, announcing the news of her engagement to Dr. Marcus Cobb! Dabney asked Agnes to open champagne, although she herself could not drink any.

The woman Agnes had once seen pulling into Clen’s driveway showed up, identifying herself as Elizabeth Jennings, but when Agnes went up to announce this visitor to her mother, Dabney groaned and said, “Tell her I’m sleeping.”

When Agnes reported back to Elizabeth Jennings that Dabney was sleeping, Elizabeth nodded once sharply and said, “I knew she wouldn’t want to see me. Please tell her I’m sorry and give her this.” Elizabeth thrust forth a tarte tatin. “I’d like to say I made it myself but really, it was my cook.”

“Oh,” Agnes said. The tarte was dazzling with its glazed golden orbs of apple and caramelized sugar, but Dabney hadn’t eaten solid food in over a week. “Okay, thank you.”

Dabney’s former therapist, Dr. Donegal, came and stayed past the ten-minute limit. He was upstairs with Dabney for nearly an hour, and when he came back downstairs he was wiping his eyes.

And then the most surprising visitor of all. Or maybe not. Agnes had, after all, been wondering, hoping, praying, but she had been afraid to ask.

When she heard footsteps in the hall, she had thought it was Clen. Clen was staying at the house on Charter Street most nights, sitting with Dabney until she fell asleep, and then sleeping in the awful, tiny bedroom in the attic. Like a scullery maid, he had joked. He wouldn’t take the regular guest room because he felt he didn’t belong there. The attic room had only one twin bed. Agnes didn’t know how Clen got any sleep, but he wouldn’t switch rooms no matter how she implored him.

But the footsteps in the hallway did not belong to Clen. When Agnes looked up, the person she saw standing in the doorway of the kitchen was her father.

Box.

And only then did Agnes break down and cry.

Dabney

She had everything she needed. Except…

The hospice workers were white angels with wings and soft voices. They wiped Dabney’s brow, smoothed her hair, rubbed her feet. They gave her morphine. Morphine eradicated the need for forbearance. Forbearance was, now, left to the healthy, the living. The hospice workers read aloud stories from the book Clen had made for Dabney. Or Agnes came in and read them.

Ah, Dabney thought. Ginger O’Brien and Phil Bruschelli, ninth grade, the smell of the gym when basketball was being played in the winter, the squeal of sneakers and the thunk of the ball against the polished floor, the rustle and cheering and chatter of kids in the bleachers. Dabney used to stop in the gym for a few minutes after she was finished with Yearbook. Dabney used to mock up pages of the yearbook using rubber cement, and jellied squiggles of it would be stuck to her hands. She had worn her pearls and an oxford shirt and her Levi’s perfectly faded and broken in, washed only on Sundays and ironed while she watched Sixty Minutes on TV. Her penny loafers, perfectly scuffed, replaced at Murray’s Toggery the first of every August so that she could wear them around the house for a month before school started, breaking them in.

Could she go back to those days when she was happy and safe?

She said to Clen, “You had both your arms in ninth grade.”

“Yes,” he said. “I did.”

Clen was by her side. He gave the hospice workers a break or they gave her and Clen privacy, Dabney wasn’t sure which way it worked. Clen fed Dabney ice chips and put balm on her lips with the tip of his finger, and a few tears fell because Clen’s other hand, his left hand, had been strong and beautiful, too, but now it was gone. Turned to dust, Dabney supposed, somewhere on a distant continent.

She said to him, “You’ll know when to call the priest?”

Clen nodded, his lips pressed together until they turned white. He didn’t want to call the priest because he didn’t believe in Catholicism, maybe. Or he didn’t want to call the priest because it signaled the end. The priest meant something to Dabney, she wanted to confess her sins, she wanted Extreme Unction, she wanted permission to pass on to whatever came next. Her grandmother Agnes Bernadette had received last rites, and her facial expression had immediately settled into one of peace and acceptance, like a marble Madonna.

Clen had promised to call the priest.

But not yet. Not yet.

Ice chips, angels, hands soothing her aching feet, Clen’s voice, his mighty voice. How had she lived twenty-seven years without it? How had she lived without the green glen and weak tea of his eyes?

She said to Clen, “You have to find someone else. I meant to help you, but…”

“Hush,” he said.

“I couldn’t bear it,” Dabney said. “I was selfish, I wanted you all to myself. But, Clen, you can’t be alone.”

“Cupe,” he said. “Please.”

“Promise me you’ll try.”

“No,” he said. “I will not try.”

Clen, Agnes, the hospice workers-and then, finally, the priest. Not Father Healey, who had seen Dabney from Baptism to First Communion to Confirmation, but a new priest, a young man, a man too handsome for the cloth, if you asked Dabney. Father Carlos, he had a Spanish accent and soft brown eyes. He sat at Dabney’s bedside, took her hand, and said, “Pray with me.”

She had everything she needed except… And it was time to stop longing for that. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen. She had confessed her sins and said her penance, but her real penance was that she would go without the one thing she needed.

Her journey was coming to an end. Forty-nine years. She had hoped for ninety-nine, didn’t everyone, but Dabney couldn’t complain. She hadn’t sunbathed on the golden shores of Saint-Tropez, she hadn’t visited the Taj Mahal, she had never seen the Hollywood sign or Mount Rushmore or the pyramids. She hadn’t shopped in Moroccan souks or eaten in a greasy spoon on Route 66.

But, Dabney knew, she had Nantucket. She had been born and raised here, she had worked twenty-two years in service to this island, and she would die here. She had been faithful to Nantucket. Oh, Nantucket, more of a mother than her own mother.

Everything she needed. Except.

And then, she heard his voice, or she thought she did. It was too soft at first to tell.

“Darling?”

She couldn’t believe it. She was dreaming, or in a morphine delirium. She had a hard time now discerning what was real and what was visiting her from another time. Agnes at three years old, throwing rocks to disturb the placid, emerald surface of Jewel Pond, was as vivid as Agnes yesterday reading to Dabney from the last pages of Emma.

Darling.

Dabney opened her eyes, and there he was. Box. If she had had the ability to cry or cry out or smile or laugh, she would have.

She tried a word. Here! She meant, You’re here! You came! You did not forsake me even though I so gravely forsook you. Darling? Am I darling? You have found it in your heart to come back to our home and call me darling.

Box understood here to mean, Sit here. He sat next to her. He held her hand.

He said, “Oh, Dabney.”

His tone of voice was not one she’d ever heard before. It was full of pain, sadness, regret, love. She couldn’t bear for him to say another word. What else could he possibly say?

“I love you,” he said. “I will always, always, always love you, Dabney Kimball Beech.”

She was able to blink at him. Her eyes were all she had left, but not for long, she didn’t think.

She tried again. “Please.”

He nodded. “Sshhh. It’s okay.”

“Please,” she said, or tried to say. The effort of it was too much. She was so tired. She closed her eyes.

She heard voices and felt things, she did not know what. She heard the voice of May, the Irish chambermaid, singing “American Pie.”

Where is my mother?

Your father is on his way, love.

Mama!

Dabney had taken an entire Saturday of her life to learn how to make beef Wellington so she could prepare it for Clendenin before the prom. The key to the puff pastry-which had to be made by hand, Pepperidge Farm wouldn’t do-was very cold butter. The chef at the Club Car, an old man when Dabney was in high school, had repeated this several times: very cold butter.

Albert Maku had found Dabney crying on the steps of Grays Hall. Everyone else was thrilled about starting Harvard-everyone but Dabney and Albert. He had spoken to her in Zulu and she had cried, because the world was so foreign and strange without Clen by her side. Clen was 140 miles away, in New Haven.

A blizzard on Daffodil Weekend-that had seemed such a travesty! Nina Mobley had nearly chewed the cross off her chain as she and Dabney looked out the office windows at the snow piling up on Main Street.

Oysters-Island Creeks and Kumamotos. She could have eaten ten times as many, and still it wouldn’t have been enough.

A 1963 Corvette Stingray split-window in Bermuda blue with matching numbers. That would have been nice, too, although where in the world would she have driven it? The point of that car had been in the wanting.

Matisse, La Danse. Maybe that was heaven. Blues and greens, naked, dancing, dancing in a never-ending circle, each time around as thrilling as the first.

She had been ambivalent about the pregnancy. For the eight months after Clen left, she stayed at home, cooking and cleaning for her father, playing solitaire, and reading novels of shame-Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Vanity Fair-as her belly grew rounder and harder and more embarrassing each day. The friends she’d had in high school and college had been stunned into silence. They stayed away. She was as lonely as she’d ever been.

In the delivery room it had just been Dabney, a nurse named Mary Beth, and Dr. Benton. The birth, in Dabney’s memory, had been painless, probably because she didn’t care if the baby lived or died, or if she herself lived or died. What did it matter without Clendenin?

But then, of course, they placed the baby in Dabney’s arms, and the loneliness melted away. A mother first, a mother forever.

Agnes!

Dabney had jumped on the bed while her mother applied mascara at the dressing table.

Dabney said, Look how high I’m going! She was in her red Christmas dress and white tights. Her mother had instructed her to remove her Mary Janes.

I am looking, darling, her mother said. Her eyes flashed in the mirror. That’s very high indeed. Be careful now. You don’t want to fall and break yourself.

“Mommy.”

Dabney’s eyes opened-yes, they opened still. Agnes stood at the foot of the bed with Riley; they were holding hands and they were engulfed in pink clouds, fluffy as cotton candy.

Agnes at the carnival in the sticky heat of summer, cotton candy all over her face and in her hair, begging Dabney to go on the Scrambler.

I’m afraid! Dabney had said.

But you’re a grown-up, Agnes said. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to be afraid.

Agnes and Riley, all that pink. Dabney knew it. She knew it!

Clendenin was on her left, holding her hand, and Box was on her right, holding her hand. They were both there. Dabney felt that she did not deserve this, but she was grateful. She had everything she needed. Her heart was a kite, tethered to the earth by two strings, but it was time for them to let go so she could float away.

She was a dragonfly, skimming. Heaven was a Corvette Stingray in the sky, maybe.

Heaven was that they were all right there with her.

Clen squeezed. “Cupe,” he said.

Box said, “She’s going, I’m afraid.”

It was okay. In the end, after all, it was sweet, like freedom.

“Mommy!” Agnes said.

When Dabney closed her eyes, everything was pink. So pink.

Couple #43: Agnes Bernadette Beech and Riley Alsopp, together six months

Agnes: We buried my mother’s ashes on the Friday of Daffodil Weekend in the family plot where her father and her grandmother and great-grandparents and great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandmother, the original Dabney, were laid to rest. My mother used to say that she hated to leave Nantucket because she was afraid she would die and never return, so it was a relief for me-and for Box and Clen, too, I think-once she was safely in the ground. We kept the burial private, just the three of us, Riley, and Nina Mobley, but at the tailgate picnic following the Antique Car Parade the next day, people surrounded the Impala to pay their respects-laugh, cry, and share Dabney stories. Celerie had made a huge platter of ribbon sandwiches in my mother’s honor, and this year they all got eaten, and all I could think of was how happy this would have made my mother.

A year earlier, I had agreed to marry CJ.

Riley liked to say that he fell in love with me before he even met me, on the day he saw my photograph on my mother’s desk at the Chamber office. He said he saw the picture and stopped dead in his tracks and thought, That is the woman I am going to marry. He said that his heart had never been broken before but the closest he’d ever come was when he found out I was engaged.

My feelings for Riley developed more gradually, which he understood. My emotional plate was full-with CJ, with my mother, with Clendenin. I know that I love him, I know he is the kindest, most delightful, most handsome, most talented surfing dentist on earth and that I would be nuts to let him go-but I’m not ready to talk about marriage. Especially not this weekend. We have agreed to see what the summer brings-we will be together on Nantucket-and maybe, maybe, I’ll move to Philadelphia with him in the fall.

My mother would be ecstatic about that.

After the tailgate picnic was broken down and all the antique cars headed back out the Milestone Road toward town, I waved goodbye to Box. He was going to the Boarding House with the Levisons. In the morning, we would have coffee together and then I would drive him to the airport-the way my mother always had-so he could head back to Cambridge.

Clen had ridden out to the Daffodil festivities on his bicycle, and he was getting ready to ride home. I was worried about Clen in a way that I was not worried about Box. I left Riley to pack up our picnic and help Celerie with the last of her tasks, and I walked over to talk to Clen just as he was climbing onto his bicycle.

I said, “What are you up to tonight?”

He said, “Bourbon. Fried rice if I feel ambitious. Sox game on the radio, maybe.”

“Riley and I are breaking out the grill,” I said. “Ribs. Will you join us?”

He shook his head. “You’re sweet to ask, but I’m fine.”

“Are you fine?” I asked. There had been a couple of nights when I had gone to Clen’s cottage and we’d both drunk bourbon and one or the other of us had broken down crying because we just missed her so much. Where had she gone? She had been here, so alive, the most alive person either of us had ever known, and now she was gone. Snap of the fingers: poof, like that.

When it was Clen who broke down crying-great big heaving sobs that sounded like the call of some enormous animal, a moose, or a whale-I had thought, That is my father, crying over my mother. It was true, but it was so weird that I had to say it multiple times to make it sink in. What would our lives have been like if he had stayed on Nantucket and raised me? Or if my mother had been brave enough to go to Thailand?

“Agnes,” Clen said. And I knew something was coming.

“What?”

“I’ve been offered a job,” he said. “Running the Singapore desk for the Washington Post. It’s an assignment I’ve wanted my entire career. The job comes with a two-bedroom flat, just off the Orchard Road.” He must have noticed the look on my face, because he started talking more quickly. “Elizabeth Jennings mentioned my name to someone who owed her husband, Mingus, a favor or three. She feels guilty, I think, about the way she treated your mother.”

“You’re accepting favors from Elizabeth Jennings?” I said.

“It’s the job I’ve always wanted,” Clen said. “I’ll grow old drinking Singapore Slings in the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel.” He smiled weakly. “Agnes, I can’t stay here without her. Every day is excruciating. I can’t stay here without her, and I have nowhere else to go.”

Leaving me, I thought, when we had just found each other. That part of the world would swallow Clen up for another twenty-seven years, and I would never see him again.

He said, “I agreed to the job on the condition that I be allowed to come back to Nantucket for the month of August every year. It’s monsoon there; most of the country takes a vacation. So you’ll get me thirty-one days a year, when I’ll be at your disposal, I promise.”

I felt my face soften. Every August together was a good compromise.

He said, “And you and Riley can come visit. You can come to Singapore on your honeymoon!”

At that moment, Riley swooped up behind me and hugged me with such gusto, he picked me right up off the ground. “Did somebody say ‘honeymoon’?” he said.

Couple #44: John Boxmiller Beech and Miranda Gilbert. Together.

Box: There was always work. Harvard, my textbook, the secretary of the Treasury, who was now bandying my name around for Federal Reserve chairman, as the current chairman had been caught in a scandal and would most likely end up resigning. I would teach my seminar at the London School of Economics in June, and I was to be the keynote speaker at the annual Macro conference, this year held in Atlanta.

It was on a whim that I found myself in New York City. I had a former student named Edward Jin who had abandoned graduate work in economics in order to train as a chef. Apparently he was quite talented and successful; he had secured enough backing to open his own restaurant, called The Dividend, on the Bowery, and he invited me to the soft opening. It just so happened that I had nothing scheduled the weekend of this invitation, and I was partial to Manhattan in the springtime. I called Edward Jin and told him I would attend, and I booked a junior suite at the St. Regis.

The soft opening at The Dividend was an intimate affair-thirty or so friends and family and investors of Edward Jin’s gathered in the bar area, which featured wood floors salvaged from an Amish farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a chandelier made from an old wagon wheel, and a lot of copper pots and candlelight and hand-muddled cocktails made from ingredients like kale and fresh ginger. This was the way with many restaurants now-farm-to-table, organic, produce and meats assiduously researched and hand-sourced. It was good and fine and noble, but I missed Dabney’s cooking.

I knew no one except Edward Jin and he was, naturally, too busy for anything but a warm hello and a single introduction-to his married sister who was a stay-at-home mother in Brooklyn. I mentioned that I had taught Edward at Harvard; she responded that the family had all been stunned when Edward was admitted to Harvard since he’d been rejected from Brown, Duke, and Dartmouth, and I laughed and said that yes, college admissions were arbitrary and capricious.

After that, we had pretty much exhausted our conversational possibilities. I panicked and wished fervently for Dabney, who used to be able to carry on a conversation with an ox or a doorstop.

I was saved, however, because at that moment, Miranda Gilbert walked in.

If I say that my heart stopped or my breath caught I would sound like the heroine in one of the English novels Dabney so loved to read. Leaping heart, snagged breath, I wasn’t sure how to describe it but something happened when I saw Miranda.

What was she doing here?

Then of course I realized that she had been Edward Jin’s TA for more than one of my courses, and I remembered that they had hit it off rather well and used to meet for beers at the Rathskeller, which I did not approve of since she was, after all, responsible for giving Edward Jin his grades.

I was initially consumed with jealousy. Were Miranda and Edward now seeing each other?

Miranda gasped when she saw me and came over right away. The lighting was low in the restaurant but I thought she looked flushed.

“Box,” she said. “My God, I had no idea you would be here.”

“Nor I you,” I said. I kissed her cheek while holding both her hands. She smelled like Miranda always smelled, like an apricot rose, or something as delicate and lovely.

She said, “I was so sorry to hear about Dabney. You got my card?”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.” I had gotten many, many cards; most of them, including Miranda’s, I had left unopened because it was too difficult to read them. I put them in a larger envelope and forwarded them to Agnes.

“She was a special woman,” Miranda said. “She had a gift for love, the way other people have an eye for color.”

This was so true, it made my eyes burn, and I blinked rapidly.

“Yes,” I said. “She did. She was always right about love. It was uncanny.”

Miranda and I switched place cards at the long harvest table so that we could sit next to each other, and we spent the evening in a bubble of great food and better wine and esoteric conversation that left everyone else at the table out.

I said, “Have you seen much of Edward, since you’ve been in New York?”

“Edward?” she said, as if she didn’t know whom I was talking about.

“Our host,” I said. “The chef.”

Miranda laughed. “No,” she said. “I haven’t seen him at all before tonight. I didn’t even know he was in the city. He tracked me down on Facebook.”

I felt happy to hear this. Miranda and Edward were not together! But this didn’t mean she was available.

“Are you…dating anyone?” I asked. “Has anyone replaced the good doctor?”

She sipped her wine and nudged her glasses up her nose in a way I found bewitching.

“No,” she said.

Dabney had said Miranda Gilbert, but I hadn’t listened.

I hadn’t listened, Dabney, because I was married to you. You you you.

But I heard Dabney’s words now: Miranda Gilbert. She loves you, Box.

Dabney was never wrong. She had the gift of love, the way some people have an eye for color.

At the end of the evening, I helped Miranda on with her coat.

I said, “Another drink?”

“I’m sorry to say I’m tuckered out, Box. And I have an early meeting tomorrow. I’m afraid I must head home.”

“No!” I cried out. Showing my hand dreadfully, I knew.

She smiled in a way that thrilled me. “Take me to dinner tomorrow night, will you? Someplace just the two of us?”

I said that I would.

And I did.

And somewhere in the atmosphere, or dare I say the heavens, the spirit of another woman was sighing in bliss at being right, once again.

Clendenin

The late spring night was mild, so Clendenin stood out on the deck of the ferry, where he could watch the lights of Nantucket recede.

He would spend the night in Boston, then fly the following day to London, and then on to Singapore. He had packed one trunk, which would precede him, and he traveled now with a large rolling suitcase, easily manipulated with one hand.

Singapore. He couldn’t believe it. He had waited so long, to no avail, it had always been just out of reach, and now it was like a golden apple that had dropped into his hand.

He had called Elizabeth Jennings to thank her, and she had said, “I had nothing to do with it. I only mentioned to Jack that I knew you. He took the ball and ran with it. You can hardly be surprised, Clen. You have a Pulitzer. Any foreign desk in the world would be lucky to have you.”

Gracious of her to say. He doubted it was true, but he wasn’t going to argue.

Singapore was his perfect match.

He recalled a similar ferry ride, over a quarter century earlier. A young man, twenty-three years old, with two healthy, strong arms, a sense of adventure, and a big dream, was heading out to conquer the world.

He had waved madly at Dabney and had called out I love yous.

Dabney had told him, again and again, We are a perfect match. No matter what happens, we are going to end up together.

End up together. Yes, he supposed they had.

The foghorn sounded its long, lonely note. Dabney was gone. He would forever dwell in the prison of her absence.

But he had been so lucky. She had granted him a second chance: six months of the purest happiness he’d ever known. He pictured Dabney pulling into his driveway in the Impala and climbing the three steps to the porch of his cottage. Her hands on the sides of his face. Her smile.

In his jacket pocket, Clen fingered Dabney’s pearls. She had given them to him in her final days. When he first held them, they were still warm from her neck.

Keep these, she said. And think of me.

As if anything else were possible.