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.”