Box had to agree with her: it was an honor. He was glad that Dabney was back to her supportive and agreeable self. She was far more encouraging than he’d anticipated.
“Thank you, darling,” he said. “For understanding.”
“Don’t be silly,” Dabney said.
Her voice was light, even joyful. She must be feeling much better, he thought.
Box called the secretary back.
Dabney
Nina walked into the office wearing a chic new pair of glasses and announced that she had a date with Dr. Marcus Cobb for the following Wednesday night.
Dabney was nearly speechless. “Who is Dr. Marcus Cobb?” she asked. The name sounded familiar, but Dabney couldn’t place it. It sounded like the name of one of the guys Oprah had elevated to celebrity status-Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz-but that wasn’t right.
“The eye doctor,” Nina said. “He joined the Chamber earlier this week.”
“Right!” Dabney said. She had just processed his application yesterday. “I am losing it!”
“He asked me out when he came into the office,” Nina said.
“Did he?” Dabney said. She was surprised that this was the first she was hearing of it. “Where is he taking you?”
“To the Galley for dinner,” Nina said.
The Galley Beach was not just a good first date, it was the best first date. “I can’t believe it,” Dabney said.
“You can’t believe someone would want to take me out?” Nina said.
“No!” Dabney said. “It’s not that.” She didn’t know how to explain what she was feeling. If Nina was finally going to go on a date, Dabney had wanted to be the one to set her up. She wanted to redeem herself for the Jack Copper debacle. “When do I get to meet him?”
“I’m not sure,” Nina said. Her face held an expression that Dabney couldn’t decipher. “I think maybe I’d like to take this one slow…maybe keep it to myself for a while…would you understand if I didn’t introduce you right away?”
“I promise not to say anything,” Dabney said. “I know I messed up with Jack, Nina. I would love to meet Dr. Marcus Cobb, just get a look at him, and I swear not to say a word about auras or smoke. I swear!”
“Dabney,” Nina said, “I’m asking for space with this one. Okay?”
“Oh,” Dabney said. “Okay.” She tried not to feel hurt. She supposed she should be glad that Nina had taken care of things on her own. Dabney was terribly busy.
She and Clen had been spending nearly every afternoon together-either at the pool or at the beach. Clen preferred the pool. It was less of a hassle and the wind didn’t ruffle his newspapers and there was indoor plumbing, as well as the blender for margaritas. Dabney was becoming accustomed to frozen drinks and homemade sandwiches-one more delectable than the last-delivered to her chaise.
Dabney preferred the beach because to her, the beach was Nantucket, and it returned her to the summers of her youth. Once upon a time, Dabney and Clen had been the King and Queen of Madequecham Beach. Clen was in charge of bringing the keg each Sunday, and Dabney organized the firewood, the charcoal grills, the hot dogs and hamburgers and marinated chicken thighs, the chips and potato salad and brownies. They played horseshoes and touch football and they threw the Frisbee. They listened to the Who and the Boss and Van Morrison. Making love in the green grass, behind the stadium with you, my Brown-Eyed Girl.
They had good, long talks during those afternoons. Clen told her the story of how he’d lost his arm, which was so horrific and disturbing that Dabney couldn’t bear to think about it. She would reach out periodically and stroke the skin of his stump and think of what a brave man he was, what a resilient man.
She signed out on the log nearly every day, writing, errands. Her errands were: Beach. Pool. Sandwiches. Talk. Love.
Love.
Clen had said to her, “Take the words back. I want to hear you take them back.”
She laid her hand on his cheek and looked into the green glen and weak tea of his eyes. “I take them back.”
I don’t love you.
“Tell me you didn’t mean them when you said them.”
She said, “I didn’t mean them when I said them. I have always loved you, Beast, and I always will.”
It was, all of it, something like a state of bliss, but it was coming to an end. They had been granted a week’s reprieve when Box called to say he was going to Washington.
“The president?” Clen had scoffed. “Are you sure he isn’t exaggerating his own importance?”
Box had flaws like everyone else, but exaggerating his own importance wasn’t one of them. Dabney was just grateful for an extra week of freedom.
Agnes, however, was growing more curious by the day. Where were you going today? I saw you driving on the Polpis Road. Why were you not at work? I called the office at three o’clock and they said you’d stepped out. Again. What’s going on, Mom? Is there something you want to tell me? Are you seeing Dr. Donegal again, because if you are, I think that’s great. Nina says you’re out doing errands. What kind of errands? Does Nina know where you’re going?
Dabney yearned to tell her daughter the truth.
Clen said, “Why don’t you?”
Maybe if she’d been having an affair with Dr. Marcus Cobb, or a young waiter from the Boarding House, she would have confided in her daughter. But Clendenin Hughes was a nuclear bomb.
A week after Agnes turned sixteen, Dabney had started teaching Agnes to drive in the parking lot of Surfside Beach. They went in the evenings after dinner, just the two of them, and Dabney rode shotgun and offered tips she thought might be helpful. They drove Dabney’s Mustang, which had been an impulse buy after her Camaro died. She’d had the Mustang for only eighteen months total (buying a Ford had been a mistake), but the car would have great importance to her because in it she had told Agnes the truth.
Dabney didn’t remember her exact words. What would she have said?
Honey, sweetheart, darling…Daddy-Box-isn’t your biological father. Your biological father is a man named Clendenin Hughes.
It had gone something like that.
He lives in Asia now. He left the country before I discovered I was pregnant and it was impossible for him to get back. It would have been far easier for me to go over there, but I couldn’t go, and so I told him to please let me raise you on my own. I’m not explaining this well, darling, it was very complicated.
Clendenin Hughes. He lives in Thailand now, I think, or Vietnam.
All Dabney could remember was Agnes’s high-pitched, hysterical screaming like Dabney was stabbing her in the eye with a fork.
She had waited too long. Dr. Donegal had said thirteen. Box had wanted her to know at age ten.
But Dabney was Agnes’s mother; Dabney was in charge of what her daughter knew, and when.
Dabney hadn’t wanted Agnes to know at all, ever.
What did it matter? Really, what? Box had been a good father. He had been with Agnes since before lasting memory. Why mess up Agnes’s beautiful head with information she would never, ever need?
Because it was the truth. Because it was blood. Dabney and Box had done a lot of, if not actual lying, then sidestepping of the truth. Agnes had asked why she looked nothing like Box and Box had said, “Human genetics are capricious, my pet.” Agnes had asked Dabney about the photographs of her and Clen together in the yearbook. This was your boyfriend, Mom? Yes, I suppose it was. Whatever happened to him? Oh, he’s long gone.
Agnes had never seen her birth certificate. Clen’s name wasn’t on it. Dabney wouldn’t allow it; she’d been too freshly wounded, too consumed with baffling emotion. Dr. Benton, who was the doctor on Nantucket before Ted Field, had done the delivery and he had every idea who the father was, but Dabney looked him dead in the eye and said she had no idea. She said she had slept with a lot of boys the preceding summer.