What would they say when she told them she had lost the ring?
Riley said, “We can come back early tomorrow morning with my father’s metal detector.”
This was the third time he’d suggested the morning, and the metal detector. He knew the search was fruitless.
“You can leave,” Agnes said, also for the third time.
“Agnes…”
“What?” she snapped. She flipped over onto her butt and regarded Riley, who was dutifully holding up the incandescent rectangle of his phone.
He plopped onto the sand next to her and put one of his strong, warm, dentist’s hands on her knee. “Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry about the ring.”
“CJ is going to kill me,” Agnes said.
“He might be upset,” Riley said. “But I’ll point out, it’s just a thing. A precious, valuable thing, I know. But still only a thing.”
Agnes would never be able to summon the courage to tell CJ she’d lost it, which meant that she would have to try to replace it without his knowing. How would she ever come up with the money? She made sixty-eight thousand dollars a year at her job, and she had eleven thousand dollars in savings. She could spend her savings on another ring and pay the rest off in installments, she supposed. Or she could go to her parents for the money. Mommy, Dad, I need twenty-five thousand dollars in order to buy a new engagement ring, and yes, I do know that’s as much as a semester’s tuition, room and board at Dartmouth, but if I don’t replace the ring to its exact specifications, CJ will break up with me.
She could never, ever ask her parents for the money. Maybe Box alone? He liked CJ a lot.
But no.
She had to find it. She wished it had been locked onto her finger, like her Cartier love bracelet.
She searched, handful after handful of sand, inch after inch of beach. She plucked out every pebble, stone, and shell.
“We can come back in the morning,” Riley said. Time number four. “With the metal detector.”
“I can’t leave,” she said. “The tide. What if the tide washes it away?”
“The tide doesn’t come up this far,” Riley said.
Agnes started to cry. The ring was gone. CJ would never forgive her. She would be placed in a category with Annabelle Pippin, a woman who had needlessly wasted his money. Manny Partida had said that CJ lost his temper with Annabelle because she had bid too high on an auction item without his permission-these last three words being operative. It wasn’t that CJ couldn’t afford it. It was that he hadn’t okayed it.
Agnes thought about finding the receipt for the ring on his mail table. It had been right out in the open when Agnes let herself into CJ’s apartment and CJ was in the shower. Almost as if he had wanted Agnes to find it.
Twenty-five thousand dollars.
Agnes would apologize, but he might not forgive her, just as he still hadn’t forgiven Dabney for saying that he and Agnes weren’t a perfect match. What Agnes realized at that moment of sitting on the cold beach, sifting through handful after handful of sand, crying her eyes out, was that Dabney was right. CJ was not only wrong for her but, probably, bad for her.
“Here,” said Riley. He handed her a gently used napkin from the picnic basket, and Agnes blotted her eyes and blew her nose.
Agnes had been dating CJ for an entire year before she told him that Box wasn’t her biological father. She had wanted to keep that part of her history private, but when it looked like things were getting serious, she told him the truth. CJ had told her it was okay, she didn’t need to be ashamed or embarrassed, he was glad she had finally felt comfortable telling him. He had smiled at her reassuringly and said, “It explains certain things about you.”
“Certain things like what?” she asked.
But he hadn’t answered, and Agnes’s world had tilted a little more out of kilter.
Down the beach, some kids were setting off bottle rockets. Agnes let Riley pull her to her feet.
Dabney
She watched Box stride across Elizabeth Jennings’s front lawn toward Cliff Road, where they had parked the Impala. Dabney knew she should follow him, but she couldn’t make herself go.
She wanted to be where Clen was.
The second Box walked out the door, Dabney raised her eyebrows at Clen and said, “What happened, really?”
“He hit me,” Clen said. “Punched me.” He pointed at his chest.
“I find that hard to believe,” Dabney said. “What did you say to him?”
“I know you’d like this to be my fault,” Clen said.
“That’s not true.”
“You need to tell him, Cupe.”
“I know I do. But…”
They were interrupted at that moment by Elizabeth Jennings herself, who came rushing into the room in her usual imperious manner. Dabney knew Elizabeth because Elizabeth had sat on the Chamber of Commerce board of directors for the past eighteen months. If Dabney was very honest, she would admit that she found Elizabeth a bit self-important and her so-called elegance a bit practiced. Elizabeth was popular in Washington circles; she was a hostess along the lines of Sally Quinn and Katharine Graham. What else did Dabney know about her? Her résumé stated that she had attended Mary Washington and worked briefly as an administrative assistant at the State Department. Dabney knew she came from old Washington money; she was related somehow to President Taft. Dabney knew that Elizabeth had had two daughters, and that her husband had died. Dabney did not know that Elizabeth’s husband, Mingus, had been friends (indeed, partners in crime!) with Clendenin Hughes. This was unfortunate indeed.
“I heard there was a brouhaha in here,” Elizabeth said. Her eyes skipped about the room, narrowing in on the rug under the side console, which was askew. She bent to straighten it. When she stood, she glared at Dabney like she was an errant child. “Dare I ask what happened?”
“Oh,” Dabney said. She was afraid to look at Clen. “Nothing.”
“I lost my balance,” Clen said. “Dropped my glass and it broke. I’m very sorry, Elizabeth.”
“I hope you’re all right,” Elizabeth said.
“Fine,” Clen said. “We got the shards picked up but you might want to vacuum in the morning.”
Elizabeth beamed at Clen, as if nothing delighted her more than the thought of pulling out her Dyson or giving an extra instruction to her cleaning lady. Ever the gracious hostess, Dabney supposed.
“And John?” Elizabeth said, addressing Dabney. “Where has he gone off to?”
John? Dabney was temporarily stymied, until she realized that Elizabeth was asking about Box. Nobody called him John. That Elizabeth chose to do so only increased Dabney’s ire.
“He left,” Dabney said bluntly. She had other words at her disposal that would have softened the blow-he had to scoot, he wasn’t feeling well, he was tuckered out after all the excitement at the White House-but Dabney didn’t feel like granting Elizabeth the favor of a lovely excuse.
“Well, he’s very naughty and didn’t say goodbye,” Elizabeth said. She then seemed to take stock of the situation before her-Dabney and Clen alone together in the living room where a glass had broken and an endowed chair of economics at Harvard had left a party without thanking the hostess. Elizabeth Jennings knew nothing of Dabney and Clen’s past-or did she? one could never be certain-but neither was the woman naive. She probably had a good idea about what had transpired, or at least its general nature. She might be mentally sharpening the tines of her gossip fork.
Leave, Dabney thought. Go home, and find some way to apologize to Box. Or end the shenanigans now, and just tell him the truth.
But Dabney did not leave. She headed back onto the deck, ostensibly in search of another glass of vintage Moët & Chandon which she did not need. She was almost instantly captured by the congressman, who apparently had already bored everyone else at the party and hence had no choice but to give Dabney a second helping of his opinions.