“No!” Dabney said. “Stay! Please stay!”
I looked at David. “Stay,” he said. “We can watch The Wizard of Oz.”
David and I started dating shortly thereafter. We kept it under wraps for the most part, appearing out in public only as “friends,” but I don’t think we were fooling anybody. Agnes Bernadette died in January, and David proposed to me the following Easter Sunday, in front of Dabney, over the dinner she had once again prepared.
Dabney said, “You two are a perfect match. I can see it.”
But the fact of the matter was, David couldn’t actually marry me because he was still married to Patty Benson. He had never hunted her down and asked for a divorce. It was when he finally used the information that he had gotten from the private investigator to track Patty down in Texas that he learned she had overdosed on Valium the year before. She was dead.
David had been afraid to tell Dabney. He believed that Dabney had spent her whole life waiting for her mother to come back. Dabney had been in therapy for years, dealing with her fear of leaving the island, which both David and Dabney’s therapist, Dr. Donegal, believed was connected to her abandonment. But Dabney took the news in stride.
“Oh,” she said. She shrugged. “Maybe I should feel sad? But I hardly remember her.”
Dabney was not so levelheaded in her relationship with Clendenin. The romance endured, despite the fact that she was at Harvard and Clen at Yale. There was the disastrous weekend of the Yale-Harvard game in New Haven during Dabney’s sophomore year. Both David and I thought that would be the end, but Dabney refused to let go.
And then, Dabney found herself unexpectedly pregnant at twenty-two. Clen was already in Bangkok; he sent her a plane ticket, but Dabney refused to leave the island. She would raise the baby herself, she said.
There was one time during the pregnancy when David was working a double and I heard Dabney crying in her room. I knocked lightly and opened the door. Dabney raised her face from the pillow and said, “I hate love, Shannon! Love is the worst thing in the world!”
I sat with her awhile and rubbed her back. I almost felt like a mother. I asked her if she missed Clendenin and she said yes, she missed him with every cell of her being. I asked her if she was angry at Clen for not coming back to Nantucket. She told me that she had asked him to please let her be. Not to call her or write to her or contact her in any way ever again. This was news to me, and I was pretty sure it would be news to David.
Dabney said, “His dream is over there. I couldn’t ask him to stay on Nantucket, Shannon. He would hate me and hate this baby…just the way…” She trailed off.
Gently, I said, “Just the way, what, Dabney?”
“Just the way my mother did,” she said.
“Your mother didn’t hate you,” I said. But with those words, I was way out of my comfort zone. Who was I to explain why Patty Benson had done what she’d done?
Dabney started crying again. “I thought Clen and I were a perfect match. I have been right about everyone else. Why was I wrong about myself? It isn’t fair!”
I agreed. It wasn’t fair.
David died of a heart attack in his sleep when Dabney was thirty-four, Agnes nearly twelve. It was a sad time for us all, although Box was around to help us manage things.
I stayed on at the police department until I had my thirty years and could properly retire. Then I decided to leave Nantucket. It was too lonely a prospect to stay, a woman nearly sixty-five, alone on this island. I had cousins in Virginia, and I liked the idea of moving south, someplace milder.
But then Dabney got involved. She asked me, did I know Hal Green, he had been a summer resident for years with a house in Eel Point, and only now had moved to the island year-round. He’d lost his wife a few years earlier to breast cancer, and he was a terrific guy; Dabney knew him because he entered his Model A Ford in the Daffodil Parade each year.
I said, “No, Dabney, I do not know Hal Green.”
Dabney said, “That’s good, that means he hasn’t had any run-ins with the law.”
I did not crack a smile. I knew what Dabney was up to.
She said, “I think you should meet Hal Green. I think you would like him.”
I said, “Oh, do you?”
Dabney said, “Come for dinner on Saturday. I’ll invite him.”
“Dabney.”
“Please,” she said. “Just come.”
Hal and I have been married for four years.
Clendenin
She was like Dabney twenty years earlier, Dabney as she had been standing on Steamship Wharf just before he left. But there was something else in this woman that grabbed at him: the hazel eyes, and a certain facial expression he had only ever seen in the mirror.
He clenched his right fist and felt his phantom left fist clench in unison; he felt his whole left arm in a way he hadn’t in months, except in dreams.
He couldn’t believe it.
“Agnes?” he said, his voice no more than a whisper.
“Yes,” she said.
It took some convincing to get her inside. He understood the urge to flee. It was scary and confusing, this reunion, unplanned, unexpected-but for him, not unhoped for.
He said, “Can I offer you a cup of coffee? Or some tea?”
She blinked at him.
He said, “I don’t bite.”
She barely moved her head, whether to indicate yes or no, he wasn’t sure.
He said, “I have bourbon.”
She turned off her car, a hybrid, more a toy than a car. Clen wondered what Eight-Cylinder Dabney thought about the Prius.
He poured two Gentleman Jacks, neat, and Agnes threw hers back without flinching. His daughter.
She said, “My mother comes here.”
He couldn’t tell if it was a question or not. “Yes,” he said. “We’re friends.”
“Friends,” Agnes said.
Clen downed his bourbon, then poured two more. He didn’t know how to proceed; he didn’t know what Dabney had told the girl.
He said, “How did you know to come here?”
She said, “That I can’t tell you.”
He laughed, not because she was funny but because she was so much like him. He felt like he was being born. His daughter, his child, his progeny, his DNA, his his his. How had he missed out on this until now? Tears stung his eyes. It was too much, it was overwhelming. He stared at the grain of the oak table. Agnes held her silence. Any other girl her age might have been shrill or hysterical, angry or dramatic.
Oh, Dabney, he thought. Forgive me, please.
He hadn’t realized what he had given up-not really-until now.
He said, “Does your mother know you’re here?”
“She does not.”
“Are you going to tell her you met me?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
Clen said, “I answered your letter, years ago. I never heard back. Did you get my letter?”
“I did,” she said. “Thank you. It helped me to read it. It was enough.”
“It wasn’t close to enough,” Clen said. “You deserved much more.”
“Let’s not have that conversation right now,” Agnes said. “Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, relieved.
“I want to talk about you and my mother,” Agnes said.
The relief evaporated. “I think you should probably ask your mother.”
“I have asked my mother,” Agnes said. “She has been disappearing all summer long-leaving work for three- and four-hour stretches. She tells Nina she’s ‘running errands.’ A few weeks ago, I saw her by chance about a half mile from here, and when I asked her about it, she said she was going to have lunch at Sankaty.”
Clen nodded. Nobody who knew Dabney would believe Sankaty.
Agnes said, “That was bullshit, of course.”
Clen drank his second bourbon. He itched for a cigarette.
Agnes said, “She comes here to see you. She comes every day?”