“Yes,” Nina said. “Theater of the absurd. I don’t know where people come up with this stuff.” She stared into her coffee cup like it was a deep well. “Even weirder-someone heard that you have terminal cancer and you wanted to be back with Clen before you died.”
Oh, God, Dabney thought. She felt dizzy then, dizzy like she might faint, and she focused on her penny loafers, side by side, as steady as the horizon.
“I wish you had called me back,” Nina said. “I would have suggested that you call Vaughan and head it off at the pass. He adores you, Dabney. He’s hard on you, yes, but like a favorite teacher. You could have explained.”
“What is there to explain?” Dabney asked. “The man has known me my entire life. He can hardly have been surprised.”
“I would have burned the log, or dropped it off Old North Wharf,” Nina said. “I might not even have had to do that. Vaughan might have forgiven you the missing hours. After all, the Chamber runs like clockwork, and our coffers are at an all-time high, thanks to you.” Nina put her gold cross into her mouth, then took it out and slid the cross along its chain. “But there was one board member, there’s always one, who wanted your head on a platter.”
“Elizabeth Jennings,” Dabney said.
Nina nodded morosely.
Dabney said, “Well, I’d better go up.”
Vaughan Oglethorpe was sitting in Dabney’s chair with his feet up on Dabney’s desk, which she found offensive. It was her father’s old Dragnet desk, a desk Dabney loved more than any piece of furniture or objet d’art in her home. Vaughan had the log open in his lap; he was paging through it, making notes on a legal pad. When he saw Dabney, he got to his feet.
He was seventy-eight years old, the same age Dabney’s mother would have been. Vaughan and Patty Benson had gone steady one summer; it was all gin and tonics and dinner dances at the Sankaty Beach Club and rides down the Milestone Road in Vaughan’s convertible MG, which was what he drove when he wasn’t driving the hearse for his father. He was the only person Dabney still had contact with who had known her mother well. But Patty had dumped Vaughan, and Dabney suspected he had always hated Dabney a little bit for this reason, despite his outward displays of avuncular affection.
The room smelled of embalming fluid.
She would be cremated, she decided.
“Dabney,” he said. His voice was as heavy and somber as a thundercloud. He had never been replaced as board president, she guessed, because people were afraid of him the way they were afraid of the Grim Reaper.
“Vaughan,” she said. Bright smile. Fresh-faced in her headband and pearls, although she had slept a total of ten hours all week and she was down below a hundred pounds. Maybe he wouldn’t fire her. Maybe just a warning.
“It’s come to my attention that you’ve had personal issues that have kept you from doing your job.” He held up the log. “Since Daffodil Weekend, you’ve missed fourteen full days, and the days you have been present, you’ve been out of the office a total of a hundred and ninety-two hours.”
Could that be right? All those stolen lunches, entire afternoons at the beach with Clen. Days she was legitimately sick in bed. The past four days taking care of Agnes. The stupid lunch at the Yacht Club with Box. Clen Clen Clen. A hundred and ninety-two hours she had missed. She was appalled. She would have fired herself.
“The board isn’t pleased,” Vaughan said. “One member in particular. She feels your personal life has gotten in the way of your work performance.”
She wants Clen, Dabney thought. Hell hath no fury. What was Elizabeth doing on the board anyway? She didn’t own or work for a Nantucket business. But she had money and influence; she was a summer person who “cared” about Nantucket. She had used her charms with Vaughan Oglethorpe, batted her eyelashes, flashed her pretty manicure, and maybe promised him a back scratch.
Still, Dabney said nothing. Was he going to drop the hammer?
He said, “The board took a vote and it was decided that it’s time to ask you to step down.”
At that instant, Dabney realized that both Riley and Celerie were at their desks, quiet as church mice, staring right into the front office, listening to every word.
“Step down?” Dabney said.
“I’m asking for your resignation, Dabney,” Vaughan said.
Asking for her resignation? Asking her to step down? She, Dabney Kimball Beech, was the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce. She had, with Nina’s help, turned Nantucket into the thriving business community it now was. In 1992, the Chamber had 340 members, a budget of $175,000, and there were thirty thousand visitors annually. Twenty-two years later, under Dabney’s leadership, there were 620 members, a budget of $1.2 million, and seventy-five thousand visitors annually.
Should she quote these statistics? Surely he already knew them. But it didn’t matter, because she, Dabney Kimball Beech, had done what so many great people before her had done. She had proved to be human.
“Okay,” Dabney said. “I’ll just collect my things.” She looked around the office, wondering where to start. The desks were hers, the oriental rugs, the original Abigail Pease photographs, which every single visitor to the office commented on, the green-apple-candle smell. How could she pack up that smell?
“I’m asking Nina Mobley to take over as executive director,” Vaughan said. “I assume you approve of that choice?”
“Yes,” Dabney bleated. She couldn’t imagine that Vaughan Oglethorpe or anyone else on the board cared what she thought now. She was being discarded like a piece of trash.
Suddenly, Nina was at the top of the stairs. She said, “If you’re asking for Dabney’s resignation then you might as well ask for mine as well, because I will not work here without her.”
“Nina,” Dabney said. But Nina was already collecting things from her desk. She took down the calendar from Nantucket Auto Body, which they had each consulted a hundred times a day. Dabney realized that what Nina had said was true. She would never have been able to work in this office without her.
Vaughan clasped his hands together in front of him; the false sympathy required of a funeral director rose to the surface. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Nina. Let me encourage you to reconsider.”
“I quit, too,” Celerie said, standing in the doorway of the back office. “Dabney Beech is my idol! She is my hero! I have never known anyone like her! She inspired my love for this island! She made me appreciate its uniqueness and she made me want to serve as its advocate! She made me think of it as home, and I grew up far, far away from here! I am devoted to Nantucket, but more than that, I am devoted to Dabney Kimball Beech!”
“I’m leaving, too,” Riley said. He was holding his guitar case and a copy of The Grapes of Wrath and the framed photo he kept on his desk of Sadie, his chocolate Lab.
“Wait,” Vaughan said. “Everyone please just wait a minute. You can’t all leave.”
Just then, the phone rang, and this seemed to give Riley great joy. He smiled widely, showing off his perfect teeth.
“With all due respect, sir,” he said to Vaughan, “you’d better answer that.”
Box
He loved Cambridge in the fall, winter, and spring, but he did not love it in the summer. He wouldn’t have liked it under the best of circumstances, but now he found it unbearable-air-conditioning instead of open windows, the campus inundated with foreign visitors. Even the Charles was a disappointment; it looked like spoiled chocolate milk and smelled even worse.
Box ate every meal out, most of the time venturing across the river into Boston proper to do so, because it stretched out his night. He walked for the same reason. Now, there was nothing more depressing than his apartment after dark. If left to his own devices, he would sit in a chair facing the window and drink an entire bottle of wine by himself while listening to Mozart’s Requiem.