The phone rang, startling her. Would Clen be brazen enough to call the house? Then she realized that the phone call was from Agnes. Agnes called every Thursday night at nine thirty because she knew her mother would be home for Sandwich and a Movie. Thank God that Dabney had come back! If Dabney hadn’t answered, Agnes might have grown worried and called Box, and then there would have been some explaining to do.

“Darling!” Dabney said.

“Mommy?”

Dabney said, “Honey, are you okay?” Did she dare hope there was trouble in paradise, Agnes’s engagement to CJ on the rocks? Oh how Dabney would inwardly rejoice!

“It’s my job,” Agnes said. “I found out yesterday that we didn’t get funding from National for the summer. The club is shutting down until the school year starts back up.” With these words, she started to cry.

“Oh, honey,” Dabney said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I knew it was iffy,” Agnes said. “I should have mentally prepared myself.”

“So what will you do all summer?” Dabney asked. She had a dreary picture in her head of Agnes working as a temp in CJ’s office, fetching coffee, answering the phone.

“I’m coming home,” Agnes said.

“What?” Dabney said. “To Nantucket?”

“Yes, Nantucket. I don’t hate it as much as you think, Mom.”

“I didn’t think you hated it,” Dabney said. However, Agnes didn’t love Nantucket the way Dabney did. She hadn’t been home for the summer since her freshman year in college. Agnes had inherited Clendenin’s taste for globetrotting. There had been trips to France and Italy in high school, then a summer in Ireland, then a summer working at a camp for disadvantaged children in the Bronx, which had eventually led her to her current job. “I just thought you might want to stay in the city with CJ.”

“He wants me to stay,” she said. “But Manhattan stinks in the summer. I’d much rather be at the beach. I can work as a counselor at Island Adventures; I already talked to Dave Patterson. I can plan the wedding. And I can hang out with you and Dad.”

Agnes was coming home for the summer! Dabney felt light-headed.

“CJ is really busy,” Agnes said. “He has to negotiate contracts before training camp starts for his football players, and one of his clients for the Yankees, I can’t tell you who, is in the process of being traded to San Diego. But I’m trying to get him to come up on weekends when he can.”

“Weekends,” Dabney repeated. She would spend a summer’s worth of weekends with CJ? When Dabney closed her eyes, she saw a thick, olive-green fog. Agnes’s coming home was the best surprise Dabney could have hoped for. Dabney could save Agnes. And Agnes, quite possibly, could save Dabney.


Clendenin

He couldn’t cut a steak, he couldn’t tie his shoes, and he couldn’t button the cuffs of his shirt. A grocery cart was okay, but not a grocery basket. Childproof pill bottle, forget about it. Chopping a tomato was difficult but not impossible; he hadn’t yet tried to shuck corn. Typing was a slow and arduous process, so he wrote everything longhand now, then read it into a special program on his computer. He had a hard time folding his laundry, and uncorking a bottle of wine.

He could shave, but he had always hated shaving anyway, so he’d let his beard grow in for four months, two weeks, three days-the amount of time that had passed since he’d lost his arm.

Transactions like paying the pizza guy from his wallet and then accepting the hot box was a complicated dance that frustrated Clen and embarrassed the deliveryman. It was his left arm that was gone, so shaking hands was still okay.

He probably shouldn’t hold a baby, but there were no babies in his life.

He could crack an egg, flip an omelet, ride his bicycle, and swim. And he could smoke, thanks to the invention of the Bic. Lighting a match was a trick from his past.

Usually when dusk descended, which happened later and later as June approached, Clen stood on his porch and took aim at the crows with his BB gun-he was getting pretty good-and then he smoked a cigarette and dropped the butt into the mayonnaise jar half filled with water at his feet. It was a nasty habit he’d picked up overseas; it had been impossible to live in Bangkok, and later Hanoi, and later still Siem Reap, and not smoke. He had thought he would give it up when he returned, but he had given up so much already that he couldn’t quit the cigarettes.

He either made himself something to eat (an omelet, fried rice) or he called something in, hence the awkward relationship with the pizza-delivery guy, although Benny knew him now.

And then, when it was fully dark, Clen climbed into the car left at his disposal-he had gotten a special driver’s license, valid as long as he wore his prosthetic, which he never did-and he drove into town, past the house on Charter Street where Dabney lived.

If he had told anyone he did this, they would have thought him a stalker, a creep, a man hopelessly mired in the past. He didn’t feel like any of those things. He drove past Dabney’s house because he liked to see the lights on and think of her inside-tossing a salad or sticking fresh flowers in a vase of water, or reading Jane Austen in bed.

He knew she was married. He knew there was next to no chance that she would leave the economist just because Clen had decided to come back. But he loved her in a way that could not be ignored, and so he was determined to try. The kiss in front of his cottage had been the kiss of a lifetime. If he got nothing else, he would be happy with that.

In every dream he’d had since being back on Nantucket, he had both his arms. It was because of Dabney. She returned him to his whole self.

Clen had found out about the baby in a letter from Dabney, the sort penned on a thin, light-blue airmail envelope-from the outside, identical in appearance to the three letters Dabney had sent that had preceded Clen’s arrival in Bangkok, those saying how much she loved and missed him. The letter about her pregnancy had reached Clen after he returned to Bangkok from a grueling three-week assignment in Pattaya, which was a more disturbing, derelict, and soulless place than Clen could have imagined existed. He had been overseas for slightly less than two months, enough time for him to have gotten a hang of the way things worked, but also to have become disenchanted.

I don’t know how to say this, Dabney had written. So I’ll just say it: I’m pregnant.

And then later in the letter: I want nothing from you. I considered terminating but I can’t bring myself to do it. I am due in May.

May, he thought. Meaning that Dabney had gotten pregnant in August, a few weeks before he left. They had had frequent, clinging, urgent sex in those final days, and Clen had not always used a condom. One night in the Quaker Cemetery came to mind.

Their parting had gone more smoothly than he’d imagined. When the job offer came from the Southeast Asia desk of the New York Times, he had thought Dabney would…flip out, cry, scream, beg him not to go, threaten suicide or murder. But she had been resigned, even happy for him. She had smiled, and said, I’m so proud of you. You have to accept, Clen. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. She had been so even-keeled about it that he’d thought, momentarily, that she had decided to go with him.

No, she said. I’m staying here.

So what you’re saying is we’re breaking up?

She said, We are a perfect match. No matter what happens, we’re going to end up together.

And you really believe that? he said.

Let’s wait, she said. And see what happens.

It was the mature thing to say, but he couldn’t help feeling injured by it. This was stranger still because it was him leaving. The two of them with their Ivy League degrees had spent the past year on Nantucket working jobs that were beneath them. Clen had been itching to go someplace bigger, more important, someplace where news was actually happening. He had been thinking of New York. A relationship with Dabney would have been plausible from New York-back every weekend or every other. But Bangkok?

He had waved goodbye to her from the Steamship, yelling her name and telling her he loved her until she was out of sight. Then, he had retched over the side of the boat.

Upon receiving Dabney’s letter, Clen borrowed a thousand dollars against his future salary and bought her a plane ticket. He called her from a sweltering Western Union office, believing that now that Dabney was pregnant, she would have to come. He was far more excited about the prospect of seeing Dabney than about having a baby. What did that even mean, having a baby? He wasn’t sure, but he had not expected Dabney to say what she said, which was, I will not come there. I’m going to have this baby alone.

What? he said.

The only way I will survive this, she said.

He didn’t understand. What? He was shouting, despite the queue of Australian backpackers behind him, listening to his every word.

Is if you promise never to contact me again. Cold turkey. Never contact me again. Please respect my wishes. Please.

We can make it work here, he said. I’ll rent a bigger place, and hire a woman to help you with the baby!

Clen, she said. Please.

Please what? He was ready to pull his hair out in frustration. Just come, Cupe. I bought you a plane ticket.

I can’t! she said. I’m not sure you get it, or that you’ve ever gotten it. I can’t do it, I’m too afraid, and afraid isn’t even the right word. Clen could hear her breathing; he could tell she was trying not to cry. I’m sorry, Clen. I just can’t.