Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

Where was she going? Agnes couldn’t very well follow her.

The campers were intrigued. “Was that your mom?” Samantha asked. “Like, your Mom mom?”

Agnes realized that to her campers, she probably seemed too old to have a mother.

“Was that her car?” Archie asked. “A 1967 Chevy Impala?”

There was a motorhead in every group. Agnes nodded. “That was my mom,” she said. “My Mom mom. And yes, that’s her car.”

“Your mom must be cool,” Archie said.

That night at dinner, Agnes waited until Dabney had finished her first glass of wine and poured her second before she asked. Again, it looked like her mother had gotten sun. The freckles on her cheeks were plentiful and pronounced.

“I saw you on the Polpis Road today,” Agnes said. “By the Quidnet turnoff? I was with my campers. Where were you going?”

Dabney took a bite of her grilled salmon with homemade dill sauce, then made a face of ecstasy. Agnes had to agree: her mother cooked like a goddess. Agnes had gained three pounds since she’d been home.

Dabney said, “The summer between my senior year in high school and my freshman year in college, I got a flat tire on Main Street.” She dabbed her lips and took a sip of wine. “In the Nova. I popped it against the granite curb right outside of Murray’s Toggery. And no sooner had I gotten out of the car to look at the damage than a police car pulled up.” Dabney smiled. “And it was Grampy!”

“Oh,” Agnes said.

“What are the chances my own father would wander by at the exact moment my tire popped? I was very happy to see him, even though he made me change it myself. You remember what your grandfather was like.”

“Mom,” Agnes said. “Where were you going today?”

“I just thought of that story because of how funny it is to run into, you know, your parents, or your kids, when you’re out doing other things, living your life.”

“Mom.”

Dabney lifted a spear of asparagus with her fingers and nibbled it. “I had lunch at Sankaty Beach Club,” she said.

“Really?” Agnes said. This didn’t sound right. Dabney didn’t like to go to the Sankaty Beach Club, because her mother, Patty Benson, had been a member there, and thus Dabney had decided the place was cursed. “I thought you refused to eat there.”

“Well,” Dabney said, “I did today.”

Dabney was out of the office when Marcus Cobb came in to register with the Chamber. Marcus Cobb was actually Dr. Marcus Cobb, an ophthalmologist, who was setting up a practice on Old South Road.

A real eye doctor! Nina thought.

He was of medium height, had a shaved head, and was dressed in a shirt and tie. Nina loved a man in a shirt and tie, probably because she had grown up on Nantucket, where nobody wore a shirt and tie except for the high school superintendent and the insurance guys across the street.

Nina said, “You know, I could use a pair of glasses. I haven’t been able to see clearly in years.”

This made Dr. Marcus Cobb laugh. He thought Nina was kidding.

Couple #17: Genevieve Martine and Brian Lefebvre, married twenty-one years, five daughters

Genevieve: When I first met Dabney, I was twenty-one and she was seventeen and we worked together at Nantucket Cotton, a T-shirt shop which was the most successful retail spot on the island. I was from Canada, I had just graduated from McGill with a useless degree in French language and literature, and I had come to Nantucket because I had accidentally fallen in love with my cousin’s husband. I came from a large Catholic family and my mother, who was positively verklempt with me, told me to leave the country and pray to God for forgiveness.

I took the first job I was offered; the T-shirt shop was desperate for help. Dabney, although four years younger than me and still a teenager, was my manager. The owner, a man named Ed Law, told me I was to listen to Dabney and take all my direction from her. She was, he said, the best employee he’d ever had.

Dabney was a cute girl-she always wore jeans, loafers, opera-length pearls, a headband, and, during her shift, a pink crewneck T-shirt that said NANTUCKET NATIVE in navy letters across the front. Ed Law had had the T-shirt custom made for her, she said. And I thought, Wow, Ed Law is a cool dude.

Dabney was the one who told me that Nantucket Cotton was the highest-grossing retail space on the island, outearning even the galleries and the jewelry stores. Every visitor to the island wanted to leave with a souvenir, Dabney said. A T-shirt was lightweight, inexpensive, and practical. Ed Law had been the first person on the island to branch out beyond the name of the island. He created a T-shirt satirizing the first line of the famously lewd limerick. The T-shirt said: I AM THE MAN FROM NANTUCKET.

We sold thousands.

What I quickly learned about Dabney was that not only was she a good manager-she was organized and fair with our work schedule, responsible with the cash register and the “bank,” and she led by example with her work ethic (she folded a T-shirt better than I’d ever seen it done, and stacked them in order of ascending size, which wasn’t mandatory by Ed Law’s standards, but that was how Dabney liked it done)-she was also a superstar when it came to customer service. She engaged the customers, and asked where they were from and where they were staying. She had encyclopedic knowledge of the island and would always suggest restaurants to people, or off-the-beaten-path places to bike and picnic. People loved it! Most customers ended up buying extra T-shirts because of Dabney, and then Ed Law got the idea to sell tourist maps for three dollars apiece, and Dabney would customize the maps for everyone who came in based on their individual needs and desires.

“You should work for the Chamber of Commerce,” I said.

She beamed at me. “You’re right!” she said. “I should!”

“But what would Ed Law do then?” I said. And we laughed.

Dabney had a boyfriend named Clendenin Hughes, who would wait for her at the end of every shift. He would sit on the bench out in front of the shop and read until Dabney was finished. Then he would take her hand and they would walk off.

I worked with Dabney for three summers, until I had an ill-fated love affair with Ed Law. I had just earned forgiveness for my cousin’s husband, when I had to start all over again. After leaving Nantucket Cotton, I waitressed at the Atlantic Café, and then I decided I needed a “real job,” and I was hired as a receptionist by Ted Field, who at that time was so new to the island, he made me feel like a local.

Meanwhile, I continued to get involved with married men, despite my best efforts to avoid them. It wasn’t me; it was them. They lied to me. Ed Law had insisted he was separated, on the verge of divorcing-not true at all. When Dabney was graduating from Harvard, I was dating Peter the Fireman, whom I later discovered had…a wife and two kids in Billerica, Mass. And when I found out Dabney was pregnant, I had just broken up with Greg, a pilot from Bermuda. Married.

I could ask for forgiveness all day long, but it wasn’t helping. It was like an affliction, or a disease I was carrying.

I saw Dabney at the grocery store-in the middle of February, in the middle of the night-her belly about ready to burst. I gasped at the shock of it. Hugely, roundly pregnant, Dabney Kimball, who had been so responsible with the cash register.

She was buying chocolate ice cream. She looked over and saw me, but she did not smile.

“Oh, hi, Genevieve,” she said.

My heart swelled with affection. Dabney was one of the only people who pronounced my name correctly, with four syllables. Ge-ne-vie-eve.

I said, “What’s this? Is the baby…yours and Clen’s?”

She looked at me with flat eyes. “No,” she said. And then she walked away.

Well, one can’t work as a receptionist at a doctor’s office and not hear all the gossip: yes, it was Clendenin’s baby, no, it wasn’t Clendenin’s baby, it was someone else’s, a summer kid’s, then no, it wasn’t the summer kid’s, it was Clendenin’s after all. Probably, maybe Clendenin’s, nobody was sure, and Clendenin himself was gone, off to be a reporter in the Sudan.

When the baby was born, I knew her name and weight within the hour: Agnes Bernadette, seven pounds fourteen ounces, eighteen and a half inches long. But there was no announcement in the paper.

And I thought, How did the sweetest, smartest, most together young woman I had ever met end up like this?

For a baby gift, I special-ordered a tiny pink T-shirt that said NANTUCKET NATIVE in navy letters across the front. An inspired gift, I thought. Dabney sent a card on her monogrammed stationery: Love the T-shirt…so many good memories…thank you for thinking of us. But that was the last I saw or heard from her for a while. At that time, Ted Field was not her doctor.

Then, a few years later, I received an invitation to Dabney’s wedding. She was getting married to an economics professor from Harvard! I was thrilled for her, if a little jealous. I was dying to meet someone suitable-someone single-and get married.

Dabney and Box wed at the Catholic church and held the reception in the backyard of Dabney’s grandmother’s house on North Liberty. It was a wedding exactly like one would expect for Dabney-there were lots of roses and champagne cocktails and tasty hors d’oeuvres and a string quartet played Vivaldi, and Dabney looked beautiful in an ivory lace dress. She was in photographs with everyone, including the caterers and the valet parkers. Agnes wore a little pink dress that matched the color of the roses and I thought, This is a more fitting ending for someone as magnificent as Dabney.