Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

“I’m not coming back, Vaughan,” she said. “I do have a suggestion for a new director, however.”

True, Celerie was young. But she had energy and enthusiasm and a fresh outlook. She was bright and she learned quickly. She had the fire. She also would have a direct line to Dabney. Dabney would consult with her until…

“Well,” Dabney said. “Until I’m not able to consult anymore.”

Vaughan made some phlegmy, throat-clearing noise that Dabney knew was meant to conceal his relief.

“Okay,” he said. “Have Celerie e-mail me her résumé. Pronto.”

Next, it was out to Celerie’s house-a sad little rental on Hooper Farm Road. As soon as Dabney pulled into the driveway, she realized that this was the house that her friends Moe and Curly used to rent. Moe and Curly had surfed at Madequecham Beach back when Dabney and Clen were in high school and college. Dabney had come to parties at this house; she had thrown up in the backyard after too many vodkas with grape soda.

Dabney chuckled as she walked up to the front door. She was Dabney now and she had been Dabney then, but they were two different people.

Sometimes life seemed very long.

And other times, not.

Dabney knocked, and Celerie opened the door right away. She was holding a paperback copy of Emma, by Jane Austen. She was wearing a short blue terry-cloth robe. And pearls. And the navy headband with the white stars.

Dabney knew she had been right to come.

Celerie’s mouth formed a tiny O of surprise, the way other girls her age might react to a visit from Justin Beiber, or the way Dabney’s grandmother, Agnes Bernadette, would have reacted to a visit from the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II.

“That’s my favorite book, you know,” Dabney said.

“Yes,” Celerie said, and her eyes brimmed with tears. “I know.”

“Can I come in and talk to you for a minute?” Dabney asked.

“Of course.” Celerie indicated the room before her, featuring a gray, tweedy-looking sofa, a large square rag rug, a boxy TV with rabbit-ear antennae, and a rotary phone. “We call this room the museum because nothing actually works.”

Dabney laughed. She could just barely smell the marijuana smoke of thirty years earlier, and see the hazy silhouettes of Moe and Curly and a girl they all called Meg the Drunk Slut, crowded around a red glass bong.

Celerie wiped at her eyes. “I just made a batch of watermelon lemonade. Can I offer you a glass?”

“Yes,” Dabney said. “I would love a glass of watermelon lemonade.”

Celerie vanished into the kitchen, which Dabney could see was outfitted with the same linoleum and Formica of three decades before. That refrigerator used to be filled with Miller beer and the dreaded vodka and Welch’s grape soda. Moe and Curly used to brag that they spent ten dollars a week on groceries, leaving the rest of their disposable income for booze, weed, and Sex Wax.

She was the only person she knew who salvaged such details.

Dabney sat on one end of the sofa; at the other end was a feather pillow that held the soft indentation of Celerie’s head.

Celerie returned with a pink frosty glass.

Dabney tasted the drink. “Delicious perfection!” she said, and Celerie actually smiled. She sat next to Dabney.

Dabney said, “First of all, I owe you an apology.”

“No,” Celerie said. “You don’t. I get it.”

“Well,” Dabney said, “you shouldn’t. You should be madder than hell at me. I skipped out on a lot of hours of work this summer. I cheated not only my husband, but I cheated Nantucket. I cheated you and Riley and I cheated poor Nina, leaving her to hold the office together.”

“You held the office together,” Celerie said. “Because it was like you were there even when you weren’t there.”

“Thank you for saying that,” Dabney said. “But I didn’t come here so you could compliment me. I came here so I could compliment you. You did an incredible job this summer, once again. I couldn’t have dreamed up a better information assistant. Now, that being said, I have a question for you.”

“A question?” Celerie said. “What is it?”

“Would you-please-submit your résumé to Vaughan Oglethorpe? Today, if possible? I want you to apply to be the new executive director of the Nantucket Chamber of Commerce. I will guide and advise you for as long as I’m able.”

Celerie stood very still, and then she broke out in a war whoop and raised her hands in a V over her head.

“Yes!” she said.

There was no reason to continue putting off the inevitable, so he scheduled a dinner at Abe & Louie’s with Michael Ohner, the divorce attorney. Ohner talked all night about depositions, subpoenaing credit cards, tax returns, financial statements, shared assets, and alimony.

Ohner said, “Do you see giving Dabney the Nantucket house in exchange for a lesser payout? Because as unjust as it seems in this case, you are going to have to pay Dabney.”

Box waved his hand. “She can have whatever she wants.”

“I’m not going to let you give away the farm,” Ohner said. “Do you see naming this fellow Hughes as a third party?”

A third party? Box thought. There was a time, decades earlier, when Box would have considered himself a third party.

The next day, Box called Dabney to warn her that legal action was pending. He had a pile of messages from her in his voice mail in-box, including one desperate-sounding message from a week or so earlier. Possibly she’d had a few glasses of wine and was feeling guilty for the way she had publicly embarrassed him. Or she had woken up and realized that Clendenin Hughes wasn’t worthy of her in any respect. Her so-called love for him was little more than a leftover teenage romantic fantasy.

She answered immediately. “Hello?” she said. “Box? Is it you?”

Something in her voice caught his attention. For possibly the first time in twenty-four years, he had a gut feeling where his wife was concerned.

He said, “Dabney? Are you all right?”

“No,” she said. “I’m not.”

When he hung up the phone, he was shaking. He had only just begun to come to terms with the idea of living his life without Dabney by his side. But the news that she was dying, that he would, in a matter of months, be living in a Dabney-less world, pierced his heart like a long, sharp needle and drew out whatever lifeblood had been pumping through it.

He quickly wrote Michael Ohner an e-mail, saying that he would not need his services after all.

She was staying on Nantucket through the fall and maybe the winter.

She was staying on Nantucket until…

She called Manny Partida and asked for a leave of absence from the Morningside Heights Boys & Girls Club. It was decided that Wilder would take over at the helm while Agnes was gone. Agnes could work at the Island Adventures after-school program twenty hours a week. Dave Patterson was thrilled to have her.

CJ and his attorney pleaded down, as Agnes had known they would. He was sentenced to ninety days in jail and eighteen months’ probation. There was a restraining order in place. CJ wasn’t allowed within a hundred yards of Agnes for the next five years.

What would Agnes’s life be like in five years?

A week after Labor Day, Riley had to head back to dental school at Penn. Agnes drove him and Sadie to the airport. She couldn’t believe how sad she felt. The night she had spent with Riley eating cheeseburgers in his Jeep and then going on a wild-goose chase in search of Dabney seemed like aeons ago, and yet she hadn’t gotten enough of him somehow.

They stood in the crowded airport terminal. Everyone was leaving-heading back to Manhattan or Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, heading back to work or school, sweaters and real shoes, football games and Broadway openings. Summer was over. It happened every year, but this year it was hitting Agnes the hardest because the one thing about a Nantucket summer was that no one ever wanted it to end.

She was afraid she might cry.

“You saved my summer,” Agnes said. “Thank you for being my friend. Thank you for helping me find Clen. Thank you for loving my mother. Thank you for…being you.”

“Hey,” Riley said. He grabbed Agnes’s chin and she felt her heart spin in its socket. “You’re welcome.” He bent over and kissed her. They kissed and they kissed and they kissed-it felt like an entire summer’s worth of kissing-until his flight was called and he had to leave Agnes to board his plane, with Sadie barking in protest.

As soon as the night air got a chill, she started to careen away from him.

Careen away from him. The phrase came unbidden, borrowed from their ancient history together, one of their first dates-sledding, during an unexpected snowstorm in December 1980.

Clen and Dabney hadn’t so much as held hands in December 1980, but this was not to say that they didn’t have a relationship. Dabney had pursued Clen with an enthusiasm that he suspected was based in pity. He was the new kid, too much smarter than anyone else to have made any friends. Dabney approached him one day after English class and asked him if he’d ever read Cheever.

Was she teasing him?

Of course, he’d said. He had gobbled the red volume of stories the year before, on recommendation from the young, vivacious librarian, Eleanor, back in Attleboro. He now knew all about commuter trains, gin and tonics, and adultery.

Dabney had taken to engaging him in conversations about books-she liked Jane Austen, he preferred Chekhov and Kafka-and from there she probed a bit into his personal history. What was his affinity with the depressing Russians? Had he moved to Nantucket from a gulag? Clen was hesitant to talk about himself, but he let certain details escape: He lived with his mother, he said. He was an only child. His mother waited tables at the Lobster Trap. They lived in a cottage out behind the restaurant.