Everything she needed. Except.

And then, she heard his voice, or she thought she did. It was too soft at first to tell.

“Darling?”

She couldn’t believe it. She was dreaming, or in a morphine delirium. She had a hard time now discerning what was real and what was visiting her from another time. Agnes at three years old, throwing rocks to disturb the placid, emerald surface of Jewel Pond, was as vivid as Agnes yesterday reading to Dabney from the last pages of Emma.

Darling.

Dabney opened her eyes, and there he was. Box. If she had had the ability to cry or cry out or smile or laugh, she would have.

She tried a word. Here! She meant, You’re here! You came! You did not forsake me even though I so gravely forsook you. Darling? Am I darling? You have found it in your heart to come back to our home and call me darling.

Box understood here to mean, Sit here. He sat next to her. He held her hand.

He said, “Oh, Dabney.”

His tone of voice was not one she’d ever heard before. It was full of pain, sadness, regret, love. She couldn’t bear for him to say another word. What else could he possibly say?

“I love you,” he said. “I will always, always, always love you, Dabney Kimball Beech.”

She was able to blink at him. Her eyes were all she had left, but not for long, she didn’t think.

She tried again. “Please.”

He nodded. “Sshhh. It’s okay.”

“Please,” she said, or tried to say. The effort of it was too much. She was so tired. She closed her eyes.

She heard voices and felt things, she did not know what. She heard the voice of May, the Irish chambermaid, singing “American Pie.”

Where is my mother?

Your father is on his way, love.

Mama!

Dabney had taken an entire Saturday of her life to learn how to make beef Wellington so she could prepare it for Clendenin before the prom. The key to the puff pastry-which had to be made by hand, Pepperidge Farm wouldn’t do-was very cold butter. The chef at the Club Car, an old man when Dabney was in high school, had repeated this several times: very cold butter.

Albert Maku had found Dabney crying on the steps of Grays Hall. Everyone else was thrilled about starting Harvard-everyone but Dabney and Albert. He had spoken to her in Zulu and she had cried, because the world was so foreign and strange without Clen by her side. Clen was 140 miles away, in New Haven.

A blizzard on Daffodil Weekend-that had seemed such a travesty! Nina Mobley had nearly chewed the cross off her chain as she and Dabney looked out the office windows at the snow piling up on Main Street.

Oysters-Island Creeks and Kumamotos. She could have eaten ten times as many, and still it wouldn’t have been enough.

A 1963 Corvette Stingray split-window in Bermuda blue with matching numbers. That would have been nice, too, although where in the world would she have driven it? The point of that car had been in the wanting.

Matisse, La Danse. Maybe that was heaven. Blues and greens, naked, dancing, dancing in a never-ending circle, each time around as thrilling as the first.

She had been ambivalent about the pregnancy. For the eight months after Clen left, she stayed at home, cooking and cleaning for her father, playing solitaire, and reading novels of shame-Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Vanity Fair-as her belly grew rounder and harder and more embarrassing each day. The friends she’d had in high school and college had been stunned into silence. They stayed away. She was as lonely as she’d ever been.

In the delivery room it had just been Dabney, a nurse named Mary Beth, and Dr. Benton. The birth, in Dabney’s memory, had been painless, probably because she didn’t care if the baby lived or died, or if she herself lived or died. What did it matter without Clendenin?

But then, of course, they placed the baby in Dabney’s arms, and the loneliness melted away. A mother first, a mother forever.

Agnes!

Dabney had jumped on the bed while her mother applied mascara at the dressing table.

Dabney said, Look how high I’m going! She was in her red Christmas dress and white tights. Her mother had instructed her to remove her Mary Janes.

I am looking, darling, her mother said. Her eyes flashed in the mirror. That’s very high indeed. Be careful now. You don’t want to fall and break yourself.

“Mommy.”

Dabney’s eyes opened-yes, they opened still. Agnes stood at the foot of the bed with Riley; they were holding hands and they were engulfed in pink clouds, fluffy as cotton candy.

Agnes at the carnival in the sticky heat of summer, cotton candy all over her face and in her hair, begging Dabney to go on the Scrambler.

I’m afraid! Dabney had said.

But you’re a grown-up, Agnes said. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to be afraid.

Agnes and Riley, all that pink. Dabney knew it. She knew it!

Clendenin was on her left, holding her hand, and Box was on her right, holding her hand. They were both there. Dabney felt that she did not deserve this, but she was grateful. She had everything she needed. Her heart was a kite, tethered to the earth by two strings, but it was time for them to let go so she could float away.

She was a dragonfly, skimming. Heaven was a Corvette Stingray in the sky, maybe.

Heaven was that they were all right there with her.

Clen squeezed. “Cupe,” he said.

Box said, “She’s going, I’m afraid.”

It was okay. In the end, after all, it was sweet, like freedom.

“Mommy!” Agnes said.

When Dabney closed her eyes, everything was pink. So pink.

Couple #43: Agnes Bernadette Beech and Riley Alsopp, together six months

Agnes: We buried my mother’s ashes on the Friday of Daffodil Weekend in the family plot where her father and her grandmother and great-grandparents and great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandmother, the original Dabney, were laid to rest. My mother used to say that she hated to leave Nantucket because she was afraid she would die and never return, so it was a relief for me-and for Box and Clen, too, I think-once she was safely in the ground. We kept the burial private, just the three of us, Riley, and Nina Mobley, but at the tailgate picnic following the Antique Car Parade the next day, people surrounded the Impala to pay their respects-laugh, cry, and share Dabney stories. Celerie had made a huge platter of ribbon sandwiches in my mother’s honor, and this year they all got eaten, and all I could think of was how happy this would have made my mother.

A year earlier, I had agreed to marry CJ.

Riley liked to say that he fell in love with me before he even met me, on the day he saw my photograph on my mother’s desk at the Chamber office. He said he saw the picture and stopped dead in his tracks and thought, That is the woman I am going to marry. He said that his heart had never been broken before but the closest he’d ever come was when he found out I was engaged.

My feelings for Riley developed more gradually, which he understood. My emotional plate was full-with CJ, with my mother, with Clendenin. I know that I love him, I know he is the kindest, most delightful, most handsome, most talented surfing dentist on earth and that I would be nuts to let him go-but I’m not ready to talk about marriage. Especially not this weekend. We have agreed to see what the summer brings-we will be together on Nantucket-and maybe, maybe, I’ll move to Philadelphia with him in the fall.

My mother would be ecstatic about that.

After the tailgate picnic was broken down and all the antique cars headed back out the Milestone Road toward town, I waved goodbye to Box. He was going to the Boarding House with the Levisons. In the morning, we would have coffee together and then I would drive him to the airport-the way my mother always had-so he could head back to Cambridge.

Clen had ridden out to the Daffodil festivities on his bicycle, and he was getting ready to ride home. I was worried about Clen in a way that I was not worried about Box. I left Riley to pack up our picnic and help Celerie with the last of her tasks, and I walked over to talk to Clen just as he was climbing onto his bicycle.

I said, “What are you up to tonight?”

He said, “Bourbon. Fried rice if I feel ambitious. Sox game on the radio, maybe.”

“Riley and I are breaking out the grill,” I said. “Ribs. Will you join us?”

He shook his head. “You’re sweet to ask, but I’m fine.”

“Are you fine?” I asked. There had been a couple of nights when I had gone to Clen’s cottage and we’d both drunk bourbon and one or the other of us had broken down crying because we just missed her so much. Where had she gone? She had been here, so alive, the most alive person either of us had ever known, and now she was gone. Snap of the fingers: poof, like that.

When it was Clen who broke down crying-great big heaving sobs that sounded like the call of some enormous animal, a moose, or a whale-I had thought, That is my father, crying over my mother. It was true, but it was so weird that I had to say it multiple times to make it sink in. What would our lives have been like if he had stayed on Nantucket and raised me? Or if my mother had been brave enough to go to Thailand?

“Agnes,” Clen said. And I knew something was coming.

“What?”

“I’ve been offered a job,” he said. “Running the Singapore desk for the Washington Post. It’s an assignment I’ve wanted my entire career. The job comes with a two-bedroom flat, just off the Orchard Road.” He must have noticed the look on my face, because he started talking more quickly. “Elizabeth Jennings mentioned my name to someone who owed her husband, Mingus, a favor or three. She feels guilty, I think, about the way she treated your mother.”