The Matchmaker (11 page)

“I’m sorry?” Box said.

“Apparently he’s developed an allergy to our house,” Dabney said. “Or he’s trying to punish me because I said he and Agnes aren’t a match. Or he’s trying to control Agnes.”

“Dabney,” Box said. “Are you okay?”

“Not really,” Dabney said. “I’m not really okay at all.” She realized she was verging on histrionics, but she couldn’t help herself. What should she do? Tell Box about Clendenin?

“You need to pull yourself together, darling,” Box said. “Perhaps call Dr. Donegal?”

Dr. Donegal, her therapist. Box thought she was going mad.

Well, she was going mad.

“I don’t want you to go tomorrow, darling,” Dabney said. “I want you to cancel London. Please. Come back to Nantucket. Agnes is here, and…I’m here.”

“Cancel
London
?
” Box said. “I’m sorry, darling, did you just ask me to cancel
London
?
”

“Yes,” Dabney said. “Please.”

“You do realize this has been set up for the better part of a year,” Box said. “They can’t just find another lecturer. And Jesus, Dabney, they pay me a king’s ransom.”

“We don’t need any more money,” Dabney said. “I think we can both agree on that.”

“The money is hardly the point,” Box said. “It’s my reputation and my word and everything else. And you are overreacting. Something is bothering you, but my coming back to Nantucket isn’t the answer.”

Dabney was quiet.

Box said, “I’ll be back in two weeks, darling.”

He wasn’t going to cancel London. There was nothing Dabney could say or do. His reputation, his word, his brilliant and esteemed career in economics was on the line.

“You’re right,” Dabney said. “Of course, you’re right.”

“Get some rest,” Box said. “You’re overtired is my guess. And you’re looking too thin. Good meals and sleep, darling. I’ll be back before you know it.” With that, Box hung up.

Dabney reached home but did not go inside. She was spinning. She had eaten nine oysters but she was still hungry. There was chicken marinating in the fridge; she could throw it on the grill.
Go into the house and grill the chicken,
she thought.

She checked her phone. Quarter to eight.

Please? 8:00.

The lives we lead.

She climbed into the Impala and drove out the Polpis Road.

B
ox asked her to keep an eye on her mother while he was in London.

“She hasn’t been feeling well,” he said. “She’s been acting strangely.”

“Of course, Daddy,” Agnes said.

However, Dabney was so independent and Agnes so consumed with her own problems that it took a few days for Agnes to realize that her mother
was
acting strangely. Almost like she was hiding something.

On Agnes’s first day home, Dabney got up to go for her walk, as always, wearing her headband and pearls. She left the house as Agnes was fixing herself a cup of coffee with real cream. (Life’s joys were in the details; CJ took only skim milk in his coffee and he insisted that Agnes do the same, but CJ was now hundreds of miles away and Agnes wanted cream, dammit!)

By the time Dabney was dressed and ready for work, Agnes was at the table, eating a plate of scrambled eggs, whole-grain toast with homemade blueberry jam, and crisp bacon. This was, for her, a decadent breakfast. CJ always ate a power shake—spinach, wheat grass, seaweed. Agnes sometimes grabbed a Vitaminwater on the way to the subway, and on the weekends she ate half a grapefruit. As Agnes crunched a piece of bacon, she thought of how horrified CJ would be if he could see her stuffing her face, still in her pajamas at a quarter to eight, and she hadn’t exercised, hadn’t done so much as touch her toes. CJ was out the door every morning at six a.m. to run in Central Park and then go to the gym, and he liked Agnes to join him. He told her before she left that he feared she would fall away from her routine. His biggest fear, she supposed, was that she would return to him fat and lazy.

Agnes had assured him this wouldn’t happen. But as she snarfed down her delicious eggs, she realized that he had a right to be concerned. She had been home for less than twenty-four hours and was already being a slovenly pig. The thing was, it felt good.

Dabney said, “Honey, I would have made you breakfast.”

“I’m a grown woman, Mom,” Agnes said. “Do you want me to make you a piece of toast? I hogged everything else.”

“I’m happy to see you eating,” Dabney said. “You’re too thin.”

 “
You’re
too thin.” Her mother’s clothes were hanging off her, and her cheekbones were jutting out. “Daddy says you’re not feeling well.”

“Wheat allergy, I think,” Dabney said.

“You and everyone else in the world,” Agnes said. “So I guess no toast for you.”

Dabney said, “I’m headed into the office. There’s a Business After Hours tonight at the Brotherhood, so I’ll be home late, after dinner. You’ll fend for yourself?”

“Of course,” Agnes said.

Dabney smiled, then kissed Agnes’s forehead. “I love you, darling. I’m so happy you’re here.”

Agnes had moved right back into her childhood bedroom, which her mother had redone as a guest room. There was an all-white king bed with navy accent pillows, and luscious, buttery pine furniture. The room was filled with light, and it was situated all by itself at the east end of the house. Agnes wasn’t sure what CJ found so objectionable about it.

Agnes missed CJ terribly—but at the same time, not at all. She could eat freely when she was away from him, and she could breathe freely. CJ was so perfect, so beautiful to look at, so confident in his manner, so successful in his business, and so absurdly generous, that Agnes wondered what exactly he saw in her. Agnes was young and pretty and she was a devoted do-gooder, but she had seen photographs of CJ’s ex-wife, Annabelle (Agnes had googled her, and had creeped her on Facebook and Twitter). Annabelle was as gorgeous as a model, her hair and makeup always perfect. She had sat on charitable boards and chaired events; she had been an actual socialite, with socialite friends who had apartments comprised of entire floors in Park Avenue prewar buildings, whereas Agnes lived in a one-bedroom walk-up on West Eighty-Fourth Street. CJ had lived on Park Avenue as well, but he had lost his apartment in the divorce, and then Annabelle had sold it and bought a waterfront property in Boca Raton, where she served on charitable boards, chaired events, and lived off CJ’s money.

Freeloader,
he called her.
Good for nothing. She doesn’t realize the value of money because she never had to earn it.

Aside from this, CJ didn’t say much about Annabelle or about why the marriage had failed, even though Agnes had repeatedly asked. CJ said that both he and Annabelle had signed a paper agreeing never to discuss the particulars of their split. A gag order. This had sounded reasonable at the time, but after what Agnes had heard from Manny Partida a few weeks earlier, Agnes wasn’t so sure. She thought spending the summer away from CJ might be the best thing.

Manny Partida was Agnes’s boss, the regional director, the head of every Boys & Girls Club in New York City. He was the one who had  come in to tell Agnes that National wouldn’t be funding any summer programs for her club that year. Agnes was devastated; she had more than six hundred members, and what exactly were those kids supposed to do all summer without any programming? Agnes loved the kids at her club in direct proportion to how little they had. Her favorite children, ten-year-old twins named Quincy and Dahlia, were homeless; they lived with their mother in a shelter, but not always the same shelter. They each brought a rolling suitcase to the club, which Agnes kept safe in her office so that no one would pilfer their things. Dahlia liked to make fairy houses out of twigs and grass and sometimes even old straws and McDonald’s cups that she found on the perimeter of the club’s crumbling asphalt basketball court. Agnes could have cried just thinking about the two of them without a safe place to go all summer.

As if this weren’t upsetting enough, Manny had another bomb to drop.

He said, “A little bird told me you’re engaged to Charlie Pippin?”

“CJ,” Agnes said. “Yes, I am.” She looked down at her left hand, though her fingers were bare. The diamond CJ had given her was too valuable to wear safely to work.

“When I knew him, which wasn’t that long ago,” Manny said, “he went by Charlie.”

“You knew him?” Agnes said.

“He was a big donor, one of the biggest, at the Madison Square Club, ten, twelve years ago,” Manny said. “He and his first wife.”

Agnes nodded. On one hand, she didn’t want to hear about CJ and Annabelle, and on the other hand, she craved every detail.

Manny said, “I realize people change.”

Agnes smiled uncertainly. “Excuse me?”

“People change,” Manny said. “He changed his name, and he switched affiliations to the Morningside Heights Club, which is good because you can certainly use the money. But I’d advise you to be careful.”

“Careful?” Agnes said.

“Rumor has it he wasn’t very nice to his first wife.”

“Wasn’t nice?” Agnes said.

Manny held up his palms. He wore a light blue T-shirt under a khaki suit and a three-inch silver cross on a chain around his neck.

“I’m not saying he hit her, because I don’t know the specifics. But there were stories flying around for a while. Something happened at one of the benefits for the Madison Square Club. They had both been drinking, the wife had bid on something quite expensive without asking his permission, he lost his temper, and I heard…” Here, Manny trailed off. “This is just what I heard, Agnes, and so take it with a grain of salt. But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t tell you. I heard he got physical with her.”

“What?”

“Hair pulling, arm twisting, some not-so-nice stuff.” Manny stood up. “But again, that was ten, twelve years ago, and people change. Just please, Agnes, please be careful. You’re one of the best directors I have, and I only want to see you happy.”

Manny Partida had left the office, and Agnes had sat glued to her chair for a long while, thinking that Manny Partida was full of shit, or whomever was feeding his ear was; the people at the Madison Square Club were probably mad or jealous that CJ had moved his financial allegiance uptown, and that he had brought Victor Cruz in to sign autographs! Lorna Mapleton, who was the director at Madison Square, was in her sixties; she thought Agnes was too young to be at the helm of a club.
Physical?
Agnes couldn’t imagine CJ being physical with her. It was true he had a temper, especially when he was drinking, and Agnes had heard him slice people to ribbons over the phone. But he was always gentle with Agnes, he cared about her well-being, that was why he liked her to exercise every spare moment and why he watched her diet—no carbs, no cheese, no sauces. Her body was his temple, he said. He would never hurt her.

Agnes hadn’t told Dabney what Manny Partida said—God, no, that would have sent Dabney into a tailspin—but Agnes had decided on the spot that she would spend the summer at home on Nantucket.

That first afternoon, Agnes walked into town. She wasn’t a town person the way Dabney was. Dabney loved town. For her, the allure of Nantucket was found on the grid of four square blocks. This was where the action was—the real estate agents, the insurance agents, the pharmacy with lunch counter, the art galleries and florists and antiques stores, the churches, the post office, the administration buildings, the clothing boutiques, the T-shirt shops. Town was where the people were. Dabney loved people, and anyone found on the streets of Nantucket, if only for an hour or two on a day trip, she thought of as “her people.”

Agnes, on the other hand, preferred anonymity, which was why she liked Manhattan. This might have been a response to growing up as Dabney Kimball’s daughter. She had never gotten away with anything as a teenager; if she took a drag of a cigarette on the strip off Steamship Wharf or if she held hands with a boy on the bench outside the Hub, it was reported back to Dabney within the hour. This was why Agnes preferred the quieter, more remote parts of Nantucket—the far-flung beaches, the trails through the state forest, the secret ponds.

But today she felt otherwise. Today she wanted to be recognized as Dabney Kimball’s daughter. She stopped in at Mitchell’s Book Corner and browsed for a moment, then she crossed the street to check out the cute party dresses at Erica Wilson. She tried on a flirty yellow number and bought it on a whim—it was bright, the color of summertime. In the city, she, like everyone else, tended to wear black.

She window-shopped, meandering like a tourist, and was shocked when nobody recognized her. Ms. Cowen, who had been Agnes’s field-hockey coach, walked right past her. Of course, Agnes hadn’t lived here since graduating from high school. And she had cut her hair. But still, Agnes felt weirdly displaced. This was where she was from, but she didn’t quite belong here.

There was only way to rid herself of this feeling. She headed upstairs to the Chamber of Commerce office.

The Nantucket Chamber of Commerce was located above what used to be an old bowling alley, and the office always smelled vaguely of bowling shoes. To combat this, Dabney occasionally lit green-apple-scented candles. The combination of bowling shoes and green apple came to define the Chamber and, by association, Dabney herself.

When Agnes walked in, she was greeted by a shriek—happy, excited, perhaps a touch manic.

Nina Mobley.

“Agnes! Your mother told me you were here, but I didn’t think I’d be lucky enough to see you on the first day!”

“Hey, Nina,” Agnes said, bending down to give Nina a squeeze. Nina, like Dabney, seemed never to change—frizzy brown hair, gold cross at the neck, squinty eyes. Nina had always been a squinter, as if the world lay just out of focus.

Agnes noticed that Dabney’s desk was unoccupied, and by habit she poked her head into the “back room,” where the information assistants sat, answering the phones. There was a girl with a high, blond ponytail chattering away about her “favorite restaurant, American Seasons”—and at the near desk sat a guy with thick brown hair that curled up at the collar of his pale blue polo shirt. The two of them were so cute and perfect that Dabney might have picked them out of a catalog. The guy was finishing off a frappe that Agnes identified as having come from the pharmacy lunch counter across the street; he was at the slurpy-sounding end. When he looked up and saw Agnes, he jumped to his feet. She noticed that he was wearing Hawaiian-print board shorts and flip-flops, which were both in violation of Dabney’s usual dress code.

“Oh, hey!” he said. “I’m so sorry. Can I help you? I’m Riley Alsopp.”

Agnes smiled. He seemed quite earnest; he must be new, maybe too new to know about the no-beachwear rule. Agnes had worked as an information assistant one summer, and she had hated it. Her mother had made her wear a knee-length khaki skirt and button-down oxford shirts. (“I look like
you,
” Agnes had complained.) Her mother had insisted that when Agnes wasn’t on the phone with potential visitors, she should be memorizing the Chamber guide and learning the arcane details of the island’s whaling history.

Riley, however, had a copy of Salinger’s
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction
open on his desk. Odd. He was too old for a summer reading list.

“I’m Agnes,” she said. “I’m…”

“Dabney’s daughter,” he said. “Your mother talks about you all the time. And I’ve seen your picture.” He smiled at her, showing off very straight white teeth.

Agnes turned around. Unlike most offices, where the bosses hid in the back, here Dabney and Nina sat in the front room. This, of course, was Dabney’s idea. She wanted to be the first person someone encountered when he or she walked into the Chamber. But Dabney’s desk was still empty, and now Nina Mobley was on the phone.

“Where is my mother?” Agnes asked Riley Alsopp. “Do you know?”

“She went out around lunchtime,” Riley said. “And she hasn’t been back.”

“Lunchtime?”

“Noon or so,” he said. “You can check the log.” Next to them, the blond ponytail yammered on about her
other
favorite restaurant, Cru. Cru better for seafood, she said. American Seasons better for land animals.

Land animals?
Agnes thought.

Riley Alsopp winked at Agnes. He said, “I’m still learning the ropes.”