I am afraid of both saying too much and not saying enough. First and foremost, I want you to know how sorry I am for the way things ended. They didn’t have to be that way, but I categorized it a long time ago as an IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION: I could not stay, and you could not go. Not a day has gone by-honestly, Cupe, not an hour-when I have not thought of you. When I left, I took a part of you with me, and I have treasured that part these many years.
I am not the same person you knew-not physically, not mentally, not emotionally. But, of course, I am ever the same.
I would very much like to see you, although I realize this is almost too much to hope for.
I am writing this from my layover at LAX. If all goes well, I should be back on Nantucket tomorrow morning.
436 Polpis Road, cottage in the back.
Ever yours, Clen
Dabney read the e-mail again, to make sure her addled brain had understood.
Tomorrow morning.
Couple #1: Phil and Ginger (née O’Brien) Bruschelli, married twenty-nine years
Ginger: It would have been presumptuous of me to call myself Dabney’s best friend, because even in 1981, freshman year, Dabney was the most popular girl in the school. When I say “popular,” you might be thinking she was blond, or a cheerleader, or that she lived in a big house on Centre Street. No, no, no-she had straight thick brown hair cut into a bob, and she always, always wore a headband. She had big brown eyes, a few freckles, and a smile like the sun coming out. She was about five-three and she had a cute little body, but she never showed it off. She wore either cable-knit sweaters and kilts or a beat-up pair of Levi’s and an oversize men’s oxford shirt. She had the shirt in four colors: white, blue, pink, and peach. She always wore penny loafers, and she always wore a strand of pearls and pearl earrings. That was Dabney.
Dabney Kimball was the most popular girl in the school because she was genuinely kind to everyone. She was kind to Jeffrey Jackson, who had a port-wine stain on his face; she was kind to Henry Granger, who started wearing wingtips and carrying a briefcase in second grade. She included everyone in planning events like Homecoming floats and December Delight. She had grown up an only child raised by her father, Lieutenant Kimball, who was a police officer. Her mother was…well, no one knew exactly what had happened to her mother. A couple of different stories had circulated, as gossip does, but all we knew for sure was that Dabney no longer had a mother, which made us love her even more.
Dabney was also smarter than everyone else at Nantucket High School, except for Clendenin Hughes, who was what our English teacher, Mr. Kane, called a “hundred-year genius.” Dabney was probably a ninety-nine-year genius.
Freshman year, Dabney and I were fledglings on the yearbook committee. The committee was mostly upperclassmen-it was, actually, all upperclassmen, except for the two of us. Dabney felt that, despite our lowly status, freshmen should be represented just like the other three classes, and that no one was going to look out for us if we didn’t look out for ourselves. So that winter, Dabney and I hung out a lot. We would go to yearbook meetings every Tuesday and Thursday after school, and when we were finished, we would watch the boys’ varsity basketball team.
I had a huge, horrible crush on Phil Bruschelli. Phil was a sophomore, and in the varsity games he mostly sat on the bench. If the team was ahead by more than twenty points, Phil would go in for a few minutes. One such time when this happened, I grabbed Dabney’s arm in excitement.
I’ll never forget the look on her face. It was what I’ll now call amused recognition. She said, “You like him. You like Phil.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. Because even though Dabney and I were practically best friends, my crush on Phil wasn’t a secret I was willing to share.
“Yes,” she said. “You do. I can see it. You’re all…pink.”
“Of course I’m pink,” I said. “It’s a hundred degrees in here and I’m Irish.”
“Not your face, silly,” Dabney said. “Your, I don’t know, your aura is rosy.”
“My aura?” I said. “Rosy?”
After the game, Dabney insisted that I wait with her in the hallway outside the boys’ locker room. Her father was coming to pick her up, she said.
“Why aren’t you walking?” I asked. Dabney lived right across the street from the school.
“Just wait with me,” Dabney said. And then she pushed my hair back off my shoulders and flipped up the collar of my IZOD shirt. She was so close to me I could have counted her freckles.
I said, “How come you don’t have a boyfriend? You’re so pretty and everyone likes you.”
She said, “I do have a boyfriend. He just doesn’t know it yet.”
I wanted to ask her whom she meant, but at that instant Phil Bruschelli walked out of the locker room, all six foot three of him. His dark hair was still damp from the shower and he was wearing a dark-brown shearling jacket. I nearly fainted away, he was so cute.
Dabney stepped into his path. “Hey there, Phil.”
Phil stopped. “Hey, Dabney.”
Dabney said, “Nice that you got a little playing time today. Varsity game, you must be psyched.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, whatever. Coach says I have to pay my dues. Wait until next year.”
Dabney pulled me close to her side. “You know Ginger, right, Phil? Ginger O’Brien? We’re doing yearbook together.”
Phil smiled at me. My vision blurred. I teetered. Smile! I thought. Smile back! But it felt like I was going to cry instead.
Phil said, “You serve at church, right? You’re an altar girl?”
I felt flames of embarrassment licking my cheeks. Rosy indeed. I nodded, and then made a chirping noise like a sparrow. Who wanted to be recognized as an altar girl? And yet, I was an altar girl, and I had been since I was ten years old. It wasn’t exactly a secret.
Phil said, “My mother makes me go to Mass once a month, and I see you there whenever I go.”
“I’m not surprised you noticed Ginger,” Dabney said. “She’s gorgeous.” With that, Dabney hooked her arm around my neck and kissed my scorching-hot cheek. “See ya, gotta go! My dad is here!”
She bounded out the door to the back parking lot, but her father wasn’t waiting. Lieutenant Kimball drove a squad car, which I would have noticed. There were no cars waiting. Dabney was walking home, abandoning me at a time when I needed her to prop me up. I decided I would never forgive her.
But then Phil asked if I liked basketball and I said yes, and he asked if I wanted to come watch him play for the JV team the following afternoon, and I said sure. He said he would have a lot more playing time in that game, and I said, Okay, great. And he said, Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, don’t forget me! And I felt like a flock of birds had startled in my chest.
Phil and I have been married for twenty-nine years and we have four beautiful sons, the youngest of whom plays power forward for Villanova University.
Rosy indeed.
Dabney left the Chamber office at four-thirty as usual. All preparations for Daffodil Weekend were in place; Dabney could have organized it in her sleep-thank goodness-because her afternoon had been consumed with rereading Clen’s e-mail and then obsessing about it.
I suffered a pretty serious loss about six months ago, and I’ve been slow recovering from it.
What kind of loss? Dabney wondered. Had he lost a good friend, a lover? Dabney had lost her father from a heart attack a decade earlier, and her beloved chocolate Lab, Henry, had died at the age of seventeen, just before Christmas. But neither of these losses compared with the loss of Clendenin.