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.”
“You’re accepting favors from Elizabeth Jennings?” I said.
“It’s the job I’ve always wanted,” Clen said. “I’ll grow old drinking Singapore Slings in the Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel.” He smiled weakly. “Agnes, I can’t stay here without her. Every day is excruciating. I can’t stay here without her, and I have nowhere else to go.”
Leaving me, I thought, when we had just found each other. That part of the world would swallow Clen up for another twenty-seven years, and I would never see him again.
He said, “I agreed to the job on the condition that I be allowed to come back to Nantucket for the month of August every year. It’s monsoon there; most of the country takes a vacation. So you’ll get me thirty-one days a year, when I’ll be at your disposal, I promise.”
I felt my face soften. Every August together was a good compromise.
He said, “And you and Riley can come visit. You can come to Singapore on your honeymoon!”
At that moment, Riley swooped up behind me and hugged me with such gusto, he picked me right up off the ground. “Did somebody say ‘honeymoon’?” he said.
Couple #44: John Boxmiller Beech and Miranda Gilbert. Together.
Box: There was always work. Harvard, my textbook, the secretary of the Treasury, who was now bandying my name around for Federal Reserve chairman, as the current chairman had been caught in a scandal and would most likely end up resigning. I would teach my seminar at the London School of Economics in June, and I was to be the keynote speaker at the annual Macro conference, this year held in Atlanta.
It was on a whim that I found myself in New York City. I had a former student named Edward Jin who had abandoned graduate work in economics in order to train as a chef. Apparently he was quite talented and successful; he had secured enough backing to open his own restaurant, called The Dividend, on the Bowery, and he invited me to the soft opening. It just so happened that I had nothing scheduled the weekend of this invitation, and I was partial to Manhattan in the springtime. I called Edward Jin and told him I would attend, and I booked a junior suite at the St. Regis.
The soft opening at The Dividend was an intimate affair-thirty or so friends and family and investors of Edward Jin’s gathered in the bar area, which featured wood floors salvaged from an Amish farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a chandelier made from an old wagon wheel, and a lot of copper pots and candlelight and hand-muddled cocktails made from ingredients like kale and fresh ginger. This was the way with many restaurants now-farm-to-table, organic, produce and meats assiduously researched and hand-sourced. It was good and fine and noble, but I missed Dabney’s cooking.
I knew no one except Edward Jin and he was, naturally, too busy for anything but a warm hello and a single introduction-to his married sister who was a stay-at-home mother in Brooklyn. I mentioned that I had taught Edward at Harvard; she responded that the family had all been stunned when Edward was admitted to Harvard since he’d been rejected from Brown, Duke, and Dartmouth, and I laughed and said that yes, college admissions were arbitrary and capricious.