Main Street was a swarm of festive humanity. Everyone wore yellow and green to celebrate the three million daffodils blooming on Nantucket. There were children with daffodils painted on their faces and daffodils wound around the handlebars of their bikes. There were dogs with daffodil collars. Every single person seemed to want Dabney’s attention. In years past, she had handled this situation with grace and aplomb. She used to love knowing everyone and having everyone know her. She used to trade inside jokes with the town administrator and the garbage collector, the bookstore owner, the woman who owned the lingerie store, Andrea Kapenash, wife of the police chief, Mr. Berber, the fifth-grade teacher who had been Agnes’s favorite, a certain summer resident who sat on the board of the New York Stock Exchange, and a different summer resident who anchored the six o’clock news in Boston. This was a cross section of humanity who had one thing in common…they all loved Nantucket Island. But in this contest, Dabney was the undisputed frontrunner. She loved Nantucket more than anyone else had ever loved Nantucket. She knew her devotion was unusual, possibly even unhealthy, but on a day like today, it didn’t matter. Today she was among like-minded people.
Dabney chatted with everyone who crossed her path, but she felt like she was speaking in an automated voice, like the voice that played on the Chamber of Commerce voice mail when one called after business hours. Yes, it was magnificent about the weather, no, she couldn’t remember a nicer day, no, she couldn’t believe another year had passed, yes, she was ready for summer, she was always ready for summer. Good to see you, she said, but her words clinked like counterfeit coins. Could everyone tell? Dabney yearned to grab someone by the arm-even the channel 5 news anchor-and spill her guts. I don’t feel well at all, there’s something wrong with me, Clendenin Hughes is coming back to Nantucket today, he might even be here as we speak, and my husband doesn’t know. My daughter announced last night that she is engaged to a man who seems like the Second Coming, but whom I alone know to be unsuitable. And there is nothing I can do or say. Here I am, Nantucket’s matchmaker, ostensibly a romance expert, and yet my life is unraveling. Nothing is as it should be.
Can you help? Can you help me?
Dabney bumped into Vaughan Oglethorpe, the Chamber board president, her boss, who stood out like a sore thumb in his black shirt, black tie, and black suit. Vaughan was the island’s only undertaker, and he could cast a pall over the sunniest of days. His hair was whiter than when Dabney had last seen him, and his nose more beaky; he was starting to resemble the national bird. He was as tall and lanky as ever, but more hunched in the shoulders; he looked like Lurch from The Addams Family, or like some other benevolent monster. Perfect for an undertaker.
“Dabney,” he said. The lugubrious voice, too, suited his profession. Vaughan had known Dabney her entire life-he had been an old beau of Dabney’s mother, Patty Benson-and he liked to take credit for all of Dabney’s successes on the job.
“Hello, Vaughan,” she said. “How do you like this weather?”
Vaughan stroked his bony chin, his expression dour. He smelled like embalming fluid; often when Dabney stood this close to him, she held her breath. She looked down at her loafers.
“What a turnout!” he boomed suddenly. “You’ve done it again, Dabney! Good work!”
“Thank you, sir,” Dabney said.
“No!” he shouted. “Great work!”
As usual, Box drove the Impala in the parade while Dabney rode shotgun. This smarted a little, as it did every year. The Impala was Dabney’s car; Box drove it exactly once a year, in this parade. Why didn’t Dabney drive and Box ride shotgun? This, after all, was Dabney’s festival. But Agnes and Nina Mobley and even Box himself thought it looked better if he drove. Dabney should be free to wave at the crowds like she was passing royalty.
Fine, Dabney said. Fine, whatever.
Agnes and CJ sat in the back, exuding the smugness of the newly engaged. Dabney wanted to scowl, but she couldn’t. All eyes were on her. She had to smile. She had to beam. She put a hand on top of her straw hat to keep it from blowing away.
Once they had parked in Sconset, under giant elms showing off their new spring leaves, Dabney poured herself and Agnes a glass of champagne. Dabney wasn’t one to seek solace in alcohol, but circumstances were piling up against her so rapidly that she saw no alternative. She took a nice, long sip of champagne, which sparkled against her tongue. Any second now, she would relax.
She set out the picnic on a card table covered with her yellow linen tablecloth, used only this one day a year.
She realized that she had forgotten to pick up the lemon tarts from the Nantucket Bake Shop.
“Oh my gosh!” she said. “I forgot the tarts!”
Box was uncorking the white Bordeaux. He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “No one ever eats them anyway.”
Dabney stared at her husband. Forbearance, she thought. But emotion overcame Dabney’s sturdy genes: her eyes filled with hot tears. She turned away from Box, and from Agnes and CJ, who now seemed like some hideous two-headed monster, and all the others who were starting to mill on the street. She couldn’t let anyone see her crying about the forgotten tarts. She felt like Clarissa Dalloway, who decided that she would get the flowers for the dinner party herself. This picnic, with the ham, and the asparagus, and the ribbon sandwiches that everyone felt comfortable ridiculing, was Dabney’s picnic. It was an expression of her very self, and yet here was John Boxmiller Beech, the brilliant and celebrated economist, telling her it didn’t matter. Which was the equivalent of saying that she, Dabney, didn’t matter.
She stumbled down the street, wishing she were alone, wishing she were anonymous, wishing-for the first time in her forty-eight years-that she were not stuck on this island where every last person thought he knew her, but where in reality no one knew her.
Oh, something was wrong.
Dabney’s vision was blurred by tears, and by drinking champagne on an empty stomach. She knew she should return to the car and eat a ribbon sandwich. There was a big crowd around the 1948 woodie wagon, which had won Best Car three times in the past decade; this year they had done a Wizard of Oz theme. The police chief, Ed Kapenash, was dressed as the Scarecrow.
Dabney didn’t stop, didn’t turn around, she just kept going. Clarissa Dalloway had survived, but someone at her dinner party had committed suicide. Was that right? And then of course Virginia Woolf had done herself in. She’d walked into the River Ouse with rocks in her pockets.
Dabney felt unsteady on her feet. Her hand was shaking so badly that champagne spilled onto the cuff of her yellow oxford.
She saw him waiting at the corner of Main and Chapel Streets. He was straddling a ten-speed bicycle, the same one he had ridden everywhere as a teenager because there had been no money to buy him a car. He used to ride that bike whenever he met Dabney to be alone. They used to meet in the Quaker Cemetery, they would meet at the old, abandoned NHA property called Greater Light, and they would meet at the high school football field. Their song growing up had been Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” not only because Dabney had brown eyes but because of the line about making love in the green grass behind the stadium. That line had been written for her and Clen.
She knew it was him even though he in no way resembled the twenty-two-year-old she had last seen at Steamship Wharf in 1987. He was bigger-seventy or eighty pounds heavier at least-and he had a mustache and a beard. He was a grown-up, a man.