The Matchmaker (13 page)

“Well, you’re not supposed to wear board shorts to work,” Agnes said. “Did my mother give you a hard time?”

“No,” Riley said. “She told me they were fabulous.”

“She did?” Agnes was starting to feel like the planet was spinning the wrong way on its axis.

“She did,” Riley said. “If you want to know where your mom is, maybe you should ask Nina.”

“I tried, this afternoon,” Agnes said. “Nina isn’t giving her up.”

“Well, I’m finished playing,” Riley said. “Do you want to get out of here? Go somewhere else, maybe?”

“God, yes,” Agnes said.

They climbed into Riley’s Jeep, a forest-green Wrangler with a six-foot soft-top surfboard strapped to the roll bars. It was the quintessential Nantucket vehicle. He told her he’d owned it since he was eighteen and had driven it only on the island, back and forth between his parents’ house in Pocomo and the south-shore surfing beaches.

“I’m sorry it’s covered in dog hair,” he said. “I have a chocolate Lab named Sadie, and she is the queen of this particular castle.”

“Oh my God,” Agnes said. “We had a chocolate Lab for thirteen years named Henry. My mother
loves
chocolate Labs. I think I just figured out why my mother hired you.”

Riley laughed. “Believe me, I’m used to people loving me for my dog. Now, where should I take you?”

Agnes plucked at the yellow silk of her dress and arranged it around her legs. She wasn’t used to anyone asking her what
she
wanted. In her life at home in New York, CJ made all the decisions. He picked the restaurants and the Broadway shows and the parties they would attend, he told her when to meet him at the gym, he picked the color of her nail polish when she got a pedicure.

What did
she
want?

“I want to find my mother,” she said. “And I’m starving.”

Riley held up the plastic cup with the five-dollar bill. “How about somewhere cheap?” He started the car, then looked over his shoulder as he shifted into reverse. “Food first,” he said. “Then find.”

They stopped at the Strip on Steamship Wharf, where Agnes got a cheeseburger with waffle fries (carbs and more carbs!), and Riley got three slices of pizza and two Cokes. They drove to Children’s Beach and ate in the car overlooking the harbor.

“I used to come here as a kid,” Riley said.

“Yeah, me too,” Agnes said. She didn’t mean to trump Riley’s childhood nostalgia, but the grassy expanse of Children’s Beach had been etched in her brain from her earliest memories. Her great-grandmother had pushed her on the swings and taught her how to pump her legs; Box used to sit on the green slatted benches reading
The Economist
while Agnes mastered the monkey bars. Her mother had planted her funny old red-and-white-striped umbrella, which exactly matched her red-and-white-striped bathing suit, in the sand at the shoreline while Agnes filled buckets with a slurry of sand and water.

“So what brings you home this summer?” Riley asked.

“I work at a Boys and Girls Club in Upper Manhattan, and we lost our summer funding,” Agnes said.

“Lucky break?” Riley said.

“Some people might see it that way,” Agnes said. “I worry about my members. This literally leaves six hundred kids without anywhere to hang out this summer.”

“Whoa,” Riley said.

“I’m trying not to dwell on it,” Agnes said. “I tell myself they’ll all go to the public library where it’s air-conditioned, and they’ll read.”

“That’s a good vision,” Riley said. He folded his pizza in half; a rivulet of orange grease ran down his chin. Agnes handed him a napkin. “I love kids. That’s one reason why I’m becoming a dentist. I mean, I’m interested in the medicine of it, but my dream is to build a strong family practice. I want to watch kids grow up, hear about their lacrosse games and their baton-twirling competitions, and their first dates.”

“I sometimes worry that I get too attached to the kids at the club,” Agnes said. She thought of Quincy and Dahlia, baking on hot squares of sidewalk. She had once told CJ that she wanted to adopt them and give them a safe home. But, as CJ had pointed out, Quincy and Dahlia already had a mother. And CJ didn’t want kids at all—not biological, not adopted. “Some of them have really tough lives. It’s difficult not to become overly invested in their well-being.”

Riley smiled at her. “You have a good heart,” he said. “Like mother, like daughter.”

Suddenly, Agnes felt anxious. “Is it okay if we go? Is it okay if we go find her?”

Riley tossed his pizza crust out the window, where it was pounced on by hungry seagulls. “Of course,” he said.

Nantucket was only thirteen miles long and four miles wide, but it was by no means a small or simple place. There were countless dirt roads and mysterious acres. Agnes didn’t know where to start looking. But wherever Dabney was, she was driving the Impala, and thus she would be hard to miss.

“Should we go east or west?” Agnes asked.

“East?” Riley said. “Maybe she went to Sconset?”

“Sconset?” Agnes said. Dabney had always had lukewarm feelings about Sconset, in much the same way Union soldiers had lukewarm feelings about General Lee. There had been a period of time, years before Agnes was born, when Sconseters had wanted to secede. They had wanted their own town building and their own board of selectmen—and this had rubbed Dabney the wrong way. Now, as director of the Chamber, Dabney had to embrace and promote Sconset—the entire Daffodil Weekend was celebrated there—but Sconset fell prey to Dabney’s rules: she would go once a year to the Chanticleer, once a year to the Summer House (but only for drinks and the piano player; she didn’t trust the food), and once a year to the Sconset Casino for a movie. Every single day of the summer, she suggested that visitors bike out to Sconset, where she advised them to have lunch at Claudette’s or ice cream from the Sconset Market—but she would never do these things herself. Agnes did not see her mother going to Sconset—for secret errands or otherwise. “Not Sconset. Let’s head west.”

Riley took a right onto Cliff Road, and Agnes began the lookout. She checked the driveways of all the grandiose homes on the right that overlooked the Sound. Maybe some friends had appeared from off-island and persuaded Dabney to play hooky from work and from Business After Hours? Her friends Albert and Corrine Maku sometimes showed up and demanded spontaneous fun. There might have been other people Agnes didn’t know about—maybe one of her couples from 1989 or 2002 or 2011?

Really, what other explanation could there be?

Riley fiddled with the radio and, finding nothing satisfactory, turned it off. He said, “So, Agnes, do you have a boyfriend?”

“A fiancé,” she said.

“Oh, okay. I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Your mother didn’t tell me you were engaged, and you’re not wearing a ring.”

Nope,
Agnes thought guiltily. She had taken off her ring. Agnes had accidentally seen the receipt for the ring lying on CJ’s mail table; it had cost him twenty-five thousand dollars. Agnes had nearly fainted. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar ring. Agnes could never, ever wear it to Morningside Heights, nor could she wear it on Nantucket as she led biking and rock-climbing excursions. The ring was in its box on her dresser. It was pretty but useless, a caged parakeet.

“My mother didn’t tell you?” she said.

“No, but like I said, I’m not exactly privy to office secrets.”

“It’s not a secret,” Agnes said. “Although maybe my mother wants to keep it that way. She doesn’t approve.”

“No?”

“No.” Agnes sighed. “You do know, right, that my mother is a matchmaker?”

Riley threw his head back and laughed into the evening air.

“She’s set up forty-two couples,” Agnes said, “all of them still together. She’s
famous
for it. She sees an aura—pink if it’s good, green if it’s bad. And my aura with CJ is green, so she can’t give her blessing.”

“You’re kidding,” Riley said.

“Not kidding.”

“I told you I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Riley said. “She’s a matchmaker! No wonder she was so excited when I told her I played Tevye in
Fiddler on the Roof
.”

Agnes smiled. It was impossible to sustain a bad mood with this guy: he was too happy-go-lucky. “You’d better watch out,” she said. “I think she has plans for you and Celerie.”

“You think?” Riley said. “I was considering asking Celerie out, actually.”

Ridiculously, Agnes experienced a pang of jealousy at this statement. Oh my God, what was
wrong
with her? “You should!” she said.

“But I think she has someone back home,” Riley said. “In Minnesota.”

“Minnesota is pretty far away,” Agnes said.

“You’re right,” he said. “Okay, I’ll do it. I’ll ask if she wants to go up to Great Point with me on Saturday.”

Another pang of jealousy: Agnes
loved
Great Point. To her, the perfect summer day was a cooler full of drinks, a couple of avocado BLTs from Something Natural, and a trip up to Great Point in a Jeep like this one—top down, radio blaring.

Agnes watched as Riley negotiated the curves of Madaket Road. He and Celerie would make a good couple. Agnes had thought that when she saw them together at the office. But earlier, at the office, she hadn’t known Riley. She hadn’t heard him play “Puff the Magic Dragon,” she hadn’t watched him eat pizza, she hadn’t talked with him about her job. It was amazing how, after the past hour, she now felt like she had some sort of claim on him. The thought of him bestowing his affection on Celerie with her bouncy ponytail and her cheerleader moves and her favorite this and other-favorite that was upsetting.

No—what was really upsetting was that Agnes couldn’t locate her mother. They weren’t going to find her driving out to Madaket, of this much Agnes was suddenly certain.

“Would you mind taking me home?” Agnes asked.

Riley hit the brakes and the case of his guitar bumped against the back of Agnes’s seat, emitting a dissonant chord. “What? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Agnes said. “This is silly. It’s a wild-goose chase. I’ll just wait for my mother at home.”

“Oh,” Riley said. “Okay, no problem. But just so you know, I’m happy to keep looking.” He sounded wistful. Well, he had been enjoying the adventure, and now it was over. It had nothing to do with Agnes.

“I appreciate that,” Agnes said. “But I’d like to go home.”

Riley’s cute face with his perfect, straight white teeth settled into an expression of something like hurt or regret. But that would be erased, Agnes was sure, once he asked out Celerie and Celerie said yes. It would, no doubt, be rosy auras all around.

It was ten thirty when Dabney finally walked in the door. Agnes was sitting at the kitchen table with an empty glass of milk in front of her. She had eaten half a dozen of her mother’s oatmeal cookies and had let three of CJ’s phone calls go to voice mail.

Dabney was clearly startled to see Agnes; she nearly dropped her Bermuda bag. “Oh! Darling, I’m sorry…I didn’t expect…what are you doing…what?”

Agnes studied her mother. She was wearing the same navy polo shirt and madras skirt, penny loafers and pearls that she’d been wearing when she’d left that morning. Her hair was smooth in its headband. But something was different. What was it? She looked like she’d gotten sun. Had she been at the
beach?
Agnes wondered. She thought of Riley and Celerie up at Great Point, but that served only to irritate her further.

“Where have you been?” Agnes said. Her voice had a jagged edge. She could remember using such a tone with her mother only once before.

Dabney’s expression was inscrutable at first. This woman, whom Agnes had believed to be so transparent,
was
hiding something. Tip of the iceberg, indeed!

“Tell me right now!” Agnes said. She was only too aware that she sounded like the parent in this scenario. “You left work at noon. You didn’t answer your cell phone! You
skipped
Business After Hours! Where. Have. You. Been.”

Dabney’s eyes shone defiantly.

“Out,” she said.

The reversal, Agnes thought, was complete.

S
he was utterly predictable; she never failed to act exactly like herself. The only surprising thing she had ever done in her life was to start this extramarital love affair.

But it was Clendenin Hughes. He had plucked her heart out of her chest when she was fourteen years old and she had never been able to reclaim it.

Love was her only excuse.

As soon as Dabney opened the door to Clen’s cottage, she smelled garlic and ginger. Clen was at the stove; when he turned around, he didn’t look surprised to see her, which she found maddening. She handed him a bottle of Gentleman Jack; she had stopped at Hatch’s on her way to his house.

He said, “Only you would bring a hostess gift to a sexual rendezvous.”

“That’s not what this is,” she said.

He said, “Wanna bet?” And in one fluid movement, he scooped her up with his strong right arm, threw her over his shoulder, and carried her to the bed.

There was only one thing to do: she laughed.

“Stop!” she said.

“What?”

“Turn off the burner on the stove,” she said. “You don’t want to burn the house down.”

“Wanna bet?”

It was the same, it was different. She didn’t have time to say what was which or which was what because there was no thinking involved. It was, in fact, like going up in flames. His mouth devoured every part of her, his skin burned against hers, his size crushed her, but as much as he gave her, she wanted more, faster, more. He sucked her nipples and she groaned, pressing herself against his thigh, leaving him wet there. How
long
had it been since she’d felt this way? When he thrust into her, she nearly broke in half; she opened her mouth and howled like an animal. She had slept with only two men in her life—Clen and Box—but Clen now was a third person. She was intoxicated by his physicality. His tongue, his lips, the way he tasted, the way he smelled, her hands in his thick hair, her cheek against his beard, skin on skin. It had been years since she’d even remembered she had a body, desire,
needs
.

When it was over, he peppered her face and neck with kisses as the sweat cooled on her body. She reached out and stroked the curve of his stump. The skin there was as soft as a baby’s skin.

She closed her eyes. She saw cherry blossoms, bubble gum, and raspberries so ripe and juicy that they fell from the branches with the slightest touch.

When it was time for Dabney to head home, she started to cry.

Clen said, “Oh, Cupe, don’t.” Which made her cry harder.

“Come tomorrow,” he said.

“I
can’t!
” she said.

“Just for five minutes,” he said. “Please.”

The next day, Dabney signed out on the log at noon, writing
errands/lunch
.

“More errands?” Nina said slyly.

Dabney gave her a pointed look.

“I don’t think you should sign out on the log when you leave,” Nina said. “Just go. Vaughan hasn’t checked the log in years.”

Dabney appreciated Nina’s leniency and her willingness to be an accomplice, but signing out on the office log had become a discipline of working at the Chamber, and Dabney couldn’t bring herself to abandon it. She would conduct her love affair during business hours, but she would still sign out, thereby holding fast to one shred of her personal integrity.

The “five minutes” turned into an afternoon by the pool. Clen made watermelon margaritas and they floated on blow-up rafts. Clen was still a good swimmer, despite his missing arm; he moved through the water cleanly, with power. Dabney gazed at him with amazement and he said, “I bet you thought I’d go in circles, didn’t you?” The water brought out his playful self; they splashed and dunked each other and poured more margaritas and generally acted like the teenagers they had been, so long ago.

Every time she thought to get up and leave, she found a reason to stay.

She said, “I can’t believe I’m going to miss Business After Hours. I haven’t missed a Business After Hours in fourteen years.”

He said, “I’ll order pizza and french fries and wings.”

She said, “I can’t have pizza. I’ve given up wheat.”

He said, “That’s the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard.”

He was right. Whatever was wrong with her, it wasn’t a wheat allergy.

He said, “You’re too thin.”

She said, “I’m down to 106, which is what I weighed in eighth grade.”

He said, “Jeez, Cupe.”

She thought,
Lovesick
. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel any guilt yet, but when the guilt kicked in, she feared, she would disappear. Box was in London. He stayed in a suite at the Connaught, and his daily life included a chauffeured Bentley that transported him back and forth between the hotel and the School of Economics, and to dinner at Gordon Ramsay and Nobu. His landscape was Big Ben, St. Paul’s Cathedral, the National Gallery, Covent Garden, the London Bridge, and the Thames. Dabney could say the names of these places and things, but she had no concept of what his life there was like, just as he had no clue what her life was now like.

When he returned, she would have to tell him.

They ate dinner in bed, and Dabney drank a beer, something she hadn’t done since the summer of 1987. She groaned and grunted with delight as she ate, she pulled strings of cheese from the pizza with her fingers and dangled them into her mouth. She sucked the sauce off the chicken bones, she dragged piping hot fries through ketchup, mayonnaise, and mustard, then back again. She would never have eaten like that in front of Box, but with Clen she was perfectly at ease.

It was for this reason, she supposed, that she said, “I’m worried about Agnes.”

The name
Agnes,
although spoken casually, sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Dabney immediately stiffened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

“No, no,” Clen said. “Please. Please tell me. What is it?”

“She’s engaged,” Dabney said.

Clen coughed. “Agnes is getting married?”

“Yes,” Dabney said. Her voice was barely a whisper—the late, dark hour and the fraught topic seemed to require it. “To a man named CJ Pippin. He’s a sports agent in New York.”

Clen said, “And Agnes and this CJ person who is a sports agent in New York…are they a perfect match?”

“No.”

“Really?” Clen seemed felt suddenly alert, intrigued. “And you’re allowing it, Cupe?”

Dabney laughed. “Allowing it? That question shows just how little you know about having children.”

“You’re right,” he said. “What I know about children I could write on my thumbnail and still have room for the Lord’s Prayer.”

“I have to go,” Dabney said. The pain of their shared past, over a quarter century gone, was exquisite.

She stood on her tiptoes to kiss him goodbye. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had a day like today,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Dabney?”

“What?”

“I want to meet her,” he said.

“Who?” she said. And then, “No.”

“Dabney.”

“No.”

She turned and walked to her car, shaking her head.

All the way home, she thought,
Agnes, Agnes, Agnes.

And you’re allowing it, Cupe?

A few days later, Dabney overheard Agnes on the phone with CJ. Dabney didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but once she was within earshot, she couldn’t move away.

Agnes said, “I don’t see what your problem is with staying
here
…my mother
likes
you…yes, she
does
…you have to let that go, CJ…no, I am not coming to New York…it’s summertime, I belong here…I don’t want to, CJ…yes, baby, of
course
I love you…I could say the same to you…okay, baby, I’m sorry, I’m
sorry,
I said!” Tears. “CJ, please,
I’m sorry
!
”

And you’re allowing it, Cupe?

No, she was not allowing it. It was time to step in.

Dabney’s first thought was Dave Patterson, who ran the Island Adventures program. He was scruffy, outdoorsy, and entrepreneurial. He had built Island Adventures up from a camp for ten kids to the sought-after program it was now, serving two hundred kids, and he had bought his own real estate and had built his own facility, including a fifty-foot rock-climbing wall. But Dave lived on Nantucket year-round—he, like Dabney, would never leave (another reason she liked him)—and as much as it pained her to say it, she didn’t envision Agnes living year-round on the island.

Dabney had another idea for Agnes, and that was Riley Alsopp.

Was Dabney troubled by the fact that Riley had done the obvious and asked Celerie Truman out on a date?

Not really. Dabney had heard about the date in excruciating detail from Celerie, who had appeared at the Chamber office half an hour early just so she could talk to Dabney about it. Never mind that Dabney was Celerie’s boss, never mind that Dabney was Riley’s boss, never mind that Dabney, as director, might not love the idea of her two information assistants—who had to work next to each other all summer—dating. Celerie seemed eager, frantic even, to tell Dabney the whole story.

What had happened was this: Riley had planned on taking Celerie to Great Point for the afternoon, but Great Point had been closed due to nesting piping plovers, so  Riley had suggested Smith’s Point—same idea, a remote spit of sand, but on the other side of the island. Celerie had been game—heck yeah, she had never been to Smith’s Point or Great Point. One of the failings of her first summer was not having befriended anyone with a 4WD vehicle; all of Celerie’s friends drove Mini Coopers, so she had gone exclusively to Surfside. On the way from Great Point to Smith’s Point, Riley’s Jeep ran out of gas. The Jeep was older, the gauge unreliable. They were close to Cisco Brewers, so they decided to spend the afternoon there, drinking beer and listening to live music in the sun.

All good, right? Wrong! Celerie drank too much too quickly and didn’t eat anything. It seemed the only food served at the brewery was from a hot-dog cart, and Celerie, as her name suggested, was a vegetarian. She had a Sheila’s Favorite from Something Natural back in the Jeep, but by the time she thought of it, it had been sitting in the sun for hours and would be poisonous. Riley suggested calling a cab, or asking his father to pick them up—but Celerie, being drunk, insisted on one thing and one thing only and that was drinking more. She began to act like a real ass-hat (her word). She approached the lead singer of the band and suggested that he let Riley sing. The lead singer had no interest in relinquishing his microphone to Riley, but Celerie persisted in harassing him. Riley told the lead singer not to worry, he didn’t want to sing. Celerie started to cry, insisting that Riley really did want to sing, and then, seconds later, she began to throw up. She was so sick that she monopolized the brewery’s main bathroom for two hours. Riley waited for her just outside the door, continuously asking could he help, could he call a taxi, could he call her roommate?

When she finally did emerge, Riley had his Jeep waiting. His father had come with a gas can. Riley drove Celerie home and walked her to her door. By that point, it was dark and her roommate was out at the Chicken Box. Celerie made it inside to the living room, where she passed out facedown on the rag rug.

It was, she informed Dabney, the most embarrassing experience of her life, short of what had happened to her during sophomore year, which was too mortifying to relay, even now.

Celerie also said that Riley had called the next day to check on her, and that when Celerie launched into her serial apology, “I’m sorry, so sorry, so sorry!” he said, “Please don’t worry about it, happens to the best of us, my fault for forgetting the sandwiches, maybe we can try it again sometime.”

Celerie had looked imploringly at Dabney and said, “Do you think he’ll ask me out again?”

Dabney realized then that she was being asked her opinion as a matchmaker.
I must be sick,
she thought. Her radar for such manipulation was failing.

She smiled at Celerie. “One never knows.”

But of course Dabney did know: Riley was just being polite. He had been well raised. Riley needed someone a few years older; Celerie was scarcely twenty-two.

Riley needed Agnes.

But perhaps not as badly as Agnes needed Riley.

And while she was working on Agnes, why not Nina as well?

Dabney had tried to interfere in Nina’s love life once before, when she told Nina not to marry George Mobley. Nina hadn’t listened and Dabney hadn’t blamed her; Dabney had waited too long to speak up and the relationship had too much momentum to stop. It had been like a boulder rolling down a hill. Nina had been left with a mountain of debt on one side of the seesaw, and five bright, talented kids on the other. In the seven years since Nina’s divorce, she had not gone on a single date. She told Dabney she was too tired, too busy, and too disenchanted.

The name that kept presenting for Nina was Jack Copper. Dabney was stuck back in the conversation where she told Nina about Clen’s return, and Nina had confessed to nearly hooking up with Jack. Jack Copper was single, he had always been single, and he was wiry, perpetually sunburned, craggy, salty. He had a South Boston accent that drove people like Box nuts, but that Dabney happened to adore.
Arararar, wicked pissah, I gotta stop smokin’, arararar, kinda tough when you live at the bah.
Jack Copper ran a fishing charter off his forty-two-foot Whaler; he always caught fish, which attracted a lot of fancy clients. He drank beer at the Anglers’ Club, he shot darts at the Chicken Box, he drove a Chevy pickup truck. He always talked to Dabney about her Impala, and he, too, dreamed of a Corvette Stingray split-window with matching numbers in Bermuda blue. Jack Copper wasn’t a bad choice. Dabney might not have come up with his name on her own, but she was intrigued that Nina regretted  passing him up.

Dabney dialed the number for Eleanor Sea Fishing Charters. “Eleanor Sea” was named for Eleanor C.—Jack’s mother, who had once owned a boardinghouse on India Street.