Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

Clendenin

He went down to the police station with CJ and the arresting officer while Dabney took Agnes to the emergency room. It ended up being a very long night. CJ was charged with aggravated assault, and Agnes received thirty-five stitches in her scalp and was held at the hospital overnight for observation.

When Clen and Dabney finally met back at Clen’s cottage around quarter of four in the morning, Clen poured a shot of Gentleman Jack for himself and a glass of wine for Dabney and they sat at his big oak table in the dark. Clen threw back his shot; he wasn’t feeling that great himself. CJ had bloodied his lip, bruised his cheek, and given him a nasty black eye. On her way home from the hospital, Dabney had stopped at the grocery store for a bag of frozen peas and a porterhouse steak.

“For your face,” she said.

He said, “And maybe tomorrow night, it will be dinner.”

Dabney sipped her wine. “The beautiful young woman you’ve been seeing? It’s Agnes?”

Clen poured himself another shot, but let it sit in front of him. He slowly spun the glass.

Yes,” he said. “She came out to the house looking for you, and she found me.”

Dabney’s eyes were shining with tears. Happy ones, he hoped, although he wasn’t sure. “And how has it been…between you and her?”

Clen knew that his answer was important; this had been an emotional steamroller of a night. There was no road to take but the true, straight one.

“Things between us have been lovely,” he said. He threw back the shot. “You have raised an intelligent, thoughtful, kind human being. She is your daughter, Dabney. I have absolutely no claim to her.”

“Box is an excellent father,” Dabney said. “I couldn’t have asked for better. But there are things about Agnes that are purely you.”

“I’ve seen those things,” Clen said. “Even in the short time I’ve known her.”

“Well, now that you’ve found her, don’t let her go.”

There were no words he could offer in response to that, so Clen took Dabney’s hand and led her to bed.

When Agnes woke up in the hospital, Dabney was sitting in a chair by the bed. She was wearing her headband and pearls, but she looked exhausted.

Agnes said, “Have you been here all night?”

Dabney said, “No, I went back to Clendenin’s for a little while, took a shower and a nap, but I wanted to be here when you woke up.”

Agnes noted the phrase went back to Clendenin’s but she didn’t know what to do with it.

She said, “Where’s Daddy?”

Dabney said, “He’s in Cambridge. He caught the late ferry last night. He…had to go back.”

“Does he know what happened?”

“I called and left him a message,” Dabney said. “I’m sure he’ll call you, or come see you. He loves you very, very much.”

“I know,” Agnes said. She leaned back into her pillows. Her head hurt and she was thirsty. “You were right, Mommy. CJ wasn’t my perfect match.”

Dabney squeezed her hand. “There is going to be a perfect match for you somewhere down the road, darling,” she said. “That I can promise.”

CJ’s arrest got two inches in the sports section of the New York Post, and a call came to Agnes’s cell phone from a producer at ESPN who wanted to do a segment about “Charlie Pippin’s Fall from Grace.” Annabelle Pippin had already agreed to talk, the producer said.

Agnes did not return the call. Let Annabelle talk to the media about Charlie Pippin’s fall from grace. Agnes wanted to forget the man had ever existed.

He had been charged with aggravated assault, but he would plead down. There would be jail time, twelve to eighteen months; there would be anger-management classes and hours of community service. He had been fired from his firm. Bantam Killjoy was now being represented by Tom Condon.

It was his own fault. Agnes had broken the engagement and his heart, but there were other ways of dealing with this than bashing Agnes’s head in. CJ needed help. He would do it again to the next woman if he didn’t get help.

In the next few days, voice mails piled up on Agnes’s phone: Wilder from work called, as well as Manny Partida; Dave Patterson from Island Adventures called; Jane Meyer, Agnes’s roommate from Dartmouth, called (she had seen the Post); Rocky DeMotta called, saying how sorry he and the rest of the firm were; Celerie called, as did Riley.

Really, the only message Agnes cared about was the one from Riley. He said, “Hey, Agnes, I heard what happened. I’m going to give you your space, but when you’re ready, I’m here to talk. We can walk the beach and throw the ball to Sadie.”

Agnes would miss a week of work. She was taking Percocet; her head had to heal. There was lots of time to lie in bed and think.

Her mother delivered trays of food, her meds, ice water with thin slices of lemon; she brought DVDs and novels. Agnes wasn’t hungry, and she couldn’t focus to watch TV or read. The ice water and the meds were all she wanted, and the dark room and the soft pillows and the knowledge that Dabney was there. She had a repeated vision of herself and Riley walking along Ladies Beach with the sky pinkening as a tennis ball flew through the air. Go get it, Sadie! Run!

Her mother came in and sat on the bed. She patted Agnes’s leg.

“Do you feel any better today?” Dabney said.

“Yes,” Agnes said. “Actually, I do.” Her vision was clear, her head felt lighter, the pain was lifting. She was ready to get up, to get on with it.

But her mother had something to say. “You may have noticed Box hasn’t been here.”

“He’s called me every day,” Agnes said. “He wanted to come back, but I told him not to worry. I feel better.”

Dabney took a breath. “Box left, honey. He left me, he’s gone. He found out about Clendenin…he found out that Clen and I are friends again. That we’re in love.”

“Oh,” Agnes said.

“I’ve made a royal mess of things,” Dabney said. “A fine royal mess.” Dabney started to cry into her hands and Agnes felt well enough to reach out and hug her mother. She had not been blessed with any supernatural powers or special vision, but she was able to understand that her mother loved two men at once. Agnes would forgive her for that because she knew Dabney couldn’t help it.

By Friday, Agnes was healed enough to stay home by herself, and Dabney could return to the Chamber. She had received numerous messages from Nina Mobley, asking Dabney to please call her-at the office or at home, no matter the time of day-but Dabney had been focused on Agnes. She had called Box daily with updates and was consistently treated to his voice mail. Aside from Clen, Dabney hadn’t talked to anyone.

At ten minutes to nine, Dabney found Nina Mobley sitting on the bench outside the Chamber office holding two cups of coffee.

Nina’s eyes filled with tears. “Thank God,” she said. “I’ve bought two coffees every day this week, hoping you would show up, and every day I had to drink them both myself. The caffeine has been hell on my nerves.”

Dabney took one of the coffees. It had been perfectly made by Diana across the street at the pharmacy, with cream and six sugars. Dabney sat on the bench next to Nina and gazed at the front of the Chamber building, which was so familiar to her that it was like looking into a mirror.

Nina said, “I don’t know how to tell you this.”

“Tell me,” Dabney said.

Nina said, “Vaughan Oglethorpe is upstairs waiting for you.”

Dabney sipped her coffee. She wasn’t sure why she felt surprised at this news. Vaughan had come to fire her. And why not? She was a tart and a floozy and an embarrassment.

“I guess I’d better go upstairs, then,” Dabney said. “He knows everything?”

“I wish you had called me back,” Nina said. “I nearly came to your house, but I thought you and Agnes deserved privacy.”

“Thank you,” Dabney said.

“Vaughan has the log,” Nina said. “I told you not to sign out. I told you I would cover for you.”

“I didn’t want you to have to lie,” Dabney said. More coffee. The coffee was the only thing that was keeping her from screaming. “You’ve got your ear to the ground. What are people saying?”

“It could be worse,” Nina said. “But you know how people on this island are.”

Yes, Dabney did know how people on this island were-they gossiped mercilessly, they tore people’s reputations apart like sharks with a bleeding seal. Her eyes fluttered closed as she remembered how brutal people had been to Tammy Block when the news about her and Flynn Sheehan hit. Dabney shuddered. She had been responsible for that, or partially. She alone had seen the pink aura around them.

“What have you heard exactly?” Dabney asked.

“That you admitted to being in love with Clendenin. That you’ve been seeing him secretly since he got back to the island. That you’ve been secretly communicating with him for the past twenty-seven years. That you’ve been sending him money in Asia.”

“Not for twenty-seven years!” Dabney said. “Not sending him money in Asia!” But even as she said this, she realized that where gossip was concerned, you didn’t get to make a distinction between what was true and what wasn’t.

“There’s also a rumor that you and Box have an ‘arrangement’ because Box is gay and is having a sexual relationship with the Federal Reserve chairman.”

“You must be kidding me!” Dabney said. “Someone actually said those words? Sexual relationship with the Federal Reserve chairman?”

“Yes,” Nina said. “Theater of the absurd. I don’t know where people come up with this stuff.” She stared into her coffee cup like it was a deep well. “Even weirder-someone heard that you have terminal cancer and you wanted to be back with Clen before you died.”

Oh, God, Dabney thought. She felt dizzy then, dizzy like she might faint, and she focused on her penny loafers, side by side, as steady as the horizon.

“I wish you had called me back,” Nina said. “I would have suggested that you call Vaughan and head it off at the pass. He adores you, Dabney. He’s hard on you, yes, but like a favorite teacher. You could have explained.”

“What is there to explain?” Dabney asked. “The man has known me my entire life. He can hardly have been surprised.”

“I would have burned the log, or dropped it off Old North Wharf,” Nina said. “I might not even have had to do that. Vaughan might have forgiven you the missing hours. After all, the Chamber runs like clockwork, and our coffers are at an all-time high, thanks to you.” Nina put her gold cross into her mouth, then took it out and slid the cross along its chain. “But there was one board member, there’s always one, who wanted your head on a platter.”

“Elizabeth Jennings,” Dabney said.

Nina nodded morosely.

Dabney said, “Well, I’d better go up.”

Vaughan Oglethorpe was sitting in Dabney’s chair with his feet up on Dabney’s desk, which she found offensive. It was her father’s old Dragnet desk, a desk Dabney loved more than any piece of furniture or objet d’art in her home. Vaughan had the log open in his lap; he was paging through it, making notes on a legal pad. When he saw Dabney, he got to his feet.

He was seventy-eight years old, the same age Dabney’s mother would have been. Vaughan and Patty Benson had gone steady one summer; it was all gin and tonics and dinner dances at the Sankaty Beach Club and rides down the Milestone Road in Vaughan’s convertible MG, which was what he drove when he wasn’t driving the hearse for his father. He was the only person Dabney still had contact with who had known her mother well. But Patty had dumped Vaughan, and Dabney suspected he had always hated Dabney a little bit for this reason, despite his outward displays of avuncular affection.

The room smelled of embalming fluid.

She would be cremated, she decided.

“Dabney,” he said. His voice was as heavy and somber as a thundercloud. He had never been replaced as board president, she guessed, because people were afraid of him the way they were afraid of the Grim Reaper.

“Vaughan,” she said. Bright smile. Fresh-faced in her headband and pearls, although she had slept a total of ten hours all week and she was down below a hundred pounds. Maybe he wouldn’t fire her. Maybe just a warning.

“It’s come to my attention that you’ve had personal issues that have kept you from doing your job.” He held up the log. “Since Daffodil Weekend, you’ve missed fourteen full days, and the days you have been present, you’ve been out of the office a total of a hundred and ninety-two hours.”

Could that be right? All those stolen lunches, entire afternoons at the beach with Clen. Days she was legitimately sick in bed. The past four days taking care of Agnes. The stupid lunch at the Yacht Club with Box. Clen Clen Clen. A hundred and ninety-two hours she had missed. She was appalled. She would have fired herself.