Elin Hilderbrand - The Matchmaker

He had wasted twenty-seven years!

Twenty-seven years, it seemed impossible. Where had they gone? It had taken him seven years to learn the country of Vietnam, to learn how to live with people who looked at him in fear and distrust. His language skills were poor; he had gotten by with French and broken English. The country was as hot as soup; the only place he had truly loved had been Dalat, in the hills. The Times had gotten him a room at the Dalat Palace and every morning he opened the wooden shutters and gazed out over the lake. Every night he drank a dozen bottles of ice-cold 333 and shot billiards in the stone-grotto bar. Best billiards table in Southeast Asia, he could attest. People would come and go-French, Australians, soldiers, doctors, entrepreneurs who said that communism wouldn’t hold. It was human nature for man to want to make his own money, it didn’t matter if he lived in Dalat or Detroit.

Clen could have been with Dabney all that time. He had smoked so many cigarettes, and eaten so many bowls of pho and so many banh mi prepared on the side of the road by a woman wearing a triangle hat, squatting by the grill, turning the meat, layering the meat on a freshly sliced baguette with carrots, mint, cilantro, cucumber, and the sauce of the gods.

He could have been with Dabney.

He’d spent five years with Mi Linh, but she wouldn’t come with him to Bangkok. Bangkok was a hole, she said. He was lucky to have gotten out of there after his first year. Why go back? She had been right, it was a hole, far worse the second time. And then, he’d lost his arm.

He did not rue the loss of his arm the way he rued all those years without Dabney.

While Dabney slept, he worked on a surprise for her. It was taking him hours and hours to interview and transcribe-and still it would be incomplete. He just didn’t have the resources. Agnes helped him where she could. Agnes assured him that what he was doing was awesome in the truest sense of the word. It is the best thing, she kept saying. It is the very best thing.

Dabney was well enough to go to the Cranberry Festival. She donned her cranberry cable-knit sweater and her matching kilt and she and Agnes and Clen drove out to the bogs in the Impala with the top down. The weather was spectacular-a sky so blue it was painful to look at, and mellow sunshine, a gift in mid-October.

“Days do not get any more beautiful than this one,” Dabney said. She had, for the first time, allowed Clen to drive the Impala. She hadn’t come out and said so, but she was too weak to drive-and she leaned her head back with her face in the sun.

She was asleep by the time they arrived at the bogs.

“What should we do?” Clen asked, once they had parked in the space reserved for them. EVENT JUDGE, the sign said, because Dabney was to judge the chutney and the muffins.

“Wake her up,” Agnes said. She climbed out of the backseat. “Here, I’ll do it.” She jostled Dabney’s shoulder. “Mommy! Mommy, we’re here.”

Dabney’s eyes flew open and she sat straight up, adjusting her sunglasses. “Okay!” she said. “I’m ready!”

The bogs were crowded with visitors. Dabney was thrilled to see so many people in attendance-parents and children and older, year-round residents, all of whom knew her by name. There were free balloons and face painting and half-a-dozen food booths-chutney, cookies, sauce, juice, muffins-all made from the fruit harvested a few hundred feet away. Clen tried samples of everything, even though he didn’t much care for cranberries.

Suddenly, Celerie appeared, her hair in one long braid down her back, her cheeks as red as apples. She was wearing a cranberry-colored wool dress and black tights. Headband and pearls. She was a younger, fair-haired version of Dabney. Clen had been warned about this, but still he chuckled when he saw her.

“The guest of honor!” Celerie said. She hugged Dabney so hard that Clen saw her wince. Dabney was fragile, everything hurt, brushing her teeth hurt, she’d told him, and folding a napkin hurt, and he was tempted to tell Celerie to take it easy, but Dabney just smiled with relief when Celerie let her go and said, “You’ve done a brilliant job!”

Celerie beamed. She turned to Clen. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Hughes.”

Clen bowed and said, “The honor is mine, Miss Truman.”

At the same time, they said, “Dabney has told me so much about you.”

Dabney sat at the judging table alongside Nina Mobley and Dr. Ted Field and Jordan Randolph, publisher of the Nantucket Standard. Tastes of this and that were placed before the judges, and Dabney made notes on her clipboard. Clen took a few steps back so that he could observe her in her element. He knew she wanted to give every participant a blue ribbon.

At one point, she raised her face and scanned the crowd. She was looking for him, he realized. He raised his arm and waved.

I’m here, Cupe. I’m right here.

After the festival, Clen, Dabney, and Agnes drove out to the airport to pick up Riley. He was staying for two nights to enjoy Nantucket in the fall; he had wanted to come earlier but he’d had a practical exam that morning.

Agnes was buzzing with excitement. When Clen pulled up in front of the airport, she jumped out of the backseat and said, “I’ll run in and get him.”

Dabney watched her as she hurried for the entrance.

“She’s rosy,” Dabney said. “Rosy like I’ve never seen.”

That night, Dabney cooked the four of them dinner in the gourmet kitchen of the Joneses’ big house. Clen lit logs in the enormous stone fireplace and they all hunkered down on the deep, soft sofa and chairs while Dabney ferried in platter after platter of delicacies-dates stuffed with blue cheese wrapped in bacon, Nantucket bay scallop ceviche, rosemary cashews. It was a feast already, and those were just the appetizers. Riley acted as bartender, pouring champagne for Agnes, filling Clen’s scotch, and making himself a series of increasingly stronger Dark and Stormys, which they all sampled, even Dabney. Riley talked about the rigors of dental school and Agnes told stories about the kids in her after-school program and Dabney checked to make sure everyone was eating and that everything was delicious.

She stopped on her way back into the kitchen and kissed Clen.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered.

There wasn’t enough time.

Dabney decided it was so nice by the fire that they should simply eat dinner there, like a picnic, rather than at the table. Dinner was beef Wellington with homemade mushroom duxelles, real foie gras, and homemade pastry, and a cheesy potato gratin and pan-roasted asparagus with toasted pine nuts and mustard-cream drizzle, and a salad with pears and dried cranberries and pumpernickel croutons.

“Mommy,” Agnes said. It was always “Mommy” now, Clen noticed, or maybe it had always been that way. What did Clen know? “You’ve outdone yourself.”

“I can barely move,” Riley said. He fell back into the cushions of the armchair. His plate was clean; he had gone back for seconds of everything, which had made Dabney fuss over him more, if that was even possible. “It was so delicious, boss.”

“I first made beef Wellington back in the spring of 1982,” Dabney said. “Before Clen and I went to the junior prom.”

“This one was even better,” Clen said.

Dabney tucked herself under Clen’s right arm, and he felt her smile against his chest. She had eaten next to nothing, but neither Clen nor Agnes had nudged her about it because it did no good. Dabney ate when she was hungry, which was about once every three days. That she had outdone herself was right. Clen knew that this was the last meal she would ever cook.

There was, no doubt, an elaborate and scrumptious dessert waiting somewhere within the confines of the Joneses’ enormous SubZero refrigerator, but none of them would partake in it tonight. Dabney fell fast asleep against Clen’s chest. Agnes and Riley rose to silently do the dishes while Clen sat and enjoyed the dying embers of the fire before carrying the ninety-six pounds of Dabney Kimball back to his cottage to bed.

Stop time, he prayed. Now. Stop it now.

There was something she wanted, but she couldn’t bring herself to ask for it.

By the end of October, her mother was in a wheelchair. She slept all the time now, and, at her request, she was staying at Clen’s cottage. Dabney weighed almost nothing. She was so thin, it was as though a part of her had been erased.

Agnes didn’t know what to do. She talked to Riley every night on the phone. Her mother was going to die. Christmas Stroll didn’t seem like a realistic goal. Agnes was going to have to call hospice, and soon.

November 6 was Dabney’s birthday. She was forty-nine.

He asked her what she wanted to do to celebrate, and she said that she wanted to order Cuban sandwiches from Foods for Here and There, and she wanted to watch Love Story with Clen and Agnes.

“No cake?” he said. Dabney liked proper pomp and circumstance when it came to birthdays: cake, candles, cards, and presents. That had been true when she was a teenager, and he’d assumed it still was.

Dabney shook her head. Just the sandwiches and the movie, she said.

He said, “Don’t you think Love Story might be too…maudlin?”

“It’s my favorite movie,” she said. “I’d like to see it one more time.”

Agnes arrived at his cottage, looking very, very sad. She and Clen had decided that afternoon to call hospice. They would let Dabney enjoy her birthday, and then hospice would come every day for as long as they were needed.

Dabney would not live to see fifty.

Before the sandwiches and the movie, Clen decided to give Dabney her surprise. She held it in her lap and turned it over, admiring the plaid wrapping paper in navy blue, Nantucket red, and Kelly green.

“I love this wrapping paper,” she said. “I wish every present I’d ever gotten had been wrapped in this paper.”

A good start, he thought. Agnes had picked out the paper.

Dabney touched the present some more, fingering its edges. Taking her time with the last present she would likely ever open.

“I think it’s a book!” she said.

“Open it, Mommy,” Agnes said.

Dabney opened it. The cover of the book was pink, a dusty-rose blush. And in black letters on the front it said, THE MATCHMAKER: DABNEY KIMBALL BEECH.

“Oh,” Dabney said.

She turned to the first page. Couple #1: Ginger (née O’Brien) and Phil 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.

And so on and so on-through Tammy Block and Flynn Sheehan, and Dr. Donegal, and the Levinsons, and Genevieve and Brian Lefebvre, and the failed story of Nina Mobley. Clen had managed to collect nineteen of the forty-two stories. He had done the interviews, and had edited each story to make it readable.

Dabney paged through the book, laughing and cooing, and saying, Yes, yes, I remember that! When she looked up at Clen, her eyes were shining with tears.

“I can’t believe you did this,” she said. “This is the most wonderful thing anyone has ever given me.”

“You have brought so much love into the world, Mommy,” Agnes said.

Clen said, “I thought it was important. Agnes will keep it. Her children will read it. And their children. They will know you through those stories.”

Dabney blinked. Tears dropped onto the pages. “Thank you,” she whispered.

There was something she wanted. She was afraid to ask for it. Forbearance, she thought. She was running out of time.

It was the middle of the night, three or four in the morning, her birthday officially over. The present of the book had overwhelmed her. It was a living history, her life story really, that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren would read. They might think of her the way she thought about Dabney Margaret Wright and Winford Dabney Wright and all the other women who had preceded her. She was merely taking her place in line.

The Cuban sandwich had been delicious, and Love Story had been okay until the scene where Oliver tells his father that Jenny has died.

“Turn it off,” Dabney had said.

“Are you sure?” Clen said.

“Yes.” Dabney knew what was coming, and she couldn’t handle the sight of Oliver sitting alone in the snow.