He couldn’t cut a steak, he couldn’t tie his shoes, and he couldn’t button the cuffs of his shirt. A grocery cart was okay, but not a grocery basket. Childproof pill bottle, forget about it. Chopping a tomato was difficult but not impossible; he hadn’t yet tried to shuck corn. Typing was a slow and arduous process, so he wrote everything longhand now, then read it into a special program on his computer. He had a hard time folding his laundry, and uncorking a bottle of wine.
He could shave, but he had always hated shaving anyway, so he’d let his beard grow in for four months, two weeks, three days—the amount of time that had passed since he’d lost his arm.
Transactions like paying the pizza guy from his wallet and then accepting the hot box was a complicated dance that frustrated Clen and embarrassed the deliveryman. It was his left arm that was gone, so shaking hands was still okay.
He probably shouldn’t hold a baby, but there were no babies in his life.
He could crack an egg, flip an omelet, ride his bicycle, and swim. And he could smoke, thanks to the invention of the Bic. Lighting a match was a trick from his past.
Usually when dusk descended, which happened later and later as June approached, Clen stood on his porch and took aim at the crows with his BB gun—he was getting pretty good—and then he smoked a cigarette and dropped the butt into the mayonnaise jar half filled with water at his feet. It was a nasty habit he’d picked up overseas; it had been impossible to live in Bangkok, and later Hanoi, and later still Siem Reap, and not smoke. He had thought he would give it up when he returned, but he had given up so much already that he couldn’t quit the cigarettes.
He either made himself something to eat (an omelet, fried rice) or he called something in, hence the awkward relationship with the pizza-delivery guy, although Benny knew him now.
And then, when it was fully dark, Clen climbed into the car left at his disposal—he had gotten a special driver’s license, valid as long as he wore his prosthetic, which he never did—and he drove into town, past the house on Charter Street where Dabney lived.
If he had told anyone he did this, they would have thought him a stalker, a creep, a man hopelessly mired in the past. He didn’t feel like any of those things. He drove past Dabney’s house because he liked to see the lights on and think of her inside—tossing a salad or sticking fresh flowers in a vase of water, or reading Jane Austen in bed.
He knew she was married. He knew there was next to no chance that she would leave the economist just because Clen had decided to come back. But he loved her in a way that could not be ignored, and so he was determined to try. The kiss in front of his cottage had been the kiss of a lifetime. If he got nothing else, he would be happy with that.
In every dream he’d had since being back on Nantucket, he had both his arms. It was because of Dabney. She returned him to his whole self.
Clen had found out about the baby in a letter from Dabney, the sort penned on a thin, light-blue airmail envelope—from the outside, identical in appearance to the three letters Dabney had sent that had preceded Clen’s arrival in Bangkok, those saying how much she loved and missed him. The letter about her pregnancy had reached Clen after he returned to Bangkok from a grueling three-week assignment in Pattaya, which was a more disturbing, derelict, and soulless place than Clen could have imagined existed. He had been overseas for slightly less than two months, enough time for him to have gotten a hang of the way things worked, but also to have become disenchanted.
I don’t know how to say this, Dabney had written. So I’ll just say it: I’m pregnant.
And then later in the letter: I want nothing from you. I considered terminating but I can’t bring myself to do it. I am due in May.
May, he thought. Meaning that Dabney had gotten pregnant in August, a few weeks before he left. They had had frequent, clinging, urgent sex in those final days, and Clen had not always used a condom. One night in the Quaker Cemetery came to mind.
Their parting had gone more smoothly than he’d imagined. When the job offer came from the Southeast Asia desk of the New York Times, he had thought Dabney would…flip out, cry, scream, beg him not to go, threaten suicide or murder. But she had been resigned, even happy for him. She had smiled, and said, I’m so proud of you. You have to accept, Clen. This is the opportunity of a lifetime. She had been so even-keeled about it that he’d thought, momentarily, that she had decided to go with him.
No, she said. I’m staying here.
So what you’re saying is we’re breaking up?
She said, We are a perfect match. No matter what happens, we’re going to end up together.
And you really believe that? he said.
Let’s wait, she said. And see what happens.
It was the mature thing to say, but he couldn’t help feeling injured by it. This was stranger still because it was him leaving. The two of them with their Ivy League degrees had spent the past year on Nantucket working jobs that were beneath them. Clen had been itching to go someplace bigger, more important, someplace where news was actually happening. He had been thinking of New York. A relationship with Dabney would have been plausible from New York—back every weekend or every other. But Bangkok?
He had waved goodbye to her from the Steamship, yelling her name and telling her he loved her until she was out of sight. Then, he had retched over the side of the boat.
Upon receiving Dabney’s letter, Clen borrowed a thousand dollars against his future salary and bought her a plane ticket. He called her from a sweltering Western Union office, believing that now that Dabney was pregnant, she would have to come. He was far more excited about the prospect of seeing Dabney than about having a baby. What did that even mean, having a baby? He wasn’t sure, but he had not expected Dabney to say what she said, which was, I will not come there. I’m going to have this baby alone.
What? he said.
The only way I will survive this, she said.
He didn’t understand. What? He was shouting, despite the queue of Australian backpackers behind him, listening to his every word.
Is if you promise never to contact me again. Cold turkey. Never contact me again. Please respect my wishes. Please.
We can make it work here, he said. I’ll rent a bigger place, and hire a woman to help you with the baby!
Clen, she said. Please.
Please what? He was ready to pull his hair out in frustration. Just come, Cupe. I bought you a plane ticket.
I can’t! she said. I’m not sure you get it, or that you’ve ever gotten it. I can’t do it, I’m too afraid, and afraid isn’t even the right word. Clen could hear her breathing; he could tell she was trying not to cry. I’m sorry, Clen. I just can’t.
Okay, he said. Fine. You win. You win, Dabney! I’ll quit my job. I’ll come home.
No, she said. Absolutely not.
What? he said.
Do you think I want you to end up like my mother? If you come back to live here on Nantucket, you will have a small life, a lot smaller than the life you’re going to have overseas anyway. And you’ll hate me, and you’ll resent our child, and you’ll take off in the middle of the night and I’ll never see you again. She paused. No, she said. No way. I don’t want you to come home.
I won’t do that. You know I won’t do that.
What I know, Dabney said, is that you won’t be happy here, writing for the Nantucket Standard. You’re too talented. You’re the hundred-year genius, just like Mr. Kane used to say. You need to face the facts.
What facts? You’re pregnant with my child.
It isn’t going to work either way. It isn’t going to work!
I thought you said we were a perfect match, destined to end up together!
Well, I was wrong, Dabney said. I was terribly, horribly, awfully wrong. I have been right about everyone else, but wrong about us. There is only one solution, one way I’m going to survive, and that is if you let me go. Just please let me go.
I can’t let you go, he said. I love you!
Silence.
What? he said. I leave, and suddenly you don’t love me?
She said something too softly for him to hear. He imagined her words like raindrops falling somewhere into the South Pacific.
I didn’t catch that, he said.
Not suddenly, she said.
There was suggestive coughing from one of the Australians in line and Clen waved a desperate hand over his head, as if to say, I’m drowning here, buddy. Please let me try to save myself. This was the conversation of his life, he realized that. He also knew it might end up costing as much as the plane ticket he had just purchased.
Tell me you don’t love me, he said.
I don’t love you.
You’re lying, he said. You know it and I know it. You’re lying, Cupe.
You will find someone else, she said. And so will I.
As anyone who has ever been in love would know, those words blew him to bits, as though he had stepped on a land mine, or a booby trap set by guerrilla forces. It was the worst pain he had ever sustained. Worse than being hit by his drunk father, worse than waking up and finding his father dead at the kitchen table and then having to knock on his mother’s bedroom door and tell her the news.
Okay, he said. Fine. Cold turkey. Not another word. You understand that, Cupe? Not. Another. Word.
He was calling her bluff, or so he’d thought.
The only way I’m going to survive is with a clean break, she said. Please respect my wishes and let me, and this child, go. Please, please, do me the favor of never contacting me again.
Dabney.
Silence.
Dabney!
He would have thought she’d hung up but he could still hear her breathing.
Fine, he said.
Silence.
If that’s what you want, he said.
Silence.
We all make choices, he said.
He had always been smarter than everyone else, and he’d thought that might help him, but in this case it didn’t matter. Possibly, it made things worse. What he imagined as the finely calibrated gears of his mind were thrown practically into reverse, so that anything he tried to do—track down a source in Surat Thani, or kick-start his motorbike, or cook rice—ended up a disaster.
In May, he learned that Dabney had given birth to a baby girl and named her Agnes Bernadette, after her grandmother. He couldn’t count the number of times—when he was riding in the stinking hot third-class berth of a train, or slogging through rice paddies, or meandering through the markets looking for ripe mangoes but being offered teenaged girls—when the name had popped into his head like a chiming bell.
Agnes Bernadette.
He had heard from Agnes herself only once, shortly after her sixteenth birthday. Dabney had finally told Agnes about her true paternity and Agnes, unbeknownst to Dabney, had sent a letter to Clen in care of the New York Times. The letter had been forwarded to Clen, who at that time was living in Hanoi, in a good flat in the French Quarter. He had just won the Pulitzer and he had an offer for a book deal; for the one and only time in his life, he had been flush with cash, and there had finally been talk of transferring him to the Singapore desk, which had become his sole professional aspiration. Clen and his girlfriend, Mi Linh, drank a lot of champagne and ate dinner twice a week at the Hotel Metropole. They spent weekends at a resort in the cool hills of Sapa; Clen rented a junk and they sailed the emerald waters of Halong Bay.
Agnes’s letter had been straightforward: she now knew that Clendenin was her real father and she wanted to meet him; her mother, however, could never find out. Agnes was spending the summer in France. Could Clendenin meet her in France?
Clen had chewed on his answer for as long as he dared. The worst thing, he realized, would be not to respond at all. He wanted very much to buy a ticket to Paris and meet Agnes there. The whole idea of it was cinematic. He understood from the tone of her letter that Agnes didn’t need him to be a father; she had the economist for that. She did, however, require a connection. She was sixteen years old, on the verge of becoming a woman, trying to accrue self-awareness, and she wanted to fill in the missing link. Which was him.
What Clen couldn’t swallow was this meeting taking place without Dabney’s knowledge. He assumed that, seventeen years later, Dabney had made some sort of peace with his absence. She had married, she ran the Chamber of Commerce, and she had, he could only assume, a happy life. If he went behind her back and met Agnes in Paris and she found out about it—well, that wasn’t something Clendenin could risk.
Clen had written back to Agnes and tried to explain all this. The letter he’d sent had been ten pages long. It was an atonement of sorts, because that many years later he had come to understand that Dabney’s telling him she didn’t love him was the ultimate act of love. She hadn’t wanted him even to consider coming home because she knew he would be unhappy, unfulfilled. Not returning to your mother, and by circumstance, you, is the great shame of my life. I offer no excuse other than I was young and selfish, and I believed myself to be destined for great things. In the years since I’ve left Nantucket, I have seen sights both sublime and horrific, and I have tried to uncover truths and bring light and sense to this often misunderstood part of the world. But although I have never met you, I have always been aware that my greatest accomplishment is that I fathered a child. You.
Clen had both anticipated and dreaded a response. If he and Agnes started a secret correspondence, Dabney would be devastated as well. There was no good way for a relationship between them to proceed, and yet he wanted it to. He wanted it to.
But it was a moot point. Agnes never wrote back.
He couldn’t reel in a fish, or dig a grave, or change a tire. He couldn’t shuffle a deck of cards or deal a hand of poker. He would never be able to help Dabney fasten her pearls. This last thing bothered Clen more than he thought it might.
But he wasn’t disheartened, yet. He had the kiss, which redoubled his determination. He was going to keep trying. He was going to make Dabney take those words back, and admit that she had never meant them in the first place.
Tammy: I am the match Dabney doesn’t like to talk about.
We’d all like our lives to be nice and neat. High school, college, marriage, kids, job, church, community, two-week vacations in Aruba or Tuscany—and then watch your kids, and then their kids, follow suit. Some people have lives like that, and some don’t.
I dropped out of Fairleigh Dickinson University (we all called it “Fairly Ridiculous”)—or, rather, I failed out—after three semesters. I just couldn’t handle the reading, it put me to sleep, plus I was drinking every night and smoking a lot of dope. I married a guy I met at a biker bar, a guy I barely knew. We drove to Atlantic City and got hitched, then we moved up to Rhode Island because my new husband was going to work as a fry cook for a buddy opening a fish restaurant. I got pregnant, had a son, then a year later, another son. My new husband left me for one of the waitresses at the fish restaurant and then those two ran off and I never saw a single support check.
I needed a way to make a living while being a full-time mom—at that point, I was qualified to be either a prostitute or work the register at the CITGO—and seeing that these were piss-poor options, I went for my real estate license.
I had a talent for selling houses, and my secret weapon was that which had served me well my whole life—apathy. You want the house? Great. You don’t want the house? Someone else will.
I landed on Nantucket ten years ago the way many people land here, I suppose—I came for a vacation and decided I never wanted to leave. I sold my Victorian on Prospect Street in Providence for three times what I paid for it, banked the profit, and rented a cute three-quarter house on School Street. (Three-quarter house meant two windows to the right of the front door and one window to the left. I was crazy for architectural terminology.)
Dabney Kimball Beech lived one block over, on Charter. I used to see her out walking every morning, and I have to tell you, she didn’t seem like anyone I would want to be friends with. It was the headband that put me off, I think, and the pearls. Who wore pearls at seven o’clock in the morning to go power walking? I quickly learned that Dabney was the director of the Chamber of Commerce and that she was quite beloved around the island. When I interviewed for an associate-broker position at Congdon & Coleman Real Estate and I mentioned I lived on School Street, the man interviewing me said, “Oh, you’re neighbors with Dabney Kimball.”
I said, “Yes.”
He said, “If Nantucket elected a president, she would win by a landslide.”
I decided it would be wise, as a Realtor brand-new to town, to meet Dabney Kimball, so I strategized to be out watering my front flower bed at seven in the morning when she walked past.
I thought she might ignore me, but she stopped and literally beamed at me. And that was my introduction to the magic of Dabney Kimball Beech.
She said, “Hey there! You just moved in a few weeks ago! I’ve been dying to meet you. I’m Dabney.”
I said, “I’m Tammy Block.” We shook hands.
She said, “You’re the newest Realtor at Congdon & Coleman.”
I had only had the job for twelve hours. How could she have known?
I said, “Yes, that’s right.”
She said, “And I’ve seen your boys waiting at the bus stop. They’re so handsome.”
I smiled proudly because who can resist compliments about one’s children? But then I grew wary. This was probably just lip service.
Dabney said, “Today is Tuesday. I’m alone tonight. Come over for some wine, will you?”
I did go for “some wine.” We finished two bottles, along with a dish of smoked almonds and some really good French cheese and savory crackers and quince paste, which I had never tasted or even heard of before, but which was delicious. Things were like that at Dabney’s house—refined and lovely and eclectic, but not fussy. She made me feel completely at ease, even after I learned that her husband was some kind of famous economist who taught at Harvard, and Dabney herself had gone to Harvard. Usually when I was in the presence of educated people, I felt embarrassed about my pathetic three semesters at Fairly Ridiculous, but I did not feel that way around Dabney.
She asked me if I was married. I said, Long divorced.
She got a twinkle in her eye and told me she was something of a matchmaker. Forty-two couples to her credit, all of them still together.
I laughed and said, “Oh dear God, don’t even try. I don’t need a husband, or even a boyfriend. What I need is a plumber to fix the toilet in the boys’ bathroom. It runs incessantly.”
The very next day, Flynn Sheehan was standing at the top of my friendship stairs. I caught my breath. He had the most arresting blue eyes I had ever seen.
He said, “Dabney Kimball sent me?”
I thought, She has sent me a husband. And boy, was she spot-on. Just looking at Flynn Sheehan gave me butterflies.
He said, “Something about needing a toilet fixed?”
I laughed, then introduced myself and welcomed Flynn Sheehan inside. I was glad I had just come from work and was still wearing a dress, heels, and makeup. I led Flynn Sheehan up the stairs.
He said, “How long have you been renting the Reillys’ house?”
I said, “Three weeks.”
He said, “I basically grew up in this house. Kevin Reilly was my best friend. He was killed in Iraq in ninety-one.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“That’s why I came on such short notice. Kevin’s parents aren’t exactly known for their upkeep of this place…”
“Oh,” I said. “The place is fine. It’s charming. I love everything about it, except the running toilet.”
Flynn stopped at the top of the stairs. He was looking at marks made on the doorjamb, pencil marks and initials I hadn’t even noticed.
He pointed to a mark near his waist. “This is Kevin, age five, and me age five. Kev at ten, at twelve, me at thirteen, Kev at fifteen.”
I studied the marks: FS 2/10/77. KR 8/29/83.
Flynn pointed to the highest mark, at about his present height. “This was the last time we did it, right before he left. He had me by half an inch.”
I looked where Flynn pointed. FS 3/30/91. KR 3/30/91.
Flynn blinked. “He was like a brother to me.”
I didn’t know what to say but I felt my heart doing funny things, things it hadn’t done in a long time.
Then I noticed his wedding ring, and I thought: Story of my life.
Flynn fixed the toilet in thirty seconds, and when I tried to pay him, he waved me away. He was the most attractive man I’d seen in years and he had shown me the softest part of his heart within three minutes of meeting me. But he was married.
At the door, he handed me his card. FLYNN SHEEHAN PLUMBING. The address was a P.O. box. I found myself wanting to know where he lived. I would drive by his house and try to catch a glimpse of his pretty wife.
He said, “If you need anything, and I mean anything, even if it’s not plumbing, I want you to call me.”
I felt myself redden. I wondered what he meant by that.
Then he said, “The Reillys are my people. If anything goes wrong with the house, they would want me to take care of it.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
Flynn descended the friendship stairs and strode out to his truck, whistling.
“Goodbye!” I called after him. “Thank you!”
A day later, when I saw Dabney, she said, “So, you met Flynn?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you for sending him.”
Dabney gazed at me. She had dark brown eyes, but they seemed to send out gold sparks at times. “So what did you think?”
“He fixed the toilet in half a minute. I probably could have done it myself if I’d bothered to give it a try.”
“No,” she said. “I mean, what did you think about Flynn?”
“Nice guy,” I said.
“You’re rosy,” she said. She jumped up and down like a little kid, then she snapped her fingers. “I knew it! I knew it! You’re rosy!”
“Rosy?” I said.
“You liked him.”
“Dabney,” I said. “He’s married.”
Dabney’s face fell and I felt like I had just toppled her ice-cream cone.
“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”
I learned something quickly about Nantucket. Although it was a small island, you could go months without seeing someone. I went six months without seeing Flynn Sheehan. Indeed, I went for days and weeks without thinking about him. And then he would pop into my mind—most often when I walked up the stairs and saw the hash marks on the doorjamb—and I would hope and pray that the kitchen faucet would leak, or the light would go out in the refrigerator.
Then one night I happened into American Seasons for a celebratory drink. I had just sold my first house, a fixer-upper on Pilgrim Road, listed at $1.2 million. The listing broker had to get home to his family, but my boys were at football practice until seven, so I had a couple of free hours. I didn’t think anyone would be at the bar at American Seasons at five o’clock—but I was wrong. When I walked in, Flynn Sheehan was sitting there alone, with a tall beer in front of him.
I said, “Flynn, hi! Tammy Block, I’m the one who rents the…”
“Reilly house,” he said. He gave me a sort of half smile, and I thought my heart would stop. “Like I could ever forget you.”
I have gone on long enough, and the story from here takes a bad turn. Some people had neat and orderly lives, and some people’s lives were messy and morally ambiguous. I have lived the latter. Did Flynn and I have an affair? Yes. It pains and embarrasses me to confess that. Did Amy Sheehan—who was, in anyone’s objective opinion, a miserable woman—discover the affair by looking at Flynn’s cell phone records and spread the news of my slutty debauchery all over the island? Yes. Was I ready to pack up my belongings, uproot the kids, and move off the island? Yes.
There were only two reasons I didn’t do this. One was: I loved Flynn Sheehan with every fiber of my being. After Amy smeared our names like blood all over every street in town, he had a difficult choice to make. He could try to repair his marriage and salvage his family, or he could leave. He called me up at eleven o’clock on the night the news broke and said, “I left her, Tammy. I love you.”
The other reason I didn’t leave Nantucket was because of Dabney Kimball Beech. As soon as she heard the news, she knocked on my front door. I ignored her. I didn’t want to hear her lecture. Surely anyone with a life as perfect as Dabney’s would never understand adultery—even though, technically, she was the one who had set me up with Flynn.
When I didn’t answer the front door, she knocked on the back door. When I didn’t answer the back door, she started tapping on my windows. I had to hide in my powder room, where she couldn’t see me. But she was relentless, and finally I gave up. I let her in the back door and waited for the beatings to begin.
She hugged me. Then she sat down at my kitchen table. She said, “I am going to hold your hand until you stop crying.”
I cried for quite a while. I cried and cried. When I finally stopped to blow my nose, I said, “Why did you send him to me when you knew he was married?”
“Because,” Dabney said, “you two are a perfect match. You’re meant to be together.”
Dabney was right. Flynn divorced Amy and married me on the beach in Madaket with only our children and Dabney and John Boxmiller Beech in attendance. There are still people on this island who won’t speak to me, who won’t meet my eye in the supermarket, who wouldn’t give me a referral for a sale if I were the last Realtor left on Nantucket. But I have Dabney—and she is not the person she appears to be.
She is so much more.