The event at Sankaty consisted mostly of captains of industry with golfing tans and their Nantucket Lightship basket–toting wives drinking scotch and eating pigs in a blanket, but suddenly Box found himself talking to a girl who had graduated from Radcliffe only four years earlier, a girl born and raised on Nantucket named Dabney Kimball. She had studied art history, but her roommate had taken Econ 10, so Dabney knew who Box was. Soon she was offering to take him on a tour of the island the following day.

“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” he said. She was wearing a madras headband in her brown hair and her face had a fresh-scrubbed look. Box would never have called himself an insightful person even back then, but he had been able to tell that underneath Dabney’s simple, pretty package lay hidden treasure.

She said, “Oh, please? It would be such an honor. I love showing the island off. I’m an ambassador of sorts.”

“But surely you have other plans?” he said. She was young enough to spend her Sundays playing boccie on the beach, or sailing around the harbor while lying across the front of her boyfriend’s sloop.

“I have a two-year-old daughter,” she said. “But my grandmother watches her on Sundays, so I’m free all day.”

A two-year-old? Box thought. If she had graduated four years earlier, she would have been twenty-six. If she had a two-year-old, she would have gotten pregnant at twenty-three. Very few Radcliffe women had children right out of college. They all went to law school now, business school, medical school—or, in the case of art-history majors, they spent years doing graduate studies in Florence or Vienna. Box checked Dabney’s hand for a ring, but her fingers were bare. She wore no jewelry except for a strand of pearls and matching pearl earrings.

“Okay,” Box said. He was agreeing to the tour without even wanting one. “Thank you. I’d like that.”

Agnes stayed home with Dabney on Sunday morning while Box and CJ golfed at Miacomet. When Box got home, Agnes said, “I’m worried about her, Daddy. What if I called in to work this week and stayed here with her?”

“You know your mother won’t let you do that,” Box said. “She’s not going to stay home from work, and she wouldn’t want you to either. Think about the kids.”

Agnes was the executive director of the Boys & Girls Club in Morningside Heights, a job that paid next to nothing but that gave her enormous satisfaction. It was a job that, quite frankly, scared Box and Dabney. Their daughter sometimes stayed at the club until eight or nine at night with a handful of kids who had no one at home to feed them or put them to bed. Box wrote Agnes a sizable check each month to pay for her rent on the Upper West Side and a car service home whenever she left the club after dark. He suspected, however, that Agnes was too modest to use the car service regularly. He suspected that Agnes took the subway.

While they were golfing, CJ had admitted that Agnes’s job unnerved him as well, and said that after they were married he was going to encourage her to work for a different nonprofit, preferably one in midtown. Box had agreed that this was a good idea.

“The kids aren’t more important to me than my own mother,” Agnes said.

“Your mother will be fine,” Box said.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Box said. “She has an appointment with Dr. Field in the morning. It’s probably just Lyme disease. Three weeks of antibiotics, she’ll be as good as new.”

“Okay,” Agnes said. “CJ has a client negotiation in the morning, so we’ll leave tonight.”

“I’ll take care of your mother,” Box said. “I promise.”

On their tour of the island nearly a quarter of century earlier, Dabney had driven Box to Quaise and Quidnet, to Madaket and Madequecham, to Shimmo and Shawkemo in her battered 1972 Chevy Nova. It wasn’t the car he’d expected a young lady like her to drive; she seemed like someone who would be more comfortable in a Saab convertible or a Volkswagen Jetta, but then she explained that she had been raised by her father—a Vietnam vet and a Nantucket policeman—and he had turned her into a motorhead. This term, coming out of Dabney’s wholesome mouth, made Box throw back his head and laugh. But Dabney was dead serious. She had purchased the Nova with her own money, and she wanted to trade it in for a Camaro. Her dream was to someday own a Corvette Stingray split-window with matching numbers in Bermuda blue. She was a devoted Chevy girl, she said.

She was sorry that the Nova didn’t have four-wheel drive only because that meant she couldn’t take him up the beach to her favorite spot, Great Point.

“That’s okay,” Box had said. He didn’t tell her that the tour had already run so far over his time limit that he’d missed the ferry he had booked back to the mainland.

She said, “I’ll take you to my second-favorite spot. And we can eat. I made lunch.”

Her second-favorite spot was Polpis Harbor, where she parked overlooking the sparkling water and the scattering of sails. Dabney pulled a wicker basket out of the Nova’s trunk. She had made fried chicken, macaroni salad, and strawberry pie. She handed Box an icy cold root beer, which was the most delicious thing he could remember tasting in his forty years.

Up until that point, Box had been a confirmed bachelor. He had dated dozens of women—most of them very smart, some of them very pretty, and one or two who were both. But Box had always imagined love as a musical note, and so far nobody had struck the right one. But the note resonated loud and clear that afternoon at Polpis Harbor with Dabney. It was a sweet, thrumming sound that nearly knocked him off his feet. He, who had never really given a thought to anyone’s feelings but his own, wanted to know her. She seemed ripe for the picking; he loved her pert, freckled nose. But he also knew he should proceed cautiously.