The Matchmaker Page 49

Maybe if she’d been having an affair with Dr. Marcus Cobb, or a young waiter from the Boarding House, she would have confided in her daughter. But Clendenin Hughes was a nuclear bomb.

A week after Agnes turned sixteen, Dabney had started teaching Agnes to drive in the parking lot of Surfside Beach. They went in the evenings after dinner, just the two of them, and Dabney rode shotgun and offered tips she thought might be helpful. They drove Dabney’s Mustang, which had been an impulse buy after her Camaro died. She’d had the Mustang for only eighteen months total (buying a Ford had been a mistake), but the car would have great importance to her because in it she had told Agnes the truth.

Dabney didn’t remember her exact words. What would she have said?

Honey, sweetheart, darling…Daddy—Box—isn’t your biological father. Your biological father is a man named Clendenin Hughes.

It had gone something like that.

He lives in Asia now. He left the country before I discovered I was pregnant and it was impossible for him to get back. It would have been far easier for me to go over there, but I couldn’t go, and so I told him to please let me raise you on my own. I’m not explaining this well, darling, it was very complicated.

Clendenin Hughes. He lives in Thailand now, I think, or Vietnam.

All Dabney could remember was Agnes’s high-pitched, hysterical screaming like Dabney was stabbing her in the eye with a fork.

She had waited too long. Dr. Donegal had said thirteen. Box had wanted her to know at age ten.

But Dabney was Agnes’s mother; Dabney was in charge of what her daughter knew, and when.

Dabney hadn’t wanted Agnes to know at all, ever.

What did it matter? Really, what? Box had been a good father. He had been with Agnes since before lasting memory. Why mess up Agnes’s beautiful head with information she would never, ever need?

Because it was the truth. Because it was blood. Dabney and Box had done a lot of, if not actual lying, then sidestepping of the truth. Agnes had asked why she looked nothing like Box and Box had said, “Human genetics are capricious, my pet.” Agnes had asked Dabney about the photographs of her and Clen together in the yearbook. This was your boyfriend, Mom? Yes, I suppose it was. Whatever happened to him? Oh, he’s long gone.

Agnes had never seen her birth certificate. Clen’s name wasn’t on it. Dabney wouldn’t allow it; she’d been too freshly wounded, too consumed with baffling emotion. Dr. Benton, who was the doctor on Nantucket before Ted Field, had done the delivery and he had every idea who the father was, but Dabney looked him dead in the eye and said she had no idea. She said she had slept with a lot of boys the preceding summer.

On the line for father, it said: unknown.

Dabney had decided to confess on Agnes’s sixteenth birthday because of the birth certificate. Agnes needed a copy to apply to a summer study program abroad, and whereas Dabney had been able to handle the birth certificate up until that point—for school registration, Little League, etc.—now it was impossible to keep it out of Agnes’s hands. Agnes could have taken five dollars to the registrar at any moment and gotten a copy herself.

The screaming. You lied to me. You lied about my very being. How can I trust anything you say ever again? How do I know you’re even my mother? I wish you weren’t. I wish you weren’t my mother.

Dabney was prepared for all this. Dr. Donegal had told her to expect it. Of course, it was one thing to know it was coming and another to actually experience it. Dabney was glad she had chosen to break the news while she was still in the driver’s seat of the Mustang. Agnes might have floored it—straight over the sand and into the ocean.

I wish you weren’t my mother.

Other girls Agnes’s age threw out lines like that all the time, Dabney knew, but Agnes never had. Dabney wouldn’t lie: it hurt, and it hurt worse because Agnes had every right to be angry. Dabney had withheld pertinent information, perhaps the most pertinent. Dabney had lied to her about her very being. Dabney had misjudged the timing. She had wholeheartedly disagreed with Box about telling Agnes at ten. What ten-year-old was mature enough to understand paternity? Agnes had only just learned what sex was. And at thirteen, Agnes had been going through puberty—she got her period, she started shaving her legs, her face broke out—no, Dabney wasn’t going to add to her worries by telling her about Clen.

At sixteen, Agnes was mature, responsible, intelligent, and calm. Dabney had thought she would take the news in stride. It explained why there were no pictures of Box with Agnes as a baby, and why they shared no physical characteristics.

But Agnes was hysterical. She was beyond angry, beyond upset. Dabney had driven from the Surfside Beach parking lot to their house on Charter Street while Agnes wailed. The windows of the Mustang were rolled up, but Dabney was still convinced that everyone on the island could hear.

When they reached the house, Agnes called Box in Cambridge. Dabney had thought that Agnes would be equally upset at Box for keeping the secret—but no. Agnes merely wanted Box’s confirmation that what Dabney had said was true (as if Dabney would lie about something like that?), and finding it so, she cried and cried, allowing Box, and only Box, to console her.

To Agnes, Dabney was the liar, the slut, the enemy. Agnes didn’t speak to Dabney for three weeks, and even after that, things were strained.

A mother first, a mother forever. Dabney had lived by these words, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t made mistakes. She had made a mistake in not telling Agnes sooner. I’m sorry, darling!

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