When Dabney looked at Agnes and CJ, she saw a haze that was the gray-green of clouds before a thunderstorm. Normally, when Dabney saw a miasma that bad, the couple split right away.

Dabney saw no choice but to tell Agnes the truth. A mother first, a mother forever.

“No,” she’d said. “You are not a perfect match.”

Agnes had packed her suitcase and left that very afternoon, a day and a half early, ignoring their usual day-after-Christmas tradition of prime-rib sandwiches and board games. She had left without taking any of her gifts; Dabney had been forced to pack them up and mail them to New York.

Box had been confused when he emerged from his study. “Wait a minute,” he said. “What happened? Why did they leave?” Agnes had left without saying goodbye to Box, and Dabney knew she had done so because she didn’t want Box to have the chance to try to persuade her to stay.

Dabney had sighed. “I told Agnes something she didn’t want to hear.”

Box lifted his square, black-framed glasses so that they rested in his snowy-white hair. He was a gifted and esteemed man, but there were times when Dabney wished she would be spared the lecture. Box thought her matchmaking was frivolous and silly on a good day, and abominably meddlesome in the private affairs of others the rest of the time. “What?” he asked. “What did you tell her?”

“I’d like to keep that between her and me,” Dabney said.

“Dabney.” His eyes were a piercing blue, clear and cold, exacting.

“She asked if I thought she and CJ were a perfect match.”

Box raised his chin a fraction of an inch. “Certainly you didn’t offer your opinion?”

Dabney didn’t answer. Her feet were together and her hands were clasped in front of her kilt. She was the errant student facing the headmaster. Box was her husband, she reminded herself. They were equals.

Box’s visage turned a florid pink. “Certainly you did offer your opinion. Otherwise she wouldn’t have run off.”

“Run off,” Dabney said. It was a bad habit of hers to repeat the phrases Box used that she found asinine. Like “run off." That was Professor Beech trying to sound not only Harvard-like but British. Heroines in Edwardian literature “ran off.” Agnes had climbed into her Prius and absconded without noise or toxic emissions.

“Rude of them not to say goodbye,” Box said. “I would have expected more from CJ. You just don’t stay in a man’s house, and then up and leave without a word.”

“You were working, darling,” Dabney said. “The closed door is very intimidating, as I’ve told you hundreds of times. I’m sure they didn’t want to disrupt you.”

“They wouldn’t have been disrupting me,” Box said. “I was only reading. And there is nothing intimidating about a closed door. All they had to do was knock.”

“It’s my fault,” Dabney said. The day after Christmas and the day after the day after Christmas were now ruined.

Box breathed audibly. He wanted to say something punishing, perhaps, but like the perfect gentleman he was, he refrained. He knew that Agnes’s departure was punishment enough.

The weather for Daffodil Weekend would be perfect, but that was it; everything else about Dabney’s life was disheveled and topsy-turvy. Her daughter had come home—that was good—but she had brought CJ with her, and that was bad. And Clendenin Hughes would be arriving on Nantucket the next morning. Dabney did not feel well—her abdomen was tender, her back was sore, she was fatigued. On top of everything else, she probably had Lyme disease!

Dabney dealt with her mixed bag of circumstances the way she had dealt with everything else in her forty-eight years: she used forbearance. She began by calling Ted Field’s office and scheduling an appointment for Monday morning. Ted Field, the doctor of choice on the island, was wildly popular and always overbooked. But Dabney knew she would get an appointment because decades earlier, at her own wedding, Dabney had introduced Ted Field’s receptionist, Genevieve Lefebvre, to her husband, Brian (Couple #17). They had been married twenty-one years and had five daughters.

“What’s the matter?” Genevieve asked. “You sick?”

“Not quite right,” Dabney said. “Maybe Lyme. I don’t know. Maybe old age.”

“Oh, hush. You look the same as you did when you were seventeen,” Genevieve said. “The doc can see you at nine.”

That accomplished, Dabney felt marginally better. Maybe Lyme. Maybe just stress.

She was able to grit her teeth and make it through the rest of the day. She greeted CJ warmly, then sent him and Agnes out to pick up the blanket of daffodils and the daffodil wreath that would festoon the Impala in the Antique Car Parade the next day. She called Nina and apologized for being distracted in the office and for needlessly snapping at her.

(When Dabney had returned to the Chamber of Commerce without a strawberry frappe from the pharmacy, Nina had squinted at her in confusion. “So where did you go, then?”

And Dabney said, “You need glasses, Nina.”

Nina had recoiled as though Dabney had smacked her across the nose with a newspaper, and Dabney felt like a terrible, cranky friend.)

Now, Dabney said, “I really don’t feel well. I’m coming down with something, I think.”

“Get rest tonight, sister,” Nina said. “Tomorrow is showtime.”

Dabney put the finishing touches on the tailgate picnic for the next day, although she had prepared most of it in advance. Dabney made the same picnic every year because, just like Thanksgiving and Christmas, Daffodil Weekend was all about tradition. The ribbon sandwiches were the highlight of her picnic—crustless Pepperidge Farm white bread with a layer of egg salad (yellow), a layer of scallion cream cheese (green), and a layer of maraschino cherry cream cheese (pink). Agnes and Box teased her both for making the ribbon sandwiches and for enjoying them. It was WASP cuisine at its very essence, they said. Why not serve Velveeta on Triscuits while she was at it? Or a dish of pickled cauliflower? Dabney ignored the taunts; their aversion simply left more ribbon sandwiches for her, and for Peter Genevra, superintendent of the water company, who stopped at her picnic every year to wolf down half a dozen.