The Matchmaker Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    Dabney also made a bourbon-glazed spiral-cut ham, a loaf of braided honey-curry bread, poached asparagus with hollandaise sauce, and a tortellini salad with herbed mayonnaise. She served lemon tarts from the Nantucket Bake Shop. She bought a bottle of Taittinger champagne for herself and Agnes, good white Bordeaux for Box, and a twelve-pack of Stella Artois to offer those who stopped to visit.
    As Dabney was cutting the crusts from the Pepperidge Farm loaf, Box entered the kitchen. He had arrived that morning while she was at work; she hadn’t seen him since Monday at 7:00 a.m., when she’d dropped him at the airport as she did every Monday morning.
    “Hello, dear,” he said, and he kissed her chastely on the cheek. His greeting alone summed up the way things were between them. Pleasant, civilized, sexless. He called her “darling,” or occasionally “dear.” When they were dating and first married, Dabney used to long for Thursday afternoons because back then, Box would leave Harvard when his last class was over at three, and he would often make it to the island by five. Dabney would meet his plane or his boat and they would head straight home to make love. Now, Box stayed in his faculty apartment on Thursday nights. He worked until seven or eight and then went out to dinner with colleagues. He tried to convince Dabney to come to Cambridge on Thursday evenings. There were so many new restaurants, they could attend the reading series at the Coop or go to the Symphony. But Dabney always declined. Box knew that asking Dabney to come to Cambridge was like asking her to scuba dive without an oxygen tank in Marianas Trench. She believed, in her own mind, that she simply would not survive.
    Box grew weary at her refusal to travel, and Dabney grew aggravated at him for trying to prod her into it. I never pretended to be anyone else! she had shouted at him a few years back. The shouting had been startling to them both—theirs was not a marriage where emotions ran hot—and the discussion died there. Box stayed in Cambridge on Thursday nights, and Dabney stayed on Nantucket.
    Now, as usual, Dabney said, “How was your week?”
    “Good,” Box said. “My Turkish editor called. They’re picking up the new edition.”
    “Oh, wonderful,” Dabney said. In addition to holding an endowed chair, Box had authored the macroeconomics textbook used by more than four hundred universities across the country. It had been translated into twenty-four languages. Box wrote an updated edition every three years; the amount of income this generated was nauseating. Box made somewhere between three and four million dollars a year