The Matchmaker by Elin Hilderbrand Page B

more serious? Dabney never got sick. In his heart, Box believed that Dabney was suffering from stress. Anyone watching her work would have thought she was in charge of running a ten-billion-dollar multinational company: she took her job that seriously. And then there was the specter of the man on the bicycle. Clendenin Hughes—or maybe not. Maybe Box had been mistaken.
    He picked up the phone to call Dabney at the Chamber. It had been so long since he’d called her at work that he had forgotten the number. Oh—3543, of course. There had been years and years when he had phoned Dabney at work every single day—to check in, to ask about the weather, to find out the score of Agnes’s field hockey game, to tell her he loved her. But possibly just as many years had passed since he’d grown too busy to call every day. He had classes, students, office hours, graduate assistants and department meetings to manage, his textbook to write and revise, articles to critique and publish, associate professors to advise, the crumbling markets in Europe to analyze and comment on (he appeared as a guest on CNBC two or three times a year). He’d also been receiving phone calls from the Department of the Treasury, which, although flattering, required intricate, time-consuming problem solving. He routinely complained that he needed four extra hours in each day. He started secretly to resent having to travel to Nantucket every weekend, and so he’d recently asked Dabney how she would feel if he spent one weekend a month immersed in work in Cambridge.
    She had said, “Oh. That would be fine. I guess.”
    She had said this with equanimity, but Box—although not gifted when it came to reading minds—figured out that it would not be fine. Or maybe it would be fine? Dabney was as self-sufficient and independent a woman as Box had ever known, and over the years, their union had settled into a comfortable arrangement. They were like a Venn diagram. She lived her life and he didn’t interfere—and vice versa. The space where they overlapped had grown more and more slender over the years. He assumed that this was normal, as was his waning sex drive. His nonexistent sex drive. He had considered going to a doctor and getting a pill, but that struck him as embarrassing, and beneath him. Dabney wasn’t complaining, anyway. Box figured that he and his wife had simply settled into the well-feathered nest of middle age.
    Nina Mobley answered on the first ring. “Nantucket Chamber of Commerce.”
    “Hello, Nina, it’s Box,” he said. “Is my wife there?”
    “I’m sorry,” Nina said. “ Who is this?”
    “Box,” he said, feeling mildly annoyed. Though it had been aeons since he’d called. “John Boxmiller Beech. Dabney’s husband.”
    “Box?” she said. “Is everything all right? ”
    “Nina,” Box said. “Is my wife there, please?”
    Dabney came on the phone. “Is everything okay?”
    “Yes, yes,” Box said. “ I just had a call from Ted Field, who told me you passed the tick test but that he put you on antibiotics anyway.”
    “He did. But I’m not taking them. I feel much better.”
    “If he prescribed them,” Box said, “then you’d better take them.”
    “I feel much better,” Dabney repeated. “Why did he call you anyway? I’m the patient. You’re not my father. He shouldn’t have called you.”
    Box was tempted to agree with her, patient confidentiality and whatnot. But he and Ted Field had rowed together at Harvard a million years earlier; they were friends. Box wondered if Ted had called because there really might be something more serious going on.
    “He said your white blood count was high, and that you should probably go to Boston to get it checked out.”
    “Not going to happen,” Dabney said.
    “Or it might be a wheat allergy. Perhaps you should stop eating bread?”
    “Box,” Dabney said. “I feel much better.”
    He had been married to the woman for twenty-four years; he realized that no one