“Okay,” Calista said matter-of-factly. “I can keep this up as long as you can.”
“Keep what up?” Miranda groaned.
“Not talking about your date with Lucas.” Calista opened a bridal magazine that was as thick as the Baltimore phone directory. “According to Psst!, you and Lucas were secretly married on a private beach in a moonlit ceremony in Northern Wales. The bride wore overalls, I assume?”
“Shows how unreliable their informants are.” Miranda flipped through the pages of a magazine. She was halfway through it before she noticed that it was one of Alec’s baseball weeklies, and not a bridal magazine. “I’m still very single.”
“But there was moonlight?”
“There was a moon.”
“And there was a private beach?”
“Yeah. So?”
Calista marked her place with a pink Post-It and clapped the magazine shut. “Moonlight. Private beach. Lucas Fletcher. You! That sounds like a recipe for romance to me.”
“I suppose.”
“You kept him at a distance, didn’t you?” Calista asked knowingly.
“He was a perfect gentleman. I didn’t have to hold him off.”
“I don’t mean physically.”
Miranda feigned interest in a story about the latest Japanese pitching sensation. She knew what her sister meant. “Don’t you ever have doubts? That maybe getting married is the worst thing you can do?”
“I love Alec,” Calista said, her expression, to use her word, gooey. “He loves me. When he proposed to me, I felt complete. I knew he was the one for me the first time we met.”
Miranda pushed her magazine aside. She had been covering the baseball game that night eighteen months ago in New York, when star right-fielder Alec Henderson had proposed to Calista. Right there on the mound during the seventh-inning stretch, he had asked Calista to be his wife. Jordan Duquette, Alec’s teammate and best friend, had handed him the ring and had lead the audience in the applause once Calista had accepted. Jordan had never been more of a phony than in that moment—applauding his friend’s commitment knowing that he himself was a devout two-timer.
Miranda rested her elbow on the table and played with her gold stud earring. “Didn’t that scare you, knowing from the start that Alec was someone you could fall in love with?”
“Now I know for sure that you really like Lucas.”
“Who?” Miranda raised her guard just as quickly as she had lowered it.
“You know who. The man you seem to have fallen for.”
“It’s not worth talking about. It would never work out between us.”
“Because he’s famous, like Jordan, or because you think he’s like Jordan?”
Miranda avoided looking her sister in the face. “This has nothing to do with Jordan.”
“You’re right, it doesn’t. It has to do with you and your inability to trust.”
“I trust you,” Miranda fired. “I trust Bernie.”
“Not every guy you meet is like Jordan. Just because Lucas is famous, it doesn’t mean that—”
“Fame just gives men more opportunities to be cockasses.”
Calista gave her sister a glassy smile. “Of all the foul words you’ve picked up in that sports department, that one has to be the blue-ribbon prizewinner.”
“Sorry,” Miranda sulked.
“Every man you meet isn’t like Dad, Miranda.”
Calista’s soft, measured tone didn’t soften the impact of her words. “Wh-What do you mean?” Miranda stammered.
Calista smiled sadly. “I think you know, Andy. You grew up in that house, too.”
“You know about dad’s affairs?”
Calista nodded and opened her magazine again. “I caught him in the equipment shed with our softball coach when I was fifteen. It was the day you hit that three-run homer and won us the state championship. Up until then, I thought Dad had gone to all of our games because he liked seeing us play.”
“He did.” Miranda’s stomach turned. “He was proud of us. He called you Rocket, because of your pitching, and he called me Slugger, because I could hit. Damn it, Callie, he was cheating with Coach Kiley, and you knew about it? You’ve known all this time that Dad was an adulterer? I only found out a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry, Andy.” Calista went to her sister’s side of the table and hugged her. “I thought you knew, too.”
Bile bubbled to the back of Miranda’s throat. “How could I have known? I was too busy thinking that I had the perfect father. He sure made an idiot of me. How could he love us, and take such pride in us, yet regularly betray Mom?”
Calista stepped into the kitchen to get Miranda a cup of coffee. “Is that why you stopped coming home for holidays?”
“I work on holidays. Usually. Thanksgiving is a big day for high school football in Massachusetts. I always volunteer to work so one of the guys with a wife and kids can spend the holiday with his family.”
“You have family, too, Miranda. You could have come home for Thanksgiving last week. You haven’t been home for Christmas in seven years. Mom said you stopped coming home because you two had a fight.”
“It wasn’t a fight.” At least I don’t remember it that way, Miranda thought. “I told Mom that she should think about leaving Dad.”
“She won’t. She’s…stuck, or something.” Calista set a steaming mug before Miranda, then sat back down. “She misses you. She says she misses us being a family.”
Miranda laughed bitterly. “Like we were ever a real family.”
“Come on, Andy, be fair.”
“It was a lie, Callie. On the surface, it was flawless, but underneath it was totally rotten and fake.”
“I don’t remember it as being bad. Dad’s cheating didn’t affect us.”
“It affected me!” Miranda slapped her hands flat on the table and vaulted to her feet. “He does it over and over again, and Mom allows it. She goes on as if what he does is acceptable.”
“I found out about Dad when I was a kid, so maybe I’ve had enough time to come to terms with it. You were an adult, so maybe that’s why it’s so hard for you take. Did you really think that Dad was perfect?”
“Infidelity is one hell of a flaw, Callie! I never thought that anyone I loved so much could hurt and humiliate me so deeply.”
“Is this about Dad or Jordan?”
“It’s about me,” Miranda said. “And how stupid I am to trust men who claim to love me.”
“Not every man will hurt you, Andy. There are some good ones out there.”
“Oh really?” Miranda challenged. “Bernie can’t find a good man, and he works at it full time.”
“Speaking of Bernie, I thought he wanted to come down and help us pick out wedding favors.”
“He’s still reaping the rewards of his big cover story on my weekend in Wales. He got sent to the European Music Awards in Madrid. I’ve been assigned to high school wrestling for the foreseeable future as punishment for taking Bernie instead of Meg with me. It seems that every man involved in that date got something out of it. Me, I get the short end. I’m a carpet, just like Mom.”
A fine furrow appeared between Calista’s elegant eyebrows. “She wanted to keep her family together. She handles her life the only way she can.”
“What about you? How will you handle it when Alec cheats on you four months into your marriage? Why don’t the two of you just live together for a while before Alec pushes you over the broom?”
“I want to marry Alec,” Calista said. “I want to be his wife.”
“Se o casamento fosse bom, não precisava de testemunhas,” Miranda muttered. And I agree, she thought to herself: if marriage were a good thing, it wouldn’t need witnesses.
“Avó Marie Estrella was married five times and she never got it right,” Calista fired back. “Of course she would think that. And quit quoting Avó Marie Estrella like she wrote one of the gospels.”
“From April to September, Alec is in a different city every we
ek,” Miranda persisted. “You don’t know what he’s doing or who he’s doing it to. He’s just like—”
“Dad?” Calista cut in. “Jordan? Alec isn’t like them, Andy. I look like Mom, but I’m no more like her than you are. Stop trying to scare me just because you’re scared.”
Miranda tucked her fists under her arms and retreated to a corner of the screened deck. “Why does everyone keep accusing me of being scared?”
“Because you are. You’re scared to fall in love, especially with Lucas Fletcher.”
Miranda listened to the whisper of Calista’s turning pages and the random twitters of a family of sparrows living in the yews in the backyard. Miranda had always thought herself the bumbling Oscar Madison to her sister’s well-appointed Felix Unger. Despite their differences in personality, appearance, style and temperament, they had always understood each other. Miranda returned to the table, surprised that Calista knew her better than she had realized. “It’s been a month and he hasn’t tried to get in touch with me,” she said after a pensive silence.
“He’s on the road,” Calista said. “According those magazines, when he left Wales he had to play thirty-five shows in twenty-one cities in forty-two days. That’s got to be exhausting.”
Miranda drummed her fingertips on the tabletop. “He had his publicist call the paper when he wanted to reach me before.”
“He’s coming back to Boston to make up the show they had to postpone because of the crush,” Calista said. “He’ll get in touch.”
Calista had voiced Miranda’s fondest hope. “You sound so sure that he will,” Miranda said.
“I know he will.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because he’d be a total cockass not to.”
Miranda chuckled. Her sister’s faith was formidable, and the right medicine to soothe her anxious soul. Miranda sat down beside her and shared her magazine. “That’s a nice dress.” She pointed to a straight, floor-length gown made of ivory silk with white embroidering on the skirt.
“I don’t have the figure for that one,” Calista said. “I have too much bust and hips. This dress would look good on you, though.”
Miranda mustered a weak smile. “Me getting married…I can’t even picture it.”
“I can.” Calista touched her forehead to her sister’s as she hugged her. “The bride will wear Patriots blue and Bernie will be your maniac-of-honor.”
* * *
“What’s up, baby?”
Miranda, who had been poised to unlock the door to her apartment, whirled around. Startled by the deep voice issuing from the dark recesses of the corridor, she struck a fight pose, her right fist drawn and ready to fracture the windpipe of the tall, broad and shadowy figure approaching her.
“I’m unarmed,” the figure said with a snicker as he raised his hands halfway in surrender.
Miranda, still poised to attack, dropped her guard only slightly when her night visitor’s face came into view. “What do you want, Jordan?”
Jordan Duquette had an excellent mouth, and it pulled into the devilish smile that most women found irresistible. The smile that had won Miranda over on their first meeting now reminded her of Sylvester the Cat’s smug expression in the brief moments when he had a live Tweety Bird in his chops.
“I wanted to see you.” Jordan stuck his hands in the pockets of his team bomber jacket. “It’s been a long time. Too long.”
“Six months isn’t a long time.” Miranda unlocked her door and shouldered her way into her apartment. “In fact, I don’t think it’s long enough.”
Jordan tried to follow her but Miranda blocked his way. “Come on, Andy. You can’t still be mad.”
He flashed the smile again, this time with a tilt of his head to showcase his dimples. Miranda swung her knapsack at him. The blow bounced off his thickly muscled chest. “I haven’t heard from you since I found out that you were ‘done’ with me by having Meg’s trashy column shoved under my nose at work! Do you have any idea how humiliating it was to walk into the newsroom after that? Especially after every move you ever made was chronicled in that damn column?”
Miranda could almost hear the rusty cogs of Jordan’s brain working beneath his salon-coiffed Afro. “So you’re still mad,” he finally said.
She tried to slam the door. When he shoved his foot in the gap, she slammed it even harder. “Stop being so theatrical, Miranda. You’re acting like we were married or something.”
“Go away, Jordan, before my neighbors call the police.”
“I’ll comp the cops to a few home games and they’ll let me camp out here all night, if I want to. I just want to talk to you. You don’t have five minutes for an old squeeze?”
She scowled in annoyance and anger. Even knowing how stupid it was for her to do so, she opened her door. “Three minutes.”
He moved through her apartment with familiar comfort after taking off his jacket and carelessly slinging it onto her small dining table. He went straight to the fridge, which had been his habit, and grabbed a beer before zeroing in on her worn slouch sofa and grabbing the television remote. He turned on the television, and like a big lazy dog, he paced in front of his spot before he sat down. The television was already tuned to ESPN, so Jordan set down the remote, propped his beer upon his belly, and put his feet up on the cocktail table.
The sight was as familiar and welcome as a scene from a recurring nightmare. Jordan’s big, muscular body, dressed in its usual off-field costume of khakis and white button-down shirt, dominated the living room section of her apartment. It had been months since his last visit, but he easily settled into his favorite spot with her favorite beer and her favorite television program. Six months ago, she would have been in the comfy depression beside him. But that was in another time, when ignorance had granted her what passed for happiness.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” she said. “Tick, tock.”
“I came all the way over here from the ballpark after my exhibition game for a reason, Miranda.” He switched stations to watch scrambled porn.
“You mean a reason other than to annoy me?” She set her knapsack on the counter that divided the kitchen from the living and dining room areas. “Spit it out.”
He tipped his head sideways and squinted as he tried to make out the pornographic images. “How was your date with the rock star?”
“Pick up a Herald-Star on your way home and find out. They re-ran Bernie’s article in today’s paper, to correspond with Karmic Echo’s return engagement in Boston tomorrow night.”
“I want to hear the story from you. Alec says you didn’t give anything up to Calista.” When she didn’t answer, Jordan pressed further. “Did you give anything up to Lucas Fletcher?”
“That’s none of your business.”
He turned off the television and joined her in her tiny kitchen. “It’s my business because I care about you.”
“Then why didn’t you call me or come see me when I was in the hospital?” she snapped. “The only reason you’re here is because you saw my name in all those newspapers and magazines and yours wasn’t attached to it!” She stormed out of the kitchen, kicking off her sneakers and untucking her white shirt as she went. “You can’t stand the fact that my involvement with Lucas Fletcher scores bigger headlines than your name ever did.”
“Look, I wanted to see you because, honestly, I’ve missed you.”
She wanted to hit him with something, but she had nothing large enough within reach. His ego would have to do. “You’re here because someone who’s more famous, more rich, and more popular than you showed a slight interest in me.”
Jordan stayed close on her heels. “I know I made some mistakes while we were together, but I’m willing to make it all up to you, if you’ll give me a chance.”
She sank into her sofa, tired in body and mind, and she just wanted to go to bed. “It is so predictably and so typically you to think that you can say all the right things and I’ll just let you back into my life as t
hough you hadn’t hurt me so badly that I couldn’t breathe without pain for two weeks. You never even apologized! If you didn’t want to see me anymore, Jordan, I could’ve dealt with that, but you let a gossip column do your dirty work for you. I’ve already given you all the chances I have in me.”
“Alec said that he saw you at Calista’s last weekend.” He sat on the end of the sofa. “He said you never looked better. I couldn’t wait to see you. That’s why I hit two homers tonight, to make sure the game didn’t go into extra innings. I waited outside this building for you for two hours. I had to promise the building manager tickets to a game next season just so he’d let me in.”
Miranda made a mental note to have a word with her building manager.
“You’re the perfect girl for me, Miranda. You’ve got legs from here to Canada, a really nice face and you know everything about sports, even the dumb ones.”
She was not moved. “Well, with all that going for me, why’d I bother with four years of college?” She picked up the remote and changed the station to Lifetime, just for spite.
“You have a good sense of humor, too,” Jordan added.
“So do you, if you think I’m interested in seeing you again.”
“Things wouldn’t be the same, Miranda.”
She was sure that this was his way of saying that he’d be more discreet about his dalliances. He met her skeptical gaze, and for a fleeting moment, she saw him as she had when they first started dating. He was handsome, there was no denying that. The amber eyes dancing against his velvety brown skin could be so kind, when he wanted them to be. His nose had been broken once, but it added a manly ruggedness to features that might have otherwise been a bit too pretty. Jordan commanded attention when he entered a room with his easy grace and charm. He was as powerful and handsome as a mythical god. Too bad he was as monogamous as a Boston tomcat.
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