She found Avery in the office upstairs, fighting to keep her eyes open while staring at a stack of legal documents. “Contracts,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been much fun today. I’m glad you snuck away. I wanted to be sure you are really okay with everything.”
“Of course, I’m okay,” Miranda said. “Why wouldn’t I be okay? This is like a dream come true.”
“It’s a little fast, isn’t? When he asked for the ring, I wasn’t sure what to say. I let him have it because I knew Bunny would—” Then she stopped. “Never mind.”
“You knew Bunny would what?”
“Get it back if he flaked out.”
“Oh,” Miranda said. “Well he didn’t flake out.”
“No, no, he didn’t. And we’re happy for you. I’m happy for you. I just wanted to check in, you know. Maybe it’s just the lawyer in me.”
“Not like I need a pre-nup or anything.”
“Well, your dad already has one. He and Linden have been hammering out the details.”
Miranda rolled her eyes. “It’s not like that.”
“Tell me what it is like?”
Miranda sank back into the chair and closed her eyes. “I’ve always been in love with him. There I said it. But I never really thought about what that meant. And now here we are, all grown up, and there’s Lynn to think about.”
“Have you thought about that? It’s not easy, you know.”
“But you did it.”
“Yes, but you were a teenager. And I had the Book.”
“The Book?”
“Yup, your mother could never leave anything to chance. She wrote the equivalent of a Supreme Court case brief on you. She prepared briefs about everything in your life from when you were first born to that awful boy that was mean to you at summer camp.”
“Joseph Groton? He was in there?”
“Your mom was an amazing lawyer. The best. She had everything laid out and organized. Every trick or turn, she anticipated. No one could shake her. When I first started with the firm, I would go to her trials just to watch them unfold. She had everything documented. Other firms hated going up against her. The lawyers that worked under her dreaded the hours of mock trials she would hold. No surprises. She even had that hanging over her desk.”
“No surprises? I didn’t know that.”
“Not even this would surprise her. She knew this would happen. I always thought that Joseph would come around, but your mother knew best.”
“Joseph? Really? I think he is doing time for selling prescription drugs to minors.”
“Maybe you can’t plan everything.”
“But you can try. My mother did apparently,” Miranda said.
“She was a great woman, Miranda. I never tried to replace her, I hope you know that. I just always wanted to be here for you. With Lynn, it might be a different story. You don’t know much about her mother, do you?”
“Scott won’t talk about her.”
“That isn’t good, Miranda. You can’t just pretend she doesn’t exist. You aren’t some replacement mother. The girl has a mother. For better or worse.”
“But I don’t know anything about her.”
“Do you want me to look into it? You should really know what you are getting into.”
“You’d do that?”
“Of course, I’d do that. It’s probably nothing. Bunny mentioned the mother had a drug problem. Avery spoke the last bit using Bunny’s high-brow accent. “Maybe if you knew a little more, you could draw Scott out in conversation. Make some sort of plan for the future. No surprises and all.”
“You sound like my mother,” Miranda said.
“Don’t talk like that. You’ll make my mascara run.”
“Fine then, can I use your computer? I need to check my emails, and I left my phone charger in my apartment. I haven’t checked in a week.”
“That sounds nice. A week without a cell phone! Are you sure you want to check now?”
“Yeah, it’s just work and stuff. You know.”
“Oh, I know. I’ll go order us some pizza then.”
After logging in, the screen flooded with emails. The one from Facebook asking to confirm her engagement, which she clicked on without pause, thinking of Lynn’s excitement downstairs. Many from Ambrose. And then the two from the college. She clicked on those first—all her classes were cancelled, and the president of the university needed to see her. He left his assistant’s cell phone number with instructions to call immediately.
Picking up the house extension on the desk next to her felt alien. She used to spend hours on this very phone, sitting at this desk playing solitaire on the computer while talking to Danielle about such important topics as which bathing suit to wear to Avery’s party and whether or not Scott would be there. Now as she punched the buttons, she focused on more important details than bathing suits and parties; she wanted to know if she still had a job. She was one year out from tenure. As the phone rang through, one thought filled her: Ronan. She tried to shake the image away. He wouldn’t have filed a complaint. But then she remembered his anger, his hurt.
“Hello,” Kathleen said. Miranda knew her from social things at the university. Wine and cheese things where the faculty who were deemed important for the moment mingled with visitors at the president’s invitation. She favored navy blue twin sets and skirts with ballet flats. Her hair, a silky golden color, was always tied up in a bun. Miranda’s cheeks burned with embarrassment; what would someone like Kathleen think about her and Ronan?
“Yes, hi, Kathleen. This is Miranda from the poetry department. I was just in Turkey, and I’ve received an email telling me to call you and—”
“Yes, yes. What do you have for tomorrow? The president must see you immediately.”
“Immediately?” Miranda asked.
“Of course, this must be handled properly. Is nine too early?”
“Nine. No, not too early at all. President’s office?”
“No, no, the residence, please. I’ll send over breakfast. See you at nine.”
Miranda couldn’t bear to open the emails from Ambrose yet; she couldn’t make him any more word sculptures tonight any way. The hundreds she already sent would have to be enough for a few days until she sorted out this mess with the university. Whatever this was. Words began to swirl in Miranda’s mind. Paris. Hilton. Tape. Played. In the corner of the board, she imagined including herself with a “me” tucked into the triple word score.
“Ronan,” she said softly, “what did you do?”
Scott knocked lightly on the open door frame. “Pizza’s here.” He stepped inside the room. “Hey, you okay? You don’t look so good.” He picked up her face in his soft hands and looked into her eyes. “God, I love being able to do that,” he said. “I get to touch you. Look at you. But I’m sorry, love, what’s the matter?”
Miranda stretched out her arm and clicked away from the email screen. She didn’t want to mention Ronan—not today—but there was an extremely high chance he had just cost her her job. Today was supposed to be about them and the future. “Nothing,” she said. “I have a meeting at nine in the morning tomorrow. And I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be away from you.”
“It’s okay. How about this? How about Lynn and I drive up on Friday? Then we can stay until Sunday night. If we’re going to do this, we have to start figuring things out. Wait, that’s not why you’re upset, is it? It’s only six months until school’s out in June. And we have Spring Break and lots of long weekends. We’ll have time together. We’ll make it work.”
He pulled her to standing and pressed his whole body against hers.
She let herself melt into it and began kissing him in return. “No,” she whispered. “This is perfect.”
“Enough already.” Stanton’s voice boomed up the staircase. “The pizza is getting cold.”
“I guess we have to go,” Scott said.
“Wouldn’t want to upset your future father-in-law?”
“More. Y
ou forgot the more. I believe I have already upset him quite a bit. He hasn’t been downstairs all day; I am starting to be afraid.”
From downstairs came her father’s muffled, “Well, I’m not waiting anymore.”
Miranda tilted her head and shrugged. “Maybe it would be a good thing to be a little afraid of him. He does have a history of forming opinions about you. You go on ahead; I just need to log out.”
At the table, she chewed every bite of her pizza at least twenty times. She nibbled delicately on the crusts. She took long pauses for tiny sips of soda. She had a fourth slice even though her stomach protested by straining the top button of her jeans. The longer she took to eat, the longer they would be together. Avery had pulled out the Scrabble board along with the pizza delivery. Miranda and Lynn teamed up; Lynn leaned in against Miranda and wrinkled her nose at the letters they had.
“I hope you’re good at this,” Lynn said. “Spelling isn’t my best subject.”
Everyone laughed.
So far they had the lead, making use of “qi” on a triple letter score. The only time Scott’s hand left her lap was when he moved to place his tiles on the board. She had never seen him make Scrabble decisions so quickly before.
Stanton was a master at filling in the spaces between words with single and double letter combinations that resulted in three- or four-way scoring, and he soon caught up to Lynn and Miranda’s score while making it almost impossible for anyone else to place words. For once, Miranda was grateful for her father’s strategy. The game crept along very slowly.
“So,” Avery said, as Stanton plotted another thwarting placement of an e and an x. “Will you be staying the night again? We have to get up early in the morning, but you shouldn’t hear us.”
“I have to go back tonight,” Miranda said. “I have an appointment in the morning.”
“And I have school,” Lynn said. She pursed her lips together and sank her chin to the table. “I used to love school, but now I’d rather be with you guys.”
“Well, Miss Lynn, you are welcome to come back any weekend. Our house isn’t just open on holidays. And now, well, it looks like we will officially be family. After the wedding, we’ll be your grandparents, too. Oh, Stanton, did you realize that?” Avery said. “I’m too young to be a grandmother!”
“My mother said the same thing,” Scott said. “Then she got over it. She likes to bring up having a granddaughter in conversation in places like restaurants or in lines at the store. The waitress or the cashier undoubtedly chimes in with, oh, not you, you’re too young to be a grandmother. Gives her the biggest smile.”
“Better than Botox,” Lynn adds. “At least that’s what Grandma Bunny says. I wouldn’t want to shoot poison in my face. Yuck.”
“Yuck, indeed,” Stanton said, finally placing his tiles. “That’s it, I’m out, and there are no tiles left.”
Lynn looked down at the tally sheet. “You won!”
“I always win, dear one,” Stanton said. “Just look how lucky I am. And before I forget to officially say it, Scott, I’m glad you finally stepped up. I was beginning to think I scared you away for good.”
“No offense, sir, but I don’t think that would have been possible.”
“Congratulations to you. All three of you.” Stanton raised his can of soda high. They all followed suit, clinking cans across the table.
“Thank you, Daddy,” Miranda said.
Miranda helped clean up the paper plates and pizza boxes, while Lynn twirled around Scott begging to stay one more night. Miranda imagined putting her arms out wide and spinning, too, letting her oversized University of Connecticut sweatpants billow away from her body. She’d hold back her head, a broad grin across her pale and freckled face, and let out a chorus of please, please, please directed at the universe herself. Please, please, please let us just stay together in this house. Please, please, please let me skip the meeting with the president tomorrow. Please, please, please let us start being a real family right now.
Scott folded up the last of the pizza boxes into the recycling bin. “Well,” he said.
“Yup,” she said, her eyes still turned up toward the ceiling, still imagining spinning under the halogen lights that illuminated Avery’s carefully chosen granite countertop. She felt tear drops rim her lower eyelids and kept her gaze up.
“Hey, pumpkin,” Scott said. “You know what time it is, right?”
“Vitamins.” She spit out the word.
“And?”
“All, right, I’ll go. Randa, you won’t leave while I’m upstairs, will you? I need a hug goodbye.”
“No, of course, not. I’ll wait right here.”
Lynn dragged herself out of the kitchen.
“Come here,” Scott said. He pulled her closely against him. She buried her head into his shoulder, inhaled his Old Spice scent, and finally let herself cry. Her body shook from the effort of at once holding it back and finally letting it go like a car stalling. He sighed and hugged her tighter. “It’s going to be a long few days,” he said. “You’ll keep your phone charged?”
“Of course,” she said gulping for air. “You’ll call?”
“Yes, and text. You won’t be able to teach your classes.”
“About that,” she said. “They cancelled my classes. I have a meeting with the university president in the morning.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I really just found out before dinner. I’m not used to telling anyone anything.”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“Or Ronan.”
“Oh,” he said, dropping his arms down at his side. He tapped his faded green Chuck Taylor against the ceramic tile. “But that would be fine. You could come to New Jersey right away. We wouldn’t have to wait.”
He picked her up and spun her around.
Wouldn’t have to wait, she thought to herself. All of sudden everything felt much too fast like the ride at the shore that spins and spins until all you see is the streaky blur of the other carnival rides and people waiting for their turns. You go so fast that the music almost doesn’t catch up; you stop hearing the words and only feel the beat as it mixes with your heart.
C H A P T E R
THE CAMPUS WAS UNDENIABLY beautiful. She would miss this if she lost her position here. The sky was a perfect blue for the clear and cold weather. Even in winter with the trees bare and piles of black-tinted snow melting at the corners of brick sidewalks, it was beautiful. The whitewashed campus buildings sparkled in the sun. Miranda plunged her hands into her pockets and hugged her arms close against her body.
In a blinding realization at four in the morning, Miranda decided that she would beg for her job. As much as she wanted to marry Scott, she didn’t want to give up her whole life. It’s not like a poet could get a job just anywhere. She and Scott could use the money when they finally got married; having a kid meant needing money—even Miranda, in her limited experience with children, knew that much. And she liked her job. She liked sitting in the loose circle of her workshop classes, nodding along as students read through their work and began to debate about the second or third stanza. She loved seeing students with the sparks of inspiration, the fever of creation burning rosy on their cheeks as they stopped by her office. And she loved this place, the beautiful cold campus that she struggled to get across in time. Lynn and Scott could love it there, too. The woman didn’t always have to give everything up for the man.
The president’s residence was as you would expect. It was a tall building in the middle of campus, white with green shutters, and a long sprawling porch on the front that rose up from ground level by an impressive set of marble steps. Miranda steadied herself with one hand on the railing as she picked her way up the stairs. She looked at the door and suddenly wasn’t sure if she should knock or just go in. During the regular term, the front of the residence served as an office space for the assistant and any specially commissioned committees. People came and went at will, but today, the college
was closed. She stopped at the top step, unwilling to go any further and risk making a mistake that would damn her case further.
As soon as she stopped, the front door sprung open, and President Jonas Nicholls himself beckoned her inside. “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I wish it were under better circumstances.”
He ushered her into a sitting room just off the main hallway. Fine leather chairs in the college’s hunter green surrounded the fireplace that had a white marble mantle. A surprisingly large fire filled the hearth. The rug under her feet was so plush that with each step her footing gave way in a slight slide. She stopped walking and stood in front of the fire, pulling off her coat and folding it over her arm. Not knowing what to expect, she didn’t want her coat to be too far away from her.
The president entered, carrying a tray with two cups of coffee, milk, sugar, and some breakfast pastries. The joke around campus about meetings was that if the president was there the food would be great. From the look of the cheese Danish with sugar icing, the joke was true. “Please take a seat,” he said. He motioned to a chair next to the fireplace and sat the tray down on a low table in front of it. “Coffee?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said, reaching for a cup. Normally she took sugar, but Miranda couldn’t imagine the awkwardness of opening the sugar and stirring. To do so, she would need to set down her coat. Instead she took a sip of dark bitter liquid and smiled.
He cleared his throat. Then he clasped his hands in front of his chest, raising his shoulders, before exhaling the words she most feared hearing. “There’s been a complaint.”
“A complaint?” Miranda choked out.
“Yes. I am sure you can guess the origins of this issue.”
Miranda swallowed hard.
“In light of the man’s age and current status, we are left with a certain amount of leeway here. Leeway is also afforded by the secondary set of circumstances you seem to have found yourself in. Apparently, you have been quite busy in the last few months.”
Miranda shifted in her seat. His tone dug at her, and he didn’t stop looking at her, eyeing her up and down as if he were imagining the details Ronan must have provided.
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