Triple Love Score (29 page)

She pushed herself against him and rested her head on his shoulder. She sighed, trying to release the tension from her body. The excitement of the last few days leaked from her; dreams never matched reality. While she wouldn’t want to give up this feeling, she didn’t want to trade away the last six years of her life and all she had worked for. Being a stay-at-home mom never even entered her thinking. Her mom worked as a trial lawyer until she got so sick that she couldn’t stand for longer than ten minutes. And even then, she took calls and consulted from home. Bunny’s idea of staying at home meant running every charity auction and playing tennis at the club every afternoon. Avery made a few stabs at putting dinner on the table, but at fifteen, even Miranda with her limited kitchen skills could cook dinner more safely than Avery. With relief, Avery turned back to her work, and the remaining domestic tasks were outsourced to a variety of services and hired staff. Miranda wasn’t the type of woman to swoon at babies or get excited about new recipes. She loved books and teaching, the way her mother loved the courtroom and the law. With her Blocked Poet work, Miranda could see glimmers of her old joy for writing, which by all accounts would be difficult to do while watching Dora the Explorer or waiting to carpool the soccer team. If Scott wanted that kind of life, that kind of wife, he picked the wrong person.

Then the doorbell rang, startling them both to their feet.

“Shit,” Scott said.

“What is it?”

“Kendra,” he said.

“Kendra?” she asked. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”

“I have basketball. Kendra is the sitter. Remember with the Facebook. I’m such a jerk to cancel now.”

“That’s not a problem—I’d like to see this basketball you speak of,” Miranda said.

“You would?”

The doorbell rang again.

“Yes, I would. Or is it weird for me to come? Do girlfriends go?”

“Girlfriends? Sometimes, but you are more than that. You’re my fiancée.”

Miranda felt her stomach flip over when he said it.

“I’d love for you to meet my friends. I’m sure this is all going to throw them for a loop. It will be fun to watch. You can make fun of me. They all do.”

“I couldn’t possibly. I’ll be your cheerleader.”

“You may want to rethink that after you watch him play,” Lynn said, rushing past them both to get to the door. “There’s a reason that I stay with Kendra. That and the pizza. Daddy, can Kendra and I get a pizza?”

Kendra was exactly what you would expect from a babysitter except in addition to the snapping gum and cell phone, she settled her AP Organic Chemistry book loudly on the table to shake Miranda’s hand. “Nice to meet you,” she said.

“You, too. That’s quite a book.”

“Yeah, I think the book is a warning sign that the class will kill you. Three of my classmates started seeing a chiropractor after starting this class! Two got eyeglasses. I’ve escaped the curse so far, but I do have a callous on my index finger from writing so many notes.” She held up her finger for Miranda to examine.

“Wow,” Miranda said.

Kendra snapped her gum.

Scott hustled into the room in basketball shorts and the most garish neon green sneakers. He handed Kendra twenty dollars. “Pizza is cool. Just don’t let her order the anchovies. She says she likes them, but she doesn’t.”

“I do, too,” Lynn said.

“You do not. We’ll be a little later tonight. I’m going to have to take Miranda for dinner after this to make it up to her.”

“Make what up to me?”

Scott pointed at his shoes and then the safety strap that he was attaching to a pair of yellowed, wrap-around glasses he pulled out of his pocket and affixed to his head.

“Oh,” Miranda said. “Well.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll change before dinner.”

Scott drove them slowly through the streets of his very quaint town. The main street, lined with both shops and houses, looked like something from Currier and Ives—all white clapboard siding and shutters in respectable colonial colors like hunter green and burgundy. The church, Dutch Reformed, was a giant stone structure with a triptych of stained glass documenting the passion of Christ over the glossy, red front door. The door itself was so massive, Miranda couldn’t imagine it even opened.

“You play in there?” she asked.

“Well, not in there, around back.”

Behind the stone church stood a glass and metal edifice that rivaled a modern art museum. “You play in there?”

“Yes, it’s like a Y.”

Women in high end yoga gear streamed out of the building, slipping into BMW and Lexus SUVs. Inside, they were greeted by a perky girl with dyed red hair wearing an all-black spandex suit.

“Kind of like a Y?” Miranda asked as Scott showed his identification and signed in.

“Well okay, a gym. The church had a campaign about bodies being the temple of God, and some of the members got together and created a gym. They opened it to community membership to help defray the maintenance. The pastor said yes because it meant they could spread the word of God to more people.”

“At a gym?”

“Yeah, all the treadmills replay the Sunday sermons. And the muzak is all hymns. Other than that it’s like a regular gym.”

“A regular gym with Bible verses on the wall,” Miranda said, pointing to First Timothy, 4:8 inscribed over the reception desk. “‘For while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.’ Very valuable advice. Exercise now for the afterlife.”

“Don’t knock it until you try it. It’s nice here.”

“I know, I know,” Miranda said. “It’s certainly modern.” Everything glistened from being both new and clean. They walked past a room of treadmills and elliptical machines. People of all shapes and sizes, eyes fixated on the screens on top of their machines, walked, ran, and climbed to their own rhythms.

Scott opened the next door, which led to a cavernous gym with yellow wood floors that squeaked under your shoes just like in high school. Miranda was grateful that instead of the classic bleachers, the sides of the court were lined with stadium seats. “A local movie theatre closed and donated the seating. If you sit up there long enough, you can still smell the popcorn.”

On the far side of the court, five men dribbled and shot in a frantic rush. They bobbed and weaved around each other, each playing against his own invisible opponent.

“Finally,” the tallest and widest man, sweat already soaking through his oversized sweatshirt called. “Oh, I see, a chick.”

“Not just any chick,” Scott bellowed back. “My fiancée.”

The other men stopped dribbling and trotted the length of the court to circle them. They stood panting, blatantly eying Miranda up.

“So you did it,” the bigger man said. “You really did it.”

Miranda held up her left hand and wiggled her fingers. “Yup,” she said. “He did.”

The big guy grabbed her up into a hug, lifting her feet off the ground. “Congratulations,” he whooped. Putting her down, he extended a hand, then pulled it back, wiping it on his sweaty shirt before extending it again. “Pastor Dan, welcome to the gym of the Lord.”

“That’s not what it’s really called,” the shortest man in the group said. His sneakers were a blinding fluorescent orange. “I’m Rabbi Irv. And mazel tov.”

“Let me guess,” she said to the next man. “You’re a priest?”

“No, close though, I’m a lawyer. Jonah. Nice to meet you.”

The next man, with the most ebony skin Miranda had ever seen, put out his hand. “I’m Francis. I’m the priest.”

“Geesh, guys. Congratulations. I’m Albert, house painter.”

They stood there staring at her, not saying anything.

“I’m sensing a joke here,” Miranda said. “But I am not sure how that would turn out. Nice to meet you all.”

Pastor Dan didn’t waste any time. “So are we going to play or what?”

The men immediately separated into two groups. Pastor Dan looked at his watch, fished a whistle out from under his shirt, and blew it hard. Miranda found the game tough to follow. After a few minutes, she pulled out her phone and began scrolling through the emails from Ambrose and now from his assistant, Kristen.

She immediately liked Kristen’s style. The woman favored a single K to the word okay. Though an English professor by trade, Miranda liked when the language went feral and changed. That these changes were taking place during her own time amused her. If the text-speak dialect had longer words, she would use them in her word sculptures.

Miranda kept scrolling with Kristen taking over more and more as Ambrose’s plans sprung into life. She ordered books and hired editors. She booked all the travel reservations and kept Miranda’s itinerary up to date in a Google document that everyone could update. Her flight tomorrow was at one from Newark. Non-stop one hour and fifteen minutes. It seemed extravagant to fly to Baltimore, but the next stop was Richmond, and then Atlanta. She couldn’t keep her car for the entire trip, and it was probably safer in Scott’s driveway than racking up over a month of parking lot fees while she was on some lark of a trip. When she got deeper into the emails, she finally saw the first one marked Completed Book. She hovered over the link.

Pastor Dan blew his whistle to signal a foul, and Francis took over the free throw line. Miranda watched him miss all but one of the three shots. Then Dan blew the whistle again, and the men scurried to and fro in some pattern not quite discernable to Miranda. She waved to Scott, who locked eyes with her and smiled. Distracted, he missed a pass from the Rabbi.

“Nice work, Lover Boy,” Albert razzed, elbowing Scott in the ribs as he passed by, ball in hand, clearly a traveling foul from Miranda’s viewpoint.

She bent back down over her phone and clicked on the link. A stark black cover with the words Blocked Poet on a Scrabble board took up the full width of the tiny screen. She clicked again to open to the first page; she cringed a little seeing one of her first poems there, but she kept clicking. Ambrose had kept the formatting she used for the photo. She liked the way the images were sharper and how the poems were organized together to weave a sort of story. When she got to the last one, she realized she was crying.

“I know I play like shit, but you don’t have to cry. It’s only a once a week pick-up game. I can stop anytime, really I can,” Scott said.

“What?” Miranda said, looking up, wiping at the tears on her cheeks.

“I’d cry if I were marrying him,” Albert said. “Nice meeting you.” The other men waved as they filed past and out into the lobby.

“No seriously, Randa, you okay?”

“I’m better than okay; look at this.” She handed him her phone with the cover of her book on display. He clicked through, just as she had.

He reached a sweaty arm around her and pulled her to her feet. “Let me try to make up for before. Let’s go celebrate properly.”

“Hold on, let me send this to Danielle.”

“You do that, and I’ll change.”

Miranda looked up from her phone in time to watch him walk away. Watching him now was different than in Turkey; this time she knew he would come back and keep coming back. And she thought it was funny how as much as everything had changed between them, it hadn’t. As much as she wanted to kiss him and more, he still felt like her friend, the boy she grew up with. She felt a smile spread across her face. He turned and winked at her from the other side of the gym before slipping into the locker room.

Her phone buzzed in her hand. She half expected it to be a text from him, but it was Danielle calling. It must be four o’clock in the morning in Turkey.

“Is everything okay?” Miranda said, skipping the hello. “It’s almost four in the morning where you are.”

“I got tired of waiting you out.”

“Waiting me out for what?”

“To invite me to be your bridesmaid. I saw the picture on Facebook. And what’s this book you just emailed me? You’ve been keeping things from me.”

“Oh, Dani, I didn’t want to bother your honeymoon. I figured you had enough of my relationship drama.”

“But this isn’t drama, is it?”

Miranda felt her smile grow even larger. “No, it’s not. It’s really not. It’s perfect.”

“So tell me all about it.”

So Miranda told her all about the day they got back, about her mother’s ring, and how excited Lynn was. Then she told her about the book, the university President, and the tour.

“But enough about that—how’s the honeymoon?” Miranda asked.

“Things are nice. In two more hours, we have plans to take a sunrise cruise on the Mediterranean to a private island where we can sunbathe and snorkel all day.”

“Then why aren’t you sleeping?”

“Because I’ve been worried about you. And because this baby won’t sit still. It’s like she’s on American time.”

“She?”

“I don’t know that or anything. I just hope so. A girl would be nice.”

“It would. I’m so excited for you.”

“I’m so excited for you. You’ll keep me informed, won’t you? Oh, shit,” Danielle whispered. “I think I woke Omar up. He’ll be nuts if he finds me out of bed. Says I need my rest.”

“I better let you go,” Miranda said.

“Yeah, I’ll just pretend I was going to the bathroom. Call me next week, okay? We’ll be back home then.”

The line went dead before Miranda could answer. She liked the idea of her fearless friend sneaking phone calls in the middle of the night. And she liked the idea of Omar caring about Dani getting enough rest. Her friend was finally settled. And safe. After all their years together, it shocked Miranda to find that instead of Dani rushing off to do something crazy, it was her turn.

Instead of moving the car, they walked two blocks to an Italian restaurant with red and white checked tablecloths and wine bottles corked with candles that melted over the sides of the bottles, a living, breathing Italian restaurant stereotype. But the grandmother who came out from behind the counter and pinched Scott’s cheeks was anything but inauthentic. With her thick accent, she cried out, “Where is the bambina?”

“Lynn’s with Kendra,” Scott said.

“Oh, Kendra. Bright but trouble.” The grandmother leaned around Scott to peer at Miranda. She squinted her eyes and then leaned back. “You bring a girl? You?”