Leave It to Cleavage Read Free

saltiness as they plopped into the corners of her mouth.
    She lost track of how long she cried, but when she finally looked into the mirror, a pitiful woman stared back. Miranda sat up straighter and squared her shoulders, but the woman still had tears streaming down her face. Searching for something to cling to, Miranda grabbed onto the pageant instruction her mother had been drilling into her since her fifth birthday, and which she now—more gently—passed on to others.
    Okay, then. Sometimes you didn’t win the crown. Sometimes, though she didn’t have prior personal experience with this, you didn’t even make the final five. You could still put on the smile, and you could still walk the walk. If there was anything she knew how to do, it was that.
    She’d get right on it just as soon as the woman in the mirror stopped crying.
     
    As it turned out, the woman in the mirror possessed an inexhaustible supply of tears. She cried for hours at a time, eating up the entire weekend with body-wracking sobs that trickled down to wimpy little sniffles, then built back up again.
    The future was too bleak to contemplate, and the past, at least in hindsight, didn’t look all that attractive, either. Unsure what else to do, Miranda picked up the phone, forced the quiver from her voice, and used a fictional flu to cancel everything. Then she pulled the covers up over her head and hid from the world while the emptiness washed over her.
    Her grandmother Richards was the first to breach Miranda’s beachhead of fictional germs and very real misery.
    A week after Tom’s decampment, Gran appeared in Miranda’s bedroom holding an artfully arranged tray that bore a heavenly-smelling bowl of soup and a plate of saltines. A glass of water with its requisite slice of lemon sat next to a folded linen napkin. A single rose stood in one of Miranda’s cut-glass bud vases.
    At seventy-five, Cynthia Ballantyne Richards was no longer as tall as she had once been, but her loss of height did not detract from her regal bearing. Her short white hair was as artfully arranged as the tray, and she wore one of her bridge-at-the-club uniforms—a red wool pantsuit with an Hermès scarf tucked into the neckline.
    Her grandmother had always been the most astounding mixture of genteel sophistication and backwoods outspokenness, what Miranda secretly thought of as Granny Clampett after boarding school and a European tour.
    Without asking, she sat down on the side of the bed and settled the tray across Miranda’s lap.
    Miranda had never been so glad—or so horrified—to see anyone in her life. Tom’s taste in underwear and his empty closet loomed between them. She had never successfully lied to her grandmother, and they both knew it.
    “Do you know what day this is?” her grandmother asked.
    “No.” The aroma of her grandmother’s chicken vegetable soup wafted up from the tray, and Miranda breathed it in.
    “Do you care?”
    “No, not really.”
    Her grandmother reached over, unfolded the napkin, and tucked it into Miranda’s pajama top. Then she picked up the spoon and placed it in Miranda’s hand.
    “This, too, shall pass.”
    Miranda tore her gaze from the soup, which was making her mouth water, to stare up into her grandmother’s eyes. A fine line of wrinkles radiated outward from their corners, and somehow, without Miranda’s noticing, her grandmother’s skin had become paper-thin.
    “Yes, well . . .”
    “Where’s Tom?”
    Miranda froze, the spoon midway to the beckoning soup. But it was all too raw, too humiliating to share with her family. “He’s, um, out.”
Out of the house. Out of my life.
“Out of town.”
    Something flickered in her grandmother’s eyes and for a long moment they stared at each other, weighing the silence, waiting for the other to speak. Miranda had the oddest sense that her grandmother knew . . . something.
    Please, God,
she thought,
please don’t let it be the cross-dressing part.
    She braced herself for