Triple Love Score Read Free Page B

before.”
    “Thank you?” he asked. He took a few steps closer to her. He smelled like pine trees and Ivory soap. Miranda fought the urge to inhale deeply; it wouldn’t be professional.
    “With Clementine. And Tad.”
    “Oh, him. Yes, well, anything to help a lady.”
    “That’s nice of you, Ronan.”
    “It’s not just nice. I mean it. Anything to help a lady.”
    Miranda set the stack of papers down and caught his gaze. He locked his blue eyes on her, a regular Irish Rob Lowe.
    “Anything,” he said again.
    Her cheeks flushed; bowing her head, she rifled through the papers, pretending to organize them. “Oh,” she squeaked out. She wished herself some ingénue in a BBC production of Jane Austen or one of the Bronte sisters with flaxen hair neatly arranged instead of perpetually slipping from a ponytail. “Well, have a good Thanksgiving.”
    “You, too, Miranda,” he said. He stood there for a minute, but she fought the urge to look up. After a few awkward moments, he turned and left the room, leaving her with her stack of poems to be graded.
    “Good,” she thought to herself, “work for the weekend.” She would be able to whip them out of her bag and walk off into another room. “I have papers to grade,” she imagined calling out over her shoulder. “I really, simply must get this work done to enjoy the break properly.”
    Her father would nod mutely. Bunny and Linden would understand. A family of lawyers expected people to work all the time. As for Scott, if he did magically re-appear, well, she didn’t know what Scott thought, at least not anymore, and frankly, she wished she didn’t care.

C H A P T E R

    T HAT NIGHT INSTEAD OF PACKING, Miranda opened a bottle of wine and pulled out the Scrabble board and her cell phone. It was the same board that Scott had left some six years earlier, but she didn’t really think about that. Well, she did, but only in the back of her mind. Tonight’s agenda was work. Serious stuff. Before granting her Ph.D., her committee chair admonished her to play with form. “Be creative and less stiff. Fight the rigidity,” he said, the vodka and tonic sloshing over the rim of his noon refreshment. He approved the committee’s recommendation to pass her, but added, “To publish, you must be more than what you are.” This stung.
    At least she graduated, she reasoned with herself, just as she had planned. And she would teach. Also as she had planned. One couldn’t expect magic; couldn’t expect for someone like her, someone rigid, or as the chair said, stiff, to become a Poet with a capital P, an important person of arts and letters. Just finding poetry would have to be magic enough.
    Her poems could be about broken coffee cups on ceramic tile floors, and no one needed to know the shattered mug had been her mother’s favorite. When she included an allusion to the dance of the seven veils, chemotherapy danced for death instead of Salome for Herod. But no one else needed to know that—at least not until her drunken committee chair member pushed the issue. He was right; as much as she revealed herself on the page, she also held back, using the metaphors and images to hide her bruised insides.
    After earning her doctorate, Miranda didn’t touch poetry. She wrote articles on teaching poetry. Started groups that put snippets of poetry in unexpected places like bus station restrooms and interstate rest stops. She read her students’ work because she had to. She read her colleagues’ work because she had to, but she didn’t let poetry seep into her. She didn’t let it touch her soul. With her advisor’s words, poetry joined the long list of things that failed her, things that couldn’t be trusted to remain the same.
    When she moved into this new apartment in May, she struggled to stow this Scrabble board in the top of the closet. The box, after years of benign neglect and being transported to six different yet equally squalid apartments, now ripped, and board and