Triple Love Score (32 page)

I
N THE CAB FROM THE AIRPORT to the hotel, Miranda composed an entry to Lynn. On the plane to Baltimore she devoured the Hitchhiker’s Guide in an attempt to discern Ford Prefect’s style. Writing to Lynn felt a bit like submitting a poem to the New Yorker or Harpers, like she had her whole career riding on its acceptance. “A note on American Planes,” she started. “They are crowded and loud, but the honey mustard pretzel bites are not to be missed. Within the airport, a mystery develops. Did your baggage arrive? Will it spin out on the baggage carousel, the big sister of the carnival’s wheel of fortune.”

After she checked in, her phone binged with Lynn’s reply. “Do you like carnivals? What about the shore? Daddy says he is a pro at balloon popping. Says he used to win. All the time.”

Miranda remembered walking the boardwalk with Scott and begging Linden and Stanton to part with a few more dollars to just play one more game. No matter how hard she tried, he always popped more balloons, knocked down more milk bottles, or scored higher in skee ball. She quickly typed to Lynn all about this.

“But he always shares. So don’t be upset when he wins.”

The first stop in Baltimore, an independent bookstore, featured a tall stack of Blocked Poet books alongside a collection of board games and thick heavy books for toddlers about farm animals.

The bookseller shrugged her shoulder at the odd arrangement. “There are three things that sell well right now—things derived from the Internet, board games, and books for babies.”

Miranda smiled politely and sipped at the slightly bitter latte the woman had given her. “I guess it makes sense.”

“Does anything make sense?” the bookseller asked before walking away to tend to a customer at the counter.

Her first event wasn’t a reading in a traditional sense. It was more of a live writing session, according to the emails sent by Kristen. Each stop would provide a Scrabble board. Miranda would talk about her process and any rules or order she used, and then she’d create a few samples. Kristen had even created some samples for her for each place. Baltimore had: Charm, City, Orioles, Crabs. Miranda envied the local color touch and sent Kristen a note of praise. It was up to Miranda to then photograph and post the specific creations, using the “appropriate filter” and “social media application” as per Ambrose. The crowd would be invited to throw out topics for Miranda to create from which she would then photograph and send out accordingly. Unlike most readings, tickets had been sold for many of the events, and Kristen collected some requests ahead of time. Each city on the stop had a cloud document listing the place and the possible subjects she might encounter. So far the one she couldn’t wrap her mind around was Sheep Dogs. Apparently neither could Kristen; this entry was followed by a question mark.

Miranda had arrived at this first event an hour too early. She texted Scott about the board games, toddler books, and lattes. He and Lynn were watching her nature video. He photographed a baby polar baby and its mom from the screen and sent it to her.

“They reel you in with the baby animals,” he wrote. “Then they switch to the killing. I should never have let her watch this.”

When her phone rang, Miranda stepped out onto the sidewalk in front of the store.

“Hello, Miranda,” sang an overly chipper voice. “Kristen here. Just checking to see how things are going. You’re there, right? Everything fine?”

Kristen said so much that Miranda wasn’t sure when or if she was supposed to reply. Instead, she found herself nodding into the phone. When Kristen finally took a breath, all Miranda could manage was, “Hi.”

“Hi,” Kristen said. “So, tonight you are at the Nuclear Books. Tomorrow you do a teen event at the Boys and Girls Club—that is a fundraiser for the local literary project. Then you are on to Richmond. Same deal there. Bookstore then fundraiser. Oh, wait, there’s also the book festival there. Ambrose has documents for your CPA about the tax deductions on your fundraising participation. This should offset some of the revenue from the books. But as I said in the email, we need your CPA to sign off. And soon. I need to start cutting the checks on your payments.”

“CPA?” Miranda said.

“An accountant. You have one, don’t you?”

“I don’t,” Miranda confessed.

“Oh, silly, you should have said so. I will hire one. Do you need anything else?”

“Anything else?”

“Yes, dinner reservations. Information about museums. Show tickets. Whatever you need, you reach out to me, and I make it happen. Ambrose calls me the magician.”

“The magician?”

“Yuppers. I am at your service. Anything you need. Anything. The weirder the better, in fact. Gives me something to blog about. Kristendoes.com.”

“You have a blog?”

“Yes, that’s why Ambrose hired me. It’s like double marketing for the firm.”

“The firm?”

“Oh, geesh, Miranda, you are really not informed. You need to read all the emails I sent.”

“I will.” Miranda said, counting how many steps it took to get from one side of the bookstore’s storefront to the other.

“Do you promise? Pinky swear promise that you’ll read the emails and let me know if you need anything.”

“Pinky swear.” Miranda couldn’t help but smile saying it. It sounded like something Lynn would say.

“Then we are good to go. Signing off,” Kristen said, disconnecting the line.

The bookseller poked her head outside the door. “There you are. We’re ready for you.”

Miranda hadn’t noticed the stream of people enter the store while she was on the phone. All the folding chairs were full, and a few people milled around behind the book row. They all had copies of her book in their hands. The stack next to the latest role-playing game about dragons now only stood two books high. She was almost selling out.

And at the end of the event after such winning poem themes as spring training, Ford trucks, and many requests about Ocean City and vacations, the crowd applauded her loudly and two people scooped up the last two books. The bookseller shook Miranda’s hand and invited her back for her next book.

The whirlwind feeling of it all wore off on the cab ride back to her hotel. It was a mid-level chain, nice enough to have a marble floor in the lobby with a fish tank along one wall, but not nice enough to have room service. As she sat alone in her room contemplating a dinner of macadamia nuts and Milano cookies from the mini bar, the loneliness of this whole adventure really struck her. There were fortyone more days to go.

E
ACH DAY SHE SAID to herself that she would get up early and go see some of the sights to create her own list of local color words, but each night she stayed up for hours talking to Scott on the phone.

“I wonder what our life is going to be like,” Miranda whispered into the phone, her voice hoarse from talking for the last two hours already, recounting the people she met at the bookstore event like the lady with pink hair who wanted a board done with all the names of her cats and the man who just crept around the back of the event taking her picture with his cell phone.

“What do you mean?” Scott asked. “It’s going to be awesome.” He too whispered, not wanting to wake up Lynn, who had already interrupted the call twice to tell Miranda about the new bunny in her classroom and why long division is difficult.

“No, like specifics. Like imagine it’s Sunday morning. What do we do? Do we read the paper? Do we eat waffles?”

“Well, waffles take too long. So it’s pancake city. I’ve got a griddle that takes up two burners on the stove.”

“I love that you cook,” Miranda said.

“I love that you eat. Especially pancakes. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but they are the best thing I make.”

“Surely you can make other things.”

“Mac and cheese. From a box. I microwave a good, organic chicken nugget. And I can roast a ham.”

“A ham?”

“Yup. You just put it in the oven. No fuss, no muss.”

“What do you eat with the ham?”

“Mac and cheese.”

“From a box?”

“Yup. I’m a regular old Julia Child here. We probably don’t read the paper on Sunday morning. Let’s just say that you only get about twenty minutes of sitting still when Lynn’s in the room. Especially on a weekend. School wears a kid out, but by Sunday, they are recharged and ready to go.”

“Oh,” Miranda said.

“Oh, you didn’t anticipate that?” Scott asked.

“Not that, I’m recalculating. We will eat pancakes and then go to the zoo to walk them off.”

“Run them off, you mean, but okay. The zoo, I like that. I was afraid you were going to say church.”

“Well, maybe church, we’ll see about that. Maybe your basketball games count for that. But let’s start with the zoo. What animal would you be?”

Scott didn’t hesitate. “Otter,” he said.

“Otter? Tell me why. I have to hear this.”

“They swim and have fun; have you ever seen a moping otter at the zoo? Never. They swim. They play with balls in the water. And people love them. Think they’re cute.”

“I think you are cute.”

“See, I’m already half way there,” he said.

“I love you, too. That’s it. You must be an otter,” she said.

“Then it’s a done deal. I will be the otter. And you my dear, you are a giraffe.”

“A giraffe? How did you get to that otter man? Why can’t I be an otter, too?”

“You are more majestic than an otter. You rise above, beautiful. You see things.”

“I see things?”

“Yup, that’s why you are a poet. You see the things other people miss.”

“I miss you,” Miranda said.

“Oh, baby, I miss you, too. I’ve been missing you for far too long in this life. I can’t wait for that Sunday to happen. It’s going to be a three-Red Bull day tomorrow”

He yawned.

She yawned.

The clock read three fifteen.

Most nights, they fell asleep with phones on until their batteries died.

In the morning, still thousands of miles apart, she sent him articles about the dangers of energy drinks. In response, he sent her pictures of his students in various states of chaos with baking soda and vinegar volcanoes and red clay models of the founding fathers.

“Touché,” she replied back. To be cheeky, she had Kristen ship a case of Red Bull to the apartment. He took a picture of that and posted it on Facebook announcing to the world that romance was no longer dead.

She replied with a word sculpture on the Blocked Poet feed. Bull, Love, Red, Devoted, Yours.

Ambrose replied to that. “Keep doing this. Corporate loves the love. Selling rights.”

Kristen sent a new contract the next day, which offered better payouts than a B-list celebrity’s. Every post with the corporate sponsor’s name earned a flat rate of ten thousand dollars. Click-through rates applied to each liked or shared post. If someone used the embedded coupon code, the click-through rate when up by twenty-nine percent. With her followers expanding every day, even a poet could do the math and see the value enough to sign.

Miranda spoke at another store, school, community center, hotel banquet room. Then she got on a plane and did it again and again and again.

The car Kristen arranged dropped her off in front of a house that made her parents’ house look like a child’s toy. The driveway wound so far back that Miranda had mistaken it at first for just another road. The house, three stories tall, featured grand columns out front like Tara and outdoor double staircases winding up either side to the front door on the second floor. Festive greens dotted with red berries flanked the doorway with a pineapple at its pinnacle. Miranda knew it as the colonial symbol for welcome and that it stood proudly on the university’s main gate. This was obviously the right place.

She took the stairs to the right and examined the door unsuccessfully for a bell. Instead, she lifted the heavy brass ring that hung from a lion’s mouth on the center of the door. As she lifted the ring, a chime rang out Pachelbel’s Canon in the interior of the home. Footsteps quickly followed, and Miranda found herself enveloped in a hug from a petite brunette in a red business suit.

“Hello,” said the woman. “Did your driver find the place okay? Well, silly me, obviously, or you wouldn’t standing there. I’m Ellie,” she said. “Class of ’88.”