Triple Love Score
Page 1
A D V A N C E R E V I E W S O F T R I P L E L O V E S C O R E
“Granett’s beautifully written novel, full of twists, turns and truths about the ups and downs of life, had me spellbound from the very first page.”
—KRISTY WOODSON HARVEY, author of Dear Carolina and Lies and Other Acts of Love
“With engaging characters, romantic gestures, and one board game, Granett makes poetry cool again.”
—AMY E. REICHERT, author of The Coincidence of Coconut Cake and Luck, Love, and Lemon Pie
“A love story that is on one hand sweet, but on the other full of surprises and intrigue, set against the background of Scrabble. It sounds entirely unlikely but this is exactly what Granett has spelled out in a novel that deserves kudos and could easily become a guilty pleasure.”
—JACQUELYN MITCHARD, author of New York Times #1 Bestseller The Deep End of the Ocean
“. . . a romantic pleasure with delightfully unique characters and a plot that takes you on an unexpected journey. Granett has a clear writing style that brings each scene to life and makes for a tremendously engaging read. As a fan of love and poetry, I highly recommend it!”
—ANITA HUGHES, author of Santorini Sunsets
“An entertaining and perceptive story of our times.”
—KATHRYN CRAFT, award-winning author of The Far End of Happy and The Art of Falling
“Like tiles on a Scrabble board, Granett’s characters unfold and connect and diverge again. Readers will be hooked as they follow Miranda’s unlikely adventures—ones that take her across the country and as far away as Istanbul and France—as her long-held dreams concerning love and career are both challenged and re-defined.”
—AMY IMPELLIZZERI, award-winning author of Lemongrass Hope
“. . . what is refreshingly different are descriptions of how and when convention fails, what causes a very quiet life to evolve into something different, and how the soul can be awakened to new opportunities. Women seeking a solid story of a poetry professor's awakening will find Triple Love Score a delightful romp through options Miranda never realized she had.”
—DIANE C. DONOVAN, Midwest Book Reviews
“While there’s nothing weighty in this fun, lighthearted book in terms of subject matter, the novel includes plenty of steamy sex scenes as well as some unexpected plot twists and turns. Granett includes an intriguing, relatable human dilemma as Miranda tries her new ‘lightness’ and ‘no strings attached’ attitude on for size. The protagonist must ultimately decide whether it is smarter to listen to the warnings of her rational brain or simply allow herself to follow what feels right to her passionate heart. An entertaining romance novel with an engrossing plot, a conflicted heroine, and a couple of surprising, poignant takeaways.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
Triple Love Score
Brandi Megan Granett
Print Edition ISBN: 978-1-942545-40-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016932379
©2016 Brandi Megan Granett. All Rights Reserved.
SCRABBLE®, the distinctive game board and letter tiles, and all associated logos are trademarks of Hasbro in the United States and Canada, and are used with permission. ©2016 Hasbro. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, Inc.
www.WyattMacKenzie.com
Contact us: info@wyattmackenzie.com
To Avram.
Without you, I wouldn’t know enough about love to write even a sentence about it.
You never realize where you are going until you get there, where nothing is planned, nothing is known, and you’re drawn back into the heart’s old orbits, tiny as a grain, massive as a moon.
— Pat Boran, excerpt from “Moon Street”
EVEN AT TWELVE YEARS OLD, Miranda knew better than to dissuade her mother from orchestrating her own funeral.
“So,” Louise began, “you will wear the brown dress. Not the black. You are too young for black. Anita will iron it for you and make sure you have fresh hose. Daddy, luckily, already wears the right suit. The town car will come for you. Yes, you will sit in the back. Don’t even ask to ride up front. The car will take you to the church. The big one, downtown, the one my mother loved. I didn’t like it there except for the music. I loved the organ and the choir. So that’s what it will be. All music. No sense in your father standing up there to speak. I couldn’t do that to him.” Her mother’s voice quavered. She could pretend to be okay with dying for only so long.
Miranda, perched on the bow window seat of her parents’ bedroom, remained silent. There was no sense in talking. Her mother valued knowledge, concrete plans, and making sure everyone knew exactly what to expect.
Louise leaned back against the floral print chaise lounge and gasped for breath before continuing. She picked up the gold chain she wore around her neck. Her engagement ring, a single emerald cut diamond, hung from the chain, and caught the light. Cancer robbed her mother of the simplest of things like wearing this ring; all of her joints swelled from the treatment while everything else shrunk. The ring at once could not fit and could not hold. Louise let the ring dangle in front of her for a moment before tucking it back into her blouse. Miranda stroked the Hermes scarf on her mother’s head.
“Randa,” she said, “it makes me feel better to know you are prepared. Tell me which dress you will wear.”
Miranda knew what the doctors said and didn’t argue. Her mother smelled like death, sickly sweet like overripe fruit. Her thick hair, a chestnut brown and wavy, like Miranda’s own, abandoned her shortly after the first treatments. Her arms could barely manage to lift a full glass of water. And Miranda’s mother was always right. If Louise said knowing about the funeral would make it better, it would.
The funeral turned out as planned. The brown dress, which Anita ironed. The car where she sat next to her father. The big church downtown. But her mother hadn’t mentioned the flowers. The smell of them: waxy, sweet, green. Yet the scent of their wilting decay hung in the air, too. Miranda clung to her father’s side as he moved up the crowded aisles. Her parents, both lawyers and popular ones at that, served on committees, argued cases, and taught at the law school. Throngs of people came to say goodbye. Each bent low and tried to look Miranda in the eye, but she couldn’t match their gaze. Their eyes ringed red from tears didn’t mirror her own grief. They hadn’t known what was coming; they hadn’t sat in that sunny room and discussed death and funerals with her mother. Miranda spent her own tears long before the funeral.
Finally, they made their way through the crowd to the front where Linden, Bunny, and Scott sat. Bunny, her mother’s best friend, knew the drill. Bunny hired the organist and booked the church. Linden arranged the car service. Even though they weren’t related, they were family. Miranda slid over next to Scott as she always did. He was her brother and best friend rolled into one. He would play video games with her and sometimes let her win or picked her for his manhunt team. They watched movies together and re-enacted scenes for their parents’ applause. They took turns reading to each other on long car rides to the shore where they would swim and play Frisbee while their parents perfected the margarita with many failed but consumed batches. But today wasn’t like that. Miranda suspected no day would ever be like that again.
Of course, they sat in the front pew. Miranda knew that. Her mother had stressed that point. “I know you don’t like being front and center, my girl,” she said,
petting Miranda’s hair, then sun-streaked from the summer spent by the pool watching her mother try and fail each day to swim like she used to. “People expect you up there. Funerals are for everyone, not just the family. Try to remember that.”
But in the front row, they were closer to the flowers. And their smell. It began to stick to the back of her throat and reach down deep into her lungs. Her chest constricted. The Reverend signaled for everyone to stand. The weight of this day and all the days of her mother’s illness pressed down upon her. Miranda went to move, but her legs gave out from under her just as the thunderous noise from the organ began. She saw her father’s gaze transfixed on the cross over the altar and was grateful he didn’t see her falter. She tried again to stand. This time a hand around her waist lifted her. Scott looked down at her, his own eyes brimmed with tears. He lifted her up and then took her hand, pulling her arm close to his. He kept his arm tensed and flexed. She leaned into him, gripping his fingers so tightly that the knuckles on both their hands turned white. Embarrassed, she moved to let go.
“No,” he whispered, squeezing her fingers tightly back. He didn’t let go. He kept her upright for the entire service of music and through all the goodbyes in the foyer of the church. He held her hand until the driver opened the door to the town car and ushered her inside.
“Thank you,” was all she said to him.
He only nodded in reply.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Acknowledgments
C H A P T E R
MIRANDA STOOD ON THE STREET CORNER admiring the brightly dyed flowers arranged in so many buckets in front of the bodega. With the dreary gray of fall about to be winter hanging in the sky, the flowers struck her as even more improbable, even more abstract, something her undergraduate students could write a poem about. She snapped a picture with her phone and emailed it to everyone in her afternoon section of Intermediate Poetry. “Bring a pencil and paper to class,” she added.
The campus already felt empty with the approach of Thanksgiving as she took the long way from her car to the classroom. The fitness tracker she kept clipped to the inside of her belt, hidden from view, reminded her that her footstep count for the day lacked about five thousand steps from her ten thousand goal. Miranda didn’t want to go crazy about the exercise thing; too many women her age did that as if exercise could stop them from turning thirty. They took Pilates and spun, did yoga and now Zumba. She couldn’t bring herself to really even say the word, such an ugly-hybrid, nouveau word, commercial speak, let alone put on skin-tight spandex and “have so much fun” you will forget you are exercising. Nothing about dancing under fluorescent lights in a musty exercise room sounded like fun.
Dancing, however, a rumba proper or a tango, or some other Latin-flavored, romantic dance under the light of the moon or the black lights of disco in Ibiza—now that sounded fun. Miranda let her thoughts wander as she stepped carefully on the damp cobblestones, slicked with leaves. She imagined phoning Avery, her stepmother, and saying, “No, I’m not coming for Thanksgiving this year. I’m going to Ibiza.”
But she remembered Avery’s email all too clearly. “The Cramers are coming! Scott, too!” Only Avery used about twelve exclamation points, excited to have everyone back together again. But Miranda didn’t share her enthusiasm. At least not anymore.
After her mom died, Miranda tried everything possible to be someone else, but with Scott, she had no choice. He already knew who she was. With him, she could relax and stop pretending to be fine or to like horses or to love school or even to be happy. She loved how he listened to her stories. She loved how he made everyone laugh. She loved how he made her feel like everything would be just fine after a round of Frisbee. And Scott liked her; Miranda knew that. But not liked her-liked her. He was a big brother, an older cousin, a family friend. Even if she had once hoped it could be more than that.
Like when she was sixteen to his eighteen and finally filled out her red and white Polka-dotted bikini, and he didn’t take his eyes off her all day, not even while he was eating. Or the time they both got drunk on cheap beer on the back deck of his parents’ house in Rhode Island after her seventeenth birthday party and sat under a full moon listening to the waves in the distance, their fingers dangling centimeters apart, electricity flowing across the slight divide. Or the time he came to her place at NYU unexpectedly, bringing takeout Thai and Scrabble, six years ago. She buzzed him up to her apartment, and he walked in as if he visited her all the time, flinging his coat over the back of the futon and pulling a bottle of wine from a paper bag, while she tried to act casual and set about picking up stray hair-ties and empty soda cans from the tiny area she and her roommates called the living room.
“I hope you have a corkscrew,” he said.
“Yes, but I hope you don’t mind serving a minor. My birthday isn’t for another two weeks.”
“I thought it was the twelfth,” he said.
“Reverse that,” she said. “Twenty first.” She fidgeted through the kitchen drawers looking for the corkscrew. Suddenly it seemed like nothing in the kitchen belonged to her. He shifted her entire world off its axis just by showing up.
“Oh,” he said.
“It’s not my first or anything,” she said, pointing to the rack of wine and assorted liquor behind her. “And you know that. You gave me my first beer when I was only seventeen.”
“No, it’s not that. I just wanted to do it right.”
“Do what right?” She moved as if in a dream, still fumbling with wooden spoons and mismatched yard sale measuring cups, until the sharp tip of the corkscrew pricked her index finger.
“Nothing. I brought Scrabble. Let’s play.”
With the wine opened, they settled down on either side of the coffee table. Well, at least he settled down. He sat on the futon, his basketball-playing body taking up the full space with knees spread wide. She sat on the floor across from him, wishing for all the world that she had washed her hair that morning; she felt a few escaped strands from her ponytail press against her cheeks. She hoped it wasn’t too greasy; each year it grew darker and darker, the blonde of her youth disappearing to mouse brown. Grease only amplified the effect.
But he didn’t seem to notice her hair or that she was in her pajamas. He handed her a container of Pad Thai and shook out his seven letters.
And after a few minutes and few sips of wine, she stopped caring, too. He launched into a story about selling bonds that ended with a bad joke about handcuffs.
She laughed at his joke. With him, she didn’t have to be so grown up.
“So,” he said, “has this writing program made you any better at Scrabble?”
They played with focus, only stopping to pass out a second round of spring rolls and to steal a bottle of wine from her roommates’ personal stash.
Miranda played mystery on a double word score with a blank tile. “Bingo,” she chorused. “Fifty points.” She hopped up to do a victory dance. As she did, her foot clipped the table, and the tile bag toppled over.
They both bent to pick them up. He smelled like Old Spice, the way her father did before the chemo made her mo
m’s nose too sensitive. “You,” Miranda started to say, to ask or to explain why she couldn’t stop staring at him.
“You,” he said in reply.
Then he leaned in closer and pressed his lips against hers. His eyelashes stirred against her cheeks as he closed his eyes. She leaned in closer. And neither one moved to stop. For a very long moment, lips slightly parted, they breathed in the same air, as they hovered in the sweet spot right after a kiss.
Then his phone went off, startling them both.
He snapped backwards and patted down his pockets for the source of the interruption. He stared at the number. “I think I have to take this,” he said. “Some kind of hospital.”
As he stood up, his pant leg caught on the edge of the board, bouncing all the letters out of place as he slipped out of the apartment and into the hallway.
For what felt like an hour, she strained to hear his footfalls in the hallway outside.
When he pushed back in, she almost didn’t recognize him. He ran a hand through his hair, leaving it standing on end like a man electrocuted. The color in his cheeks disappeared.
“I have to go.” He kissed her cheek and grabbed his coat. “I’ll be back after your birthday,” he said.
Too stunned to say anything, she just watched him go.
She expected him to be back. Her birthday came and went. Her emails and calls went unreturned. She thought for sure that he would show up at Avery’s next party with some excuse about work. She would pretend to be mad, but knew she would get over it just to talk to him again. If he didn’t want to kiss again fine—well, not fine, but she would deal with that—but it wasn’t okay to walk out on their entire friendship.
“Where’s Scott?” she asked as Bunny enveloped her in a hug at the front door.
“Scott?” Bunny asked.
“Don’t be funny,” Miranda said. “You know, your son? I saw him a few months ago, but lately he’s been MIA.”
“Dear,” Bunny called over her shoulder, “do we know a Scott?”