Leave it to Cleavage

by Wendy Wax

  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 the third degree, though that was more her mother’s style than Gran’s, and breathed a huge sigh of relief when her grandmother let the subject pass.

  “The Lord does not give us burdens without equipping us to carry them.”

  She definitely knew something. Something that she didn’t want to say and which Miranda definitely didn’t want to hear. Stalling, Miranda dipped her spoon into the soup and brought it to her lips.

  “Mmmm, Gran, nobody makes chicken vegetable like you do.”

  One of her grandmother’s silver eyebrows rose. “I am not vain about my cooking.”

  “No, no, of course not.” Miranda took another spoonful and almost sighed at the warmth and perfection of it. “Though you easily could be.”

  Like she had as a child, Miranda dipped a saltine in the soup and ate most of it in one bite.

  “Lord, you’re half starved.”

  “Mmmph.” Miranda swallowed. “I haven’t had much of an appetite.” Nor could she remember when she had last eaten.

  “Yes, I can imagine.” Her grandmother speared her with a look but didn’t ask what she’d been eating or when Tom would be back, for which Miranda was deeply grateful.

  “You know, sometimes disaster and opportunity are just opposite sides of a single coin. It’s only when we’re tested that we find the motivation to become more than we have been.”

  Miranda reached the bottom of the bowl and the end of the saltines. If anyone but her grandmother had been sitting there, she would have lifted the bowl to her lips to drain the last drop.

  “You’re sounding awfully prophetic, Gran.” She raised her own eyebrow in direct imitation. “But you make a mean bowl of chicken vegetable.”

  Her eyelids were heavy and her stomach felt pleasantly full for the first time in a week. The hurt and horror of Tom’s betrayal was still there, and she had no more idea how to handle things today than she had a week ago, but her Gran was here. She wasn’t completely alone.

  Her eyelids fluttered open as her grandmother stood and lifted the tray off Miranda’s lap, leaving the rose on her nightstand.

  “I think there are things you’ll tell me when you’re ready, Miranda. In the meantime, all I ask is that you remember who you are and where your responsibilities lie.”

  “Wow, Gran.” Miranda yawned and stretched, comforted by her grandmother’s presence and the warmth of the soup now filling her belly. “I’m going to have to nominate you for Town Oracle.” She yawned again. “Maybe Ballantyne should sponsor a Mystical Wise Woman Pageant.”

  Her grandmother bent over and kissed the top of her head, and for a brief moment Miranda was a little girl again, and all was right with her world.

  “Get some sleep, Miranda. It’ll help you mend. I’ll lock up on my way out.”

  For the first time since Tom’s departure, Miranda slept for more than a few minutes at a time. She slept for eleven hours, deeply and completely and without a single dream about Tom—or what his absence would do to her life.

  She woke at 7 A.M. and flicked on the television set. She lay there for a while half listening to the news, letting her mind wander, until the tragic story of a small-town manufacturer grabbed her attention.

  It was widgets, not bras, and the town was called Henryville, not Truro. But the company had been clipping right along for several generations, until the family member running it absconded with a large chunk of the employee pension fund.

  Miranda’s eyes flew open, and she sat straight up in bed as she realized it wasn’t just her and their marriage that Tom had pummeled so mercilessly. She didn’t know what sorts of red flags he’d waved at Fidelity National, but he’d left Ballantyne, her family’s single most important asset, leaderless. If anything happened to the company it wasn’t just her family who would suffer; its three hundred employees would be out of work.

  Miranda threw the covers off, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

  Without jobs, and no other sizable employer around to provide new ones, they and their families would be wiped out.

  And so would Truro.

  Oh, God.

  Her legs were weak from lack of use, but Miranda made it to the dresser, where she pulled out underclothes and stared in dismay at her reflection in the mirror.

  The thick dark hair that normally hung down her back stuck straight out in an impressive Medusa imitation, and her face was so pale that the freckles across the bridge of her nose stood out like chocolate chips on an underdone cookie. Her green eyes looked as dull as the algae that sometimes filled the pond out back, and she had a bad feeling that she’d lost weight—not a plus when you were almost six feet tall and already skinny as a rail.

  Miranda tried a smile. Her lips quivered and made her look like a dog that had just spotted the rolled-up newspaper in its master’s hand—but at least she wasn’t crying anymore. At this point, a day without tears was way up there next to winning the swimsuit competition and making the top ten. Funny how low your expectations could drop.

  In the master bath she flicked on the small TV and confirmed that it was Monday morning, which meant she’d spent two more days feeling sorry for herself than it had taken God to create the universe.

  Careful not to confront herself in the mirror again, Miranda stripped off her pajamas and stepped under a pulsing stream of hot water. Cradled in the steamy warmth, Miranda drew air into her lungs and turned her face up to the stream of water
, wishing she could stay in this warm wonderful place forever.

  For a few bracing moments she stood naked and alone in her steamy cocoon. Then she forced herself to open the glass door, reach for a towel, and step back into the real world.

  It was time to get down to the plant and hunt for clues to where Tom had gone, and find out how bad things really were at Ballantyne.

  chapter 3

  M iranda drove through the front gate of Ballantyne Bras’ corporate headquarters, wincing as she always did as she passed under the archway that read BALLANTYNE BRAS . . . SUPPORTING TRURO FOR OVER A HUNDRED YEARS.

  She ignored the security guard’s surprise—he couldn’t be any more startled to see her than she was to be here at eight-thirty on a Monday morning—and parked her BMW in Tom’s spot.

  In the lobby she stopped briefly at the front desk. “Good morning, Leeta.”

  The receptionist choked on her doughnut. “Sorry, Mrs. Smith.” Leeta patted her throat while Miranda waited for her to swallow and catch her breath. “With Mr. Smith away on business, I wasn’t expecting . . .”

  Miranda’s mind leaped at the tidbit of information. They knew Tom was gone and they thought he was coming back. Evidently they hadn’t gotten their kiss-off notes yet. “It’s okay, Leeta.” Miranda pulled her gaze from the receptionist’s closely cropped fingernails to meet the middle-aged woman’s gaze, wishing she could come out and ask exactly where Leeta thought Tom was. “Tom, um, asked me to pick up a few things from his office.”

  “Do you want me to . . .”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll show myself in.”

  Miranda sailed down the corridor and through Tom’s office door. Closing it behind her, she leaned back against the hard wood surface, surveying her husband’s domain while she stilled her heartbeat and got her breathing under control.

  She wasn’t sure what she was afraid of. She was a Ballantyne, and the current, if abandoned, wife of the president and CEO; it was unlikely anyone would demand an explanation for her presence. It was equally unlikely that Tom had circulated a memo announcing his intention to desert her. All she needed was a clue or two, something that would help her figure out where Tom had gone and why.

  The knot in her stomach loosened slightly as she sank into a chair behind the mahogany partners desk that had once belonged to her grandfather. In its glossy reflection she could still see herself and Tom, fresh from business school at Emory, newly married and ready to carve out their niches within the company.

  She’d intended to be the first woman of her family since Great-grandmother Rachael to take a hands-on role in the business. She’d thought she would sit behind this desk one day—or at least share it with Tom. She blinked back tears as she thought of all the other things she’d thought that had turned out to be wrong.

  She’d had her first miscarriage that year. And her second the year after that. Everyone was very careful of her feelings, but her role as the bearer of the future heir was clear, and it never occurred to her to stop trying. She’d been waiting a lifetime to be the kind of mother she’d wanted hers to be.

  Two years later she was on progesterone and off her feet for long periods of time—not exactly conducive to the running of a thriving corporation.

  Before she knew it, she’d been relegated to family spokesperson—a role for which her years as a beauty pageant contestant had amply prepared her. And Tom, who refused to even discuss adoption, became the chosen one, learning the business from her father, earning his praise, and apparently developing a very personal affinity for the fruits of his labor.

  Her father. Miranda reached for the phone, already imagining the relief she would feel at the sound of his voice. She could lay her troubles at his feet just as she had as a child, and then . . .

  Her hand froze. She wasn’t a child any longer; at thirty-eight she was long past the age when she could go running to her daddy.

  “Okay, then,” she said aloud as she began her search. “You’ve tossed two houses, you should be able to finish this place in ten minutes, tops.”

  Unfortunately, Tom’s laptop wasn’t there, and none of the files stacked neatly on his desk were labeled “All the Bad Stuff I Did” or “This Is Where I’m Hiding.” She worked her way through the desk drawers, hoping to stumble onto something important, hoping it would turn out to be like shopping, and she’d know what she was looking for when she found it.

  What she found was a box of paper clips, six dog-eared business cards, a roll of stamps—God, she hated irony—and an ancient Ballantyne catalogue. She found absolutely nothing of interest—no photos, no ladies’ underwear, in Tom’s or anyone else’s size—and nothing that could remotely be construed as a clue to where Tom had gone. Or what he’d done to Ballantyne.

  Leaning back in the chair, she drummed anxious fingers on the desktop and tried to figure out her next step. An attempt to buzz Tom’s assistant, Carly, produced no response.

  “Leeta?” she said into the intercom, “where’s Carly?”

  “Carly took a personal day today, Mrs. Smith. Her little girl is sick. And with Mr. Smith out of the country . . .”

  Okay, here was another sliver of potentially useful information; at this point she’d take anything she could get. “You know, Leeta,” Miranda said, “I seem to have left Tom’s contact number at home, and I have a question about some of the things he wanted me to pick up for him. Do you have a phone number handy?”

  She waited hopefully.

  “He didn’t leave one this trip. He said he was going to be on the move until it was time to come back.”

  Miranda clamped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from asking “when” and “from where.”

  “Can you spell the name of the city he’s in for me? I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble getting it right.”

  There was a long silence, and then Leeta complied. “Sure, Mrs. Smith. That’s H . . . O . . . N . . . G”—she paused to let the first four letters sink in—“K . . . O . . . N . . . G.”

  There was another protracted silence.

  “Right, then,” Miranda said brightly. “Um, thanks.”

  Okay, so Leeta thought she was a moron, but she now knew that Tom had made his absence appear work-related, which meant Carly might have booked his flight and made his hotel reservation. Even if he weren’t still in Hong Kong, at least she’d have a trail to follow.

  Miranda thought about Tom moving on to a new life, not coming back. A much-too-familiar lump formed in her throat, and her eyes welled up. Shoving away the hurt, she forced herself to think. In order to go anywhere beyond Hong Kong and stay there, Tom would need money. Lots of it.

  Miranda’s stomach dropped as she realized that the company wasn’t the only monetary source Tom might have tapped.

  With a sudden sense of urgency, Miranda picked up the phone and punched in the main number of the local bank where they kept their personal accounts.

  Her heart raced as she followed the prompts to put in their joint account numbers, first for the household checking and then their savings and money market accounts. She barely breathed while the computerized voice spelled out the bad news with all the emotion of a tin can. But it hardly mattered, because she had enough emotion for all of them.

  She called back again, hoping she had misheard, but the tin voice refused to change its story. It was gone. All of it. Except for a balance of two thousand dollars and seventy-five cents in her household checking account, which now constituted her entire net worth.

  Tears formed and her lower lip quivered. Stretching an arm out on the cool mahogany, Miranda laid her head down on her arm and squeezed her eyes shut in a futile effort to halt their flow.

  When the knock sounded on the door, Miranda scrubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand and sat up in her chair. “Yes?”

  The door opened and Ballantyne’s head bookkeeper stepped into the room. Helen St. James was a few inches shorter than Miranda and a couple of years older. She was what Gran would call a
handsome woman—not beautiful, but nice enough to look at—with shoulder-length auburn hair and classically even features that Miranda was having a hard time focusing on.

  Closing the office door behind her, the bookkeeper crossed to the desk. “I’ve been trying to reach Mr. Smith for almost a week now.”

  Miranda bit back the “Join the club” that sprang to her lips.

  “It’s very important that I speak to . . . Mr. Smith . . . right away.”

  Miranda noted the strange emphasis on the word “Mr.” and dropped her gaze from the other woman’s face to the hands clamped at her sides. Helen St. James’s manicure was both French and impeccable, and she had an amoeba-shaped birthmark on the back of her wrist. Were these the hands that had rested so familiarly on her husband’s butt?

  “If you speak to him, will you ask him to call me?”

  Sure she would. Right after she had him hauled off to jail for emptying all their bank accounts and scaring her to death.

  “He needs to know that . . .” The bookkeeper cleared her throat and started again. “He needs to know that I’m having a little trouble reconciling the numbers.”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll be sure to . . .” Miranda stopped as the bookkeeper’s words sank in. With great effort she dragged her gaze from the French manicure up to the bookkeeper’s face. She didn’t like what she saw there at all.

  “Fidelity National called,” Helen St. James said. “They want to move up our audit. Something’s not right with the receivables.”

  The house was cold and univiting, the afternoon sun too weak to offer any warmth. Miranda walked through the downstairs, hiking up the thermostat, turning on lights, trying to chase away the chill in the too-empty house.

  Upstairs her unmade bed beckoned. She could curl up and hide there, maybe turn on the soaps and watch fictional people suffer for a while—anything would be better than this crushing quiet and emptiness. She felt like a compass without its North point, whirling around aimless and lost. She’d never considered herself dependent on Tom, but she was beginning to realize how much she’d been defined by him. If she wasn’t Mrs. Tom Smith, who was she? And what was she supposed to do now?