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Steve’s story was an old one, so tired as to be trite. Still, it shocked Miranda. Worse, it ripped her father’s heart in half.
Through a gay volleyball league Steve had joined the previous summer, he’d met the man he said he couldn’t live without. No, his new love wasn’t younger. In fact, he was in his early sixties. No, it wasn’t because Steve didn’t love Miranda and, even more importantly, her father.
He’d simply fallen, quite unexpectedly, head over heels in love with someone else. He hadn’t been looking. And he hated that he was hurting them both, but this passion was too intense not to follow.
He hoped he could stay in their lives. “We will always be close,” he’d told Miranda, tears glimmering in his eyes, the last time she saw him.
Miranda still wasn’t ready to forgive. She simply had trouble believing that someone in a committed relationship could fall in loveoutsidethat pairing unless he was open to it. Her father tried to put on a brave face, but Miranda had held him as he’d sobbed. She’d comforted her father the following week when Steve packed his clothes, books, cooking items, and CD collection and left behind a gaping hole in the fabric of her dad’s life.
How could something that seemed so lasting, so permanent, be over so quickly? If Miranda felt shock, and she did, she couldn’t imagine the sting and numbness her dad must be enduring.
In the few weeks since packing up his stuff, he’d never called, texted, or emailed. Not once. He’d certainly never stopped by their condo on Dexter Avenue. So much for “wanting to stay” in their lives.
She couldn’t stop aching for her dad, who was her hero, her one constant in an often chaotic and turbulent life.
So, she’d been glad when, earlier this week, her father invited her to dinner. “I’ll make your favorite—Impossible meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, creamed lima beans, and Parker House rolls.” Miranda suspected he was preparing his own comfort-food dinner, but she made the appropriate grateful noises about the meal and said she’d be delighted to join him. She suspected Dad had been living off cans of soup and frozen pizza since Steve’s abrupt departure.
And she’d been even more delighted when her father confessed. “I have an ulterior motive for having you over, Miranda.”
“Oh, what’s that?”
He’d grinned at her through the magic of Facetime and said, “I think I’m ready to get back out there. You fall off the saddle and get back on, right?”
“I don’t know, Dad. It’s only been a couple, three weeks. Are you sure?” One word echoed in her mind:rebound. Her father knew Steve was with someone else. How could he not? Steve had plastered his Facebook page with pics of himself and Rory, in the bloom of their new love, all around Seattle, looking exactly like what they were—blissful lovers in the bloom of passion. It must be sickening, Miranda thought, for her dad to see them.
Miranda had assumed at the time maybe Dad had met someone. He was only a couple miles away from the Capitol Hill neighborhood and its abundance of gay bars. She guessed that he’d ventured out and met a man. After all, weren’t bars where gay guys used to meet? Hook up? Back in the day…
But Dad had surprised her.
“Oh, I don’t know how sure I am, but what can it hurt to put myself out there online? Nothing ventured…”
“Online?” Miranda asked with alarm, her stomach lurching when she imagined her daddy on some of the raunchier hookup sites she was aware of, even in her limited experience.
“Sure. It’s how the kids meet these days, isn’t it?”
Miranda remembered her father’s cautiously optimistic face on her iPhone screen. The fact that he’d been off the market for the better part of two decades wasn’t lost on her.
“I could use a little help navigating, you know. Getting my feet wet, creating a profile, stuff like that. I figured you might be a little more fluent in this stuff.” He chuckled. “I feel ancient.”
She had no idea why he’d think that, but she was happy to see him turn this corner.
And now, she stood watching him, a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia in each of her hands, as he worked at creating a profile on the most harmless site Miranda could find—wingpeople.com.
She moved into the office and set down a bowl on the edge of the desk for Dad before settling herself on the love seat. Here, she could observe him at his iMac and provide support and maybe direction as needed—and indulge in her own ice cream.
Her father turned and scooted back so Miranda could see the screen.
“That was fast.” She swallowed the ice cream in her mouth so quickly that a sharp pain bloomed behind her eyes. She breathed slowly, closing her eyes for a couple moments as the pain dissolved.
When she looked again, she smiled. “That’s not bad at all.”
In the time it had taken her to wash dinner dishes and grab the bowls of ice cream, her father had gone ahead and created his online profile. She shouldn’t have been surprised he was so quick, so slick. He was, after all, a bestselling author of what theNew York Timescalled “cozy mysteries with an edge.” His series of books, revolving around the sleuthing abilities of a librarian named Juanita Parham and her sassy, perpetually yapping chihuahua, Boots, had been a staple of the bestseller lists for nearly two decades. Miranda, only to herself, wondered why. The books were cute, had no depth, were easily solved, and oh-so-corny. Each topped out at about one hundred and thirty pages. But readers ate them up and begged for more. There was even a Hulu series in the works with Margo Martindale as Juanita. The chihuahua was yet to be cast, but word on the street was that the competition and back-biting was fierce in LA.
So, that her father was adept in writing a little marketing copy about himself should come as no surprise, she reasoned.
She set down her empty bowl on the hardwood floor and leaned a little closer to the screen so she could give her critique.
He’d used his headshot from his last book cover and Miranda was glad. For the most recent book, he’d updated his portrait, using a swanky downtown photographer who’d bathed him in gorgeous light and shadow, with the result in high-contrast black and white.
