And she, too, decided to see Josie.
"I am entitled to live my life," Joseph told them when they appeared together at his office. But there were tears in his eyes. "I am entitled to my life."
Both women were moved by the tears. And both agreed that he was entitled to his life, but with these provisos: Annie explained that the life Josie was entitled to was the life he had always lived, the one with their mother; Miranda, a more romantic soul, pointed out that while life must be lived to the fullest, Josie was no longer young, and his present life was surely full enough for someone his age.
"This is difficult for me, too," Joseph said. He squeezed his fists into his eyes like a child. The two women put their arms around him.
"Josie, Josie," they said softly, soothing the distinguished man in his pinstriped suit. They had never seen their stepfather cry.
He stood back and looked down at his two daughters, his "girls," and he saw that his girls were no longer girls. Miranda was as lovely in her skittish, eye-flashing way as ever, her light brown hair shining, grazing her shoulders, the style not much different from what she wore as a teenager. But now in her still-youthful beauty there was something willed and hard. As for Annie, she had never looked youthful, always so serious, her dark eyes taking everything in and giving nothing back. He could see a faint line of gray where her hair parted. She watched him anxiously. What could he do for her, his sad little girl? Decades ago, in his youth, a man in his position might have handed her some bills and told her to buy herself a hat to cheer herself up. He imagined her in a little velvet cocktail hat, inclined rakishly to one side. The incongruity of it made him want to shake her.
"I will be very generous to your mother," he said. "You can count on me for that."
And the daughters left the office, angry, disappointed, but hopeful for their mother's material comfort, at least.
"Hi, Felicity," they said with forced cheerfulness to the pretty VP who had initiated the increasingly successful online side of the business. There was no point in letting their misery show. Perhaps the whole thing could be patched up before Felicity and the others in the office knew anything about it.
"Well, at least they're not getting lawyers," Miranda said. "Lawyers are parasitic vultures."
"You're mixing unpleasant species characteristics."
"Vermin," Miranda said defiantly. Miranda was a literary agent and resented the legal profession on principle for interfering in matters that ought not to concern them, like her clients' contracts, but her experiences with lawyers had been particularly painful in the last six months. "They should mind their own business."
"Unfortunately, divorce sort of is their business. Some of them anyway."
Miranda had never been divorced herself. This, she knew, was only because she had never been married. She fell in love too easily, too frequently, too hard, to get married. Miranda loved to be in love. It was a pleasure she was willing to suffer for, but not give up. Right now she was in love with a ne'er-do-well day trader. She thought of him and felt a flutter of giddy admiration: his bare back bent over her computer in her dark bedroom late at night, the pained expression on his face illuminated by the big, bright monitor.
Love was one of the reasons she gave for never getting married, the primary one. But there was another. She had always been too busy, constantly on the phone, barking out orders to her harassed assistant, flirting with a publisher on the hook, raising the spirits of a disappointed author. She specialized in the genre of what Annie dubbed the Lite Victory memoir. Her clients, the Awful Authors, as even Miranda called them, had always overcome something ghastly and lurid, something so ghastly and so lurid they had to write a ghastly and lurid book recounting every detail of their mortification and misery. At the end of the book, there was a nice epiphany, and since no one could really object to an epiphany, not even Annie, the books were very popular and Miranda had built a thriving agency that required her constant attention.
Until the lawyers got to it, she thought. "Vermin," she said again. "Ha! No divorce lawyer will ever dine on my flesh."
Annie said nothing. Miranda's antipathy to marriage was a point of contention between them. Annie had always maintained that Miranda simply lacked the imagination to get married.
"Marriage is too much like fiction for you," she once told Miranda. "Too unpredictable, too influenced by idiosyncratic characters."
Miranda, who considered herself a hopeless romantic, had replied, "Fiction has a plot, the same old plot. In what way is that unpredictable?"