You Were Meant For Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

was it with her lately anyway? Was it just the engagement, or was it something deeper, more systemic?
    Her father. She realized she hadn’t talked to him for more than a week. But given the fog of dementia that enveloped him, it didn’t seem to matter how often they spoke because he was not there when they did. Still, she had to try, and she took her phone from her purse. His caretaker, Eunice, answered, and after giving Miranda a brief update, she handed over thephone. “Nate, it’s your daughter,” Eunice was saying in the background. “Your daughter, Miranda—you remember?”
    â€œMiranda?” her father said uncertainly. “Do I know you?”
    â€œOf course you know me, Dad.” She closed her eyes, just for a second, as if her sorrow were a visible thing she deliberately chose not to see. “I’m your daughter. Your girl.”
    â€œThere are no girls here. No girls.” His voice quavered. “I like girls—little girls, big girls. Girls are very, very nice. I think I used to have a girl once. What happened to her?” Now he sounded ready to cry.
    â€œDad! You still do! I’m that girl—it’s me, Miranda.”
    â€œYou’re not a girl,” he chided. “No, no, no. And Miranda—that’s not a girl’s name. I would have called a girl Rosie or Posy. Maybe Polly. But never Miranda.”
    There was a silence during which Miranda swiped at her tear-filled eyes. She had come to the mini-freeway that was Canal Street and did not answer until she’d crossed safely to the other side. But when she attempted to prod her father’s ruined memory again, it was Eunice who replied. “He’s having a bad day.”
    â€œI can tell.”
    â€œSome days he knows your name and everything. He remembers where you live and when you’re coming to visit.”
    â€œBut not today.”
    â€œNot today,” Eunice said. “Why don’t you try again tomorrow?”
    â€œI will.” She put the phone back in her purse and descended the stairs to the subway station. While on the train, Miranda took unsentimental stock of her life: eight years at a good job and a recent promotion, a nice apartment, money from both her salary and a small inheritance from hergrandmother, a father sinking deeper into the oblivion of his disease. Good friends, no boyfriend, and apart from a date with a man she’d never actually met, none on the horizon either.
    She had not been thinking about having a child when she first happened on the abandoned baby on the platform. But once she’d seen her, held her, everything changed. The very act of finding her seemed significant, so by extension, all the events leading up to it—falling asleep and missing her stop, waking up in
that
particular station, passing by
that
spot at exactly
that
moment—glowed with significance too. She’d found a baby. How not to believe that in some way that baby was meant—even fated—for her?
    But was she equal to the job? Growing up, Miranda had not been especially close to her own mother. Her strongest bond had been with her father. Then she’d gone through that typical rebellious phase in her teen years, and before she’d ever had a chance to circle back and know or understand her in any more adult way, her mother had gotten sick. And died. Yet these last few weeks had opened new possibilities, new horizons. Maybe she
did
have it in her to do it all differently, to form the kind of attachment that she had longed for in her own childhood. At the very least, she wanted to try.
    Suddenly she felt energized and, when she reached the
Domestic Goddess
office on West Fourteenth Street, Miranda bypassed the elevator and took the stairs to the fifth floor. She wasn’t even winded when she arrived. No, she was pumped, primed, and ready for the biggest challenge she’d ever faced. She’d sleep on it, of course. And then if