Chapter Text
Andy was sitting on the edge of their bed when Miranda entered the room with two garment bags from the foyer closet. Her phone lay limply in her listless hand, her gaze unfocused as she stared aimlessly into space.
"Who was that?" Miranda inquired on her way to the walk-in closet.
"My mom," Andy replied numbly.
"That was short." Poking her head through the doorway, she gave a mirthless, knowing smile. "What did she say about me this time? That I work too much or that I don't treat you right?"
"Um... yeah, no, we didn't really get to that," said Andy, her voice hollow.
Back in the room, Miranda headed to the vanity, unclasping a silver bracelet at her wrist. Through the mirror, she looked at Andy's reflection behind her. "What did she want, then?"
"What?" Andy asked, finally snapping out of her stupor. Her head lifted, her eyes blinking back into reality, meeting Miranda's in the mirror.
"What did you talk about?" Miranda frowned.
"Oh." Andy looked down, licking her lips. "She called to say that my dad died."
"All I'm saying is if I have to pretend to like her fruit cake one more time--"
"Just be nice, she's trying her best."
"She's trying to poison me."
Their hushed murmuring came to a stop when they did, standing outside the door of Andy's childhood home. For the first time, Richard Sachs wouldn't be waiting inside, reclining in his worn-out armchair, his feet crossed on the foot rest, clad in his blue slippers. He wouldn't be in the kitchen, hunting for his sugar-free dark chocolate or sneaking the one with the added sugar, and he wouldn't be getting out of the shower to greet his guests, smelling of aftershave with a towel wrapped around his waist, still dripping all over the floor. For the first time, Andy's father wasn't there, and he was never coming back home.
"Andy," Kate Sachs welcomed her daughter, her smile sad but warm, and drew her into a hug. "Baby."
"Hi, Mom," Andy whispered, tightly embracing her remaining parent. Any second now, her father would emerge from behind, waiting patiently for his turn to say hello. Andy squeezed her eyes shut, unwilling to see that he wasn't.
Parting, Kate directed her smile at Miranda, giving her, too, a hug. "Miranda. Thanks for coming."
"I'm very sorry for your loss," Miranda said earnestly, hugging back.
"Thank you," replied Kate and stepped back. With a deep breath, she turned back to Andy, taking her hands.
"How are you doing, Mom? How are you holding up?"
"Awful," she answered simply, although her smile never wavered, as if she were responding to an inquiry about the time. It had taken Miranda a long time to get used to a house where people spoke so honestly and openly about their feelings. "Absolutely terrible. I'm so mad at him for leaving me."
"Mom..." Andy let go of one hand to stroke up and down an arm that seemed so bony and frail and old all of a sudden, as if years had been shaved off her mother in a matter of days.
"Caroline said she will be here for the funeral," Miranda spoke. "Cassidy won't be able to make it, though. She sends her apology and condolences."
"Oh, no, it's fine." Kate waved her hand in dismissal. "She should focus on enjoying herself." For just a moment, her eyes lit up. "I hope you brought new pictures?"
"Mom," Andy chuckled, "I told you, we don't print them anymore. Everything she sends, I forward to you. Don't you check your phone?"
"I know that," Kate said defensively, then turned to Miranda. "My daughter thinks I don't know how technology works."
"I'm sure we have some new ones you haven't seen," Miranda placated and placed a hand on her partner's back, gesturing for her to cross the threshold into the house.
"Oh, gosh, I'm sorry." Kate pressed a hand to her chest in mortification, moving aside. "Please, come in. Oh, my mind is not here; I have so many things I have to do. There's the funeral arrangements and the will and, god, finding a casket--I still haven't done that. How am I supposed to--"
"Mom, Mom." Andy laid her hands firmly on her shoulders, stilling her rambling, while Miranda hauled their bags inside. "It's okay. That's what we're here for, to help. You don't have to do anything on your own."
"And we'll pay for everything, of course," Miranda interjected.
Kate's eyes opened wide. "Oh, no, no, I can't let you do that."
"We insist," Andy said with enough finality to brook no argument. "Now, where did you put all the papers you got?"
"Oh, they're in the kitchen." She pointed behind her at the small room off from the entrance, and then proceeded to head in that direction. Behind her back, Andy and Miranda shared a somber look, Andy shaking her head with a sigh.
"Oh, Miranda," Kate called from the kitchen, "I have some of the fruit cake you like in the fridge. I'll get some plates." For the first time since the phone call that had brought the world crashing down on her, Andy had to suppress a genuine laugh while Miranda's eyes widened in outrage, gesturing toward the kitchen as if to say "You see?"
"Come on." Andy rolled her eyes and patted her arm, entering the kitchen. On the table that hadn't been replaced since she was fifteen-years-old lay stray pieces of paper in a disorganized heap, which she tried to sort through while her mother rose on socked tiptoes to pull a stack of plates down from the cupboard.
"Why were the police here?" Andy frowned while examining a page with the Cincinnati Police Department's logo stamped at the top. Sidling up to her, Miranda took a curious peek.
"Oh, it's standard procedure, apparently," Kate casually explained, bringing the plates and a bunch of forks to the table. "When someone dies at home." Turning to Miranda, she elaborated with wide eyes, "It was a heart attack, you know. He came back from work, walked through the door, and collapsed. Just like that. Didn't even get a chance to say hello."
Miranda, as a first of many acts of kindness she would have to force herself to commit in the upcoming days, refrained from pointing out that she'd obviously been filled in on the details. As a second act of kindness, she suffered through a thin slice of cake in silence while Andy and Kate discussed the arrangements that would have to be made.
"They're expecting us at the funeral home at 3 to pick a casket," Kate said, becoming sober again. "There's something I never thought I'd say. I didn't even know that was a thing."
"Did he ever say what kind of casket he wanted?" asked Andy, also scarcely able to attach the words coming out of her mouth to reality. It also felt absurd to speak about her father in past tense--rude, even, as if any second now he would walk into the room and demand to be acknowledged.
"All he said was that he didn't want to be cremated," Kate replied, heavily seating herself on a chair and covering half of her face with her hand. "Christ, Andy, I don't know what I'm going to do without him. I just have no idea."
Miranda put down her fork, Andy raised her head; they shared another silent look. It was going to be a long few days.
Everything alright?
Worst place I've ever been, Andy texted Miranda back before pocketing her phone, and it was: being Miranda Priestly's partner, and moreover before that, her assistant, she'd visited many a showroom in the last few years of her life; never had she imagined one such place existed solely for caskets, and frankly, she couldn't think of a more depressing setting.
The funeral home director, more resembling of a tactful car salesman, walked her and her mother through rows and rows of different caskets in various colors and materials, explaining the quality and features of some much like one would a Corvette or a BMW. Andy half-expected him to slap the top of a casket and declare, "Now, this baby, she can hold a person as heavy as two-hundred pounds."
Despite what must have been a long career of performing the same task--despite the possibility that Andy and Kate were not even his first buyers of the day--he was kind and patient, urging them to take their time until they found the right casket. To Andy, they all looked the same: oblong boxes designated for the ground, in which the deceased could decompose peacefully for the rest of eternity. It hardly mattered whether the casket was mountain peak white or mahogany brown, or what type of lids it had and how soft the interior fabric was--it wouldn't matter to Richard Sachs and, for that matter, no one else would be able to appreciate the selection for very long--yet the thought of acquiring anything short of the best of the best for her father seemed unacceptable to Andy.
"This one has a memory drawer in the lid, if you want to send him off with any personal possessions," the car salesm-- funeral home director said gently, lifting the lid of a silver-lined, black casket to present the feature in question. The interior was already made to look like a bed with tufted, ivory fabric and a matching pillow, the space so narrow that, if alive, her father would have never agreed to squeeze himself into it.
As the man continued to speak and her mother feigned composure, Andy watched on in a dreamlike state of trance, escaping to a different place in her mind.
"Huh, look at that. I didn't know monkeys could bleed," her dad said playfully, kneeling on their backyard lawn with her scraped knee in his lap, his eyes crinkled with mirth.
"I wanted to get to the tippy top," explained seven-year-old Andy while the culprit loomed apathetically above her, its thinner branches swaying gently in the early autumn breeze. She tried not to wince in pain, tried to be brave, but frowned apprehensively nonetheless. "Will it leave a scar?"
"Hmm." Her dad pretended to give the matter serious thought. "Might need some stitches. Maybe even reconstructive surgery. But the good news is you'll get to keep the leg," he finished with his best smile, prompting a gleeful giggle from Andy.
"I think even Mom will agree that the best medicine in this case is ice cream. What do you say?"
"With whipped cream?" she asked hopefully.
"Don't think it'll work without," he said to her immense pleasure, the pain all gone, a grin lighting up her face.
"Come on." He got up, showed her his back, then bent over again. "Hop on."
"I'll be in my office if you need me," the funeral home director said respectfully, leaving them alone to make their decision. When she turned to Andy, Kate's eyes were brimming with unshed tears.
"Mom," said Andy and pulled her into her arms.
"I just can't believe this is all happening," Kate whispered into her hair. "It doesn't feel real, does it?"
"No, it doesn't," Andy concurred, withdrawing.
"Christ," Kate said and looked at the casket to her side, running her hand across the polished surface. "If he weren't dead already, Richie would get a heart attack just at the amount of money these things cost."
"I told you, Mom, you don't have to worry about that. We have the money."
She scoffed. "Doesn't make it any better. He hated all this fancy-schmancy stuff, you know."
"Yeah, I know." Andy smiled fondly, even if it didn't quite reach her eyes. "Remember that atrocious, brown jacket he had for, like, twnety years?" Even at her lowest fashion point, Andy had been able to tell that that clothing garment belonged on no one's body. It was a miracle she'd ever managed to find her style with that kind of upbringing.
"Do I?" her mother said, and for just a moment, she looked equally amused. "I had to persuade him not to wear it to our wedding."
"The way we practically had to force him to get rid of it when it was frayed all over already," Andy laughed. "I think I might've actually seen tears in his eyes when he finally threw it away."
Kate chuckled, too, but she was fast growing somber again. "Yes. He liked simplicity." Andy's smile gradually waned, her gaze following her mother attentively as she proceeded to walk around, touching various caskets, as if waiting for one to connect with her.
"I think he will like this one," she observed at last, resting her hand on the shiny, walnut surface of a casket, then amended, "Would."
Andy came to stand beside her, studying her selection. It didn't hold a striking difference to any of the other caskets in the room, but it was a little more subdued than some: respectable, but not something her simplicity-favoring father would have balked at. "Yeah. He would."
Kate inhaled deeply. "So that's one less thing to worry about. And we already have a joint burial plot--at least that's one thing we had the good sense to do in advance. You know, they get snagged up so fast these days, you'd think people are dying more than they used to."
"I think it's more about space," Andy replied, absently stroking the cool wood under her palm, but her mind was already elsewhere. She and Miranda had been together for the better part of a decade, yet never broached the subject of death, of making any arrangements as to not be blindsided the day one of them walked through the door and abruptly collapsed. She supposed one way or another, death was inevitable, and in their case, closer than either of them would like.
Miranda was young and healthy, she was in her prime, she possessed, it seemed at times, more stamina than Andy, but the fact remained that the age gap between them was significant, and the chances of her going first were high. Most days, Andy didn't think about it, but every once in a while, the devastating notion crept into her awareness, terrifying her to the core. Right now, standing in a casket showroom, making arrangements to bury her father, surrounded by death, the thought of losing the love of her life was inescapable.
They didn't have a joint plot, they'd never made a will, and Andy didn't think she'd ever be able to face the day Miranda left her.
"I want you to write the eulogy," Kate's words punctured the silence, invading her thoughts.
Blinking, she looked up. "What?"
"I know Dad would have wanted you to." At Andy's incomprehensive stare, she added, "You're the writer in the family, you can do it."
"Mom, I write about corrupt politicians, not eulogies," Andy argued incredulously. She didn't bother pointing out that in her early days as a reporter, she had written obituaries, but then again, none of them had belonged to her loved ones. "You can't possibly expect me to write it."
"Why not?"
"I-I wouldn't even know what to say."
"About your father?" Kate gave her a challenging, raised-eyebrow look that silenced her, but then when she thought about it some more, she realized that she really didn't know what to say. The suddenness and surprise of the whole situation aside, how did you encapsulate someone's entire life in one short speech? How did you do it when that someone was one of the closest people to you? The best writer in the would couldn't achieve that feat, surely.
"Please, Andy," Kate softly pleaded. "It would mean a lot to your father." And the "I can't bring myself to do it" remained unspoken.
Andy opened her mouth to speak, took a breath, then looked down at the casket that would serve as her father's final, eternal resting place.
One last gift.
Dinner was a quiet affair. The dining table, which would normally be used upon guests' arrival to maintain appearances, had been left stranded and traded in for the small kitchen table--big enough to serve three people.
No grandiose meal had been prepared and none was desired, but Andy had whipped up a simple salad while Miranda sliced a loaf of bread and extracted various cheeses from the fridge, and fried three omelettes while the latter set the table. Now they sat beside each other while Kate occupied the head of the table, the clinking of the cutlery and the occasional chewing sounds filling the heavy atmosphere.
They didn't discuss the impending funeral or the missing dinner party, but when the meal was finished, Miranda quietly announced that she'd relocate to the living room to catch up on work and Kate insisted on washing the dishes before finally being convinced to leave them to Andy and admitting that she was, in fact, quite tired. It was apparent that whatever strong act she'd been putting up throughout the day was diminishing, and with its departure, the feeling of death, of lack of normalcy grew.
She accepted and returned a kiss from her daughter, bade Miranda a polite goodnight--evidently too drained, physically but mostly mentally, for their usual banter--and retired to bed.
"I'm going to make some calls," Miranda murmured when she'd left, laying a tender hand on the small of Andy's back while she placed a plate on the dish rack to dry. "Do you need anything?"
"I'm good." Andy smiled gratefully and pecked her lips.
Alone in the kitchen, she gazed out of the window: the sky was darkening, unlike its New York counterpart showing millions of tiny, white stars. Out on the suburban street, cars had emptied the narrow road, their drivers all returning to their respective homes, where yellow lights lit up the windows. As a kid, it had granted Andy a sense of serenity: she was part of a community. Now, she couldn't help feeling a tinge of resentment for all the families she'd grown up around having their merry dinners, lazying together in front of the television, resuming their normal lives while hers was crumbling.
At 1 A.M., for no apparent reason, Miranda woke up. It was a marvel how deadly silent Ohian nights were in comparison to New York ones. She lived in a quiet, prestigious neighborhood in the Upper East Side, yet it still was nothing like the stillness of the night in Cincinnati, which might have been the only thing Miranda liked about Cincinnati.
But if it wasn't noise that had woken her up, then what was it? Rolling on her side, her question was answered when she stretched an arm over her companion's body and it met nothing but air, ungracefully dropping to the cold sheet beneath.
Opening her eyes with effort, she flicked on the bedside lamp and squinted as the sudden, bright light intruded on the darkness, illuminating the bed and Andy's evident absence. She sat up and squinted at the en suite door, but where the small, frosted glass window at the top usually gave away the light within, it was dark now, adding to the mystery.
Abandoning the warmth of the bed, she donned her robe over her nightgown, padding her way out of the room and feeling for any obstacles in the pitch-black hallway. At the top of the stairs, a dim light finally shone her way, disclosing her partner's whereabouts.
"What are you doing here?" she questioned upon entering the kitchen, her low voice breaching the quiet of the night, her tired eyes straining against the overhead light.
From the kitchen table, Andy looked up, still clad in the day's outfit, her hair ruffled from what Miranda knew was her frustrated habit of repeatedly pushing it back from her face. The bangs she'd once liked were long gone, but recently Andy had cut her hair just below her shoulders and these days was wearing it in supple, golden brown waves that granted her a much more mature and elegant look that Miranda found herself attracted to even more. It wasn't quite so elegant now, after the long day they'd both had, and her red-rimmed eyes betrayed her exhaustion. Miranda took a seat opposite her.
"I've been trying to write this eulogy for the past..." Andy trailed off, looking up at the large wall clock above the fridge, and her eyes widened. "Oh, god, three hours." Before her, morbidly ironically, lay her father's legal pad, its yellow pages as empty as they'd been when she first sat down to commence writing. She didn't think she'd ever experienced a worse writer's block.
"Looks like you're making progress," Miranda commented.
Andy said, "I'm half-convinced this is my mom's way of getting back at me for stealing and losing her favorite necklace in middle school."
At the sound of Miranda's chuckle, she abandoned her pen and leaned back in her chair, pushing her hair back once more. "God," she breathed, "I can't believe this is really happening. I'm actually sitting in my parents' kitchen, trying to write my dad's eulogy."
Miranda studied her face for a moment, perhaps already gauging her reaction before asking the question, "Was it rough at the funeral home?"
"Rough..." Andy echoed, turning her gaze to the ceiling. It had been surreal. It had been grim and jarring. The picture of their selected casket appeared in her head unprompted, instantly accompanied by the mental image of her father, his pale, lifeless body lying stiffly in the confined space, dressed in a suit he would have probably hated, lowered into a place Andy would never be able to visit.
She hadn't seen him, couldn't conjure up an image where he was anything other than the healthy, lively person she'd known. In her mind's eye, he was sitting across from her, rectangle glasses perched almost on the tip of his nose, a slight, knowing smirk playing at his lips, as if he knew their imminent conversation would be laden with jokes. When she thought of it like that, she was glad they weren't going with an open casket; that was exactly how she wanted to remember him.
"I think we should purchase a burial plot when we go back home," she abruptly said, looking back at a startled Miranda.
"Excuse me?"
"A joint one, I mean. For both of us. Did you know how fast they get snagged up?"
"I... didn't give it much thought."
"We have to make plans," Andy stated passionately, pressing her index finger against the tabletop. "We have to be ready."
"Okay," Miranda immediately responded, albeit slightly placatingly. "I'll take care of it."
"Thank you," replied Andy, barely audible. Then she stretched her arms above her head, rubbed her face, and groaned, "God, this is a nightmare."
"Come to bed," Miranda suggested. There was a time and place to talk about death and future plans and grief, and it wasn't 1 in the morning in the Sachses' kitchen.
"No, I have to finish this first," Andy insisted, pulling the pad to her. "It's gonna be crazy tomorrow, I won't have time."
She knew as well as the next writer that forcing it, especially when she was so tired, would produce the opposite result, but she also knew that she couldn't go to sleep before she'd gotten it over with, before she'd released that iron lump lodged deep in her chest. And, mercifully, Miranda didn't argue. Instead, she got up, headed to the oven, and Andy watched curiously as she crouched and reached inside, pulling out a half-full bottle of Scotch.
Eyes wide, lips slowly stretching into a smile, Andy inquired, "How did you know my mom had a secret stash?"
"Trust me, every mother has a secret stash," Miranda deadpanned and proceeded toward the dish rack, where she plucked two of the yellow-tinted, floral glasses they'd drunk water from at dinner. As she sat back at the table, she added, "Plus, I caught her last Christmas."
Unable to stop a grin from spreading, Andy accepted a glass and waited for Miranda to pour two fingers of liquid into each one before holding it up in a silent toast.
They drank slowly, enjoying the strong maltiness as it scorched a path down their throats, settling warmly in their stomachs. "God, that's good," Andy sighed.
"Mhm," Miranda agreed, setting her glass on the table. Andy did the same with hers, turning it in place, watching the remaining, amber liquid slosh within its confinements.
The silence that settled over them wasn't exactly tense, but it wasn't comfortable either, the weight of the last couple of days, and of the ones to come, hanging, heavy, above them, casting its shadow on the dimly lit room. They sat quietly and they drank quietly and they didn't meet each other's eyes until Andy softly confessed, "I haven't cried yet." Miranda's gaze lifted from a crack in the table, but Andy didn't look back, finding a distant spot over her shoulder instead. "Not since I got the news."
"Do you want to cry?" Miranda tentatively asked.
"I feel like I should. It's what you do when someone dies, right?" Her eyes briefly clouded over before she blinked several times, grabbing her glass for another sip. When she'd put it down, she continued, "I think I'm still in shock. I think... I didn't get a chance to say goodbye. There wasn't some long, drawn-out illness, he didn't die of old age. When my grandma died, we knew it was coming. At some point, she couldn't even leave the bed anymore; my parents had to hire a live-in nurse to feed and bathe her. So when she did die... it was almost like a relief. This is... one moment he was here, and the next he wasn't. Who could have known?"
When Miranda responded, Andy hadn't realized that she'd finished speaking, thought fragments still warring in her head for a chance to be said, that it nearly came as a surprise. "It doesn't matter," she said quietly, playing with the sash of her robe. "Doesn't matter whether you had time to prepare or not, when you lose a parent, it still comes as a shock. There's no way to prepare for that."
Andy's thoughts screeched to a grinding halt. Although Miranda was no longer looking at her, she was transfixed, waiting avidly for the next words to come out of her mouth. "When my father died, I'd had months to prepare. It wasn't enough." Andy stopped breathing. And finally, their eyes met again and Miranda elaborated, answering the unasked question, "Lung cancer. He was a chain smoker, thought he was invincible." She chuckled bitterly. "In the end, he was the first of us to go."
"You never talk about your family," Andy whispered, afraid to break the spell. She'd always tried to push, as subtly as one pushed Miranda, but it was a well-known fact that Miranda didn't delve into that aspect of her past and that their relationship would have to learn to function without venturing there. Andy knew only enough to piece together a vague picture of the upbringing that had made Miranda Miranda--nothing traumatic per se, but nothing glamorous or, as was in her own case, warm either--but the details of the life she'd had before becoming Miranda Priestly remained an enigma, as was the woman herself, and Andy was hungry for every new puzzle piece.
"It's not something I like to remember," Miranda admitted. "I was the young one--that you already know--always made to feel guilty for leaving town, for wanting something better for myself. My sisters couldn't come to terms with the fact that I'd become more successful than them and they had to stay there and raise families--never mind that they chose to. Or, well, believed they had the choice," she conceded, waving her hand flippantly. "Of course, they never had a problem accepting my checks--my parents, too. Anyway..." she sighed, her whole body sagging with the motion. "Anyway, when the time came, guess who had to pull the plug."
"How did you do it?" Andy asked in a small, thready voice.
Miranda's gaze hardened even as it locked on hers. "Like everything else I do: because I had to. Didn't make it any easier, though," she acknowledged. "Turns out that no matter how much you hate your parents, they're still your parents. And it's impossible to say goodbye."
"I love my dad," whispered Andy, then closed her eyes. "Loved."
"I know."
"I feel..." she continued, and even as she was speaking it out loud, the realization was occurring to her for the first time, "I feel like by writing this eulogy, I'm sealing my relationship with him. Like I'm accepting his death."
"You're saying goodbye." Miranda nodded in understanding.
"Yeah."