Excerpt of How Sweet It Is by Sophie Gunn

CHAPTER ONE

For over a week the envelope sat on the dining room table
unnoticed, buried under a stack of bird-seed catalogues and
household bills like a bomb waiting to go off.

Life went on around it. Work, grocery shopping, and
housework for Lizzie Bea Carpenter. School, babysitting,
and friends for her fourteen-year-old daughter Paige.

Tick tick tick.

Normal life. A good life. Well, maybe not great, but fine.
Galton New York, centrally isolated the locals liked to say,
wasn’t exactly the kind of town where remarkable things
happened.

Until Saturday, September eighth, seven-twenty-two in the
evening, when Lizzie’s world turned upside down.

“Who do we know in Geneva?” Paige asked, coming into the
kitchen, holding up an envelope covered in foreign stamps.
It had been Paige’s turn to clean the dining room. She’d
swept the crumbs under the threadbare Turkish rug, pushed
around the rag-tag assortment of antique chairs until they
looked more-or-less orderly, and tossed most of the pile of
mail, including an ominous-looking letter from her middle
school, into the overflowing recycling bin with a quick,
guilty, second glance.

Lizzie turned off the faucet, put down the mac-and-cheese
pan she was scrubbing in the sink, saw the handwriting,
and said, “Ratbastard.” She backtracked quickly. “I mean,
Geneva? Ha! No one. Let me see that.” She grabbed for the
letter, but Paige was too quick.

“Who?” Paige tore the letter open while dodging around the
counter.

“Stop!”

“It’s addressed to both of us.”

Lizzie didn’t know that she knew anyone in all of Europe,
much less Geneva, but apparently she did because she had
recognized that handwriting at a glance, even after fourteen
years. Her traitorous body knew it too, and was responding
as if it were still sixteen and stupid. “Paige, no!”

But Paige was already reading the letter. She stopped,
frozen, on the other side of the counter. “Oh. I see,” she
said, letting the letter fall to the counter. “Ratbastard.”
She said it as if it were a first name like Steve or Joe.

Lizzie wiped her hands on the dishrag. “Well. He could have
changed,” she said as carefully as she could. “We shouldn’t
jump to any conclusions.”

“He wants to come here, Mom.”

Lizzie cleared her throat. “That’s lovely.”

“On Christmas Day.”

“Ratbastard! Sorry. Lovely. Hell.” Nice work. Lizzie needed
a few minutes to pull herself together. She needed to sit
and to breathe and definitely not to hit anything. Not now,
in front of Paige. At least, not anything that would break.
Lizzie looked around at her yellow and white 1950’s retro
kitchen. It was clean, but failing. Two burners were dead on
the stove. The icemaker had quit eleven months ago. The
radio worked when you banged it. Hard. Couldn’t do much
damage in here, even if she tried.

But Paige looked like she’d already been pummeled. Her face
was blank and pale. Her black, chin-length Cleopatra hair
made her face seem rounder and her brown eyes even huger
than usual. She looked like an eight-year-old and an
eighteen-year-old simultaneously, a special effect in a bad
after-school movie about girls growing up too fast.

Lizzie picked up the letter carefully and examined it. If the ratbastard had walked into a store and asked for the stationary that screamed I’m rich and arrogant the loudest, then this was what the clerk would have given him. The cream-colored paper was heavy and stamped with a fancy watermark. The handwriting was neat, the tone straightforward. He spelled realize like a Brit, even though he was born and bred in Michigan—I realise this is out of the blue. But I’d like meet my daughter. I’ll be in the states over the holidays, and will stop by then. Twelve o’clock Christmas day? I hope she’ll be willing to see me. There was no return address, no phone number, nothing but a breezy signature—Ethan Pond. Then in parentheses, Dad.

Lizzie excused herself, climbed the stairs, turned on the
water in the bathroom sink to muffle the noise, and threw
up.

Ethan Pond, Paige’s father, the boy who’d changed Lizzie’s
life forever in the back of his Lexus senior year of high
school, was coming back.

This was a matter for the Enemy Club.

******

(later in the book, a strange man appears on Lizzie's front step after she wishes for the perfect man--one who can show up, fix things, then disappear....)

“I heard you tell your friends that you wished a man would
show up once a week, fix things that needed fixing, then
disappear,” Tay said.

“I didn’t wish,” Lizzie began, then stumbled, then started
again. “I did. But I didn’t mean—“

“Sounded like a real wish to me.”

They stood on the path, looking at each other. Lizzie felt
as if she was being pulled in two. On the one hand, this man
was everything she had wished for. On the other, he was
possibly a serial killer. What kind of man shows up out of
nowhere to grant a stranger’s wish?

Then, there was something else. Something even more
disturbing. A nagging discomfort that started as an itch at
her palms, then bloomed into heat on her cheeks. She knew
that feeling so well, even if she hadn’t felt it in a long,
long time. Shame. “I don’t accept charity, even if in a
moment of weakness, I wished for it,” she said.

He nodded, as if he’d expected just this response. “I get
that. And I know this sounds strange, but this isn’t about
you. I happen to have some free time. I happen to be stuck
in this town for a little while. And, I happen to be pretty
decent with a screwdriver.” He wiped his hands on his jeans
and nodded at the fixed gate. Then Tay Giovanni gathered his
tools. He picked up the toolbox, and started down the
sidewalk toward a broken-down red pick-up truck parked at
the curb.

“Wait. Come back here, Mr. Giovanni.” She marched after him
to the truck.

He got in, ignoring her.

“Mr. Giovanni.” Lizzie leaned in through the lowered
passenger’s window. “If you’re being honest and you’re here
to grant my wish, which I don’t believe by the way, then I’m
sorry, but that’s too creepy for words. And if Jill or
Georgia or Nina sent you, you tell them it’s hilarious and
now back off. I don’t need or accept charity from anyone.
Not from you and especially not from them.”

He waited patiently as the truck sputtered reluctantly to
life. Once the motor had caught and had quieted to an
uncertain idle, he asked, “Why do you wish for what you
don’t want?”

She had no answer. She’d wished for a charity handyman when
she couldn’t abide charity. She’d wished for Paige to leave
for a happier life with her father when the last thing she
could survive in this world was her daughter leaving.

“Don’t come back,” she said firmly, desperate to hold her
ground.

“Now, how do I know if that’s what you want or just what
you’re saying?” he asked in such a friendly casual way, as
if they’d known each other forever, as if they had something
deep and important in common and had come to some kind of
agreement long ago that really didn’t bear further
discussion.

And then Tay Giovanni, whoever he was, drove away without
waiting for an answer.