Sophie Gunn
Author Book List

Life in the small town of Galton, New York sure is sweet. At least it was until single mom and diner waitress Lizzie Bea Carpenter gets a letter from her first-ever love. He's coming back to town Christmas day to meet Lizzie's daughter, the child he abandoned way back when.

Lizzie needs now more than ever to protect her daughter, and herself, from men who show up out of the blue, promising to grant a girl's every desire. So when a sexy, mysterious stranger appears because he overheard her wish for a free handyman, she wants him gone.

Now.

At least, the smart part of her does. The other part starts to wonder if he's the only man who can help her face her past, and get back to sampling the sweetest things in life.

Excerpt

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.

A charming story of love, forgiveness, and redemption.

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