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Publication Date: August 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780778334415
Format: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Harlequin Trade Publishing / MIRA
Price: $18.99
1
It was hard and magnificent.
Faiga Kaplan, otherwise known as Faye to her friends, ran her hands down the long shaft of her latest clay creation. An earthenware vase—at least three feet in length and bearing a perfectly crafted slit for sunflowers at the top—lay on her studio table. Having been painted twice and forged through fire in her kiln, it was now ready for placement in her storefront window. All she had to do was get the heavy, hulking piece of pottery through the first floor of Magic Mud Pottery without breaking it.
Cautiously, she lifted the vase from the table. Peeking out from the sides, carefully managing her balance with each step, she creeped slowly past the tables and chairs of her studio, bumping over the threshold into the hallway, heading through the first floor. She was halfway through the old wooden building, by the center staircase, when she felt something mushy and wet beneath her left foot.
Faye didn’t need to look down.
She knew exactly what she had stepped in.
“Hillel.” Faye groaned, rolling her eyes to the ceiling.
Carefully, she put the vase down beside the staircase, turning her attention to inspect the damage now seeping through her pink sock.
“Hillel,” Faye called out again. “I’m serious. Get in here!”
Hillel, a hairless and toothless Chinese crested, peeked around the corner. Faye had adopted the pathetic-looking creature when he was ten years old. At the time, she had considered it a mitzvah, a good deed, in the wake of a dreadful breakup. She thought she could funnel all her love into this poor creature—a dog riddled with back acne and without a home—and he would adore her forever.
“I know you did this on purpose,” Faye said, lifting one foot up to display the mess.
Hillel twisted away from her, tail up, his tiny butthole pointed straight in her line of vision. She swore that dog could speak English.
She also knew that his constant accidents had nothing to do with tummy troubles. After all, Faye was a responsible pet owner. She had taken Hillel to the vet a dozen times, run every expensive test to see if there was something physically wrong with him, only to be told that the tiny monster was in perfectly good health. Indeed, the vet had promised her that Hillel would likely live another decade. No, he defecated all over her apartment for the same reason Stuart had called off their engagement. She was too much.
“Keep acting this way,” Faye warned, narrowing her eyes in his direction, “and I’ll send you to go live with Nelly. You can wear frilly doll dresses and be the guest of honor at her Second Glance Erotic Parties for the rest of your natural existence.”
Hillel strolled past her, unconcerned, before landing on a mess of blankets and pillow squares waiting for him by the storefront window.
Faye had made the tiny bed for Hillel there so he would be comfortable. She figured he could watch the people walking down Main Street, see the customers before they entered her store. It was also the sunniest, and therefore warmest, spot in her building, an absolute necessity for a dog without any fur. She did everything for Hillel. She gave him her best. Devoted her love, time, and energy to his well-being. And what did Hillel do in response?
Crap all over her.
The thought had crossed her mind more than once to return him to the shelter.
Faye never did, of course. No, as it turned out…no amount of snarling or defecating in high-traffic areas, or trying to bite her with his gummy, toothless mouth, would ever steer her heart away from the four-legged fur demon.
The reason being simple enough. She had made a promise to Hillel. She had stood outside Woodstock Animal Shelter, placed him safely in the front basket of her bike, and told him in she would care for him, and protect him—and never betray his love on a snowmobile in Lapland—until the bitter end.
Perhaps loving someone to the bitter end had always been her downfall.
Her mind wandered to her ex-fiancé, Stuart, when most applicably her nose wrinkled. The scent of dog feces was beginning to take up residence.
Faye hobbled on one foot up the stairs to the second floor. Finding her way to the bathtub, she set about cleaning up her foot.
For the last three years, Faye had been the sole proprietor of Magic Mud Pottery. She lived above her store and studio in a quaint one-bedroom apartment.
Magic Mud Pottery was one of a handful of quirky old buildings made of wood and painted in bright colors that dotted the bucolic downtown of Woodstock, New York. Set between large trees, and dotted by pride flags and double-hung windows, it was the type of town that, no matter the season, smelled like burning wood and cinnamon.
Her apartment was small, but as a single woman, she didn’t need much space. Plus, she had gotten an amazing price. On the second floor, a cozy bedroom sat towards the back of the building, overlooking a fenced-in yard and garden. In the front, a tiny living room was divided from a half kitchen by a counter. A bathroom rested in between.
As an old building, the layout—but especially the kitchen— was all types of weird. While the oven, stove, and sink were on the second floor, the refrigerator was too tall for the upstairs kitchen alcove. And so it sat downstairs, right behind the front counter, where Faye often rang up customers.
At first, it was a problem. Especially at night, as Faye often liked to sneak downstairs in nothing but her skivvies and have a late-night snack. But Faye quickly realized that most everyone who owned a business in downtown Woodstock lived elsewhere, and so, even though she had invested in curtains, she never bothered to use them.
Beyond all these things, she liked the quirkiness of the building. The fact it was strange and unusual. It reminded her of an apartment she had lived in on the Lower East Side while a young lawyer in Manhattan, with a shower in the kitchen and a bathroom outside the apartment, just down the hall.
Faye was finishing cleaning up when the bell above the front door to Magic Mud Pottery rang out.
“Faiga,” a voice called out moments later.
She recognized the voice as belonging to Nelly, who owned the building next door, where she ran the business Second Glance Treasures.
It was a gentle, lovely name for a store that was essentially extra storage space for a woman who had taken the hobby of hoarding to a professional capacity. Perhaps Faye was being too hard on the eccentric octogenarian. But No-Filter Nelly—as Faye sometimes called her behind her back—was a frequent, though not always welcome, visitor.
“One moment,” Faye called out.
Quickly, she finished drying off her foot. Spraying down her bathtub and the floor, she popped downstairs. Nelly was standing by the storefront window, arms crossed, her entire forehead wrinkling in displeasure.
“It smells like a porta-potty in here.” Nelly grimaced.
Faye huffed. “Hillel had an accident again.”
“Again?” Nelly looked towards the dog. “Maybe you should take him to the vet.” “I’ve taken him to the vet,” Faye reminded her for the ten thousandth time. Grabbing a towel and some pet odor remover, she bent down to the floor and began cleaning up his mess.
“Can I help you with something, Nelly?”
“I was wondering if you’re going to Single in the Sukkah tonight?” she asked.
“I’m not planning on it.”
“Why not?” Nelly said, following her. She always followed her. “Only twenty-four dollars a participant. For a good cause. Plus, you might meet someone.”
Faye tossed the turd in the trash. “I’m not interested in meeting anyone right now.”
“Why not?”
Faye slammed the lid shut. “You know the reason.” “Because you were dumped by your fiancé of seven years after a snowmobile accident in Lapland?”
Faye had first met Stuart Wutz during law school. After a seven-year engagement, the two-week escapade she had painstakingly planned to Lapland was supposed to be a pre-wedding getaway, a chance for them to have some fun before planning for their wedding, three months away, moved into hyperdrive.
Instead, everything about the trip had been a disaster.
Stuart complained constantly. About the cold. About the food. About his hemorrhoids. He nearly caused an international incident when he found out the hamburger he was eating was made of reindeer meat. But it wasn’t until that fateful snowmobile ride—when Stuart skidded out on a slick of ice, crashing into a snowy embankment—that their decade-long relationship came to an official end. Bringing her vehicle safely to a stop beside him, racing to check that he was okay, she was shocked when Stuart had stood up and lobbed his own attack.
You’re too much, Faye. Everything you do, everything you are… it’s just too much. No wonder your own mother couldn’t stand you.
The wedding was off. Faye was thirty-one years old, and having given Stuart the best years of her life—the best of her reproductive years, too—back to being single. It was more than betrayal. It was more than a hurt. It was an avalanche of pain that she had barely escaped from. And yet, she couldn’t completely blame Stuart for what had happened. He was simply a trigger point in a snowslip that had been building since her youth.
“So, you had one bad experience,” Nelly said.
“Not just one,” Faye grumbled.
“So, you had multiple bad experiences,” Nelly said, unfazed. “Lots of people hurt and disappointed you. Because of this, you give up on love forever?”
Faye spun around. “I don’t need a mother, Nelly!”
Her words pierced the air and turned into ice. “Everyone needs a mother,” Nelly said, simply.
Faye scoffed, hardening herself against the admission. Against the confession. She had already had a mother in her life, and she sucked. Some nights, she could still feel the pain in her wrist—in her fingers—from where her mom had permanently disabled her.
Faye twisted away from Nelly. “If you’re done pestering me about—”
Nelly cut her off. “So come for the synagogue. They always need money.”
“How about I just write them a check and spend the night reading a book and eating hard kosher salami by myself?”
Nelly grimaced. “This is fun for you?”
“Yes, Nelly.” Faye threw her hands up, exasperated. “This is fun for me. Because I like being alone. More important, I’m better alone. I have no interest in meeting a man, starting a romantic relationship, or getting married. Going to a Singles in the Sukkah event would be the equivalent of false advertising.”
Faye made her way back through her pottery studio. Picking up her vase, she turned to place it in her storefront window. And that was when she saw it. The vase she had thought was perfect…had a tiny bubble at the bottom.
“Haman’s hat,” Faye huffed. She tried not to use curse words.
“What’s wrong?” Nelly asked.
Faye shook her head. “I must have missed an air bubble before drying.”
Clay held memory. If you did something wrong at any part of the process, it would be reflected in the final work. A fingerprint at the edge. A lip all misshapen and wonky. A warp or scratch in the otherwise smooth facade, or worse…the entire thing exploding, shattering completely, when placed into the kiln for firing. Clay, contrary to popular belief, was not an easy material to work with.
“I’m just gonna throw it out,” Faye said, attempting to move it out of her window.
“Wha!” Nelly stopped her with both hands. “Why would you throw this out? You’ve already spent time to make it.”
“Because it’s awful,” Faye snapped back. “No one is going to want a vase with a bubble sticking out of it!” And because looking at that bubble was a constant reminder of all the things her mother had stolen from her.
Faye was only seventeen years old when it happened. When her mother—in another one of her random and totally unjustified rages—woke her up from a sound sleep because she had accidently left clay out on the kitchen table. Grabbing Faye by the wrist and pulling her out of bed, she dragged her down the hall to clean up the supposed mess. Faye could still recall the sensation of her hand being twisted the wrong way, the sound of it snapping as the bone broke. But most of all, she remembered screaming for her father to help her.
The abuse Faye had endured as a child changed her. She lost the scholarship to a prestigious art school in Manhattan where she was planning to study ceramics. She became wholly focused on protecting herself, remaining independent… Changing paths, she became a lawyer instead. And when she met Stuart, she thought she had found the safe, unconditional type of love that she read about in her romance novels.
Instead, her clay memory bubbled up and formed blisters all over their love. She became someone unrecognizable. Desperate to keep Stuart happy—desperate to prove she was someone loveable and worthwhile—she lost herself completely. The break up had been hard, but when she looked at her life now, at Woodstock and Magic Mud Pottery, she was grateful. What life had taught her, most of all, was that she had to protect herself.
Excerpted from MAGICAL MEET CUTE by Jean Meltzer, Copyright © 2024 by Jean Meltzer. Published by MIRA.
JEAN MELTZER studied dramatic writing at NYU Tisch and has earned numerous awards for her work in television, including a daytime Emmy. She spent five years in rabbinical school before her chronic illness forced her to withdraw, and her father told her she should write a book? just not a Jewish one because no one reads those.
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