How Sweet It is

by Sophie Gunn

  The cabins across from her were also picture-perfect. She was jealous of people who lived on the lake. They didn’t have to worry about nosy neighbors caring about their lawns getting overgrown. Some of the cabins on the other shore were so hidden, she could only see a roof or maybe a few windows. Others were open to the shore, a view over the lake their main purpose.

  A man was on a deck of one of them—

  No.

  The man on the deck was Tay.

  Lizzie felt a surge of excitement pulse through her veins that she refused to acknowledge. Seeing Tay meant nothing, a coincidence. He was a nuisance, that was all. She had no interest in him whatsoever. But when she realized there was no way she could make herself lower the binoculars and look back at her date, she knew she was in trouble.

  “See something?” Scott asked.

  “I’m not sure,” she said. She adjusted the focus.

  Tay had the cat on his lap and he stroked it slowly while he stared out over the water. She could never date a man with a cat, so she ought to just stop staring right now.

  But she couldn’t stop. His face looked tense, despite the lovely scene, as if whatever he was looking at was a million miles away.

  She scanned for the dog, and sure enough, he was by the door to the cottage, panting and wet, as if he’d just jumped into the lake for a swim despite the freezing water. The yellow tennis ball was between his paws.

  Stupid dog.

  Stupid her.

  Because she was waiting for the beautiful woman she was sure would come out of his house.

  And she was already jealous.

  But no woman came.

  She felt a rush of hope.

  “What is it? You look like you spotted something interesting,” Scott insisted.

  It was hard, but she lowered the binoculars. “I thought it was something interesting, but it’s just a common—” She paused. What was Tay? She thought of all the birds she loved and the ones she hated. She wanted to describe Tay as a pushy pest, a bird who came to other birds’ nests and had to be chased away. A bluebird, maybe. That was a beautiful, but pushy, obnoxious bird. But instead she said, “He’s a catbird.”

  “He?” Scott asked.

  “A male catbird. I can tell from the coloring.” She felt her face blush. “It’s nothing special. They’re all over the place.”

  But that wasn’t true. She’d never met anyone quite like Tay. Someone who said so little, but said exactly what he wanted to say, did exactly what he wanted to do, even if it was so clearly unwanted. And looked so good saying and doing it…

  Don’t do it, don’t do it…

  But she did it.

  She raised her binoculars again.

  He’d fallen asleep in his chair, his feet still up on the rail in front of him, his arms crossed over his chest, the cat still on his lap. His chin had dropped to his chest, his hair had flopped forward. She could see the gentle rise and fall of his chest. He started to tip to the side, ever so slightly. Then a little more. Then, gravity took over and he went halfway to the deck before he caught himself, startling awake, looking around as if he had no idea where he was.

  Lizzie couldn’t help but smile. He was adorable.

  “What are you watching?” Scott asked again.

  She shoved the binoculars into her bag. “Catbirds can be ridiculous,” she said, making no sense at all.

  Scott bit into his burger. “Funny name for a bird.”

  “Yeah. It’s their song. They mimic, so sometimes, their song sounds like a cat’s meow.”

  The cat’s meow…

  She forbade herself to pick up the glasses again.

  “Huh. And I always thought cats and birds were enemies,” he said.

  “They are,” she reminded herself. “Well, when life makes sense they are.” She looked down at the salad she had no intention of eating.

  Nothing made sense to her. Not her wishes, not her feelings for this odd man, not anything.

  What did she want from Tay and his imperturbable cat?

  CHAPTER

  13

  The next morning at the diner, Lizzie watched the chrome 1950s clock over the counter count down the seconds until seven o’clock. Ten, nine, eight, seven…

  As the red second hand swept over the twelve, Jill strode past the plate-glass door, her blonde ponytail wagging behind her. Right behind Jill came Georgia in the ugliest tweed suit Lizzie had seen yet. Before Lizzie could bring the coffee, Nina joined them, a flush of autumn colors, natural fibers, and glowing good health.

  The Enemy Club was officially back in session.

  “Okay, I’ve got a bone to pick with one of you,” Lizzie began once they had gotten through the small talk of their week.

  “I’ve got fifteen minutes till a meeting with a new professor moving in from Manhattan,” Jill said as she adjusted her bottom on the cherry-red vinyl stool as if it were her throne. She pulled her ponytail even tighter.

  Georgia checked her watch. “I have a new patient in twenty.” She was Galton’s preeminent psychiatrist. Actually, she was Galton’s only psychiatrist. “An interesting case, finally. I am so sick of these overindulged, bratty children who think a problem is when Mummy takes the Mercedes away. This one might be the real deal.” She checked her watch again, practically crackling with anticipation.

  “So nice for you that the genuinely mentally ill are finally back in town!” Lizzie said.

  Nina carefully draped herself and her flowing skirt over her stool. She looked like a fairy, her delicate features dotting her broad face. Her freckles looked backlit from inside. “I have all day. Take your time, Liz. What’s wrong? You don’t look yourself today. You look, well, rosy.”

  “Thank you.” Lizzie filled everyone’s coffee mugs, except for Jill, who as usual, refused the diner coffee and brought in a skinny mocha latte from across the street. Lizzie tried not to notice how good it smelled.

  “You do look different,” Jill said.

  “Happy,” Georgia pointed out.

  They all stared at her expectantly. She lowered her voice and they all leaned forward as one. “Okay, which one of you sent him?”

  They stared at her blankly.

  Lizzie studied their faces for signs of deceit, but there was only rabid curiosity.

  Then Jill’s eyebrows rose and her mouth opened and she said, “Oh, my God. This is about that man who fixed your gate!”

  “I knew it was you,” Lizzie accused.

  “No. Not me. Judy Roth told Eleanor Platz who told me all about it at the Food Emporium. She gave me a blow-by-blow last night.” Jill smiled knowingly. “Eleanor said, Lizzie is finally fixing up her house! And the man doing it is quite the looker!” Jill paused, waiting for confirmation.

  Lizzie shrugged noncommittally. “He’s all-right-looking.”

  “I knew something was up, because you’re way too cheap to hire someone to fix up your place,” Jill finished.

  Nina kicked Jill under the counter.

  “Ouch.”

  “It’s okay,” Lizzie said. “It’s true. I am too cheap because Paige’s education is more important. I’m going to fix the place up myself. I’ve already decided. But listen, this isn’t funny. It’s odd. Remember that conversation we had in here? When we were talking about the perfect guy?”

  “The universe hates me,” Jill groused. “Mine didn’t show.”

  “Yeah, well, mine did,” Lizzie said.

  That got their attention.

  “The Lizzie Carpenter dream man? Wham-whirr-thanks-for-installing-my-hot-tub-sir!” Georgia downed her entire cup of coffee and held out her mug for more. “Another skinny mocha latte caramel frappe, please.”

  “Coming up,” Lizzie said, filling her mug with plain black coffee. “Would you like a sprinkle of cinnamon on that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad.”

  Jill rolled her eyes. “You’re all just jealous that I’m the only honest one here who refuses that battery acid she calls
coffee.”

  Lizzie got back to business. “So, really, you swear that none of you sent him?”

  “Why would we do that?” Georgia asked, confused.

  “We’re not that kind of friends,” Jill reminded her.

  “Thank God,” Nina said. “I’d kill you guys if you sent me a—” She paused. She was living in her brother’s house, as he was away in the army for another year. The place was in pretty decent shape.

  “It would be like me sending you a personal stylist to get you out of the sixties,” Jill said.

  “Or me getting you a few sessions with a good therapist who could help you through your passive aggression problem,” Georgia said.

  “I don’t have a passive aggression problem,” Nina said.

  “Yes you do. No one is as nice as you are.” Georgia checked her watch.

  Nina sighed. “It would be like me making you guys come to my yoga classes. But I won’t, because I accept you all the way you are.”

  “See, that was passive aggression!” Georgia cried. She loved being right. Just like when they were back in school, it made her bounce up and down with excitement. “She just called us all fat and lazy.”

  “I did not!” Nina protested. “I offered to give you a wonderful gift and you, the cynic, turned it around.”

  While they goofed around about what they’d all send one another if they were going to indulge in fixing one another’s lives, an uneasy weight deep in Lizzie’s stomach was starting to form. None of them had sent Tay. She could see it in their faces.

  Finally, they noticed her stillness, and focused back on Lizzie.

  “Ask the world for what you want, and you get it,” Nina proclaimed. “Positive Thinking 101. We must recognize our dreams in order to achieve them.” She was smiling as if she’d created Tay with fairy dust.

  “Then I should get my pec man,” Jill said, her tone petulant.

  “Tell us the details,” Georgia insisted.

  “Some guy named Dante Giovanni was in the diner when we were talking and he said he overheard us. He fixed my gate latch. And my light.” She explained how Tay had refused to take no for an answer. “I told him not to come back, but he doesn’t listen.”

  “I want a man with decent pecs!” Jill shouted, her arms opened wide. She looked around at the near-empty diner. Deaf old Mr. Ruderson smiled and waved at her from his booth, a spot of ketchup on his unshaved chin. Mr. Zinelli opened his arms wide. Jill winked at them both, then turned back to her coffee. “Shoot. You always get the guy, Lizzie.”

  “When have I ever gotten the guy?” Lizzie asked. “You were the biggest prude at Galton High, and still the boys followed you like you were Madonna.”

  Jill said, “They followed me because I didn’t put out, unlike some of us.”

  Nina shot Jill a look, and to Lizzie’s surprise, Jill blushed and looked down at her shoes.

  But Lizzie didn’t have time to think about it, as the conversation, as usual, was speeding ahead.

  “Send your handyman my way next,” Georgia said. “I have two cords of firewood coming tomorrow and I need to get it stacked.”

  “So if this guy just showed up to fix stuff for no reason, how creepy is that?” Lizzie said. Her skin had gone clammy. He had been telling the truth.

  “He’s not there for no reason. He’s a man. He wants sex,” Georgia said. “Call the cops.”

  “You’re awfully sex-obsessed for a woman who never gets any,” Jill pointed out to Georgia. “Sometimes a screwdriver is just a screwdriver, Doctor.”

  Georgia rolled her eyes. “You’re a walking contradiction, Jill. You dress as if you understand men, but then you talk as if you’re innocent. Lizzie has to protect herself—and her daughter.”

  “Shhh, you two! This is about Lizzie. So what’d you do?” Nina asked breathlessly.

  “I told him to leave. But he wouldn’t. And then he came back the next day, so I called Tommy.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. And Tommy said he was a nice guy and I should be nice to him.”

  “You’re holding back,” Jill said. “What aren’t you telling us?”

  Nina cocked her head. “She is.”

  Georgia agreed. “Tell us everything. Enemy Club rules.”

  Lizzie sighed. “Okay. I’m thinking of making some kind of deal with him. If you guys didn’t send him, then I need to pay him back.”

  Nina smiled. “I’m so glad you’re going to let him stay!”

  “I’m not going to let him stay. I’m going to fix the place myself with his occasional expertise.”

  Jill studied Lizzie closely. “How gorgeous is he?”

  Lizzie shrugged. “On a scale of one to ten?”

  They waited.

  “Eleven and a half.”

  “Oh, Lizzie! How wonderful!” Georgia gushed as if she were Lizzie’s mother hearing about a doctor millionaire, not a strange man who lurked around at night, fixing things. “You’ve been so stuck. Same house, same job, same fears. You’re coming loose. Getting ready for the next step: letting go of Paige and getting a new man.”

  Lizzie shook her head. “No, no, no! I’m not going to date him in exchange for his handiwork. I’m going to—” To what? She had no idea how she could ever pay him back.

  Nina said, “There’s something else you’re not telling us.”

  “He reminds me of Ethan,” Lizzie admitted.

  “So what? Ethan was hot,” Jill said, then she blushed.

  Jill and Nina exchanged glances again. What was up with that?

  Lizzie didn’t want to pursue that odd blush. Jill had been acting weird ever since she’d told them Ethan was coming back. But the conversation was already going a million different directions, and she had to keep it on track. “I don’t want to teach Paige that men can fix everything. I made a deal with myself that I’d fix the place. So if he’s going to lend a hand here and there, I have to offer him something that Paige can see and understand. Something noble. I can never, ever, ever date him. What would that mean to Paige?”

  “That you’re dating a kind, helpful man, opening your heart to him?” Nina suggested. She always saw the good side of people.

  Georgia leaned down to get a notebook out of her briefcase, almost toppling off her stool in the process. She righted herself and said, “Look, you’ve consciously and subconsciously linked this man to Ethan, which is very astute. Your fantasy is still alive of the knight in shining armor coming to rescue you from Galton, but you know it’s wrong to act on that fantasy—especially with Paige watching at this crucial time in her life. So hold firm! You’re doing the right thing by either making things even or kicking him out. Plus, you understand that you can’t have a relationship with him. Good girl! I’m very proud. It’s a very rational solution.”

  “But Lizzie did the ‘wrong,’ crazy, irrational thing last time she was faced with a hero,” Nina pointed out. “And that turned out okay in the end, right? I mean, Ethan split, but Paige is a beautiful, sweet, brilliant girl. There was no right or wrong thing to do. In a lot of ways, she’s better off than the rest of us because she acted on her love.”

  Lizzie wanted to hug Nina for saying that, but she only let out a tiny smile, because she didn’t want to say that she did feel blessed with Paige when none of them had what she had.

  Nina went on. “So she should do what feels right. That’s what Lizzie does, it’s who she is. She doesn’t make sense—and that’s fine. It’s ridiculous to take such an intellectual stand on an emotional situation.”

  Georgia rolled her eyes and kept scribbling.

  Lizzie tried to peer at Georgia’s pad, but she covered it up. “Are you taking notes on me?” she asked.

  “Nina’s right. Forget the Georgia Phillips psychobabble,” Jill said. “She doesn’t make any sense at all. If Lizzie’s hot for the guy, she should date him. He’s cute, right? Who cares if he’s also handy with the screwdriver? Get your white-knight-on-a-horse complex out of your system with this guy, hon, s
o when Ethan comes, you’re not panting and dry-humping the couch after fourteen barren years.” She pretended to be taking notes on a napkin, then held up a cartoony picture of a guy with enormous muscles surrounded by hearts. “Here’s my notes.”

  “I’ve had dates,” Lizzie insisted. She threw the napkin in the trash.

  “Bad ones,” they all said.

  “Well, at least I’ve had some dates,” Lizzie insisted. “It’s not like I’ve been celibate.”

  “Bad dates,” they all chorused.

  “Can we forget the past, please, and focus on the future?” Lizzie begged. She didn’t want to rehash her dating failures.

  “Hold firm!” Georgia said. “You fix the place with his occasional help, only if he accepts equal payment.”

  Nina leaned forward. She was wearing long beads that fell onto the counter with a patter like rain. “You wished for this guy for a reason, Liz. And he came because the universe was listening.” Nina twirled her beads around her finger. “It’s fate, Lizzie. There’s nothing you can do but accept it. Open your heart to him—”

  “Or at least your legs,” Jill said.

  Mr. Zinelli, who had been listening in on the entire conversation, choked on his chocolate doughnut.

  Lizzie poured him more coffee, and he nodded thankfully.

  “I believe our work here is done,” Jill said. “Two-to-one, date the handyman. You pick your reason.”

  “Or maybe two-to-two,” Georgia said. “We haven’t heard your decision, Liz.”

  “It’s even,” Lizzie said. “I’m with Georgia. I’m going to fix the place myself and find a less complicated man to date. Anyway, Tay hasn’t shown up for two days. Maybe it’s all moot and I’ll never see him again.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  Three nights later, Jill came by the diner at dinnertime. “No time to talk love,” she said. “Just wanted to make sure you saw this.” She tossed a copy of the Galton Daily onto the service counter by the water pitchers, folded back to the third page. “Enjoy!”