A Happy Catastrophe Read online

  PRAISE FOR MADDIE DAWSON’S MATCHMAKING FOR BEGINNERS

  “A charming read . . . For fans of Liane Moriarty’s What Alice Forgot or Aimee Bender’s The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.”

  —Library Journal

  “A delightful, light-as-air romance that successfully straddles the line between sweet and smart without ever being silly . . . The novel is simply captivating from beginning to end.”

  —Associated Press

  “Matchmaking for Beginners is lovely from the inside out.”

  —HelloGiggles

  “Infused with the kind of magic so frequently lost as we become adults, this one-of-a-kind novel pushes the boundaries of coincidence and connection by asking us to believe in fate and, possibly, magic once again. The characters jump off the page with their quirky habits and capture hearts with their meaningful development and interactions, leading to moments that will bring readers to tears one minute and having them laughing out loud the next.”

  —RT Book Reviews (Top Rated)

  ALSO BY MADDIE DAWSON

  Matchmaking for Beginners

  The Survivor’s Guide to Family Happiness

  The Opposite of Maybe

  The Stuff That Never Happened

  Kissing Games of the World

  A Piece of Normal

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Maddie Dawson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542006460

  ISBN-10: 1542006465

  Cover design and illustration by David Drummond

  To Jimbo, for all the love and the laughter, forever and ever

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  MARNIE

  Patrick is late meeting me for dinner, which is good because it means I get a few minutes to sit by myself at our favorite table in the back of LaMont’s, where I can sip my merlot and practice how I’m going to ask him my big question.

  Patrick and I have been together for nearly four years, and I can talk to him about every little thought that might come into my head, but this—this is one of those questions, you see. Life-altering stuff. And Patrick is a man who has already had enough life-altering situations to last him a hundred years. He would prefer decades of some good old status quo.

  But . . . I just can’t.

  So I take a gulp of my wine and close my eyes. I left the flower shop early so I could rehearse. Luckily, this is Brooklyn, so people on the subway didn’t seem to notice that I was practicing out loud and enumerating talking points on my fingers.

  Here’s what I’ve got so far. “Patrick,” I will say, “I love you more than anything. You, my love, are the flap in my flapjack. The cream in the center of my Oreo cookie. The monster in my monster mash. And you are the horizon of all my longing.”

  Sappy? God, yes, although that part about the horizon of my longing might be considered poetic if I use the right tone of voice. If I’m lucky, he’ll laugh. And once he laughs, it’ll be easy. I’ll just blurt the question out, and then it will be done. Yes or no.

  “Yes or no, Patrick,” I’ll say. “Take all the time you like, my love, but please remember that I am already thirty-three years old, and that loud banging noise you hear—well, that thing is my heart.”

  For God’s sake, get a grip, Marnie.

  I smile, recognizing this voice in my head. It’s Blix—or not really her, since she’s dead and all, but it’s what she would say if she were here. I can squint and pretty much see her essence sitting across the table from me right this minute, all floaty and light, in her bright scarves and necklaces and long skirts, with her wild Einstein white hair sticking up everywhere, shaking her head and yelling at me to stop stressing about the question.

  Just lighten up! Trust in the goddamn universe for once, will you?

  Blix was always going on about the universe, and frankly, she and that universe of hers are what got me here. She was a one-of-a-kind matchmaking wizard, and she always said she knew two things from the moment she met me: I was a natural-born matchmaker, and also Patrick and I were meant to be together. (Never mind that I was engaged to be married to Blix’s grandnephew at the time; she and the universe already knew that relationship was a lost cause.)

  I wasn’t so sure I believed her. In fact, I was stunned when I found out soon after she died that she had left me her Brooklyn brownstone, having apparently decided that I, Marnie “Nobody Special” MacGraw, was the one to follow in her matchmaking footsteps and inherit her ongoing projects, as well as all the charming misfits she cultivated.

  I had no intention of actually doing anything that crazy. By then, I was divorced from her grandnephew, and I was back living with my parents in Florida, heartbroken and blindsided by life. After months of listlessly dating my ex-boyfriend from high school, I may have accidentally agreed to marry him. I had zero plans to become a matchmaker in—Brooklyn? Are you kidding me with this stuff? So I came here intending to sell the building and go back home . . . only it just so happened that there was this guy Patrick living in the basement apartment of that brownstone.

  And, well, Patrick turned out to be . . . my true home.

  Okay, if I’m being honest here, he was not the man I would have chosen. That’s when I learned that love doesn’t always come in the package we might expect. He’s a reclusive introvert, for one thing, and I’m always working out plans on how not to be alone. But he’s smart and funny and possibly the tiniest bit crazy in all the good ways, and he knows how furnaces work and also he senses exactly what to say when I’m feeling lost
or sad. He bakes the best pies from scratch, and he’s the only person I know who likes to have all his conversations about world events in the bathtub, and besides all that, he lets me eat the centers of all his Oreo cookies. From the very start, even when I was a big whiny pain who knew nothing whatsoever about city life, he took care of me and made me laugh. And I fell for him in a way I’d never known I could love anyone.

  Which just goes to show that we don’t know everything about ourselves, because this was definitely not the way I saw my life going, being the live-in girlfriend of a brooding but funny artist, and owning a flower shop where I did matchmaking on the side. By the age of thirty-three, I was supposed to be a suburban mom married to Blix’s handsome grandnephew, living next door to my parents and spending Saturday afternoons lolling around the pool with my sister while our husbands manned the barbecue pit and our kids napped in their strollers.

  The only big question I’d planned to be asking at age thirty-three was should we have potato salad as a side dish, or would corn on the cob be best.

  But you know what? Blix had some serious magic to her, and somehow she transferred that to me, and right now I hear her whispering in my ear, Oh, for heaven’s sake, Marnie, stop with this. You’re going to get everything you want. Just trust in the universe.

  So I’m sitting there practicing my speech when I get distracted because at the table next to me, a sweet-faced hipster in a plaid shirt and a fedora is being yelled at in a most entertaining way by a blonde-haired older woman dressed in white and gold. His mother, no doubt, since they have the same nose. Any person from around here could tell exactly what’s going on. A Florida mom has come to Brooklyn and has now had quite enough of us. And her unsuspecting son, not reading the signs, has gone all irresponsible on her and ordered himself some food, just as she’s planning to make her escape.

  And she’s furious. “If you think I’m going to be running through that damned airport because you had to eat something called a quail egg slider that no doubt takes thirty minutes to prepare, you’ve got another think coming!” she says. “I’m not putting up with any more of your thoughtlessness. I’ve called me an Uber, and I’m leaving. You will not be taking me to the airport.”

  Normally not having to take someone to the airport is like a huge, amazing gift. But the guy takes in this news with the glazed look of a man whose mom has been visiting for far too many days. He’s quietly mumbling that it’s four whole hours until her plane leaves and also, just as a point of information, quail egg sliders are quick to prepare.

  I am beaming over to him the message, You can make it, dude, we’re all here for you, when suddenly my hand jerks and knocks my glass of merlot into my lap, and red wine spreads everywhere, splashing the tablecloth, my skirt, the floor. As I’m standing up to escape it, the guy leaps into the air with the kind of alacrity a firefighter might display upon running into a burning building and hands me a fistful of napkins.

  “Oh, thank you,” I say. “That’s really very kind.”

  “Here. You might need more,” he says, now grabbing bundles of them.

  “No!” yells his scary mother. “Stop that, you’re spreading it. Here, I can fix this.”

  And then, in one quick motion, she stands up and tosses white wine all over the front of me. Like this is a real thing that civilized people do.

  I gasp and blink in surprise as it slowly occurs to me that the entire front of my body is freezing cold, soaking wet now with two kinds of wine.

  “OH MY HELL WHAT JUST HAPPENED,” says the guy.

  “White wine takes away red wine,” says his mother. “Believe me. She’ll thank me later.”

  “Mom!” he says. “You can’t go pouring wine on a stranger! How is it that you don’t know this?” He turns to me. “I am so sorry. Really! Please, Mom, sit down. You’re making things worse.” He’s grabbing for even more napkins. Soon he’ll be going from table to table taking them out of people’s laps, I’m afraid.

  “Oh, stop it, Graham. This will take the stain out,” she says, her eyes huge and insistent and maybe just a tad insane. “White takes out red. Everybody knows this.”

  He says to me in a low voice, “You might want to run to the restroom before she starts ordering whole pitchers of pinot grigio to drown you in.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” she says, laughing. “This son of mine! He always makes me out to be a lunatic, when he’s the one who can’t figure out how to be on time for dinner when he knows I have a plane to catch. Thanks to him, I can’t even finish my glass of wine because my Uber’s coming for me. Anyway, honey, your skirt already looks better.”

  “I’ll go to the ladies’ room and get the rest out,” I tell her, ducking in case she’s going to now start dousing me with other liquids she finds around the restaurant. “But thank you.”

  “No, no!” wails Graham. “Don’t thank her. We don’t want to encourage this.”

  “Why shouldn’t she thank me?” she says. “I did her a favor. And now kiss your old mother good-bye, you rapscallion, because I’ve got to go.”

  She holds his face between her two hands and kisses him, the loud, smacking kind of kisses, and then she turns to me. “Are you married, by any chance? Because this delinquent of mine is very available. Unfathomable, I know, but true.”

  I decide I like these two, just as Micah, the waiter, glides over with a fresh white tablecloth and some setups and a new glass of wine for me.

  “When Patrick gets here,” I say to him, “would you please tell him I’m in the restroom?”

  “Well, are you married?” the mother says.

  “She’s married to Patrick,” says Micah, and I can’t resist correcting him. Patrick and I are not exactly married, I explain, but we are committed, living together, here forever, all that.

  “It’s never forever until you get the ring,” warns the mom, and Graham rolls his eyes and picks up a huge suitcase she’d stored under the table, and begins ushering her out, his hand at the small of her back. She’s waving to all of us like a beauty queen on a parade float—and all I can think as I hurry to the restroom is that I hope he comes back.

  Because something momentous has just happened. There are sparkles forming in the air all around that guy, and I know what that means: he’s about to fall in love with somebody, and the reason I’m here is because the universe needs me to help things along.

  Sure enough, as soon as I get to scrubbing my skirt in the ladies’ room, a woman comes out of one of the stalls, and bingo! Right away I know she’s the one. The air shimmers around her, exactly the way it did around him.

  It happens like this with matchmaking sometimes. I’ve been doing this gig for more than four years now, and there are times when I’ll be on the subway or walking down the street, and I see two people who aren’t even looking in each other’s direction, and suddenly I know I have to engineer them into each other’s path. I’ve jumped out of coffee shop lines, redirected cab drivers, and embarrassed myself by racing across parks, leaping over small dogs and picnic blankets—all so I could accost strangers who were in danger of walking away and missing out on love.

  And it works. That’s the most amazing thing: the shimmers don’t lie.

  But this time! Oh my. This woman is tall and red-haired and, despite the sparkles twinkling around her, is sort of theatrically sad. I watch as she leans toward the mirror and sighs, like her face might be a disappointing used car she’s considering buying. I keep stopping my skirt-scrubbing to see what she’s deciding about herself. Is she going to buy this face or not?

  “Wow,” I say. “Would you look at my skirt! Can you believe this? I spilled red wine all over myself. How bad does it look? Is it really terrible?”

  She drags her eyes over to me. “It looks fine to me,” she says. Her voice sounds close to tears, which is a little bit of a setback for my plan for her. In the past, I’ve had to bring weeping people to meet the person they’re going to fall in love with, but I’m not going to lie: it’s a ha
rder path.

  “Funny thing,” I say. “I’m the one who spilled the red wine, but then a woman sitting at the next table stood up and threw her glass of white wine on the stain! Just tossed a whole glass on me, because she claimed that everybody knows white wine takes out red wine stains.”

  “Yeah, I think everybody might be a little crazy these days, don’t you?” she says sadly. “I’ve just been stood up by a guy who sent me thirty text messages telling me I’m the one for him, and then we make a date, and now he texted me that he changed his mind.”

  “What a jerk,” I say.

  “I even shaved my legs for this dude,” she says, “and now he’s texting me he’s not coming?”

  “Listen to me,” I say, all in a rush. “It’s awful, especially the leg-shaving part. And the texting part. Thirty texts is too many, a red flag, actually. But I have to tell you something. There’s a man out there in the restaurant right now, and I think he is going to be the love of your life. No, I know he is.”

  She blanches. As anyone would.

  “I think you should consider going out there and meeting him,” I say. “Your call, of course, but it might be something you’ll look back on and be happy about.”

  She stares at me for a minute like it’s now confirmed that I’m part of the conspiracy of crazies, and then she turns on the water and starts washing her hands. “How am I supposed to believe that you know who I’m looking for when you don’t even know one thing about me?”

  “I know. I’m just a woman in a public bathroom with wine all over her skirt. But don’t you believe that things can work out in mysterious ways? That everything is kind of just up to luck—like whether you get into a certain subway car where someone you need to meet is waiting, or whether you enter a shop and start talking to a stranger that you end up loving for the rest of your life?”

  “That has not happened to me,” she says with a bitter laugh.

  “It’s happening to you tonight,” I say. “Just go out there. He’s a very nice man in a very tasteful fedora with a little feather on it—I was sitting next to him. In fact, it was his mother who threw the white wine on my skirt, but now she’s gone and he’s eating all by himself.”