Matchmaking for Beginners Read online

  PRAISE FOR MADDIE DAWSON

  “Dawson (The Opposite of Maybe, 2014, etc.) is a generous storyteller, creating characters who are both complex and unexpected while being wholly relatable.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “In this heartfelt novel, Dawson (The Opposite of Maybe, 2014) weaves together the stories of three very different women who are bound by blood, delving deeply into the true meaning of family.”

  —Booklist

  “In Nina, Dawson (The Opposite of Maybe) introduces a lovable, flawed character challenged by day-to-day life and searching for love and a feeling of belonging . . . Nina is delightful and spirited, and her engaging, charming story illustrates the humor and quirkiness of life.”

  —Library Journal

  “Engaging writing and compelling characters seize readers from the first chapter of Dawson’s latest novel. The examination of family—in all its forms and fashions—makes this an ideal book club read.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Maddie Dawson writes a charming story about family in her new novel, The Survivor’s Guide to Family Happiness . . . an endearing story of love and loss.”

  —Associated Press

  “Maddie Dawson has been a longtime favorite writer of mine because she has the gift of tapping into the emotions and complexities of a woman’s heart and effortlessly combining tension with joy. She’s done it again with The Survivor’s Guide to Family Happiness. Put it on your list of not-to-be-missed fiction.”

  —Marybeth Mayhew Whalen, cofounder of She Reads and author of The Things We Wish Were True and When We Were Worthy

  “Like authors Liane Moriarty and JoJo Moyes, Maddie Dawson is one of those gifted writers who spins seemingly comic, romantic tales that tackle our most universal longings for love, connection, and family. In her newest book, she delivers the story of two sisters given up for adoption. Their journey to discover each other and the mother who gave them up is by turns heart-wrenching and laugh-out-loud hilarious. I loved every witty sentence.”

  —Holly Robinson, author of Chance Harbor and Beach Plum Island

  “Maddie Dawson has done it again. Witty, warm, and full of insights into life’s maddening complexities, her novels should come with a warning label: May cause tears, laughter, or all of the above.”

  —Sarah Knight, bestselling author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck

  ALSO BY MADDIE DAWSON

  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 © 2018 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: 9781503900684 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503900681 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503901209 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503901203 (paperback)

  Cover design by David Drummond

  First edition

  CONTENTS

  ONE BLIX

  TWO MARNIE

  THREE MARNIE

  FOUR MARNIE

  FIVE BLIX

  SIX MARNIE

  SEVEN MARNIE

  EIGHT BLIX

  NINE MARNIE

  TEN MARNIE

  ELEVEN MARNIE

  TWELVE MARNIE

  THIRTEEN BLIX

  FOURTEEN MARNIE

  FIFTEEN BLIX

  SIXTEEN MARNIE

  SEVENTEEN BLIX

  EIGHTEEN MARNIE

  NINETEEN MARNIE

  TWENTY MARNIE

  TWENTY-ONE MARNIE

  TWENTY-TWO MARNIE

  TWENTY-THREE MARNIE

  TWENTY-FOUR MARNIE

  TWENTY-FIVE BLIX

  TWENTY-SIX MARNIE

  TWENTY-SEVEN MARNIE

  TWENTY-EIGHT MARNIE

  TWENTY-NINE MARNIE

  THIRTY MARNIE

  THIRTY-ONE MARNIE

  THIRTY-TWO MARNIE

  THIRTY-THREE MARNIE

  THIRTY-FOUR MARNIE

  THIRTY-FIVE MARNIE

  THIRTY-SIX MARNIE

  THIRTY-SEVEN MARNIE

  THIRTY-EIGHT MARNIE

  THIRTY-NINE MARNIE

  FORTY MARNIE

  FORTY-ONE MARNIE

  FORTY-TWO MARNIE

  FORTY-THREE MARNIE

  FORTY-FOUR MARNIE

  FORTY-FIVE MARNIE

  FORTY-SIX MARNIE

  FORTY-SEVEN MARNIE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  BLIX

  I shouldn’t have come, and that’s the truth of it. It’s not even five o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m already fantasizing about a swift, painless coma. Something dramatic, involving a nice collapse to the floor, with my eyes rolling back in their sockets and my limbs shaking.

  It’s my niece’s annual post-Christmas tea, you see, when people who are barely crawling out from underneath weeks of holiday shopping, parties, and hangovers find themselves required by Wendy Spinnaker to don their red sweaters and pleated slacks one more time and go stand for hours in her living room so they can admire her expensive Christmas decorations and her refurbished mansion and drink a ridiculous red cocktail that a high school student in a waitress uniform delivers on a tray.

  As near as I can tell, the purpose of this gathering is simply so my niece can remind the good people of Fairlane, Virginia, that she is a Very Important Person, and wealthy besides—a force to be reckoned with. A giver to charity. A chairwoman of most things. I can’t keep track of it all, to tell you the truth.

  I’m tempted to stand up and ask for a show of hands. How many of y’all have souls that have withered in just the last few hours? How many would like to join me in a conga line right out the front door? I know I’d have some takers. My niece would also have me murdered in my bed.

  I live far away, and I’m old as dirt, so I wouldn’t have even come to this thing—most years I have enough sense to avoid it—but Houndy said I had to. He said I’d regret not seeing the family for the last time if I didn’t. Houndy worries about things like deathbed regrets. I think he imagines the end of life like the finish of a satisfying novel: something that should be wrapped up with a nice bow, all the sins forgiven. Like that would ever happen.

  “I’ll go,” I said to him finally, “but I am not telling them I’m sick.”

  “They’ll know when they look at you,” he said. And then of course they didn’t.

  Worse, this year would be the time when my grandnephew, Noah, has just gotten himself engaged, and so the party has stretched on into infinity because we’re all waiting for him and his fiancée to arrive from California so she can be shown the high society she is marrying into.

  “She’s just some flibbertigibbet he met at a conference, and somehow she figured out how to snag him,” Wendy told me over the phone. “Probably doesn’t have a functioning brain cell in her head. A nursery school aide, if you can stand it. Family isn’t anybody to speak of—the father’s in insurance, and the
mother doesn’t do anything for anybody, as near as I can tell. They’re from Flah-rida. That’s how she says it. Flah-rida.”

  I was still processing the word flibbertigibbet and wondering what that might mean in Wendy’s universe. No doubt I’d be described as something equally dismissive. I’m still considered the family misfit, you see, the one who has to be carefully watched. Blix the Outrage. They hate that I took my inheritance and moved to Brooklyn—which anyone knows is unacceptable, populated, as it is, by Northerners.

  I look around this room in the house that was once our family homestead, passed down through the generations from favorite daughter to favorite daughter (missing me, of course), and it takes everything I can muster to block all the negative energy that slithers along the baseboards. The ten-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree with its glass Christopher Radko ornaments and the twinkling fairy lights is trying to insist that everything here is just dandy, thank you very much, but I know better.

  This is a family that is rotten at its core, no matter what the decor tells you.

  I see things as they are, right through the fakery and pretense. I can still remember when this place really was authentically grand, before Wendy Spinnaker decided to throw thousands of dollars into some kind of fake restoration of its façade.

  But that sums up this family’s philosophy of life perfectly: plaster over the real stuff, and slap a veneer on the top. Nobody will know.

  But I know.

  A slightly drunk old gentleman with bad breath comes over and starts telling me about bank mergers he’s merged and some acquisitions he’s acquired, and also that he thinks my niece is the only person who can make Welsh rarebit taste like a potload of old socks. I’m about to agree with him when I realize with a start that he didn’t really say that last bit. It’s too loud and hot in this room, so I vaporize him with my mind, and sure enough, he toddles off.

  I have my talents.

  Then, miracle of miracles, just as we’re all about to succumb to despair and heavy drinking, the front door opens with a whoosh, and the party suddenly takes on energy, like somebody plugged it back in and we’re allowed to come back to life.

  The young couple is here!

  Wendy hurries over to the entryway and claps her hands and says, “Everyone! Everyone! Of course y’all all know my darling, brilliant Noah—and now this is his lovely fiancée, Marnie MacGraw, soon to be our exquisite daughter-in-law! Welcome to you, dahlin’!”

  The little quartet in the corner of the living room strikes up “Here Comes the Bride,” and everyone flocks around, shaking hands with the couple, blocking my view. I can hear Noah, heir to the family’s bluster and bravado, booming as he talks about the flight and the traffic, while his fiancée is being manhandled and hugged as though she’s a commodity who now belongs to everybody. If I crane my neck over to the right, I can see that she’s truly lovely—tall and thin, red-cheeked and golden, and wearing a blue beret tipped askew with a jauntiness you don’t normally see at Wendy’s parties.

  And then I notice something else about her, too, something about the way she peeks out from under her long blonde bangs. And—pow!—from across the room, her eyes meet mine and I swear something passes in a flash from her to me.

  I had been about to get up from my place on the love seat, but now I fall back into it, close my eyes, and squeeze my fingers.

  I know her. Oh my God, I actually feel like I know her.

  It takes me a minute to regroup. Maybe I’m mistaken after all. How could it be? But no. It’s true. Marnie MacGraw is just like the old glorious me, standing there, facing this onslaught of Southern gentility, and I see her both young and old, and feel my own old heart pounding like it used to.

  Come over here, sweetheart, I beam toward her.

  So this—this—is why I’m here. It wasn’t to give some closure to years of family strife. It wasn’t to drink these absurd cocktails or even to revisit my roots.

  I was meant to meet Marnie MacGraw.

  I put my hand against my abdomen, against the ball of tumor that’s been growing there since last winter, the hard, solid mass that I already know is going to kill me outright before summer comes.

  Come over here, Marnie MacGraw. I have so much I need to tell you.

  Not yet. Not yet. She does not come.

  Ah yes. Of course. There are duties to be performed when you’re being shown off to polite Southern society, when you’re the heir apparent’s intended. And under the strain of it all, Marnie MacGraw has turned fluttery, nervous—and then she makes a dreadful faux pas, one that’s so delightfully horrendous it alone would have stood her in good stead with me for a lifetime, even if I didn’t already know her. She declines to take a portion of Wendy’s Welsh rarebit. At first she simply shakes her head politely when it is thrust in her direction. She tries to claim she isn’t hungry, but that’s clearly untrue, as Wendy points out with her laser-like eyes flashing, because Marnie’s been traveling with Noah for hours, and Wendy happens to know that they missed both breakfast and lunch and have tried to survive on airline peanuts.

  “Why, honey, you must eat!” Wendy exclaims. “You don’t have a single extra calorie on those bones, bless your heart!”

  I close my eyes. She’s been here only a few minutes and has already earned herself a deadly “bless your heart.” Marnie, wobbly now, reaches out and takes a scone and a single red grape, but this is not the right thing either.

  “No, no, my dear, have some rarebit,” urges Wendy. I know the edge in the voice. Somehow Noah has failed to explain to his true love that family law here requires that guests take some of the rarebit, and then they must practically fall to the ground writhing in their rapture over its wonderfulness, always so much more wonderful than last year.

  And then Marnie says the thing that seals her fate. She stammers out the words, “I-I am so sorry, but I’m really not comfortable with eating rabbits.”

  I put my hand over my mouth so people can’t see how hard I am smiling.

  Aha! My niece’s eyes flash and she laughs her brittle, scary laugh and says in a loud voice that makes everyone stop and look: “My dear, wherever did you get the notion that rarebit has anything to do with rabbits? For heaven’s sake! Is it because they both start with R? Please don’t tell me that’s what you think!”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t—oh, I’m so sorry—”

  But that is that. What’s done is done. The dish is withdrawn, and Wendy sweeps away, shaking her head. People turn back to their conversations. Wendy the Wronged. Kids today. No manners at all.

  And where is Noah, Marnie’s savior and protector, during this little scene? I crane my neck to see. Ah yes, he’s gone off with Simon Whipple, his best friend, of course. I see him laughing at something Whipple is saying, in the adjacent poolroom, two colts stamping their hooves in delight over some incomprehensible, meaningless joke.

  So I get to my feet and go fetch her. Marnie has two bright spots of color on her cheeks, and without the beret now, her blonde hair is loose and possibly the slightest bit tangled, and might have already been deemed beyond redemption by Wendy. Beach hair. Not society hair. Definitely not hair that the movers and shakers of Fairlane, Virginia, should have to see at their annual post-Christmas tea.

  I bring her over to where I had camped out, and I pat the love seat next to me, and she sits down, pressing her fingertips into her temples. “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I’m such an idiot, aren’t I?”

  “Please,” I say. “No more apologies, my love.”

  I can see in her eyes that it’s dawning on her precisely how many things she’s already done wrong. Not counting the rarebit, she’s also wearing the wrong kind of clothing for this little soiree. Black skinny pants! A tunic top! In the sea of the de rigueur red cashmere sweaters and coiffed, sprayed hairdos and Santa Claus earrings, Marnie MacGraw with her lanky, bangs-in-the-eyes, tangled yellow hair dares to wear a gray shirt—without even one sparkly piece of jewelry to acknowledge that Christmas
is the holiest of holidays and the post-Christmas tea is the best part of Christmas! And her shoes: turquoise leather cowboy boots! Fantastic, of course. But not high-society boots.

  I take her hand in mine to soothe her and also to surreptitiously check her lifeline. When you’re an old woman, you can reach over and touch people since you’re harmless and invisible most of the time.

  “Pay no attention to Wendy,” I whisper to her. “She missed the class on manners because she was attending two extra courses on personal intimidation.”

  Marnie looks down at her hands. “No, I was the awful one. I should have just taken the rarebit.”

  “The fuck you were,” I whisper back, and that makes her laugh. People find it hilarious when an old woman says fuck; it must break every law of nature when we swear. “You were trying to politely decline eating a cute, furry animal and got embarrassed for your trouble.”

  She looks at me. “But—but it’s not made of rabbits. I guess.”

  “Well, it sounds like it is. Some people still call it Welsh rabbit. And what? You’re supposed to research all the dishes of Northern Europe in preparation for coming to a Christmas tea? Give me a break!”

  “I should have known.”

  “Look, whose side are you on? Yours or Our Lady of the Hoity-Toity Mansion?”

  “What?”

  I pat her hand. “You’re delightful,” I say. “And the truth is that my niece is a bit of a stick. In fact, look around at this whole crowd. Normally I don’t like to bring down the forces of evil on myself by being critical, but just look at all the fake smiles and sour faces around here. I’m going to have to take a bath with a wire brush to get all this negativity off me when I leave. And I suggest you do the same. Bunch of damn hypocrites eating the Welsh rarebit whether they like it or not. And you know what else?”

  “What?”

  I lean toward her and stage-whisper, “It could be made of Welsh rabbit turds and they would still eat it. Because Wendy Spinnaker is their overlord and leader.”

  She laughs. I love her laugh. We sit in a companionable silence—to anyone else’s eye, we’re nothing more than two strangers who find themselves making polite small talk because they’ll soon be related. But I am bursting with the need to tell her everything. Of course I begin badly because I am so out of practice when it comes to small talk.