The Magic of Found Objects Read online

  PRAISE FOR MADDIE DAWSON’S THE MAGIC OF FOUND OBJECTS

  “The Magic of Found Objects is wonderful fun! Maddie Dawson is such an engaging and charming writer.”

  —Robyn Carr, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “With humor, tenderness, and some of the strongest female characters to ever grace a page, Maddie Dawson delivers with The Magic of Found Objects.”

  —Karen Hawkins, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Book Charmer

  “Written with loads of humor and heart, The Magic of Found Objects is a delightful, feel-good tale of friendship and marriage, motherhood and sacrifice, disillusionment and hope. Dawson takes the reader on a quest for the perfect life partner. Is it the kind, comfortable friend right in front of you, or does the universe have something more exciting in store? Maddie Dawson at her finest!”

  —Amy Poeppel, author of Musical Chairs

  “The Magic of Found Objects by Maddie Dawson is a lovingly crafted and heartwarming story of friendship, family, and being true to oneself. The charming and quirky characters burrow into your heart and make you laugh, cry, and cheer. A thoughtful and joyful read, perfect for book clubs. Dawson wrote another winner!”

  —Amy Sue Nathan, author of The Last Bathing Beauty

  “Dawson delivers her signature charm in The Magic of Found Objects. As Phronsie makes the decision of a lifetime, her free-spirited mother and practical, loving stepmother shape her ideas of life and love. Readers will long to slip inside the pages with these lovable characters written with flawless depth and a touch of sparkle. Dawson delivers a heartfelt read that stays with you long after the last page.”

  —Rochelle B. Weinstein, USA Today bestselling author

  “Thirtysomething public relations professional Phronsie Linnelle is ready for a family—so she just might marry her platonic, lifelong best friend. A witty and wonderful romp through the mind of an entertaining woman who wants it all and has the guts to go out and get it. Bestselling author Maddie Dawson at her absolute best. You will love this hilarious, heartwarming book.”

  —Marilyn Simon Rothstein, author of Husbands and Other Sharp Objects

  “Maddie Dawson has a unique talent for telling a story that goes deep yet maintains a certain lightness throughout, at once giving readers an authentic human experience while making them still feel good about being human. The Magic of Found Objects is a warm, engaging novel that utterly charmed me. Don’t miss it.”

  —Marybeth Mayhew Whalen, author of This Secret Thing

  PRAISE FOR MADDIE DAWSON’S A HAPPY CATASTROPHE

  “Dawson has created a truly quirky story, filled with a little bit of magic (think unicorn glitter and sparkles) and a lot of love . . . An optimistic, feel-good story that celebrates love, community, goodness, and the creation of family, however it might appear.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Alive with action, compelling and evolving characters, and screwball comedy, Dawson’s latest will appeal to readers looking for a story that is both pleasurable and substantial. Personal growth is achieved by overcoming obstacles, and the ending is honest and satisfying.”

  —Booklist

  “An inherently engaging and entertaining novel from cover to cover, A Happy Catastrophe by Maddie Dawson will prove to be an immediate and enduringly popular addition to community library Contemporary General Fiction collections.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  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

  A Happy Catastrophe

  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 © 2021 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: 9781542021517

  ISBN-10: 1542021510

  Cover design and illustration by David Drummond

  To Jimbo, who knows how to make quarantine fun

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  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

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BOOK CLUB QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  I came into the world as both a surprise and a complication, which tells you everything you need to know about how things have gone ever since.

  My twin brother and I were conceived at Woodstock. And by Woodstock, I mean the music festival. Summer of ’69 and all that. The time of the moon landing, the birth of the gay rights movement in Greenwich Village, and half a million hippies converging upon a little town in upstate New York.

  Woodstock: Peace and Love.

  Remember that iconic photograph? You know the one I mean. The hippie couple wrapped in a blanket, embracing and looking bleary-eyed at the camera? When Bunny, my grandmother, was telling me the story when I was six, I asked her if those people were my parents.

  Could have been. Looked a bit like them. Bunny didn’t think so, though. She laughed and said she wasn’t sure my parents had even had a blanket with them.

  My mom, she told me, was different from anybody my dad had ever known.
(I knew that part. My mom is different from everybody.) Back then, when he met her, she was a beautiful girl, an artist who wore silver amulets and bracelets and long skirts and tie-dyed shirts she made herself, and she practiced magic. She did batik and macramé. Her name was Janet, but she had switched the letters around and called herself Tenaj.

  Was it love? It sounds like love, but maybe it was something else altogether. One of those mysterious moments in time.

  She might have bewitched him, my grandmother whispered, with a little laugh. She put her finger to her lips and her eyes twinkled. Our secret.

  My father isn’t anyone you could imagine being bewitched. He was a regular farmer’s son from rural New Hampshire, named Robert Greer Linnelle, and he was eighteen years old when he met her, and what I think is that he was bedazzled by everything he saw at Woodstock. He had graduated from high school two months before—and on a little whim, according to Bunny—he and his friend Tom drove a pickup truck to upstate New York to see the music festival. He was going to come back and settle down and work full-time on the farm after that.

  But then—over the years, she has always lowered her voice for this part—somehow with the music and the mud and the secondhand marijuana smoke and the magic, he fell in with Tenaj.

  Fell in were the words she used.

  Fell in the mud?

  Fell into her body?

  Fell in love?

  All of it, she said. She laughed. The full catastrophe.

  And after the concert was over, he didn’t go back to the farm that was waiting for him, back to his father who was counting on him and who was furious. My grandmother wouldn’t say she was mad at him, too, but once she admitted she had been “a little disappointed.” Scared for him. Still she understood how he felt, she said. She knew what love could do.

  But mainly it was his back-home girlfriend, Maggie Markley, who was the maddest. She had been in agreement with the rest of the town that she and Robert had a relationship that was the sun, the moon, and the stars. She hadn’t wanted to go to Woodstock with him because she was working, and that little decision turned out to be the worst mistake of her life.

  That’s how come my parents were pretty much strangers to each other when they got married, and they lived in Woodstock in a little tiny house together, no bigger than somebody’s corncrib. And that next May, my brother and I came tearing into the world, shaking our fists and wailing out our own brand of music—we had our mother’s eyes and our daddy’s curled-up fists, my grandmother said—both of us probably fed up with the cramped quarters in my mother’s little body and looking for some decent room where we could stretch out.

  Were we welcomed into the world? I don’t know. Bunny doesn’t talk about this point.

  I was named Phronsie, after a character in a book that my mother loved in childhood—Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. Phronsie was the youngest—a sweet, blonde, curly-haired toddler who was doted upon by the family. And they named my brother Hendrix, because well, guess why.

  Hendrix and I are from the mud and the music; we are from Tenaj’s silver bracelets and the New Hampshire dirt under Robert’s fingernails, from marijuana smoke and cornfields. We were born to a witch and a farmer who had nothing in common. Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it?

  But everybody knows that fairy tales don’t last. My father went back to the cows and the chickens and the dirt, and my mother drifted away with her artwork and her magic, turning found objects into art. He hardened up, perhaps so angry over this adventure he’d taken, which he saw as his first and last lapse of judgment. I’m sure, knowing him, he was ashamed of himself for the way he turned his head from his planned path in life and fell into Tenaj, so he doesn’t like to speak of her or those times to us.

  All I know is that Hendrix and I crashed down to earth as surprises and complications, and we were left with magic flickering in our DNA and practicality knitted into our bones.

  It’s been a war inside us ever since. And I’m not sure either one of us has ever figured out what love really is supposed to be about.

  CHAPTER ONE

  2006

  It’s Friday night at midnight, and I’m in my bed, lying next to Mr. Swanky, my snoring little pug, trying to decide between having a good cry or taking a bubble bath when my cell phone rings.

  It’s Judd, of course. Time for our Dissect-A-Date debriefing.

  He doesn’t even say hello. He says, “Okay, Phronsie. Out with it. How’d you do?”

  “Not great,” I tell him. “Let me get the paperwork.” I’ve been on my forty-third internet date, out with Mr. Cyber Security Previously Married No Kids. Judd’s been out with Red-Haired Nurse Who Lives with Her Mom.

  “You go first,” I say. I call up the spreadsheet on my laptop. When all is said and done, I’m going to write an article about the travesty known as online dating. It will be honest, searing, and hilarious. It will be called either “How to Finally Give Up Looking for Love” or “The Successful Guide to Finding Love in New York City.”

  Depending on which way this ends up.

  Maybe I’ll quit my job as a publicist and go on talk shows and give advice. I could be known as “Phronsie the Dating Whisperer.”

  He lets out a big sigh. “As usual, I’d have to say meh. She wasn’t very interesting. Doesn’t know anything about football. Kept checking her phone. I ended up leaving when one of my old ladies called and wanted to know if I could come unclog her sink, and so that’s how I really spent my evening. Plunging Mabel’s kitchen drain.”

  “Ha! Is that a euphemism?”

  He laughs. “If only.”

  It’s true that Judd has old ladies, and they all have crushes on him. It’s kind of a situation. He has young ladies, too, to be clear. He owns a gym downtown, and besides having muscles, he has nice brown eyes and a killer jawline, and women of all ages flock to him for their training. The ones over seventy keep proposing marriage. One of them—perhaps it’s Mabel, I can’t remember—says he either has to marry her or go for her forty-something daughter or her twenty-something granddaughter. Somebody in that family has to marry him, she says.

  “Let’s move on to the checklist,” I say. “Okay. Did Red-Haired Nurse Who Lives with Her Mom look like her profile picture?”

  He sighs. “Who knows? Who remembers? Write down no. Nobody I’ve met so far looks like their profile picture.”

  “Did she ask you any questions about yourself?”

  “Not a one.”

  “Okay. I’ll skip the rest. Overall scale of one to ten?”

  “Um, one point five. It was a bust. We drank a beer, she tossed her hair, told me how immoral football is, and then my phone rang, and I ducked out. End of story.” I can tell by his breathing that he’s working out while we talk. Judd doesn’t waste time merely talking on the phone; he’s always doing lunges or squats at the same time. “Okay,” he says. “Your turn.”

  “Awful. Black hole of despair. Bad haircut, didn’t ask even one question about my life. Works for a big firm, blah blah blah, frets about cybercrime, married twice before, griped about how men can’t be themselves with women anymore. More or less your typical troglodyte.”

  “This dating scene sucks,” he says, huffing and puffing. “Let’s go to the diner.”

  It’s always about the diner for Judd.

  “Luckily or unluckily,” I say, “there are three other guys who want to meet me for coffee. I’ve said no to two of them—but one of them looks promising. A firefighter who started a fund for kids whose parents died in 9/11. I might marry him just for that.”

  “Nice. Now diner, diner, diner.”

  “No, no, no. Mr. Swanky and I are comfortable, and besides, he doesn’t want me to go out, do you, Mr. Swanky G. Pug?” I lean over and pet his soft little ears, and he stretches out and I swear he smiles at me.

  “Mr. Swanky can’t express his opinion, and even if he could, luckily for everyone concerned, he’s an understanding and forgiving dog who wants you to live
your best life,” Judd says. “Come on. Meet me in the stairwell in five minutes. I have something important to tell you.”

  “You can’t just tell me now?”

  “I cannot.”

  “Oh God. Is this going to be heavy? Like, you’re moving out or something?”

  “I’ve had one of my major thinks. An epiphany.”

  “Always a dangerous thing. Okay. I’ll meet you in seven minutes, not five. But I have to warn you I don’t have any makeup on, and I’m not changing out of my leggings and T-shirt.”

  “And how is this different from any other night?” he says. “When have I seen you with makeup, is the real question. I figured you’d thrown it all out by now.”

  “I save it for dates. Seeing all the bottles lined up on my counter gives me hope.”

  “This is exactly what we need to talk about.”

  “The bottles on my counter?”

  “No. Hope.”

  Judd Kovac has been my good friend for thirty-one years. We met on our first day of kindergarten back in Pemberton, New Hampshire, when the teacher, Mrs. Spencer, sat me down next to him on the rug at circle time. Fifteen minutes later she separated us because we couldn’t stop talking. I think he was bragging about how loudly he could burp. Turns out that was the beginning of a lifelong conversation on that topic.

  It doesn’t even matter at this point that we don’t have all that much in common, besides the fact that we both escaped our family farms in New Hampshire and moved to Manhattan. Now that we’re in our midthirties, we live two floors apart on the Upper West Side. Due to the mysteries of rent-stabilization rules in New York City, we are both in illegal, but affordable, sublets that could be reclaimed at any moment by the lawful tenants who live elsewhere. (Don’t ask; it’s complicated.) We’ve become true New Yorkers, toasting periodically (usually me) to the fact that we narrowly escaped the fate of farm life that our parents tried to foist upon us. Every now and then one of us (usually him) will get nostalgic and start idealizing the simple pastoral life we left behind, the one containing lots of cows and goats. But that’s generally only when the subway is down.