Magical Meet Cute by Jean Meltzer
About the Book:
From the author of
the buzzy The Matzah Ball comes a romantic comedy for fans of Sally Thorne,
about a lonely potter who drunkenly creates a golem doll of her perfect
match—and meets the man of her dreams the next day.
Is he the real deal…or
did she truly summon a golem?
Faye Kaplan used to be engaged. She also used to have a
successful legal practice. But she much prefers her new life as a potter in
Woodstock, New York. The only thing missing is the perfect guy.
Not that she needs one. She’s definitely happy alone.
That is, until she finds her town papered with anti-Semitic
flyers after yet another failed singles event at the synagogue. Desperate for
comfort, Faye drunkenly turns to the only thing guaranteed to soothe
her—pottery. A golem protector is just what her town needs…and adding all the
little details to make him her ideal man can’t hurt, right?
When a seriously hot stranger mysteriously turns up the next
day, Greg seems too good to be true—if you ignore the fact that Faye hit him
with her bike. And that he subsequently lost his memory…
But otherwise, the man checks Every. Single. Box. Causing
Faye to wonder if Greg’s sudden and spicy appearance might be anything but a
coincidence.
Excerpt:
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.
Purchase Links
HarperCollins:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/magical-meet-cute-jean-meltzer?variant=41281223950370
Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/p/books/magical-meet-cute-original-jean-meltzer/20536306?ean=9780778334415
Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=9780778334415&tag=hcg-02-20
About the Author:
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.
Keep in touch on social media:
Author website: https://jeanmeltzer.com/
GoodReads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20590894.Jean_Meltzer
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeanmeltzer/
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