Sweet Misfortune: A Novel (16 page)

Chapter 24

Life will throw you an unpleasant curve.

T
HE DAY IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE GROUP MAIL
-sorting session, Garrett stopped by Chocolat’ de Soph uninvited, over lunch, to help continue the effort. Sophie tried hard to convey how annoyed she was by his presence, but for all her frowns, glares, rolling eyes, and sideways glances, he wasn’t dissuaded. In fact, he managed to keep smiling the entire hour he was there, politely deflecting her occasional gibes. And if that weren’t enough, he had the gall to show up after work for more of the same.

Randy was busy in the evening for long periods of time helping customers, which left Sophie alone with Garrett longer than she would have liked. But the more time they spent alone, the more she remembered how much she enjoyed his company. On more than one occasion she caught herself admiring his dimples or relishing the sound of his voice. She quickly scolded herself in each instance for the lack of self-restraint.

Their conversation lingered mostly on impersonal topics related to the mail that they were sorting, but occasionally Garrett would start a sentence with, “Remember when
…?
” which immediately sent Sophie’s mind spiraling back to much happier times—times when she would never have felt self-conscious for stealing second glances at Garrett when he bent over to pick something up off the floor. After the third
Remember when
, Sophie told herself she’d better take control of the conversation or risk losing control of her emotions.

“So did you catch any of the news coverage of me at the post office?” she asked while tearing open a pink envelope from St. Louis.

“I have it recorded,” he responded with a laugh. “I can’t believe they bought that guy’s story.”

“Yeah, thank heavens for Jim. He saved both of us a lot of unwanted attention.”

Garrett leaned against a counter. “Is he really homeless?”

Sophie nodded, then explained how she’d met the man a year earlier and how they’d established a weekly Misfortune Cookie rendezvous.

“Do you know how he knew what was going on with the whole want ad frenzy?” he asked.

She dropped a letter on the No pile. “I do. He came by yesterday and explained the whole thing. Turns out that was about the only truthful thing he told reporters that day. He really did read about the want ad in the newspapers he was using to sleep on. He knew which post office was listed in the ad, so when he saw the group of reporters hounding me he made the connection and jumped in to help.”

“Thank goodness. He deserves a reward, if you ask me. He really threw you a lifeline.”

“I know. I told him yesterday he can have chocolates for life any time he comes in the store. But you should have seen him when he came in. The only way I recognized him was from the toothless grin. He’s all cleaned up, new clothes and everything. Since his little press conference, people all over are sending in donations to a fund that Channel Two set up for him. He’s already got an apartment and a part-time job, and he says a car dealership has offered him a free used car in exchange for helping them at a promotional event.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head.

“Unbelievable.” Garrett smiled affectionately at Sophie.

Sophie returned the smile, but when she realized what she was doing she immediately wiped it away, fearing that he might take it to mean that she was enjoying being with him—which she wasn’t. Was she?

Around eight o’clock Garrett and Sophie each opened one last letter, quickly scanned what was written, and then dropped them on the No pile.

“Mine was from a guy in Pennsylvania who said happiness is a roll of toilet paper when you’re lost in the woods,” quipped Garrett. “Yours?”

“Waking up every morning next to the same man for thirty-six years
…
and counting.”

He gave her a funny look. “And you don’t think that qualifies as happiness?”

“What?” she said, shrugging.

“Seriously, you’re not going to count that? I’d give anything to have
…
someone
…
that I could rely on to be there every day, and to have that kind of love and trust for so long.”

“Oh, really,” she fired back, trying to keep her emotions in check. “Well I’m sorry to remind you, but you could have had that, and you walked away from it.”

He dropped his gaze. “I know.”

She waited to see if he was going to say anything else. “But I think you’re misinterpreting what she wrote. If you boil down the words, all she really said was that happiness is ‘waking up.’ And I’m not really a morning person, so
…
no, definitely not happiness.”

Garrett lifted his gaze and chuckled. “You’re a hard nut to crack, Sophie Jones.”

She crossed her arms and shot him a look, miffed at the way her name rolled causally off his tongue, as though things between them had never been better. “Hard to crack, maybe. But of the two of us, I’m not the nut.”

He laughed again, then looked around at the piles of mail. “So what now?”

Sophie followed his attention to the mounds of envelopes on the kitchen floor. The largest, by far, was the No pile, followed by a modest amount of maybes. The letters deemed promising were fewest in number, but Sophie guessed that even that stack totaled well over two hundred pieces. And there was still one more mail carton full of letters they’d not yet opened.

A little farther away was an unofficial fourth pile of random items that had been set aside during the sorting process. These were things that Sophie would never count as examples of happiness, but everyone wanted to keep them out so they could easily see all the strange objects that people had sent in. On top of that pile was a well-worn Birkenstock sandal, its cork mostly gone near the heel, which had sparked a lengthy discussion the night before when Garrett, ever the podiatrist, argued that it should be lumped in the Promising pile because “the road to happiness is best walked with happy feet.” Among other items in the pile were a wooden spoon, ticket stubs to the circus, a Neil Diamond CD, a catalog of gourmet-roasted coffee beans, a picture of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and a handful of unopened packets of Taco Bell hot sauce.

“Now,” she replied, “I’ll take these home and see how many pass my judgment.” She straightened and put a rubber band around the smallest pile of letters. “The nos can be tossed in the trash right now. We can leave the maybes in my office until I’ve had a chance to go through the first stack. And I guess I’ll take some of these, as well.” She sighed as she grabbed a thick handful of unopened letters from the bin.

Garrett nodded once. “Fair enough.” He looked at his watch. “The last express to Gig Harbor has already left,” he said. “Can I give you a lift? Might beat carrying all this mail around on an hour-long loop through the city.”

Sophie really didn’t want to be alone with Garrett in the car. The last time she’d sat in a car with him had been in her driveway on the night he nixed the wedding and drove away. But he was right—taking all that mail on an hour-long bus ride would be a pain. And if she hurried home, there might still be time to go see how Evi was doing. “Fine,” she said unenthusiastically. “But only out of convenience.”

He smiled generously. “Great.”

Sophie turned away and began gathering her things. “Oh, stop flaunting your dimples,” she muttered quietly to herself.

O
N THE DRIVE
to her house, Sophie dialed Evi’s number on her cell phone. She hadn’t talked to her foster sister since she’d stormed out of the store the night before. She would have called sooner, but she wanted to give Evi some time to digest whatever the inmate from the penitentiary had written in her letter.

“Hey Soph,” Evi answered. “I was wondering when I’d hear from you.”

“You sound good. Everything okay?”

There was a brief pause. “Actually
…
yeah. More than okay.”

“So
…
the letter? What did it say?”

“Why don’t you come over, and I’ll let you read it. Got time?”

Sophie turned to Garrett and whispered, “Can you drop me off at Evi’s instead?” He nodded. “Yep,” Sophie said into the phone. “I’ll be there in a few.”

Fifteen minutes later Sophie was seated on the couch in the Macks’ living room reading the letter from Evi’s birth mom’s best friend. When she was done, she brushed away a tear that had run all the way down to her chin and said, “Crap. I think I’m going to have to count this toward Garrett’s hundred.” She looked back and forth between Justin and Evalynn. “So
…
Ev. Do you think this will
…
I mean
…
are you going to be okay? With the whole mom thing?”

Evalynn bit her lip and looked at Justin. Then she squeezed his leg with one hand and rubbed her belly with the other. Looking at Sophie once more she replied, “The letter answered a lot of things for me—questions that have plagued me for a long time.” She looked at Justin again and smiled. “I think things are going to be fine.”

“You’re going to be a great mom,” Sophie assured her. “I have no doubt.”

“I’ve been telling her that forever,” Justin chimed in, “but it took a letter from a convicted felon to get her to listen to reason. Go figure.” He winked playfully at Evalynn, then addressed Sophie again. “Well, before we have to send the prego lady here off to bed, did you want some more help with the letters?”

The corners of Sophie’s mouth curled into a frown. “I hate to be a burden. I’m likely going to reject them all anyway, so no sense wasting your time.”

“Oh c’mon,” Justin prodded. “What can it hurt? Just let us give our opinions on them before you make your final decision. That way, if nothing else, at least you can tell Garrett there were accomplices in the process, and that you gave each response a fair shake.”

Sophie considered the offer. On the one hand, she didn’t want the decision making to be fettered by her friends’ input, especially since neither of them would have to suffer through a date with her ex-fiancée should she find one hundred good responses. But on the other hand, she was enjoying their company, and the thought of spending the rest of the evening alone picking through sappy letters from strangers was not altogether appealing. “Fine,” she said. “But only until Ev starts looking tired.”

With that, Sophie began going one by one through the letters. Regardless of length she read the notes aloud in their entirety, gave Evi and Justin a chance to weigh in, and then made her final decision. Besides the letter from Carly Gibbs, the first letter to meet Sophie’s highly subjective criteria was from a man in Wichita, Kansas, who offered sound reasoning, backed by examples from his own life, to support the claim that happiness is “the consequence of exercising one’s right to choose between good and bad, and choosing the good.”

After another thirty minutes, only a small handful of letters had received Sophie’s reluctant stamp of approval, and she was rapidly gaining confidence that she would be able to coast guilt free through the stack without coming even close to the number of acceptable responses needed to meet the terms of the deal.

By five minutes to ten Sophie had finished with the ones they thought had promise, and was working on the stack of unopened mail. She grabbed the next envelope from the pile, noting that it had been sent from Bellevue, Washington, about thirty minutes northeast of Tacoma. Of all the envelopes she’d read, this one was by far the lightest in weight; as she lifted it, she wondered whether there was anything in it at all, or if, perhaps, someone had sent an empty envelope. Ripping the top seam, she observed that there was, indeed, something in it, albeit very small. Her brow furrowed as she carefully tipped the envelope up at an angle, sending its contents fluttering onto the floor in front of her.

Looking at the paper that had fallen out, Sophie’s brow shifted instinctively from furrowed to frightened. For one who worked with them on a daily basis, there was no mistaking the small, rectangular shape of a fortune cookie message. She knew right off that it wasn’t from Chocolat’ de Soph because she’d always written hers by hand with a fine calligraphy pen, and this one was typed. It was also clear that this fortune had seen better days. The paper was wrinkled and worn, and the letters were smeared and somewhat blurry.

With a strange sense of foreboding, Sophie picked it up and read the tiny message, gasping aloud as recognition set in. She flipped it over and then froze. The only thing that moved as she stared at the back of the fortune was a small tear that worked itself free from her eye and trickled down her face.

At length, Sophie brushed away the dampness on her cheek and closed her hand around the paper, then looked up at the perplexed faces of Justin and Evalynn.

“Soph? What’s wrong?”

Sophie’s gaze narrowed on Justin. “I need to talk to Evi alone,” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“Of course,” he replied, standing up immediately. He put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. “I’ll just be down the hall if you need anything.”

“I need you to be totally honest with me, Evi,” said Sophie, once Justin was out of sight. “And this may sound a little strange, but
…
do you know how my parents died?”