Lily of the Valley [Paperback]

Lily Wilk always knew she was destined to be an artist -- ever since she pulled a drawing kit from a grab bag on her tenth birthday. Now Lily's work is always in demand around her small Massachusetts town, where she makes her living painting fire hydrants, lettering diplomas, and applying Gulls and Buoys to restaurant bathroom doors. But when supermarket heiress Mary Ziemba commissions her to paint a family portrait, Lily senses her lifelong dream of creating a memorable masterpiece is finally within her grasp. What she discovers, however, is that dreams often take their own unexpected twists...and with each small and gentle brush stroke she applies to Mary Ziemba's painting, Lily learns more than she ever imagined about the meaning of friendship, family, and love.
With a gift for creating fiction that is rich with an unusual sweetness (USA Today)and filled with wry humor, bestselling author Suzanne Strempek Shea delivers a poignant and unforgettable work of art inLily of the Valley.Chapter One

The night of the day I turned ten, we all got to go out to supper at a place that printed a quarter page of half-off coupons every other month in the weekly paper and invited kids to step on this big carnival scale before they ate, then again after they were done, and the only thing their parents would be charged was one dollar if any amount of weight gain over a pound was registered.

Once I finished what I could of the Southern fried chicken, the French fries, cole slaw and decorative sprig of parsley, and after I blew out the white twig of a candle jabbed into the thick-skinned Boston cream pie slice, the waitress held out a red velvet grab bag brought out only for special occasions like mine.

I stuck my right hand in and felt my way around the obvious: the butterfly net, the hairbrush, the alleys in their net sack, some kind of floppy stuffed animal staring through the dark with bulging glass eyes. I considered the plastic l34