Selling the Lite of Heaven

There it was in The Pennysaver - nestled among the other classified ads bravely singing out their romantic wares - each cleverly written heading masking a story of broken dreams. But who would believe hers? Who in her small western Massachusetts town would believe that the dutiful only daughter of Stanislaus and Edna, having against all odds and her mother's expectations finally found true love, has not only been left at the altar but for it? That she's a woman who has been left for God?
Fittingly, her holy alliance with Eddie Balicki had begun in church, just after he mysteriously abandoned the big city and moved back to his boyhood town. One glimpse was all it took.
His hands were folded in a way you only see in First Communion photos or in portraits of the Pope - fingers meeting exactly and pointing toward heaven, thumbs crossed and locked....With his eyes closed, he looked like he should have been a statue up on the altar, reeling in the ecstasy of what he already knew about heaven.
But now the worst has happened. In one ghastly moment on Good Friday, her brightly lit future, her technicolor dreams, have turned to black and white. She has died, and he has gone to heaven.
It is one thing to call the caterer, cancel the hall and the band, return the gifts. But selling the ring is another matter. One by one the prospective customers come to view, appraise, and haggle, treading through and over the life of the woman whose earlier days had been ruled by a simple rhythm: up and off to watch other peoples' lives develop in the machine at Fast Foto, then home to eat cabbage with her very Polish, very old-world parents. There's a beefy man shopping for a ring while patiently waiting for his fiancee's mother to "croak" so they can inherit the family manse. Then there are the browsers, the women looking to fill an afternoon and to gloat over someone else's misfortune. And finally, there is Randy, who glows almost as brightly as the ring, and who, despite the demands of his own engagement, finds every opportunity to return to inspect the Lite of Heaven.
In this funny, wise, and sure-handed first novel, Suzanne Strempek Shea takes us on a journey of self-discovery, finding romance and comedy in unlikely places. Her tone never wavers, and the voice of her heroine rings as true as a church bell. Best of all, Selling the Lite of Heaven evokes in loving and exquisite detail a Polish-Catholic neighborhood where love flares briefly, where the polka music is turned up, and where faith and family persist even in the face of change.