Funny You Should Mention That: The Funny Thing Is..., #2

By Holly Schindler

All They Needed Was a Little Luck

 

It's a story just itching to be told—and you're going to hear it. What choice do you have, really? Your car's overheated, and you're fortunate enough to have coasted in here—Lucky Lou's Earnest Service, an ancient filling station off the highway. Bill, the mechanic, wants to tell you all about the day nearly a year ago—the day of the big lottery draw. A day when the unluckiest bunch of folks you ever did meet may very well have seen their luck turn around…

A sweet, short read to chuckle through.

• Language: English
• Publisher: InToto Books
• Release date: Jun 17, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201178192

Holly Schindler

I'm a critically acclaimed and award winning hybrid author for readers of all ages--both the young in years and the young at heart. My work has received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, appeared on Booklist’s Best First Novels for Youth, PW Picks, School Library Journal’s What’s Hot in YA, and B&N’s 2016 YA Books with Irresistible Concepts and Most Anticipated May 2016 YA Books. My YA work has also won a Silver Medal in ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year and a Gold Medal in the IPPY Awards. My MG work is critically acclaimed as well, having made the master lists for several state readers’ awards, including this year’s Oklahoma Sequoyah Book Award and Missouri’s Mark Twain Readers Award, and has been chosen for inclusion in the Scholastic Book Fair.

Book preview

Funny You Should Mention That

Holly Schindler

Funny You Should Mention That

Published by InToto Books

Copyright © 2021 by Holly Schindler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Holly Schindler

Cover images by yevgeniy11 and Mega Pixel, courtesy of Shutterstock

Baby Brooklynn font by Font Bundles Store, courtesy of Font Bundles

Author’s Note

Last year, I wrote a collection of humorous shorts called Funny Meeting You Here. We were just going into quarantine, and I wrote about what I was missing most: people. Chance meetings. Those happy accidents that come out of nowhere, that you look back on years later with fondness, because it was the start of something—a romance, maybe. A great friendship.

Funny Meeting You Here contained stories in which the main characters did nothing more than cross paths. Meet for the first time.

I loved writing it—and this spring, as we were all getting vaccinated and inching back into something close to a normal life, I found myself wanting to tackle another humorous collection. This time, the individual stories are a bit more tightly woven together; you’ll find this book reads more like a novelette than a true short story collection. And the focus is on luck—that elusive little ingredient that seems to be the key to life going well.

I hope, as you dig into this short read, that you are either already riding a wave of good luck or are about to usher in a stretch of time that is as lucky as an entire field of four-leaf clovers.

I hope, too, that this novelette gives you some chuckle-out-loud moments. And I hope, as always, that it brings two smiles: one to your face and one to your heart.

—Holly Schindler, June 2021

Lucky Lou’s Earnest Service

If you are yourself from a different era, one of chrome bumpers and fins on the backs of Chevy’s, rock and roll and long, lazy Sunday drives as entertainment, Lucky Lou’s Earnest Service will be familiar to you. It’s right there, a background to all those days gone by: a little white filling station situated on a corner. Two gas pumps. A bell to announce your arrival and send out the filling station attendant, ready to pump your gas for you, check your oil, wipe your windshield. In those days, it thrived because it was on the main thoroughfare. One of those Route 66-style mother roads, early highways that connected one end of the country to the other. The kind of road you merged onto in order to escape—maybe for the weekend, or maybe, if your hopes panned out, for good. Put your troubles in the rearview.

Everyone expected business to trickle off at Lucky Lou’s after the four-lane interstate went through. These days, you only reach it via the scenic route. But when you do, you’ll find it every bit as busy as ever. And while the nearby string of old cabins that used to welcome summer vacationers are all long gone, along with the diner that used to feed hungry motorists, Lucky Lou’s remains as it has always been: same white building, same paper maps on a carousel inside, same bell to send that attendant out to