Semi-Psychic Life (Glimmer Lake #2) - Elizabeth Hunter Page 0,1

Marie!”

Val couldn’t hide her smile. “Grab some stools.”

“Thank you, Valerie.” She pulled out her wallet and took out twenty dollars even though Val never took her money. “Thank you, Ramon!”

Val refused to let her parents pay for their weekly coffee shop breakfast when they’d been the ones to loan her the start-up money to begin with. So Marie, knowing Val wouldn’t take her money, put it in the tip jar every week.

“And this is why my employees love you more than they love me.”

“They’re the ones cooking for me,” Marie said. “Not you.”

“And be grateful for that.”

Ramon shouted, “Marie, you better grab one of those lemon scones Honey made before they’re gone.”

“Oh, that sounds delicious.” Marie’s eyes lit up. “I do love Honey’s scones.”

“She’s trying to make me fat.” Ramon was thin and wiry, the kind of guy who ran marathons and couldn’t put on weight to save his life. He was married to Honey, who was as sweet as her name and carried all the curves in the family.

“Likely story,” Val said. “If Honey didn’t feed you sugar, you’d blow away in a breeze.”

“Bite me.” Ramon winked at her. “Get back to work, slacker.”

Val had grabbed three more coffee orders and passed them to Eve before there was a break in the line. Two more tables had seated themselves, and her server Max was already getting them set up with coffee.

Long before she’d been a mom or a psychic, Valerie Costa had dreamed of being a rock star. Having zero musical ability had made her realistic about her chances with that, so being a rock star turned into having a place where rock stars hung out.

Unfortunately, she’d never taken more than a few administration courses at the community college in Bridger City. She’d married her high school sweetheart and spent her twenties partying up and down California with Josh, living for the next concert or road trip. Josh fixed cars, and Val got jobs at whatever office was hiring and didn’t mind her multicolored hair and tattoos.

Val wasn’t a purist. She tried lots of jobs. She worked in restaurant kitchens and accountants’ offices. She worked as a landscaper for a while, then at a big coffee chain in her late twenties just to get medical benefits.

It was during Val’s coffee stint that she got pregnant with her oldest son, Jackson. Faced with the inevitability of raising a brand-new person, she started to realize that while punk rock life was fun, having a house and a retirement account might be kind of necessary.

At first Josh was thrilled about the baby. He made all the right noises and dressed their newborn son in Metallica onesies, combing his fine baby hair into a Mohawk.

They were going to be different kinds of parents. Cool parents. Punk rock parents.

Life got more tense when kid number two rolled around. Val had to work, and she couldn’t do it without her parents’ help. They moved from Bridger City back to Glimmer Lake, which Josh absolutely hated.

“We’re moving backward, not forward,” he’d said.

Secretly, Val was relieved to be back. She was close to her parents and close to Monica and Robin, who could reassure her that she wasn’t a bad mother because she wasn’t a fan of baby talk or Wiggles CDs or fluffy blue diaper bags.

Val might not have been the average mom, but she adored her boys. And while Josh liked the fun stuff about being a dad, he didn’t do well with changing diapers, balancing work and parenthood, or losing his nights to crying babies.

Josh started to stay out later and later. He didn’t show up for school meetings, and more and more of his paycheck started going missing. By the time Jackson was seven and Andy was three, Val knew he was fooling around. She confronted him. He denied it; then he walked out.

And that was that.

Val was a single mother of two with no college degree, no steady job, and no resources except great friends and family.

She could work with that.

Val decided that if punk rock life was out of reach in Glimmer Lake, then she’d make her own oasis of punk in the woods. Her mother and father loaned her the money to start Misfit Mountain Coffee Stand. Val stuffed herself and her boys into the tiny coffee outpost while she figured out how to make better coffee than the chain where she’d worked. She stumbled and messed up a lot along the way, but she had a few things working