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 in her favor.
Everyone in Glimmer Lake liked her, even if they didn’t get her. She was the weird mom who accidentally dropped f-bombs at the park, but her kids were cute and surprisingly well behaved. Plus she was Marie and Vincent Costa’s daughter. She made great coffee, she spoke her mind, but she always made you laugh.
The drive-through coffee stand turned into a café. Then Val met Ramon and Honey. Ramon was a kick-ass cook, and Honey was a baker. They’d grown up in Glimmer Lake but moved to the East Bay to work in the restaurant business, where they’d been blissfully happy. Then Honey’s mom got sick and there was no one else to take care of her.
Ramon and Honey had been the spark that started the coffee shop. They weren’t a full-service restaurant; the menu was limited to what Ramon could get delivered and what he felt like cooking that day. Honey’s baked goods became legendary. Along with Val’s personality and coffee skills, they’d been making it work for about three years, but they weren’t out of the woods yet.
Of course, it was Glimmer Lake. They’d never really be out of the woods.
And Josh?
Val’s ex was around, but he wasn’t. He flitted in and out of her boys’ lives like a punk rock fairy godfather, missing for months, only to show up with brand-new iPads for everyone or drunkenly professing his eternal love for Val after he’d broken up with yet another girlfriend.
Val ignored him. She had two kick-ass kids, amazing parents, and the two best friends anyone could ask for. She had her coffee shop, a good tattoo artist, and was paying her own bills. Just barely, but she was making it.
Okay, and now she had weird psychic abilities that were kind of complicating her life, but she’d figure out how to handle that eventually.
Or she’d go insane. Some days she really thought it could go either way.
Just after ten o’clock, Val’s two favorite people in the world walked into Misfit.
Robin, Monica, and Val were as different as three best friends could be. If they hadn’t all been put in Mrs. Cowell’s advanced reader group in fourth grade, they might never have been friends. But that reading group had turned into a lifeline in junior high, then a united and unbreakable front in high school.
Val was the crazy and slightly dangerous one. Monica was the nurturing big sister of the group, and Robin was the planner with the heart of an artist. They’d seen each other through marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, crying babies, hormonal teenagers, divorce, and death.
Monica waved Val over to their table. She handed the register over to Eve and walked to the corner table where Robin already had some notebooks spread out.
“I have fifteen minutes,” Val said. “That’s it.”
“We can work with fifteen minutes.” Robin spread her hands on the notebooks as if she was bracing herself. “What do you think about opening a mini version of Misfit at Russell House?”
Val blinked. “That’s sudden.”
“Kind of, but you’ve already had a coffee stand.”
“A drive-through coffee stand is not Russell House.”
Russell House was Robin’s family home that they’d de-ghosted the year before. Robin’s grandfather had been haunting her grandmother, and there’d been another ghost involved, the man her grandfather had murdered, and it was a whole thing.
But then they got rid of Grandpa Murderer Ghost, Grandma Helen passed peacefully, and Robin’s mom and uncle were left with a giant house that neither knew what to do with, so Robin’s mom and Monica had gone into business to turn the old mansion into a boutique hotel and event venue.
The first events had been hosted, but they were still working out the kinks of having real hotel guests.
“Hear me out, because this is not a stretch,” Monica said. “We’ve already nailed down baked goods from Honey. She’ll be doing an exclusive Russell House scone for the room bakery boxes every morning. But then we were thinking, do we want to have coffee makers in all the rooms? Or would it be better to have an espresso bar in the lobby and do in-room deliveries?”
Robin said, “It would basically be a coffee stand like you started out with. The hotel would just be paying you a certain amount to make coffee in the morning. Anything above that would be yours.”
Hmmm. Could be interesting.
Monica said, “We’re doing a lot of business day-conference things since Jake finished building the ropes course. You know you could make extra money during events like that.”
Val perched on a chair. “I like the idea, but I just went through that whole expansion drama last year that didn’t work out, so I’m feeling a little wary, and also—no offense—but I want to make sure I don’t cannibalize my business here, you know?”
“Makes total sense.” Robin slid a folder across the table. “I put a couple of ideas and numbers together for you to look at.”
Val took the folder. “Of course you did.”
“It’s just some thoughts about how you could make it work if you wanted to.” She drummed her fingers on the table. “I had time.”
Monica and Val exchanged a look.
“How’s life without Emma?” Monica asked.
Robin’s youngest had shipped off to university in Washington State the previous fall, leaving Robin and her husband Mark official empty nesters.
“It’s good.” Robin nodded. “It was nice to see her and Austin over the holidays, but… it’s also nice to have the house back to ourselves again, you know?”