Suddenly Psychic (Glimmer Lake #1)(82)

Val tried lots of things. 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. Around that time, she started to realize that while punk rock life was fun, having a house and a retirement account might be kind of necessary.

It was during her coffee stint that she got pregnant with her oldest son, Jackson. Val was thrilled, and at first Josh was too. He made all the right noises and dressed their newborn son in punk rock onesies, combing his fine baby hair into a Mohawk.

Things got tense when kid number two rolled around. Though Josh liked the fun stuff about being a dad, he didn’t do well with changing diapers, balancing work and parenthood, and losing his nights to crying babies. Punk rock parenthood wasn’t punk rock life, and 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 decided she could work with that.

Her mother and father loaned her the money to start Misfit Mountain Coffee Stand. She brought her kids to work in the tiny coffee outpost while she figured out how to make better coffee than the chain she’d worked at. 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 Val, even if they didn’t get her. She was weird, but she had cute kids and she was Marie and Vincent’s daughter. She made great coffee and always made you laugh.

A 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 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 restaurant, and 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?

He 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 professing his eternal love for Val after he’d broken up with yet another girlfriend.

Val ignored him. She had her 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 telepathic abilities that were kind of complicating her life, but she could handle that. Probably.





Just after ten o’clock, Val’s two favorite people 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 school, 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. All three had married early, and Monica and Robin had both had their kids before Val. They’d seen each other through marriage, pregnancy and miscarriage, crying babies, hormonal teenagers, divorce, and death.

Monica waved Val over. She reluctantly 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.”

“That works.” 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.”

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 was another ghost involved from a 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 grand old house into a boutique hotel and event venue.

The first events had been hosted, but they were still working out the kinks on having real hotel guests.

“We’ve already nailed down baked goods from Honey,” Monica said. “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 tapped her fingers. “It would basically be a coffee stand like you started out with. The hotel would just pay you instead of the public. And you could make extra money during events.”