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CHAPTER ONE

COFFEE, DEADLINES, AND ARIZONA INCIDENTS

MAX

It was a lovely seventy-four degrees outside, so I’d taken my laptop and settled myself down into my chair, propped my feet up on the old milk crate that had somehow found its way there at some forgotten point in time, and tried to write.

Try being the operative word.

I had thirty-seven words that at some point I’d typed before backspacing them away over the past two and a bit hours. Thirty-six of them had been the word the.

Not that I’d spent all of that time writing. I’d done a fair bit of watching the boats in the bay and even talked to my neighbor’s cat for some of it when he wandered over to proudly show me the leaf he’d caught. Sylvester was a lovely orange cat, sweet and affectionate, though his hunting skills were a bit questionable, as they tended toward leaves and stolen bits of laundry during the summer when people had things out on their lines or an open window he found his way through.

“Come on,” I told myself. “Just one sentence and the next will come to you, and then a few more and we’ll have a whole paragraph! And then I can stop.”

I typed the word the again and finally thought, What the hell? My witch owns a café, so I’ll open the book with the door opening.

I typed that out and felt triumphant. I felt even better after the customer ordered a coffee and got snarky when he was told that no, Willow did not, in fact, buy magic beans from a man who also bought cows when the customer asked that question in the wrong tone.

I was saved from having to stop myself from letting my café-owning witch turn him into a toad or something else completely out of character that I’d have to go back and rewrite by getting a FaceTime notification from my mother.

I hit accept, and her face immediately filled my screen.

I immediately knew something was wrong from the small frown between her eyebrows and the way Dad hovered nervously behind her with an odd smile pasted on his face.

“Hi, Mom! How’s RV life?”

“Hey, baby. Not quite how I pictured it when we sold the house and bought the RV.”

I frowned, noting now that Dad seemed to have mud on his clothes.

“Did it break down? You guys have only had it for a month, so it should be covered under warranty.”

Mom pursed her lips. “No. It’s your father, and I am thinking of coming home if he doesn’t shape up.”

Oh, no. If she did that, since they’d sold the house, she’d move in with me, and then Dad would show up with the RV and refuse to leave my driveway until she forgave him. I needed to smooth over whatever their ridiculous tiff was this time. No doubt it was as inconsequential as all the others they’d had since Dad’s retirement three years ago.

“What’s happened?” I asked cautiously.

“Your father got banned from another campground.”

Another campground? There had been a first?

“How many is that now?” I asked, making sure I understood.

“It was a temporary misunderstanding,” Dad interjected as Mom’s eyes looked somewhere off to the side instead of answering me.

“You were panning for gold in their decorative landscaping!”

“It fed from a creek, and there was gravel and picnic benches, which, to me, indicated recreation.”

“It was a KOA campground, and there were signs already up saying no fishing or swimming!”

“And I wasn’t. I was panning for gold.”

How was this my life?

“Okay, Dad, I can see Mom’s feeling very embarrassed and, um, you really should have realized if it said not to do other recreational things, that anything else involving the, ah, water there was a no-go.”