Touched by his offer, I smiled at my only child. Trey was tall with the wide shoulders of a football player and had brown eyes that were prone to twinkle with mischief. His chestnut hair was too long for my taste, but I reached up and ruffled it fondly. He squirmed away from my touch, readjusting his shaggy locks while introducing me to two young men from the Red Fox Mountain Co-op who’d be helping us transfer the furniture and boxes stacked in a Dunston storage unit into a charming cottage located minutes away from Novel Idea.
I’d had my eye on this butter yellow house with periwinkle shutters since it came up for sale. But at the time, there was a snag in my finances due to Trey totaling my car and trashing East Dunston High’s football field and bleachers in the process. This prevented me from making an offer on the picket fence paradise until I sold my house in Dunston. Instead, Trey and I moved in with my mother for the summer. The moment my financial burdens eased, I rushed into the Sherlock Holmes Realty office and made an offer that was immediately accepted. I happily put down a deposit to ensure that after a mid-October closing I could lay claim to the two-bedroom house in the lovely subdivision of Walden Woods Circle.
Throughout the months of August and September, I’d fallen asleep to visions of the cottage’s sunny rooms and secluded rear garden. I couldn’t wait to hang family pictures on the walls and dig up the previous owner’s spent annuals, to plant row after row of perennials that would burst through the ground the following spring. My head was filled with images of van Gogh’s irises and sunflowers, Matisse’s dahlias and daisies, and a riot of Manet’s roses. I planned to transform my backyard into an impressionist painting.
As for the interior, I wanted to decorate using a combination of furniture from my old place as well as some new pieces in bright, cheerful hues. Unfortunately, I’d have to sell a few more of my clients’ books to major publishing houses before I could afford to head over to High Point to pick out comfy living room chairs or a farm table for the kitchen. Up until now, I’d only sold two book series. One was a cozy mystery featuring a sushi chef and the second was a romantic suspense set in a Scottish castle. And I couldn’t really take credit for the sale of the romantic suspense. That deal was already in the works when I was promoted to literary agent.
Upon our arrival at the storage unit in Dunston, I pulled out boxes of clothes and milk crates stuffed with books for the boys to load into their truck. As I worked, my thoughts focused on another client I’d inherited. I still couldn’t believe that I now represented the international bestselling romance author Calliope Sinclair. If I could just convince her to make some changes to her latest manuscript, I felt certain that several publishing houses would enter into a bidding war to acquire the latest masterpiece from one of America’s best-known authors.
“Stop gatherin’ wool, girl!” My mother’s voice startled me out of my reminiscing. “You’re standin’ in the middle of the path and this box isn’t gettin’ any lighter. What’ve you got in here? Cannonballs from the Civil War?”
Putting my own box on the ground, I rushed forward to take my mother’s burden and set it in the bed of her turquoise pickup truck. I added the last box and then shut the tailgate, causing the magnetic sign plastered to the side of the truck to fall askew. I realigned the purple and black sign advertising the services of Amazing Althea, Psychic Advisor. “Sorry,” I told her. “I was thinking about work again.”
“This is work. Good work. The kind that gets you out in the open air and invites the sun’s rays to paint your face. Before long, it’ll be winter and we’ll all be starvin’ for this feelin’.” My mother held out her free arms as though she could embrace the whole world. “I always feel like a kid durin’ the fall. This is gonna be the best Halloween ever. I’m gonna decorate the front door and scare the masks right off the kids who toilet papered my holly bushes last year. They won’t come near my place totin’ rolls of Charmin ever again.”
I waited until we were both inside the truck before saying, “Is that an official prediction?”
My mother swatted me with the paperwork from the storage facility. “I don’t read the cards for somethin’ like that. I’ve gotta save my spiritual energy for when someone needs me, and my appointment calendar is as stuffed as a Christmas goose.”