I wanted to give you a sneak read from my upcoming book, Three Notch Safari.
First, here’s the cover description:
Becca Garvey’s life has just been burned to the ground by her husband’s announcement that he is abandoning her to pursue his “dream” of becoming a beach bum. Left solely responsible for not only their 25-acre homestead in Hollywood, Maryland, but a free-spirited daughter and her increasingly dotty mother, Becca is determined to face an uncertain future with optimism.
She believes that her farm—which is really only Becca’s collection of tamed exotic animals like donkeys, llamas, and miniature horses—might be her ticket to financial solvency. Her plan is to create a unique place where children and adults alike are encouraged to not only interact freely with the animals but also to have weekend “experiences” with them. If she can create that, she just might find herself with a profitable venture.
However, animals are not always cooperative, and Becca’s neighbors are not enthused about her vision of a tourist attraction in their quiet, pastoral setting. She must buy new animals, learn how to care for them, train them, and create an experience for customers…all while balancing the concerns of her neighbors and the disruptions of jealous busybodies.
One of those busybodies will do anything to stop Becca.
Ready for more?
Here’s an unedited excerpt:
By the next morning, I was wondering if the previous evening had been a freakish nightmare. But no, Mark’s side of the bed was made. And I was still roiling with anger. I stumbled out to the kitchen in my fluffy cheetah-print robe. Mark hated the robe, which I loved because it was so warm. Today I was glad I had never listened to his insistence that I toss it out and had instead kept it. It seemed like a moral victory over him.
I glanced up at the clock on the wall. Crap, already six o’clock. The critters would be getting anxious soon. Daisy, my border collie, already sat panting next to the door. I let her out, started a pot of coffee, then went back to my room to change, careful not to wake my mother, who slept in the guest room. Mom would be up soon enough and when she came out for breakfast, I’d have to tell her what had happened yesterday. Thank God she’d been in her room with the television volume up to an ungodly level so she hadn’t heard what had transpired between Mark and me as we had carried our argument from the barn to our bedroom.
It was the first time I had been glad that mom absolutely refused to wear her hearing aids. “I don’t need them,” she would insist, then constantly parrot, “What? What? What?” all day long.
Don’t get mad at mom for Mark’s stupidity.
I took a deep breath as I slid into my favorite pair of torn work jeans and my grimy boots. Both got washed regularly but they always smelled faintly of hay and manure.
I slid as quietly out the kitchen door as I could so as not to wake my mother, although it was unlikely that she would hear a tornado racing up Rt. 235, much less the door creaking open and clicking shut.
I clucked my tongue and Daisy came running. She liked nothing better than to “help” me feed my critters, although her help often took the form of nipping at heels or racing up on an unsuspecting goat in order to terrorize it. Such a brat.
The morning was already warm and sunny. Hopefully it wouldn’t be a scorcher. Late August could be iffy-most of it was brutal but it could be interspersed with some balmy days. I went to the feed shed and decided to start the morning with the goats. I opened their metal trash can full of pellets, and scooped a quantity into a pail. Which reminded me that the poopy pail still sat outside the shed, waiting to be cleaned.
I carefully secured the metal lid back down on the garbage can. I had initially tried using heavy plastic bins to store feed. Big mistake. Squirrels and mice can get into anything like that and all you’re left with is a chewed-up bin with no feed left.
The goats all anxiously ran to their fence to greet me. You liked to think that it was because they had such great affection for you, but I knew their little horizontal pupils were really gazing longingly at what I was carrying in my hand.
“Okay, babies, breakfast time,” I said. I fed my six goats in individual metal dishes set up in a row, with each dish set about two feet apart. I’m sure I made quite the scene as I dumped feed into one bowl and then ran down the line dumping some into each subsequent dish.
Right on schedule, all of the goats crowded at the first dish, then all but one ran to the second dish, then to the next and the next, until finally there was just one goat bellying up to the sixth dish of feed. “Piglets,” I murmured affectionately.
Daisy assisted by running up and down the line like a maniac, as though by doing so she was getting them to eat faster.
I returned the pail to the feed shed and hefted a bale of hay from the stack I had just purchased two days earlier. Had I known what Mark was about to do to me, would I have done anything differently this week?
I shrugged to myself. Except for horses, farm animals don’t care about your emotional problems. They need to be fed, watered, groomed, and cleaned up after, on time every day.
Dumping the hay into a wheelbarrow I keep right outside the feed shed, I took the hay to the goats’ hay station, one of few contraptions Mark had been willing to build for me. Constructed about three feet off the ground between two trees, it had wide slots so that the goats could easily eat hay from it, yet kept the hay off the ground to prevent it from getting moldy. Also, goats don’t like eating from the ground. Their penned area had trees completely devoid of vegetation from about three feet off the ground.
I lifted the hay and tossed it into the hay station with a grunt, then spent another thirty minutes taking care of the horses and llamas.
When Daisy and I returned to the house, her panting and me a little smelly and a lot sweaty, I found mom sitting in the kitchen with a cup of the coffee I had brewed. In front of her was an open box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts I had purchased yesterday morning, before Mark had turned into a complete moron. A wanker, as the British would say.
Without a good morning, she set the cup into her saucer and said, “I need to get my pie plate back from Betty Ann.”
I sighed. “Mom,” I explained patiently as I retrieved Daisy’s food bucket from under the sink. “Betty Ann dropped the pie plate off last week.”
“She did?” Mom looked at me quizzically.
I nodded and poured some of the chow into Daisy’s bowl on the floor. “She did. Listen, I need to tell you what happened last—”
“I don’t remember her coming to get it. When was she here?” Mom had that faraway look she got when she was reaching futilely backward, grasping at wispy memories.
Whenever I got a little irritated by mom’s wandering mind, I reminded myself of the woman she once was and that I could very well end up in the same situation. Except I wouldn’t have someone like me to take care of me, I would have my daughter, April.
I shuddered at the thought. I would never understand how April had become the opposite of me. Although, truth be told, wasn’t I the opposite of my own mother?
Visit the Three Notch Safari page on my web site for info on the back story and to read an additional excerpt.
Don’t forget to visit the Appearances page for a complete listing of my upcoming book-signings and events. It would be a treat to meet you and say “hello.”