LITMIR.BIZ

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fuss when he arrived. The goat must have thrown her off, because she hadn’t made a sound. She was an orange tabby and the morning sun was highlighting her white chest and paws while keeping her face in the shadows, but the rooster and goat didn’t even notice.

      I carried Charlie down the stairs and the goat followed, hopping sideways on all four hooves and kicking his hind legs in the air. “Looks like you have a new friend,” I said to Charlie as I put him down. We walked down the street in an odd parade, Charlie pecking at every speck on the ground, and the goat trying to climb everything, even making an unsuccessful attempt at the mailbox.

      Then he jumped a bunch of times, twisting back and forth in a little happy goat dance that made me smile. “You are adorable!” I couldn’t help but hope that it belonged to Joss Delaney. He owned the organic chicken farm at the end of the block and since we were dating, I’d be able to see this cutie-pie a lot.

      We walked up to Joss’s porch and I let Charlie bounce off the porch swing to get to the doorbell. We waited, six eyes on the door.

      Joss smiled when he saw me and then noticed the goat. “Pegasus?”

      Pegasus the goat pranced toward him a few steps then dipped his head again.

      “Watch it,” I said. “His head butts are lethal.”

      “Stop it,” Joss scolded the goat, who lifted his head and danced again as if saying it had all been a big joke. “Are you okay?”

      “Yeah.” I reached down to scratch the goat’s back and he arched up. “He just surprised me.” I noticed the white spot on his side that looked just like a wing. “So you have a goat named Pegasus.”

      He blew out a breath. “Seems like it. Gemma gave them to Kai, totally assuming that they could stay here.”

      Gemma was Joss’s ex-wife and his daughter Kai’s mother. They’d been through a nasty divorce and came to an uneasy truce a few months before. “That’s nice?” I couldn’t help how my voice rose at the end to make it a question. I hurried to add, “You said ‘them.’ More than one?”

      He pointed to the pen near the barn where I could see another adorable goat peering out from behind the open gate. “That’s Percy.”

      “Like from the Percy Jackson books?” I guessed. Percy was smaller and fluffier than Pegasus, and he had longer ears. The black and brown spots all over his white fur resembled a jigsaw puzzle.

      “Yep,” Joss said. “Kai can’t get enough of them.”

      She loved the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books by Rick Riordan. They were filled with mythology and adventure.

      Joss grabbed my hand as we walked over to reunite the goats. “Sorry I’m so distracted. These guys just arrived yesterday.” The small pen held several brightly colored wooden tables of various heights and balls of different sizes. “At least Gemma sent food and toys along with them.”

      “Where did she get those? Goats “R” Us?” I asked just as Percy leapt onto a blue table and Pegasus followed, pushing him off the other side, only to take turns doing it again.

      Joss smiled and then examined the latch as he pulled the gate shut. “Maybe Kai didn’t hook it properly.”

      “Maybe Charlie is luring them into his life of crime as an escape artist.”

      He pretended to frown at Charlie, and then lifted him to stare into his face. “I wouldn’t put it past him.” He set Charlie down in his own pen.

      “I better get my run in before the farmers’ market,” I said. I’d loaded everything I needed, other than Trouble, into the car the night before. “Kai still sleeping?”

      He nodded and pulled me close for a kiss, finally focusing those blue eyes on me.

      We broke apart and I was breathing fast before I even started my run.

      “Still on for Tuesday?” he called after me.

      “Of course.” I looked back to see him watching me run down the block. I sent him a flirty wave, and then ruined it by stumbling.

      Joss and I had started dating a few months before and had settled into a delightful pattern, fitting in dates during the weekends his daughter was with her mother, and when my son Elliott had rehearsals during the week. Kai had become ensnared in the same love of theater and had enjoyed watching Elliott’s rehearsals and helping with costumes.

      November in Sunnyside, California provided the best weather for morning exercise. The air was cool with only a hint of moisture as the sun came up, pushing the low-lying gray clouds of the marine layer back to the ocean. The hills in the distance were still uncharacteristically brown. We usually started getting rain in October, but not this year. All of Southern California was on high alert for fire danger—a bigger fear than earthquakes.

      I’d taken up jogging again when I unpacked the last boxes from my dad’s garage, signaling that Elliott and I were staying put.

      We originally moved in with my father during his second bout of pneumonia, and I assumed we’d move back to the city once he was recovered. My dad and I butted heads for a lot of my adult life, ever since I dropped out of college when I got pregnant with Elliott. We resolved a lot of our issues and he admitted that he wanted us to stay, and I admitted that Elliott and I wanted that too.

      Now we were making up for lost time.

      Elliott had brought the box inside, chanting, “The last box,” in the same tone as the dodo’s saying “the last melon” in the Ice Age movie. The box contained toiletries from the back of the kitchen closet, unmatched socks, and my Weight Watchers scale.

      I hadn’t been to the gym in ages, but my clothes all still fit, and I kept myself busy with my job that was often physical—lifting boxes of cat food, stirring five gallon pots of Seafood Surprise in a pan the size of a manhole, and lugging around a cat carrier filled with a cat who ate very well. I’d confidently set the scale down on the kitchen floor and stepped on it.

      The sound that came out of my mouth was something like “Gak!” The number on the small screen sparked my new morning routine of jogging and eating egg white omelets for breakfast.

      Once my muscles loosened up and I got past the aches and pains, I went through my to-do list in my head while I ran.

      I owned the Meowio Batali Gourmet Cat Food Company and we were poised to enter a new phase. Based on the success of introducing my products to the San Diego-based Twomey’s Health Food Stores, I’d recently sent a business proposal to Natural-LA Grocers, which had more than fifty stores throughout Los Angeles.

      It was all I could do to focus on the normal day-to-day issues instead of wondering why I hadn’t heard from them yet. To keep my mind off of it, I’d gone back into product development mode, trying out new recipes and taste-testing them on Trouble. I’d learned long ago that if Trouble didn’t like the food, it wouldn’t sell. This last round of new product development had confirmed that she still didn’t like anything with curry, but I wasn’t ready to give up on a Thai-themed product.

      My business had settled into a solid schedule of working in the commercial kitchen at least two mornings a week. But it left me enough time to handle the farmers’ markets, as well as work on marketing and the other behind-the-scenes tasks. Meowio had grown so much in a short period of time. And it all started with Trouble.

      I was just getting by as an apartment manager, collecting rent and handling issues like plumbing and lost keys for a small building in downtown San Diego, when I found Trouble abandoned in an empty apartment. She was so tiny then, too young to have been taken away from her mother, and had a lot of digestive problems. I started cooking her food and learned that some of my friends’ cats had the same issues. I sold my food to more and more cat owners, eventually expanding to farmers’ markets. Now Meowio Batali Gourmet Cat Food was sold all over San Diego. And soon, maybe all over Los Angeles.

      It wouldn’t have happened without Quincy Powell, a successful business

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