“Not exactly, but I wasn’t watching your feet.”
Glo focused on the broom handle. “Here goes again. I have a feeling I’m just going to zoom away this time.”
She ran through the spell and waited a beat. We all held our breath, but nothing happened. No uppity. No rising. No soaring.
“Crap,” Glo said. “Damn and double damn and phooey.”
She dropped the broom to the floor and kicked it across the room. The broom ricocheted off the wall, flipped end over end, bounced off the work island, and crashed through the back window.
No one moved for a full minute. We were eyes wide, mouths open, frozen in place.
“I didn’t see that,” I finally said. “I swear I didn’t see anything.”
Clara picked her way through the pieces of glass on the floor and looked out the window. “Uh-oh.”
“What uh-oh?” I asked her. “I hate uh-oh.”
“I don’t see the broom.”
We went outside and looked around. No broom.
“A dog must have carried it off,” I said.
Glo squinted up into the sky. “Come back, broom,” she yelled. “I’m sorry I kicked you.”
We all looked up to see if the broom would return.
“I feel like an idi
ot,” Clara said. “I’m standing here expecting to see a flying broom.”
We trooped into the kitchen and closed the door.
“I didn’t want to say anything when we were outside,” Glo said, “but I think that broom was really mean-spirited.”
“You should get your money back,” Clara said. “I wouldn’t pay for a broom with an attitude.”
I picked up where I’d left off with the cupcake icing. “It was just a freak accident,” I said more to myself than to anyone else.
Clara used one of Glo’s brooms to sweep up the window glass. “I’ll go along with the freak part.”
Diesel sauntered in through the entrance from the shop. “How’s it going?” he asked.
No one said anything. We were all contemplating the question, not sure of the answer.
His attention moved to the broken window. “What happened there?”
“Angry broom,” Glo said on a sigh.
Diesel cut his eyes to me.
“Glo kicked it to the wall, and then it sort of did a cartwheel and flipped itself through the window,” I told him.
“Hard to get sympathetic about a broom and a broken window when I’ve got a monkey sitting in my backseat,” Diesel said.
“I know. I’m sorry,” Glo said. “It turns out it’s surprisingly difficult to place a monkey.”
Clara scooped the glass up in a dustpan and dumped the pieces into the trash. “At least we’re neighbors to a hardware store. I’m going to run next door and find someone to fix my window.”