Title: Please Post Bail, Love Mom
Author: CJ Zahner
Genre: Chick Lit
Book Blurb:
Wetherbee Academy is the Harvard of preschools, and Nikki Anderson will sell her soul to get her triplets in.
Only one problem. Her soul might not be worth enough.
Now remarried and raising teens and toddlers, Nikki becomes consumed with a prestigious preschool program. She worries she failed her older children during her first marriage and is convinced enrolling the triplets in Wetherbee will resurrect her as a mother. Unfortunately, she has a nasty habit of breaking rules and bungling tasks.
Then, when a life-altering event steals her time, she ends up cutting corners, muddying motherhood, and hopping into hot water with the law.
Will a trip (or two) to jail ruin her kids’ chances of getting into Wetherbee and her second chance at perfecting parenthood?
Excerpt:
When you have three toddlers in diapers, you develop the exceptional ability to catnap anywhere and everywhere—even handcuffed in the back seat of a police car.
I rest my head against the cruiser’s window and, snap, I’m out cold.
“Who is she?”
“Is that the kidnapper?”
A dream blocks the questions circulating outside my window. In my mind, I’m basking on a beach, sipping some fruity drink called a Ticket to Fly. I drank two Tickets to Fly once in a prior life on the coast of Mexico—before kids. I crash-landed and slept for a day and a half.
Now, I need nothing to knock me out.
And if I sleep less than four hours a night? A catastrophic explosion can’t wake me.
I’m like a zombie mom. Cartoons clutter my news feed as I wander down diaper aisles in stores, hydrate on half-drunk juice boxes, and recite opening lines to happily-ever-after kid movies in my sleep.
“Ms. Anderson? Did you kidnap that baby?”
Exhaustion drowns out the voice, but the word baby sends me plummeting into a more realistic dream. I’m standing at the laundry sink amid a mound of clothes, soaking onesies, scrubbing puke, pee, poop, and, yes, an occasional wine smudge off fabric until my fingers sting. It’s only appropriate these tasks muddy my dreams, but I’m annoyed they obliterated that beach scene.
“Ms. Anderson.” Fingers rap against my window. I flinch and bang my head against the glass. “Why did you take that child? Ms. Anderson?”
I’m not entirely comfortable with my last name because I’ve been in a time warp since my second marriage eighteen months ago.
Our wedding took place on the day I gave birth. The ceremony began in the quiet of our home, family and friends surrounding us, then one giant labor pain interrupted our vows and sent us scrambling to the hospital. We said our “I dos” at the threshold of the delivery room after I delivered Sawyer but before Olivia and Sami made their way into the world.
Now, I’m raising triplets. Trying to, that is.
Last night Trip One, Sawyer, refused to go to sleep until after three a.m. He bounced his pointer finger off a pirate’s belly until I nearly grabbed the buccaneer and ripped his stuffing out. I never want to hear the words “ahoy, matey!” again.
Since my normal four hours of sleep failed me, I’m still reaching for REM. I haven’t been spine-straight and bright-eyed since I found myself pregnant at age forty-seven.
“Ms. Anderson, where were you going to take that baby?” Someone is rapping on the door on the other side of the car.
“Back away, back away.” A man in a blue uniform loops around the cruiser.
I squirm in my seat, wondering why a mother of triplets couldn’t coax a drip of sympathy from a small-town cop in a grocery store. I’m losing my touch. In my younger years, I could turn a man’s eye, convince him to relinquish his spot in a ticket line or buy me a drink at a bar.
Now? I’ve got six kids, two stepdaughters, and I’m pushing fifty. Men run when I approach—which inspires today’s million-dollar question: Why in God’s name would this makeshift cop think I was crazy enough to abduct another kid?
The grocery store scene bleeds back into my brain like a permanent marker on silk, slow and terrifyingly.
“Hold it right there,” he’d hollered with a limp-wristed wave of a pistol.
“Put that down,” I barked, positioning myself between the gun and the baby. “Are you crazy? You’ll shoot someone.”
I had managed to grab the last box of the triplets’ favorite cereal and was feeling mighty proud of myself when along comes Barney Fife to ruin my day. He was toothpick-legged, sported a crooked hat, and a lopsided holster hugged his bony hips.
“How ever do you keep those up?” I asked, ignoring his flailing arms and floppy elbow. He was more afraid of me than I was of him. “And stop waving that thing.”
“What did you say?” He stopped wagging his pistol, and honestly? I didn’t think it was real.
He stretched one long eyebrow into another, creating a hairy soffit over his eyes. “Keep what up?”
“Your pants. What are your hips, like twenty inches?”
“Now listen here,” he began. “Drop that baby and put your hands in the air.”
“Drop the baby?”
He lifted a second hand to steady his shaky first hand’s aim of the gun.
“This baby? You want me to drop this baby?”
“Are you resisting?” His voice shook.
“You can shoot me if you want, but I’m not dropping my baby.”
Practically sleep-walking through a fruitless morning, I wasn’t in a cooperative mood. Raising kids will do that, turn the meekest of mothers into Cat Woman or Mulan or whoever is the current rage.
“Put the baby down,” he reiterated and without warning, people in white shirts, red aprons, and greasy pants jumped at me, spinning my world out of control. The next thing I knew, I was handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser.
Now, people chatter outside my window as I dawdle in my half-conscious state. I drift off again. Float back to the beach in a blow-up inner tube, a pink-and-white striped straw resting against my lips—a plastic one, not paper—for once, my dreams are all about me, not the kids, my husband, or the environment. I’m sucking down my Ticket To Fly so quickly I’m giving myself a brain freeze.
“Why were you attempting to kidnap that child?” someone hollers. “Ma’am?”
Buy Links (including Goodreads and BookBub):
The novel is listed at .99 but will be increased to 2.99 on May 15th.
What makes your featured book a must-read?
Motherhood comradery! Every Mom, at one time or another, has felt like Nikki Anderson: overworked, overwrought, underappreciated, and out of sorts—a disaster waiting to happen!
Giveaway –
Enter to win a $10 Amazon gift card:
Open Internationally.
Runs May 7 – May 14, 2024.
Winner will be drawn on May 15, 2024.
Author Biography:
CJ Zahner is an author, digital-book hoarder, lover of can’t-put-down books, and she lives with a read-write-run disorder. She’s written four thrillers: The Suicide Gene, Dream Wide Awake, Project Dream, and The Dream Diaries; and three Chick Lit novels: Friends Who Move Couches, Don’t Mind Me I Came with the House, and Please Post Bail, Love Mom.
Currently, she is working on The Dream Snatchers, the sequel for her Dream Series, and a nonfiction novel, The House that Loved, detailing the effects of a drug her mother took while pregnant with her, Diethylstilbesterol or DES. (DES was prescribed to millions of women from 1938 until its banning in 1971.)
Born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania, Zahner worked full-time as a grant writer/administrator and part-time as a freelance writer until 2015 when her only sibling was diagnosed with early-onset dementia and his wife with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She said when something like that happens in your family, you realize what’s important in life. On a particularly rough day at work, she picked up her purse, walked away, and never looked back. Zahner and her husband moved to Wendell, North Carolina in 2020.
Now she reads, writes, and runs in the Raleigh area and spends as much time as possible with her family.
Social Media Links:
Author website: www.cjzahner.com www.cyndiezahner.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorcjzahner/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/TweetyZ
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cjzahner/