Chapter 1 #2
Ross snorts again, shaking his head at his friend. “You’ll be waiting forever, you fool.”
Cleet pockets my father’s expensive pen, but I don’t have the heart to call him on it.
“Uh, thanks,” I say, folding the paper and sliding it into the back pocket of my jeans.
My father forces all staffers to relinquish their phones at the beginning of their shifts, like a Boomer math teacher on a power trip, so I return Cleet’s and Ross’s phones with a tight smile and then follow them out of the office.
I’d expected them to take off immediately to pursue job leads—I’d spent five hours compiling that list for them—so I’m discomfited when they instead bypass the exit and trudge down the hall toward the two short steps leading up to the tasting room.
I trail after them and then follow them through the door, which swings shut behind me. Surely they can’t intend to…
But they do, because they approach the bar.
“You’re staying?” I ask them in disbelief.
Ross gives me a wounded look. “We just got fired, sweetheart. Of course we want to grab a drink with our friends. Would you begrudge us that?”
“Of course not,” I stammer, trying to figure out if I’m being unreasonable. “The first one’s on the house.”
“Thanks, Briar,” Cleet says, beaming at me. “Want to sit with us?”
I back up so quickly, I nearly bring down a wire display filled with Silver Star stickers. “I have to get back to work.”
“Must be nice to have a job,” Ross comments.
I don’t have a response for that, so I head into the back, hoping they’ll down their drinks quickly. But I check on them fifteen minutes later, and they’re still sitting in front of beers, talking to the bartender. The guy notices me and gives me a stare of death from behind the bar.
I feel it then: the goose walking over my proverbial grave.
An hour and a half later, I peek into the tasting room, and they’re still there, looking pissed. The other staffers must have heard the whole story by now. They’re going to be upset, and they’ll blame me for being the bearer of bad news.
Hannah would probably say I’m making this up, but I can feel dark energy leaching into the brewery, filling all the nooks and crannies like a cursed English muffin.
I try to keep busy by doing inventory in the stockroom, but the feeling only intensifies. So I’m not surprised when Bubba interrupts me a few minutes later and announces there’s going to be an all-hands-on-deck meeting by the vats. “That includes you, Princess.”
I’ve tried to like Bubba. Really I have. But he’s a big guy who tries to use his size to look down on everyone he thinks is weaker. My great aunt has always said eyes are the windows to the soul, and Bubba’s deep-set dark eyes that have about as much human kindness as a couple of raisins do.
He’s not even a very good brewer. Hannah’s brother Liam is much more talented.
Not that I’m surprised my dad went for Bubba instead of trying to poach Liam.
Bubba makes a big act of being deferential to powerful people (i.e.
my father, not me), but Liam would never put on a show.
He’s an amateur boxer, and no one with any self-preservation would attempt to bully him.
He’s tall and broad-shouldered, and everything about him screams I have a Y-chromosome, and I’m not afraid to use it!
Liam’s beer is top-notch, though. Worlds better than Bubba’s. Especially the beers Liam brews in his downtime, since everything is standardized at Big Catch.
I’ve thought about offering him a job once Silver Star is mine, but I’ll have to build up the brewery first. Make him a sweet offer he won’t want to refuse.
Someone with his talent wouldn’t work at a place where he’s forced to hand over his cell phone and where there are no chairs in the break area.
“Did he say what this meeting’s about?” I ask Bubba, trying not to sound defeated. These meetings have been nearly constant since Briar Boot Camp started, because everyone knows nothing kills the soul faster than pointless meetings.
Bubba just grunts and lifts his chin to indicate I should join him.
I fall in behind him, worried I’m not demonstrating good leadership qualities but well aware that it would be worse if I tried to “steal” the lead.
We join the others already assembled in the open area next to the beer vats, and I glance around, surprised, because everyone on staff is present, even the people who aren’t working today.
Not including Dad and me, there are twenty Silver Star employees now that I’ve let Cleet and Ross go.
My father is currently standing in the middle of them, a bemused look on his face.
“Isn’t anyone in the tasting room?” I ask.
Bubba gives me a dark look with his raisin eyes. “You know what? Cleet and Ross are out there. So we’re good. They’ll help anyone who shows.”
Now that goose is tap-dancing across my grave.
I glance at my father. “What’s all this about, Mr. Sterling?”
Yes, at Silver Star Brewery, I refer to my father as sir or Mr. Sterling. My request. I get enough disrespect without running around calling for Daddy.
“Bubba’s the one who called this meeting,” he says pointedly. “So why don’t you tell me?”
He might as well have said, You want the brewery? It’s your problem.
I turn to Bubba, who smiles at me for the first time ever and pulls out a cell phone. My father grumbles something under his breath, because, yes, technically the phone should be in the tub in his office with the others. But I’m not going to tackle this six-foot-two man and try to confiscate it.
Bubba lifts the phone. “We figured we all wanted our phones back. So we sprung them. You know this is the only brewery in town where employees are forced to give up their phones?”
“I missed a dental appointment because of you,” someone calls out from the back, provoking other murmurs of agreement.
“But we’re done playing by your arbitrary rules,” Bubba says, glancing from me to my father, who looks amused by their rebellion. Probably because he’s already checked out, and it won’t impact his life for better or worse.
Bubba fiddles with his phone until a Christmas song starts playing. “You better watch out. You better not cry…”
Giving me an arch look, he says, “Santa’s always watching, Briar. We all know what you did to Cleet and Ross.”
“I didn’t try to keep it secret.” I can feel my cheeks flushing. Damn my pale skin and its failure to keep my moods secret.
“You didn’t even have the decency to fire them one at a time. And this is after you cut our holiday bonuses.”
The song keeps piping out around us, oddly cheerful, as the staffers nod and mumble in a show of solidarity. My father continues to watch the revolution with passive interest.
“And you keep changing the schedule,” someone says from the back of the group.
“And rejecting time off,” another person yells.
“You’ve insulted every single tropical IPA I’ve made over the last six months,” Bubba steams. “And you took away the seating in the break area.”
I want to point to my father, to say he did all of those things, or I did them on his orders, but he still has another couple of months to yank the brewery from me. If he does that, the last ten months of torment will have been for nothing.
So I stay silent.
“I quit,” Bubba says with a determined nod of his heavy, stubbled chin.
“And I’ve warned every other brewer in town not to accept a job at this dump.
” Grinning, he turns and nods to the rest of the group, and I swear to God, they must have choreographed this ahead of time.
Because while I stand there, incapable of saying anything other than “But you can’t,” they come up to me one by one and quit too.
The last person, an intern who’s not even on the payroll, throws a bottle cap at my feet as a final insult. All the while, that awful song is playing in the background. The song finishes and restarts, adding insult to the injury.
I look up from the bottle cap at my feet and stare in dismay as the whole staff leaves en masse, pouring out into the cold through the back.
At least they’re not hanging around for beers the way Cleet and Ross did.
I look at my father, hoping he’s going to fix this mess he coerced me into making with him.
But he gives me a broad, satisfied smile and pats his belly.
“You know what, I’m going to give you the brewery early, honey.
We’ll sign the papers tomorrow morning. If you can make it back from this one, I’ll know you’re a real Sterling after all. ”
Then he leaves too, and I’m left a huddled mass of a person. I want to curl into a ball and pretend none of this ever happened. But this problem is mine. This brewery is mine.
But there’s no brewery without a brewer. If Bubba has been bad-mouthing me, no brewer will want to work with me, let alone a talented one who could turn this business around.
No one will want to work for me, period.
I stumble into the tasting room, briefly thankful that at least Ross and Cleet have finally left. No one else is around, so at least the staff warned the customers before they up and quit.
My only conscious thought is that I need to leave too. I need my friends. I only stay long enough to flip the sign to CLOSED and lock up. Then I head toward Big Catch Brewing, my mind in a haze.
Unless a miracle happens, I’m screwed.