2. Rafe
RAFE
"You could've woken me," I tell him.
He thumps his tail once, unbothered, and inhales the bowl of kibble like it personally wronged him.
I pour my coffee black and stand at the kitchen window watching the ranch come up gray and then gold, the tanks in the brewhouse catching the first light through the barn doors I left open last night.
I get twenty minutes of quiet before anyone else shows up, and I usually spend it running through the day's brew schedule in my head.
This morning I spend it trying to talk myself out of a decision I already made yesterday.
The interview lasted eleven minutes before I hired her.
Two of those minutes involved her son standing in my brewhouse asking, with the total lack of tact unique to eight-year-olds, whether the whole building smelled like beer, and then whether he could have my job instead of his mother having one.
I gave him an honest answer to the first question and a flat no to the second, and somewhere in the middle of all that his sister handed me a dandelion like she was closing an arms deal.
I hired the mother a few minutes later. I've had longer conversations with vendors about hop shipments.
It made sense at the time. It still makes sense. I tell myself that twice more before Gunny's truck pulls into the lot.
"Morning, boss." Gunny comes through the barn doors already grinning, which is never a good sign this early. "Heard you hired somebody."
"Word travels fast."
"Word travels at the speed of Dot Higgins, which is faster than light in this town." He drops his bag behind the bar and starts pulling glasses down for the morning prep, smirking at me over his shoulder. "Heard she's got kids too. Twins. Heard one of them brought you a flower."
"Who told you that?"
"Everybody in about a two-mile radius, far as I can tell.
It's the best thing that's happened in Pinewood Ridge since the Kowalskis' goat got loose in the church parking lot.
" He racks the last glass and turns to face me properly, arms crossed, mirroring me without seeming to notice he's doing it. "So what's her name?"
"Jenna Walsh."
"She any good with a spreadsheet?"
"She reconciled forty thousand line items a month for a divorce attorney. Never made him ask twice for a number." I pull the resume copy she left with me out of my jacket pocket and drop it on the bar so he can see the line for himself. "That's the hire. Not the kids. Not the flower."
Gunny reads it upside down without picking it up, whistles low. "That's a real skill set for a town this size."
"It's exactly what I need." I dig the folded letter out of the same jacket pocket and drop it next to the resume. "Read that."
He picks it up this time, scans it, and his eyebrows climb somewhere near his hairline. "They used the word compliance four times in one paragraph."
"I counted five."
"What happens if you don't fix it?"
"Fines first. Then they start asking harder questions about the last two years, and I don't have good answers for those, because the last office manager I had couldn't tell a ledger from a beer menu before she stopped showing up entirely.
" I fold the letter back up before he can read it a third time and start looking for jokes in it.
"I needed somebody who could read a spreadsheet without flinching. That's it."
"Sure." He says it in the tone of a man who has decided not to argue with something he finds very funny. "Purely professional. Nothing to do with the fact that you've been eating lunch alone at that desk for six years and yesterday a kid handed you a flower and you kept it."
"I didn't keep it."
"It's in a water glass on your desk right now."
Nothing useful comes to mind to say back, so I don't try.
I grab a crate of empties instead and carry it out to the truck, which is easier than admitting anything out loud.
Gunny lets me have it, mostly because he knows I'll circle back to the actual work faster if he doesn't push, and because he's already moved on to complaining about the keg washer, which has been making a sound like a dying accordion for weeks now.
By midmorning the two of us have the whole place running the way it's supposed to, malt going into the mash tun, Gunny arguing with a delivery driver about a shipment that's short two pallets, the taproom radio playing something with too much fiddle in it.
It's the kind of morning that used to be enough.
It mostly still is. I keep catching myself glancing at the office door anyway, running a mental checklist of things Jenna Walsh is going to need tomorrow.
She'll need a desk that isn't a disaster, a working password for the ancient accounting software, and some clear boundary about which parts of this building are hers and which parts stay mine.
That last one feels important enough to write down.
I find a piece of scrap paper and a pen and start a list, because that's what I do with problems that don't have a clean tactical solution.
Office is office. Brewhouse is brewhouse.
Under no circumstances are the kids allowed near the fermentation tanks, the walk-in, or the loading dock, all three of which can hurt a grown man who isn't paying attention, let alone an eight-year-old who's decided the whole building belongs to her now.
I read the list over twice, decide it's solid, and go find the one member of this operation who's actually going to listen to it without an opinion.
Biscuit is asleep in the sun by the office door, taking up roughly the same floor space as a small couch. I crouch down next to him and he cracks one eye open, tail giving a single lazy thump against the concrete.
"New rule," I tell him. "The kids don't come near me. Not the tanks, not the walk-in, not me specifically. You can like them all you want. I need one of us keeping some distance."
He studies me for a long moment, unimpressed, and then closes his eye again, which is about the response I expected from a dog who spent the entire back half of yesterday afternoon following an eight-year-old around like she was carrying a steak in each pocket.
Biscuit made his decision about the Walsh twins in roughly four seconds and has shown no interest in reconsidering it since.
I envy him that, a little. He never learned to hold a grudge the way the rest of us do.
I go back to work. It's easier than sitting with the thought for too long.
The day runs the way most of them do, long and physical and loud enough that there isn't much room left over for thinking about anything except the next task in front of me, which is exactly why I like it.
By the time Gunny heads out, the sun's dropping fast behind the ridge and the taproom's gone quiet except for the hum of the walk-in and the tick of the mash tun cooling down.
"You want me to lock up?" Gunny asks, keys already in hand.
"I've got it."
"You always got it." He says it without any edge, just an old observation he's made a hundred times before, and shrugs into his jacket. At the door he stops, looks back at me across the empty taproom. "For what it's worth, I think you did good. Hiring her."
"It was a business decision."
"Sure it was." He grins, doesn't argue, and lets the door swing shut behind him.
I mean to head straight up to the loft. I end up in the office instead, telling myself it's just a final check before tomorrow, and spend the better part of half an hour doing things that have nothing to do with checking anything.
I throw out three years of expired takeout menus.
I find a mouse that still works under a drift of unopened mail and plug it into the ancient desktop.
I move the shoebox of receipts off the chair and onto the floor so there's somewhere for an actual human being to sit down.
The dandelion's still in its water glass at the corner of the desk.
I move it two inches to the left so it isn't directly in the way of the keyboard, then stand there for a second, a grown man who just rearranged a weed for a woman he hired eleven minutes into meeting her.
I turn off the light before I can start asking myself why, and go upstairs.
Alone, the brewery goes quiet in the particular way it does at night, tanks ticking as they cool, the old barn settling around me like it's exhaling.
I climb the stairs to the loft, pour two fingers of something I don't really want, and sit down at the desk with my laptop, because it's the third of the month, more or less, and there's a piece of business I handle the same way every time, alone, after hours, with nobody around to ask what it's for.
The login takes four tries because I always forget the password on purpose, some old habit about not making anything too easy to find twice.
The account itself is nothing dramatic to look at, just a small holding company with a name that means nothing to anyone who might stumble across it, and a single standing transfer that goes out on schedule regardless of whether the brewery's had a good month or a bad one.
I've done this so many times the motions don't require thought anymore.
I enter the amount, confirm it, and authorize the transfer. It's done in under a minute.
Tonight it takes longer than it should, because my eyes keep drifting past the laptop screen to the water glass sitting at the corner of the desk, one slightly crushed dandelion still holding its shape better than it has any right to after a full day.
I don't remember deciding to keep it. I remember Josie Walsh handing it to me like it was the most natural thing in the world, like handing a stranger a flower was just something people did, and I remember not knowing what to do with my hands until I'd taken it.
I should throw it out. It's a weed in a water glass on a desk covered in invoices, and I run a business, not a garden. I look at it for a solid ten seconds, weighing the decision like it's actually a decision, and then I leave it exactly where it is and finish the transfer instead.
The confirmation screen loads, blank and businesslike, no name attached that would mean anything to a stranger, no note, same as it's been every month for longer than I want to count. I close the laptop before I can start reading too much into either the transaction or the flower.
Tomorrow Jenna Walsh starts work in the office fifteen feet from where I'm sitting right now, and I've got a list in my pocket that says exactly how far apart the two of us are going to stay.
It should be easy. I built the whole rule specifically because it's supposed to be easy.
I don't believe myself even a little, and that's a new problem I don't have a list for yet.