7. Jenna
JENNA
The lull between lunch and the after-work crowd is when Gunny runs his tests, and today he corners me by the walk-in with a small burlap pouch and the solemn energy of a man administering something he considers important.
"Smell it. Don't look, just smell it."
I close my eyes and breathe in over the open pouch, green and grassy with something citrus underneath that I've only started noticing in the last week, now that I know to look for it.
"Cascade."
"Centennial. Close, though. Two weeks ago you couldn't tell a hop from a pinecone. Now you're getting the family right even when you miss the cousin." He cinches the pouch shut like I've disappointed him only mildly. "That's basically a sommelier."
"I don't think that's how sommeliers work."
"It's exactly how they work. They just charge more to be wrong about it."
I've been keeping a tally in my head since the second week, a private scorecard nobody asked for, and by my count I'm right about four times out of ten now.
It isn't much. It's more than nothing, and nothing was where I started, back when every hop Rafe handed me smelled like the inside of a Christmas tree lot and I nodded along like I understood the difference.
Rafe comes out of the office with a small wooden flight in his hands, four glasses lined up like soldiers, each one holding an inch of something different, amber to gold to a cloudy orange that looks almost alive under the taproom lights.
He sets it down in front of me with the precision of a man defusing something.
"Time for the real test."
"I thought the hop pouches were the real test."
"That was training. This is deployment." He taps the first glass. "Pale ale. Tell me what you taste. Not what you think I want to hear. What you actually taste."
I lift the glass, swirl it the way I've watched him do a hundred times without ever admitting I was paying attention, and take a sip. It's bready, a little sweet, with a bitterness at the end that curls along the back of my tongue and fades fast.
"Toast. Like buttered toast, with a little bit of an argument at the end."
Something shifts behind his eyes, surprised in a way he's trying not to show. "That's not wrong."
"I know. I'm getting good at this."
"Don't get ahead of yourself." He slides the second glass toward me. "Amber."
This one's rounder, with caramel up front and a warmth that sits low in my chest by the time I swallow. "Caramel. Maybe a little bit like a candy bar that went to college and got serious about itself."
"That's oddly specific."
"I contain multitudes."
He almost smiles, the small private one that still catches me off guard every time it happens, like watching a locked door ease open half an inch. He nudges the third glass forward, the pale gold one, and I can smell it before it even reaches my mouth, sharp and green and a little bit dangerous.
"IPA. Deep breath first. This one's got a lot going on."
I take the deep breath. I take the sip. My whole face reacts before my brain catches up, an involuntary full-body flinch at the wall of bitterness that hits somewhere behind my molars and just sits there, refusing to leave.
"Oh my god."
"Too much?"
"It tastes like a pinecone got mad at you."
Rafe is mid-sip of his own glass when the words land, and it goes catastrophically wrong for him.
He chokes, actually chokes, beer spraying half across the bar top while he doubles over coughing, one hand slamming flat against the wood like he's trying to keep himself upright through sheer force of will.
I freeze with my own glass still raised, halfway between horrified and delighted, watching a man who once summed up an entire military career in four flat sentences completely come undone over a hop metaphor.
"Are you dying? Do I need to do something official right now?"
"I'm fine." He isn't fine. His eyes are watering and his voice comes out wrecked, half laugh and half genuine gasp for air. "A pinecone. Got mad at you."
"It's descriptive."
"It's insane. It's the single most insane tasting note I've heard in eleven years of doing this professionally." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, still catching his breath, and there's color high on his cheeks that the coughing alone doesn't explain. "Say it again."
"No."
"Say it again."
"It tastes like a pinecone got mad at you and took it out on my whole mouth. There. Are you satisfied?"
He isn't laughing anymore, not exactly, but something in his face has gone loose and unguarded in a way I've only caught glimpses of before, usually right before he catches himself and puts it away again.
"One more," he says, still recovering, and pushes the fourth glass toward me, the cloudy orange one that's been sitting there since he set the flight down, looking less like beer and more like something you'd pour over ice on a hot afternoon.
"Wheat ale. Go easy this time. My heart can't take another pinecone. "
I lift it slower, cautious now, and the smell hits first, soft and citrusy with something underneath that reminds me of a bakery early in the morning before anyone's turned the lights on.
The taste follows a second later, bright and a little bit fizzy, with orange peel and something almost like bread dough.
"This one's friendly."
"Nobody's ever called one of my beers friendly before."
"Well, this one wants to be your buddy. The other one wanted to fight me in a parking lot."
"I'm never going to be able to unhear that description of an IPA."
"You're welcome."
This time he doesn't put it away fast enough, and Gunny, wiping down the bar three feet to my left, has clearly been watching the whole thing with the patience of a man waiting for exactly this.
"Well now." Gunny sets his rag down like the moment deserves his full attention. "I have worked for this man for six years. Six years, and I have never once seen him spray beer across his own bar."
"That's an exaggeration."
"You soaked the register tape. I watched it happen, and you lost whatever dignity you had left the second she said pinecone.
" Gunny leans both elbows on the bar, grinning at me like we're conspirators now, which apparently we are.
"You know what this is, don't you? This right here. This is a man who's whipped."
"Gunny."
"Whipped. Fully, thoroughly, no chance of parole." He raises his voice slightly, pitching it toward the two regulars at the end of the bar who've clearly been enjoying the show. "Y'all seeing this? Rafe Montgomery, choking on his own beer over a hop joke."
"I have survived things you can't imagine," Rafe says, to nobody in particular, to the ceiling, to whatever god handles complaints from men being teased in their own taproom. "Combat. Deployment. Actual gunfire. None of it prepared me for this."
"Nothing does." Gunny pats the bar with obvious satisfaction and goes back to his rag, humming something that might be a wedding march, which earns him a look from Rafe that would probably stop traffic anywhere else in the building and does absolutely nothing to Gunny at all.
I decide the kindest thing I can do is change the subject before Rafe combusts entirely, and I ask the first thing that comes to mind, the flyer I noticed taped to the office window this morning with a pumpkin clip art border that looked like it survived several decades of use.
"What's Oktoberfest actually look like around here? The flyer made it seem like a big deal."
The relief on Rafe's face at the subject change is immediate and total, right up until the actual subject sets in and something closer to dread replaces it.
"It's the biggest weekend of the year. Whole town shuts down Main Street, we run the beer garden, there's a stage, food trucks, a pie contest that gets genuinely vicious.
We do three times our normal volume in two days.
" He pulls a battered clipboard off a hook behind the bar, already flipping through pages dense with his own handwriting, checklists inside checklists.
"Volunteer schedule's a mess. Tent company still hasn't confirmed the second tent.
I need six more kegs than I budgeted for because Dot's convinced this year's crowd will be bigger, and Dot is never wrong about crowd size, which means I'm already behind. "
"That sounds like a lot for one man with a clipboard."
"It's a lot for three men with clipboards, and I've only got the one, since Gunny's clipboard skills are theoretical at best."
"I have excellent clipboard skills. I simply choose not to use them."
Rafe's phone buzzes against the bar before he can respond to that, and he glances at the screen, mutters something about the tent company under his breath, and lets it go to voicemail without picking up, which tells me more about the state of his patience than anything on the actual clipboard does.
He keeps moving down his list, muttering half of it out loud: decorations and banners, the string lights that need testing before they go up over Main Street, a stage that needs building, a schedule of bands that keeps shifting because one of them plays weddings on the side and weddings don't care about anybody's Oktoberfest deadline.
"And somewhere in all that I still need actual pumpkins, real ones, enough to line both sides of the street, which means a farm run I haven't had time to schedule, on top of everything else.
" He flips to another page, and partway through, without any visible transition, without seeming to notice he's said it until it's already out of his mouth, he glances up.
"You think the twins would want to help decorate? There's a whole afternoon of hanging lights and pumpkins that's basically made for kids."
He stops. I watch it happen in real time, the exact second the question catches up with him, his shoulders going still, his eyes flicking toward me like he's checking whether anyone actually heard what he just said out loud.
It's such a small thing, four seconds tops, but it might be the loudest thing he's done since I've known him.
I don't get the chance to answer.
The door bursts open the way it always does when the twins arrive somewhere, Maggie two steps behind them with their backpacks still on, and Eli is already skidding across the taproom floor before I can process that they're here at all.
"Decorate what?"
"Lights and pumpkins," Josie says, materializing at his elbow like she's been listening from the doorway, which she probably has. "We heard through the door. Can we help? Please? I'm really good at hanging things."
"You hung one ornament on the tree last year and it fell off within ten minutes."
"It fell off because the tree was defective. Not because of me."
"Yes," Josie says, before I've managed a single word, before Rafe has said anything at all beyond the question he already regrets. "We want to help. We're doing it. This is happening now."
"This is definitely happening," Eli agrees, with the total certainty of a boy who has already mentally claimed the ladder.
I look at Rafe, half expecting him to walk it back, to say something about liability or schedules or the twenty other reasons a man like him keeps a folded piece of paper in a drawer somewhere with rules written on it.
Instead he's just standing there behind the bar with his clipboard hanging loose in one hand, staring at two kids who have already decided his entire weekend for him.
For one unguarded second before he catches himself, he looks like a man who can't quite believe what he just said out loud.
"Guess I'm decorating with an audience," he says finally, and it comes out rougher than it should for four words about string lights.
"Guess you are." I can't keep the smile off my face, and I don't try very hard to. "You did ask them."
"I noticed that. About half a second after I said it."
Gunny, from behind the bar, doesn't even look up from the glass he's drying. "Whipped," he says again, cheerfully, to absolutely nobody, and this time Rafe doesn't even bother arguing.