Chapter 21
Chapter Twenty-One
Kemp
“I got the idea for beer-battered shrimp with berry ale aioli when Kemp told me about the flavors he was shooting for in the Shore Thing Pale Ale, before the first batch was anywhere close to being ready,” Cash said on the TV screen in my darkened bedroom.
I reached for my glass of Stout of Your League on the nightstand. My aim was apparently off—no surprise since I’d gotten maybe four hours of sleep in the past forty-eight—and my fist knocked into it, spilling some beer over the side.
“Motherfucker!” I yelled, recognizing that my reaction was way over the top for a minor spill. So fucking what? I was the only one in the house, so I didn’t need to mute my shitty mood.
Feeling like my limbs weighed a hundred pounds each, I stood, grabbed a clean hand towel from the master bathroom, and mopped the beer up as the recording of today’s interview kept playing.
Cash and Gianna had crushed the Morning Dish appearance.
I’d already watched it once, so I knew firsthand how smoothly it’d gone.
Chance had also sent an email to the full Rusty Anchor staff list an hour ago—less than ten hours after the live show had aired—saying our web traffic had tripled.
What was more, Matteo, our sales guy, had spent his day fielding calls from distributors and restaurants all over the state wanting to carry our beer.
So why did I feel like punching something?
“You’re fucking exhausted,” I said out loud. My voice was rough with fatigue if anyone needed physical proof.
Someone smarter than me would’ve come home from the three-hour written exam at the fire department and grabbed a nap. That had been my intention—sleep for an hour, then start playing catch-up on my leadership course—but instead I’d pushed play on the interview. Twice now.
Scowling, I flopped back down on the bed and tuned in.
“So we’ve heard about how Chef Cash comes up with creative new dishes that incorporate Rusty Anchor’s featured beers,” Shelly, the enthusiastic host, said to my colleagues. “It’s not even nine in the morning, and I’m already craving the shrimp.”
“Come on out to Henry’s for dinner,” Cash said, on his best, friendliest behavior, “and we’ll take care of you.”
“Best offer of the day right there,” Shelly said, grinning widely for the camera. “Let’s talk about how the Shore Thing Pale Ale came about, Gianna. Was this something where Cash came to you and said, ‘Hey, can you do something with raspberries because I’ve got ideas’?”
Gianna, dressed up instead of in her usual leggings and flannel, looked professional, confident, and remarkably different from her everyday self, doing the brewery proud. She shook her head in response to the question.
“Shore Thing was dreamed up by our head brewmaster, Kemp Essex, who wanted to honor a memory of his. Apparently when he was growing up, he used to take his boat out to a place on the shore of Dragonfly Lake that was thick with raspberry bushes. I’ve never been there myself, but he said he would sit in his boat and pop berries in his mouth for hours.
That’s the flavor he wanted to bring in. ”
I hopped up off the bed again and paced as the recording continued playing. Everything Gianna had said was true, but that wasn’t the half of the memory that mattered.
Taking my rowboat out to what Anna and I privately called the raspberry shore was a tradition we’d shared throughout middle school, high school, and beyond.
Fresh raspberries were one of her favorites, and she’d beg me to take her out there.
Little did she know she never would’ve had to beg.
I’d always drop whatever I was doing to go out on the lake with her.
We’d start heading out in the middle of June to check if the berries were ripe yet.
Once they were, we’d eat so many our hands would stain, making us laugh and shrug, because it wasn’t enough to make us stop stuffing them in our mouths.
Then we’d find a sunny spot on the water and laze around for as long as we could, our bellies full, our hands and mouths pink.
We’d come back every good weather day we could and do it all again until the bushes were empty.
That was the inspiration for my Shore Thing Pale Ale. Those indulgent, relaxing, satisfying afternoons on the water in the summer heat with my best friend.
Of course, I hadn’t told the whole story to Gianna, not even when we’d gone through our practice runs last week.
Months ago, when I’d originally set out to create a pale ale with raspberries, Anna and I had been deep in the friendship zone.
I couldn’t have dreamed we’d be living together and in love by the time the beer made its debut.
Would I have told the whole story if I’d been in that interview today?
I paused my pacing and studied a candid of Anna and me on the dresser and found myself nodding. It’d make an ideal story for our Valentine’s beers. A love story on top of the beer story. But I was the one who should tell it, not my assistant brewer. It was mine and Anna’s.
“Well, the other factor,” Gianna was saying, “was that we wanted something with a little color for Valentine’s Day.”
Okay, that was out-and-out false. The beer’s pink tinge was convenient and appropriate, but it was coincidental and had happened naturally. I wasn’t driven by colors when I created new flavors.
Shaking my head, I swore out loud, again with more frustration than this little blip deserved. Saying the pink color was intended for Valentine’s Day was fine. It didn’t harm anything, and it made it a decent tie-in to the holiday. But it wasn’t how I would’ve done it.
The fact was, though, Gianna and Cash had done just fine. Better than fine. They’d fucking rocked it without me. Rusty Anchor might be half mine, but they didn’t need me there talking it up. The web traffic and inquiries were proof of that.
“Dammit,” I bit out. I hated not being in the middle of it.
I sat down on the foot of the mattress, too tired and annoyed with myself to keep pacing. Too stubborn to turn off the recording and sleep.
The truth was, it’d killed me to miss that interview today. Still was killing me.
As well as Gianna had done, I’d frequently been told by multiple people that my enthusiasm was contagious when I talked about beer and my work as the brewmaster.
The subject was near and dear. There was nothing as gratifying as taking a sample straight from the fermenter and discovering I’d nailed the flavor and aroma I’d been going for, maybe even surpassed my own expectations.
Well, pulling a person out of a burning building was powerful too, but this kind of reward was different.
It was based on something I’d created from nothing.
And now I was looking at creating less or at least sharing that creative responsibility with Gianna. Rusty Anchor beers would no longer be solely my concoctions.
“Get over it, jackass,” I told myself.
The only way I’d be able to continue to juggle everything was to let some of the brewery responsibilities go. I hated that fact, but there was nothing to be done about it. I was stuck.
Anna was right; brewing sparked me, excited me.
Firefighting didn’t, but public service wasn’t necessarily supposed to.
That wasn’t the point of it. And how could I give up something that was in my blood?
Something I’d shared with my dad? Our connection had grown even stronger when he’d pinned my badge on me all those years ago.
Working for the fire service was my family’s legacy.
My dad’s. His dad’s before him. Essex men were firefighters.
If my father were alive today, I guarantee you he’d still be chief, still doing the work he loved, and if I got the lieutenant position, he’d be so proud he might actually burst with it.
That wasn’t something I could quit just because he was no longer on this earth.
The bedroom door opened quietly, and Anna peeked in. Apparently I hadn’t heard her and Oliver arrive after work. When she saw I was awake, she came inside, leaving the door open.
Even wrapped up in my own drama, I couldn’t miss how tired she looked. Her hair was up in a messy bun, a telltale sign she’d been running late this morning. Dark shadows underlined her eyes. Her smile seemed shallow, only half there.
That was my fault. She’d been picking up a lot of my slack with the house and especially Oliver the past few days. I needed to do better. I would do better…somehow.
“Hey,” she said, her attention going to the TV. “I watched most of that when it aired this morning. They did great, didn’t they?”
“Mm-hmm,” I rumbled, sounding grumpy and miserable to my own ears. I couldn’t find it in me to snap out of it.
She scrutinized me, which irritated me further—probably a five-mile-per-hour breeze would irritate me right now—and asked, “How’d the test go?”
I shrugged. “Who knows? Pretty sure I passed.” If I hadn’t, my dad would roll over in his grave.
“That’s good,” she said, seeming confused. “I thought you’d be relieved to have it over with.”
So had I, but so far, I was still waiting for any good feelings to come along.
“Too much on the to-do list, I guess,” I said, trying hard to soften my tone.
“Is that all, or is something else wrong, Kemp?”
I shook my head, because there wasn’t simply one thing that was wrong, other than my frame of mind.
Anna sat on the mattress next to me, and we tuned into Gianna describing the difference between a stout and a pale ale, then Cash’s explanation of how he approached using the different beer types for Henry’s dishes.
The show went to a commercial break, but the remote was out of reach, so I let it play.
“Oliver must’ve had a busy day at Quincy’s,” Anna said. “He fell asleep on the ride home.”
My brows shot up. “It’s a two-minute drive.”
“Yep. I thought for sure he’d wake up when I carried him inside, but he didn’t. I even got him into his crib. He’s still snoozing.”