Page 4 of Best Kind of Trouble
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 deferentialto 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 screamsI 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’tyoutellme?”
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 thestaffers 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 sayhedid 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.
