Page 4 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

I hold onto that thought instead of the phone, all the way home.

2

RAFE

The alarm never actually goes off anymore. My body just decides it's 0430 and gets up, same as it's decided that for twenty years, and no amount of civilian living has managed to argue it out of the habit. I'm downstairs before the coffee maker finishes its first cycle, boots on, Biscuit already sitting by his bowl with the patient, judgmental stare of a dog who has been awake and waiting for at least ten minutes out of pure spite.

"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.