Speakeasy (True North #5)(31)

“Heads up!” Benito yells, whipping the football in my direction.

After dessert, my brothers and I are outside horsing around as the first snowflakes begin to fall. Benny’s throw is too high, but by some miracle I get my fingertips on the ball and wrangle it into my hands. “Go deep!” I yell to Damien, who lopes toward the chicken coop.

I use all my power to whip the ball downfield. It’s a nice, straight spiral but Damien doesn’t hustle and just barely misses it. Breathing the cold air has restored my equilibrium. Tonight I’ll tend bar and then sleep in while the plows clear enough snow to get my truck up to Stowe for the season’s first day of snowboarding.

Life could be worse, really.

Or at least I think so until our game of catch ends when Benito gets a phone call. When he steps away, Damien decides to drop a bomb on me. “I know where Otto is investing his money,” he says.

“What?” My mind is still on snowboarding—I’m thinking about how I might need to pick up some wax and sharpen up my board.

“Otto. He’s investing in the Giltmaker Brewery. They’re looking to open a brewpub somewhere.”

I stand stock still and replay that sentence in my head. Because that cannot be right. “Wait, what? Open a brewpub where?” I hadn’t had a clue that my uncle was tight with Vermont’s most decorated beer maker.

Damien—my quietest brother—gives me a shrug. “Not sure. Sounded like they weren’t settled on a location.”

“Who told you this?”

“Nobody. I heard them yapping together on the phone when I was over here fixing the tractor. They wanted cash, and he wrote a fat check. He gets interest and a revenue share.”

Interest and a revenue share. The words just sort of echo through my chest. For a minute I am speechless. But then the rage kicks in, and I drop the football, turn around and stomp into the farmhouse again.

“Dude,” my brother calls behind me. “Take a fucking breath.”

But I don’t. I storm inside, finding Otto in his lounge chair in front of a football game. “Are you investing in Giltmaker? Is that true?”

His eyes don’t leave the screen. “Yes. So what?”

So what. I want to kick his ugly fucking chair like a toddler. “You’ll write a check to strangers. But you won’t let me borrow a twenty-five-year-old tank in your barn?”

“I write Giltmaker a check and earn at least twenty-five percent over two years. I lend you the tank, you make a mess, and I have to clean it up.”

Seriously? “I don’t get it,” I snarl. “I don’t get why you think I’m a kindergartner who can’t do anything right.”

“No, I don’t. I think you’re a playboy who hasn’t analyzed the competitive marketplace for craft brews. Giltmaker brought me a sixteen-page presentation analyzing why a new location was going to help them grow.”

And now my brain might explode. “Sixteen pages, huh? Pretty fonts? That impresses you?”

“No.” Otto looks up at me for the first time. “You know what impresses me? Hustle.”

“All I do is hustle!” I yell. “Six days a week. I fill my bar with both locals and tourists. I created a destination in a town that needed one. And, not that I expect you to notice, I also helped create a place where Zara can own a business. She didn’t bring me a sixteen-page presentation, though. Maybe I shoulda held out!”

I’m practically foaming at the mouth right now, and Otto is still staring at the TV. When I was a teenager who wanted him to help me get a job at the feed store, we had a conversation almost exactly like this one.

Fuck my life.

And I can’t stop yelling. “Here’s a thing you should know—I charge my sister cheap rent because she’s family! But you probably think that’s a bad business decision. Until Zara moved uphill, I would tend bar until two and then watch her kid at six a.m. So what I want to know is this—what the fuck does hustle look like to you?”

Silence. And then, “You can use the tank after the season’s perry is bottled.”

Aha! A crumb of generosity from the king in the ugly lounge chair. He probably thinks I should feel grateful. But I just can’t. “Keep your fucking tank. I don’t need shit from you.”

At that, I turn and storm back out again, passing my mother in the front hall. “Alec,” she whispers.

But I’m too angry to stop.





A half-hour later I’m still angry. I’m standing in front of the snowboard wax in a ski shop on the outskirts of Montpelier. But I can’t read the labels because I’m still mad.

What does that man want from me? Sure, I’d been a wild teenager back in the day. I’d once had a bonfire party in a back meadow of my uncles’ farm that had left a big mess. But that had been fifteen years ago.

Otto has always treated me like the family loser. My father, for all his faults, had actually liked me.

As I continue to fume, someone appears in my peripheral vision. I get half a glance at a lithe body and long hair as a woman appears and then just as quickly retreats.

Wait. Was that…?

I ease my way down the aisle, past the snowboard bags and ski duffels, and then I peer around the corner just in time to spot May Shipley exiting the store.