Page 1 of Pour Decisions
CHAPTER ONE
JD
The first signnext to the office kitchen reads,Do not give Bubba people food!!! He is a dog!!!in bold, black lettering. Someone else hastily taped a second sign next to it with a picture of my chocolate lab, Bubba, looking like he had taken on all the world’s suffering on his dog shoulders, witheven if he looks at you like this!!!scrawled underneath.
I glance down at Bubba, who’s looking into the break room with a single drop of drool leaking from his mouth. Then, he looks up at me, a mirror of the photo on the wall. As if he’s being forced to go work the mines for sixteen hours straight rather than lay in the middle of the hall and get belly rubs and treats from everyone who works here.
“Stay, Bubba,” I say. He tentatively lifts a paw to cross the threshold of the break room. “I mean it.”
He grumbles and lays down, one paw on the tile floor.
“Clam chowder?” Dolores, a marketing manager, thrusts a small bowl of clam chowder toward me. My stomach turns.
“Dolores, it’s eight thirty in the morning. On a Tuesday.”
The only reason Dolores doesn’t shrink back is because she’s known me since I was a gangly, awkward teenager. The fact thatI’m a VP here at Stryker Liquors doesn’t hit her the way it hits everyone else.
“And?” Dolores winks and nudges me with her shoulder. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
“I don’t think they were referring to clam chowder when they coined that phrase,” I say.
”Well, whatever. It’s better than Jerry’s,” she says, lowering her voice. Jerry, who’s been in sales for as long as she’s been in marketing, is standing on the far side of the small break room with my cousin, Amy. He’s pushing a small bowl of clam chowder on her, and for whatever reason, she takes it.
“I need coffee,” I say. More coffee than any one human should drink, probably. Then again, I need some chemical help to process the clam chowder in the break room first thing in the morning.
I step past her to the coffee machine. I’ve been in the office since seven and I’m already on my third mug. As people have trickled into the office, they’ve left the machine empty. I sigh and start making another pot.
“You try this?” Amy appears next to me, her mouth half full of clam chowder. She’s also in the marketing department, just a handful of years younger than me. Amy isn’t afraid of anything, not even me—a rarity I somewhat appreciate.
“Again, it’s eight thirty in the morning.” I pour water into the machine, then more grounds. “Why are you eating that for breakfast? Are you being blackmailed?
“First of all, it’s notthatweird to have clam chowder for breakfast.”
“It’s absolutely that weird,” I say as I watch her take a bite. The smell of brewing coffee and clam chowder is nauseating.
She waves her spoon at me as she swallows.
“They were going to do a whole seafood boil,” she says, an eyebrow raised. “First thing on Monday. Thank god Jerry couldn’t do it. Can you imagine?”
I nod. A seafood boil would be measurably worse, especially since we’re at the base of the mountains in Tennessee. Jepsen is small enough and just far away enough from the nearest big city, Nashville, that no one is getting fresh crab or shrimp easily.
Also, we’rein a fucking office.
“And it’s a continuation of Jerry and Dolores’s cooking battle,” she adds, as if that explains anything. I raise an eyebrow. “You don’t know about the cooking battle?”
“No.”
“Well, you’re in your office a lot. But that’s why we have new foods every week. We keep convincing one of them that the other’s is better, so they feel the need to one-up the other person the next week.” She grins.
My eyebrow creeps up higher and my frown deepens. “Okay…”
“Hey, marketing is hitting their numbers, so you can’t be mad.” She holds up a hand.
I sigh through my nose. She’s right. All kinds of office bullshit happens around me, and I don’t get on anyone’s ass about it unless performance is slipping. Generally, the more weird shit that goes on in the office, the better people do. Dad, who’s been at the head of the company since he took it over from my grandfather twenty years ago, doesn’t feel the same way, but he doesn’t stop anyone either.
As much as having clam chowder in the break room first thing in the morning makes me nauseous, I want to gently encourage stuff like that around the office whenever I take over for my dad. Which is supposed to be very soon, if his mumblings about drastically cutting his hours and becoming more of an adviser have any weight.
I can’t wait, to be honest. Dad isn’t the easiest person to work for, and I know I can make the company grow even faster once I’m leading it. He hasn’t been training me up for this job for no reason—I’m the most capable of taking over.
