Page 68 of Pour Decisions
We go inside, leaving all the dogs besides Sadie out on the porch. Bubba and Lady give us the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen.
The formal dining room is decorated in full Thanksgiving theme, with an honest-to-god cornucopia in the middle, along with a dish with a perfectly carved turkey. Delia does allow us to help bring the other dishes to the table, setting them in the spaces around the china table settings.
Once we’ve all sat down, Delia disappears for a moment and returns with JD’s father behind her. He clears his throat and looks at all of us, but his eyes go straight to me and narrow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
JD
Dad doesn’t trustKatrina and she hasn’t even spoken a word.
I’m surprised, to be honest. He can’t recognize her, can he? They never met, but maybe Mom told him to expect her. Either way, the look he gives her puts a pit in my stomach.
“Dad, this is my girlfriend, Katrina,” I say, putting a hand on her knee.
“Your mother told me she’d be coming.” He puts his tumbler of bourbon down and groans as he eases into his seat at the head of the table. “Hi.”
No “nice to meet you.” Nothing of the sort.
The awkwardness settles over the room like a thick blanket. Dad says grace and we occupy ourselves with filling our plates. Mom’s food is always good, so it’s a welcome distraction for a while.
“When do you head out of town again, Ash?” Wes asks, grabbing a bottle of wine from the middle of the table and undoing the cap. Mom never buys anything that requires a corkscrew after an incident that stained her favorite tablecloth.
“I’m not.” Ash shifts in his seat, taking a heavy drink of his cocktail. “I moved home. Temporarily.”
Waylon and Wes exchange a glance with each other, then with me. Ash hates Jepsen, but he hated living at home even more. Something must have happened with his band. Dad grumbles and sighs. He doesn’t look thrilled at most things, but he’s clearly even more bothered by his second oldest son being back here.
“Trust me, I’m not happy about it either.” Ash glares at Dad.
“I’m glad you’re here, Ashley,” Mom says in that gentle tone she doesn’t realize is slightly patronizing even if she means well. “It’s been so long since all of my boys have been back in town for more than a few days.”
“If you’d gotten a stable job like John David, you wouldn’t be in this situation,” Dad says, pushing back from the table to grab the bottle of bourbon from the cabinet behind him.
“JD’s not the only one who got a stable job,” Wes points out with a laugh. “Waylon went to school for a billion years for his, and I literally work for you too.”
Dad ignores him and pours himself more bourbon. Like pouring fuel on a fire. Despite being in the liquor business, Dad only really drinks on holidays. The booze can make his good mood better, and his bad mood worse.
This is only going downhill.
“I’d rather die than have a job kissing your ass like JD does every day,” Ash scoffs.
“Why am I being dragged into this? I don’t have anything to do with you moving back here,” I say. “Just because your band finally fell apart doesn’t mean I should be caught up in this.”
The moment I say the words, I wish I could rephrase them, even if they have some truth to them. Even from afar, I picked up that Ash’s band isn’t the most stable group of people. He vents about them to Wes and Waylon every year, and as far as I can tell, none of the drama is his fault. But his band is his life, and I shouldn’t have implied it was doomed like that.
But it’s too late—I struck a nerve, as I always do with him.
“What do you mean by ‘finally’? You were expecting me to fail too?” Ash asks. Katrina puts her hand on my knee, and I put my hand on hers.
“I don’t give a shit,” I lie. I like a lot of his band’s music more than I’d care to admit. But I did get tired of that one song that was used in a car commercial.
Ash reaches across the table to grab the wine that Wes opened, filling one of the goblets in front of him to the rim.
The only thing worse than sober Dad and sober Ash fighting is both of them doing it while drunk.
I glance at Katrina, who looks surprisingly calm. But I can see the tension in her shoulders out of the corner of my eye. The dogs scratch at the back door and one of them whines loudly enough for us to hear them.
“I’m just saying,” Dad continues, despite it all. “You’d have some discipline and a solid path. Though JD seems to be straying from the one I graciously laid out for him.”
