Page 2 of Neat
“And these four guys are the ones responsible for every single barrel?” a woman asked.
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, a hand clapped down on my shoulder, and my brother took over. “Yep. My team and I are here five days a week, and we each raise anywhere from one-hundred-and-twenty-five barrels to one-hundred-and-fifty barrels every single day. Which means we get about twenty-five-hundred barrels out every week.”
The crowd buzzed with a mix ofooh’sandahh’s.
Noah grinned, and I couldn’t help but smile, too. I loved that I got to work with my brothers, that they were a part of my every day. Noah was older than me, but just a smidge shorter — which always ticked him off. I was lean where he was stout, and our hair was the same sandy brown — though mine was a bit longer. And Noah had Dad’s blue eyes, whereas I favored the hazel gold of our mother’s.
“That’s amazing,” the woman breathed, and her eyes fell over my brother, from his arms to his midriff and lower. “Explains why you’re built like an ox.”
She said that last part almost so softly that I couldn’t hear it, but I had — and I knew Noah had, too. If the poor girl had been a year earlier, she might have had a shot at ending her tour through town in my brother’s bed. But, as it was, his heart was tied up in a redhead currently stationed across the country in Utah doing her first year in AmeriCorps.
Ruby Grace Barnett — the mayor’s daughter who was supposed to marry someone else this past summer, but had ran way with my brother, instead.
Like I said.
Trouble.
Noah smiled, tipping his hat at the group before he turned. He squeezed my shoulder. “No pranks today, promise,” he said. “I know you’ve got plenty on your plate.”
My lips flattened. “Yeah.”
“Has she come in yet?”
“Right after this tour.”
He whistled. “Well, good luck. Come by my place later if you need a drink to decompress.” He squeezed my shoulder one last time before letting it go and heading back toward his station, and though my stomach was twisting violently again, I turned to the group, continuing on with the rest of my spiel about the barrels before I led them through the door again and back out into the cold November air.
We were just a few days past Thanksgiving, and Stratford was well into the holiday spirit. Christmas lights were strung from every building at the distillery, and the entire town was dressed in lights and garland to match. The tree in the center of town was large enough to see from the end of Main Street no matter which way you were coming, and with all that around me, I waited and waited for the holiday spirit to find me.
It hadn’t — not in years — not since my father passed away.
I inhaled the cool Tennessee air, the familiar scent of oak and honey wafting in on the breeze, but it did nothing to calm my nerves as I led the tour toward our final stop — the tasting. For the next twenty minutes, I’d be helping that group taste whiskey for what was likely the first time in their lives. Sure, they’d takenshotsof whiskey, but they’d never stopped to smell it, inhale the special aromas, taste each flavorful note, and enjoy that familiar whiskey burn on the way down.
Twenty minutes.
That’s how long the tasting would last.
That’s how long I’d have before I’d be faced with the girl I’d been trying to avoid all morning, and for most of my life, if I was being honest.
Mallory Scooter.
Scooter— as in the name on the jacket I wore, the one in large letters on the building we walked inside, the one sprawled in the top right-hand corner of my paycheck each week.
And the one my family had been at war with for decades.
To fully explain my jitters as I waited in my office for Mallory Scooter to arrive for her first day on the job, we have to go back in time a bit.
You see, Robert J. Scooter was the founder of the Scooter Whiskey distillery. And though it’shisname on the bottles and the building alike, he had a pivotal partner in crime — my grandfather, Richard Becker.
Granddad was the first barrel raiser at the distillery, the one who fine-tuned the process and made it the instrumental one it is today. It was the beginning of the partnership and, more importantly, thefriendshipbetween Robert J. Scooter and my grandfather, and it was one that lasted all the way up until the founder’s death.
And that’s when shit hit the fan.
There was nothing in Robert J. Scooter’s will about my grandfather, about leaving any part of the company to him — even though it was Grandpa who had helped build and establish the Scooter brand.
The distillery and brand as a whole was left to Robert’s family, namely to his oldest son, Patrick — who is the CEO of the distillery today. It wasn’t long after Robert passed that my grandmother died, and my grandfather right after. We’d always been told he’d died of a broken heart, and while most would argue it was because of grandma, we all knew a big part of it was the Scooters.
After Granddad’s death, my dad stepped up and kept the Becker name alive and well at the distillery. He had been young when he started, and not too long after the changing of the hands, he was made a member of the board.
