Page 56 of Summer Affair
“Aren’t you supposed to be running my bar?” Owen said when Clay entered the office.
“Aren’t you supposed to be at home getting some sleep? I mean, wasn’t that the whole point of me covering for you tonight?”
“No,” Owen said without looking up from his laptop. “The point was to watch you go down in flames.”
“Sorry to disappoint. The bar is running as smoothly as my offense.” Clay plopped down on the leather couch and suppressed the need to groan. The last thing he wanted was Owen to gloat more.
The faint hint of cherry tobacco and an assortment of beer steins reminded him of his dad. Unlike the bar, which had received a complete overhaul a few years back, Owen had left their old man’s office the same. Even down to the collection of signed photos from celebrities who visited the bar.
Owen finally looked up and that’s when Clay noticed just how spent his brother appeared. Dark circles, stress lines, and an expression of sheer exhaustion.
“You look like shit.”
Owen snapped his laptop closed. “Do you know how much paperwork it takes to run this place?”
His brother was looking for a fight. The defensive body language, the narrowing of the eyes, he was headed to that same pissed-off place he went every time one of their brothers asked about the bar. Only Clay wasn’t like his brothers. While he welcomed a good spar on the field, in his personal life he tended to listen rather than react. So he settled in and rested his arms across the back of the couch. “Why don’t you tell me?”
Owen blinked in surprise. “You aren’t going to lecture me on hiring a new manager?”
“Not unless I need to.”
Owen sat back. “Employees, payroll, deliveries, deposits, and that’s all before opening.” He ran a hand down his face, which had at least three days’ worth of scruff.
“Is the bar doing well?” The look on Owen’s face said this was the first time someone had bothered to ask, and that made Clay angry—at himself.
When their dad passed and Owen stepped up to run the bar, Clay never inquired if that’s what Owen wanted to do with his life. He didn’t think that anyone had. And in a family as large as theirs, that was pretty shitty.
“It’s doing too good and that’s the problem.”
“I know I promised not to bring up a new manager, but Dad didn’t run this place alone, he had help. That was the only way he could spend time with the family.”
Something his dad had prioritized. Family time.
Clay couldn’t remember a time when his dad wasn’t there for their Sunday dinners. He went out of his way, sacrificed a lot to make sure his sons knew he loved them. And that he cherished Clay’s mom.
His parents’ love story was the kind Rhett wrote songs about. To date, he’d never seen someone so devoted to a spouse. Gage and Josh come pretty damn close, but the way his parents loved each other … a part of his mom died right along with her husband. Here they were, over a decade later and his mom was still in mourning.
“Yeah, Dad hired help, and look what happened. Some manager decided to look the other way, not do his job right, and Dad nearly lost the bar.” Owen shook his head “I’m not going to make that mistake.”
“At least consider hiring a company to do some of the back end. Like payroll and deliveries.”
“I did,” Owen said. “And they accidentally doubled the monthly order from one of our local breweries. The basement was already full, so I had to park the extra kegs at my place.”
By “my place,” Owen was referring to the loft above the bar. While it was a luxurious three thousand square feet and had a small apartment that he lent out to employees from time to time, it still meant his brother literally lived and worked at Stout.
“Then they put the payment on a sixty-day cycle, meaning our suppliers didn’t get paid for two months on stock already delivered. Do you know how many small breweries we work with? Twenty-six. They can’t go sixty days without payment. It took me two months to unwind the absolute fuckery of a situation.”
“Why didn’t you tell us you were drowning?”
“I’m not drowning. This is what people who have to run a company do. I don’t get to show up, make some moves or sing a few songs, and call it a night.”
People whohave torun a company. That said a lot about where Owen’s head was at regarding the bar.
“Do you even want to do this anymore?” Clay asked, with zero judgment in his voice.
Owen stared at him and, before he went carefully blank, Clay saw something in his brother’s eyes that didn’t sit right.
“What’s the alternative? Sell Dad’s place? He loved this bar. It was his pride and joy. He used to bring me here every Wednesday after school. We’d tinker and polish and fix whatever needed fixing. Then when I got into high school, he let me do the inlaid wood flooring and paint that mural behind the bar. Remember that thing?”
