Page 10 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

Jenna collects them at the end of the day, apologizing twice before she's even fully through the door, gathering backpacks and crayons and a half-finished juice box with the practiced speed of someone who has done this exact scramble a hundred times before. Eli gives me a final salute on his way out. Josie waves at the drawing on the corkboard like she's saying goodbye to it personally.

"Thank you," Jenna says, at the door, meaning more than the two words cover. "For today. For all of it."

"They were fine."

"They counted grain sacks and drew you a school bus with legs."

"It's a dog."

"Sure it is." She says it exactly the way Gunny says it, which makes me wonder if the whole town learned that particular tone from the same source, and herds the twins out into the evening before I can find an answer that doesn't sound like more than it should.

The brewery goes quiet the way it does every night, tanks ticking, the taproom radio finally off, Gunny's truck long gone. I lock up, kill the lights section by section, and end up back at the corner table doing the last of the paperwork I never got to during the day, alone with the hum of the walk-in and the particular stillness that used to be the best part of running this place.

The drawing's still on the corkboard when I finish, one corner sagging where the thumbtack never quite caught, four evenly spaced circles under a yellow shape that looks nothing like the dog currently asleep by my feet. I stand in front of it longer than the drawing objectively deserves, telling myself I'm just checking that the tack's secure.

I should take it down. It doesn't belong on a business corkboard next to supplier invoices and a shift schedule. It's a kid's drawing, the kind of thing that belongs on a refrigerator, not pinned to the wall of a man who's spent twenty years training himself not to keep things.

I reach up, get as far as touching the corner of the paper, and stop.

I leave it exactly where it is, turn off the light, and go upstairs with a problem I can't put on any list, because for the first time in more months than I care to count, I don't actually want to solve it.

5

JENNA

The roof over the kitchen has developed an opinion about rain, and this morning it's sharing that opinion directly onto my counter in a steady, patient drip that's already outlasted three different pots I've tried underneath it. The cabin has charm. The cabin also seems to think charm and structural integrity are an either-or situation.

I give up on the pots around sunrise and add "bucket" to a list that already says WOODSTOVE, in capital letters, underlined twice, because the woodstove and I have reached an impasse. I've opened the little iron door approximately eleven times since we moved in. I've stacked logs the way the internet told me to, kindling on the bottom, air gaps like the diagrams show, a fire starter cube tucked in like a peace offering. I have never once produced anything warmer than a sad, apologetic curl of smoke that sets off nothing but my own sense of failure and, on more than one occasion, the smoke detector, which the twins found significantly more entertaining than I did.

I take the list into town before work, mostly because a bucket feels like the kind of problem I can actually solve before nine in the morning, unlike everything else currently on it.

The General Store smells like sawdust and coffee and something faintly like pine tar, and I've got a bucket in one hand and a box of nails I don't need yet but will probably need eventually when I find someone brave enough to look at that roof, when a woman with silver curls and reading glasses on a beaded chain plants herself directly in my path like she's been waiting there since I walked in.

"You're the new one at Ridgeline."

"I'm starting to think that's just my name in this town now."

"Dot Higgins." She says it like a formal introduction and a challenge at the same time, sticking out a hand with three rings on it. "I do hair at the salon on Main, and I know everybody, and I already know a fair amount about you, so we might as well skip ahead to the parts you haven't heard yet."

"That's an efficient way to make a friend."

"It's the only way that works in a town this size." She eyes the bucket, then me, with the diagnostic focus of a woman who has clearly assessed a hundred leaking roofs in her time. "Larkspur cabin. The Petersen place. That roof's been complaining since before you were born, honey."

"Good to know I'm not the problem."

"That roof's the guilty party. You're just its latest victim." She says it with the finality of a woman closing a case. "I'll send my nephew out. He does roofs. Meantime, are you eating all right? I've got a casserole in my truck I was bringing to the Hendersons, but they've got three already this week from the church, so it's yours if you want it."

"I couldn't possibly..."

"You could and you will. Green bean and tater tot. Nobody says no to it, not even the Hendersons, and they were only getting it out of pity in the first place." She's already turning toward the door, clearly assuming the matter's settled, and I find myself following her out to the parking lot without having agreed to anything out loud.

By the time she's handed the casserole dish through my open window, still faintly warm, she's covered my entire recent history, delivered with the confidence of someone who already knew most of it before I said a word, and pivoted without any visible transition into the subject of my employer.

"Rafe Montgomery." She says his name like she's setting a plate down in front of me, something rich she expects me to appreciate properly. "Decorated. Some kind of Special Forces, nobody knows exactly what because he's never once talked about it, not even to his own mother before she passed, God rest her. Comes home, buries his father a year later, and instead of selling that land like every sensible person in his position would've done, he builds a brewery on it."

"That land's been in his family a while?"

"Since before Colorado was a state, honey. Montgomerys have owned that ridge longer than there's been a Colorado at all. He could've sold it to developers for more money than either of us will see in our lifetimes and instead he put every dollar he had into keeping this town's economy from drying up when the mine closed. Half the businesses on Main Street would've folded without Ridgeline's supply contracts." She looks at me over the top of her glasses, and something in her expression shifts, gentler than the gossip cadence she's been running on. "He's reclusive. Doesn't date. Doesn't do much of anything but work, from what I hear, which around here is its own kind of tragedy for a man his age. Good man, though. The genuinely good kind, not the kind people just say that about."