Page 17 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

He unrolls it across two tables, and for a second I just stand there staring at eight feet of vinyl that reads RIDGLINE BREWING CO in letters a foot tall, missing the E clean out of the middle of my own family's name like the printer decided we didn't need it.

"That's not right."

"Yeah, I clocked that about ten seconds after you did." Gunny leans over my shoulder, wet-vac still running behind him. "Might be the best banner we've ever had, honestly. Ridgline. Sounds like an energy drink."

"It's not funny."

"It's a little funny."

"We open in three days with a sign that can't spell its own name."

"Reprint's forty-eight hours if we pay the rush fee, which we're going to pay, because I already called while you were wrestling that valve." Gunny says it like he's already three steps ahead of me, which, infuriatingly, he usually is. "Breathe. It's a banner, not a keg line."

I don't answer that, mostly because the twins choose that exact moment to announce their presence from up on the ladder by the front window, where they've apparently been for the last ten minutes without my noticing.

"Rafe. Rafe, look."

I look. Eli's got a string of pumpkin lights wound so many times around one arm that he resembles something closer to a mummy than a helper, and Josie is balanced on the second rung with a fistful of orange lights and the kind of concentration that usually precedes a disaster.

"That's a lot of lights on one arm."

"I'm being efficient." Eli holds up the tangled mess like it's an achievement. "I carry more this way."

"You carry them, sure. Hanging them's a different problem."

"I've got a system."

"Eli's system is throwing them at the hooks and hoping," Josie reports, entirely without malice, from her perch on the ladder. "It's not a good system."

"It's worked twice."

"Out of eleven tries."

I cross the room before either of them can turn this into a science experiment involving actual electrical cord, and pull the ladder a few inches so it's square against the wall instead of the precarious lean Eli's apparently decided is fine. "Rule one. Somebody holds the ladder. Rule two. Nobody's climbing anything I haven't checked first."

"Since when are there rules?"

"Since right now."

"That's not fair. You're just making them up."

"That's what rules are, Eli. Somebody makes them up before something goes wrong instead of after." I hold the ladder steady while Josie climbs another rung, close enough now that I can reach the string of lights myself if her aim goes bad. "Hand them here. I'll hang, you supervise."

"I'm good at supervising," she says, with total confidence, and passes the lights down like she's been waiting for someone to finally recognize her actual talents.

"What do you need me to do?" Eli calls from the bottom of the ladder, still wound in his own tangle of cord, clearly unwilling to be left out of an assignment.

"Hold the base. Both hands."

"That's not a real job."

"It's the most important job. Ladder falls, everything else stops mattering." I test the string of lights against the hook, get it seated, and glance down at him gripping the ladder's legs with the fierce concentration of someone who's just been handed classified information. "Good. Don't let go."

"I won't." He says it like an oath, chin up, and for a second he looks so much like a kid playing soldier that something in my chest twists.

For a few minutes it's almost peaceful, the good kind of chaos, lights going up crooked and getting straightened, Eli narrating an increasingly elaborate story about a nail gun he saw a contractor using outside, Gunny's wet-vac droning on in the background like white noise. I let myself believe, for those few minutes, that this is just what the week before a festival looks like. It's controlled disaster, nothing I haven't handled before.

Then the crack comes from outside, sharp and flat, gone in under a second.