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“Tell me,” she snapped, and I straightened.
“Um, me?”
“And who is the most talented tattoo artist this side of the Mississippi River?”
I snorted.
“Come on! Tell me who.”
“Me,” I droned, feeling my cheeks heat. Praise always made me feel like I’d swallowed a whole hive of bees.
“And when we went to that music festival in the park last summer and that frat boy got handsy and thought he could slide his hand up my dress in the beer garden, who was it that grabbed him by the nuts as squeezed like she was juicing a lemon?”
“That fuck deserved it.” He’d squealed like a baby, too.
“Damn right he did, but who was it that served him a fist full of justice?” Violet cried, raising her arms above her head in victory. “Which boss bitch best friend of mine was the one to serve it to him?”
“Me!” I laughed, reminded again of why Violet is the best friend in the world.
“And...” Her voice dropped down an octave, her face serious as she looked me in the eye. “Who, when they were forced out of their family for not conforming to their bullshit, antiquated, sexist ideals, managed to not only survive, but thrive? Who landed herself an apprenticeship, an apartment, and a bestie with no help from the people who would only ever doubt her?”
Taking a deep breath through my nose, I ran my hands through my hair before I answered her. “Me.”
“You can do anything, Ricki. Absolutely freaking anything. And I’m gonna be right beside you the whole damn time.”
Chapter thirteen
Asher
Thelatesummersunshone through the high windows of the barn, slanting across the room in brilliant yellow lines, the alternating stripes blinding me one moment, and leaving me blinking in the dark the next as I trudged from one end of the space to the other. I huffed out a breath, dragging the back of my arm across my sweaty forehead and watching the dust motes dance in the air around me, the wet, earthy smell of malting barley reminding me of my childhood. Stabbing the end of the shovel into the thick layer of grain at my feet, I placed both hands on my lower back and stretched, groaning with each popping sound my spine made.
I was getting too old for this shit.
“Come on, boy! Put your back into it. That barley isn’t going to move itself.”
Straightening, I placed one hand on the shovel handle for stability as I glared affectionately over my shoulder at the old man standing in the doorway of the malting house.
“You talk a lot of smack for a man without a shovel in his hand,Grandpa.”
A wheezing laugh escaped him, and I paused, narrowing my eyes to make sure he was alright. The man had just suffered a mild heart attack not two weeks ago, so I wasn’t taking anything for granted. Noticing my concern, Grandpa waved a hand in my direction, brushing me off entirely, before he continued.
“Asher, I was raking grain on this floor long before you were even a twinkle in your old man’s eye.” I wrinkled my nose, not liking the visual that phrase brought to mind, but didn’t say anything. “There was a time I could turn the whole floor faster than anyone else on the farm, so don’t give me any shit. I paid my dues, and now I get to watch you pay yours.”
“Fair enough, Gramps,” I said lightly, then went back to my work, tossing another shovel full of damp barley into the hole in the floor that funneled into the grain elevator, letting it make its way up to the dryer.
I didn’t stop watching Grandpa, though, as he shuffled across the threshold and settled himself on an oak barrel in the corner of the room. The old man shouldn’t even have been out of bed, never mind down here at the malting house, but if I mentioned it again, he’d probably whoop my ass.
Gramps was the toughest man I’d ever known. After my dad died, he took mom in—with three small kids in tow—letting us live here on the farm with him, no questions asked. It was tough for mom, living in the house my dad had grown up in, because there were memories of him in every room, photos hung on every wall. I was young when we moved here, but even I could see how those memories both haunted her and gave her strength. Having Gramps was a blessing for both of us; it gave me someone to look up to, someone to spend time with, and it gave mom the space she needed to grieve.
Once she settled in here at the farm, it became her home, and she never left.
They were both buried here now, side by side in the family plot, exactly how they’d always wanted it.
Another hour of backbreaking work and the grain was finally all moved, the auger chugging away as it shifted the last of this year’s fall harvest up to the peating kiln, allowing me to hang my shovel on the wall, ready and waiting for the next round of barley to be harvested, steeped, and then spread on the floor, a familiar cycle that had been on repeat here since the farm’s founding.
Dunn Creek Distillery had been in various levels of operation for well over a hundred and fifty years, but the history of the Dunn family in this area of Pennsylvania dated back even farther than that. The way Gramps tells it, the first Dunn men had sailed from Scotland after the failed Jacobite uprising in 1745 and had been pillars of the community ever since.
After making a fortune in the steel industry in the late seventeenth century, my however-many great grandfather decided to try his hand at making whiskey, and we’ve never stopped.
