Chapter Nineteen
“Do you want this frappucino? They accidentally made me one with caffeine, so they gave it to me anyway when they did one the right way.” Allie thunked the enormous green and white container of calories and caffeine on the kitchen counter in front of Eve.
Of course she wanted it. With a grateful sigh, she grabbed it with both hands and drank deeply.
“Whoa!” Allie commented. “You didn’t even ask if it’s skinny or regular.”
“I don’t care. I’m desperate.” Spa night might have worked for Allie and her mother, but Eve was exhausted. She hadn’t been able to sleep more than fifteen minutes at a time last night. Every time she drifted off, she had a nightmare. Either something went terribly wrong at the fundraiser or something was terribly wrong with Nick, and she was too far away to help him. She tried to remind herself that he wasn’t her problem, but she’d drift off again, and there he’d be, lost in the woods or being chased by high-heeled bartenders in fishnet stockings.
“We’re in the home stretch,” Allie reminded her. “You don’t need to look so worried. Everything’s going perfectly.”
Eve flipped a page in her planner. Even having the next two days filled to the minute wasn’t helping her stay focused right now. There was something she should have done this morning already, but she hadn’t written it down.
“Oh, hey. They’re here!”
Well, whatever it was, it was too late now. The news people had just pulled onto the property.
“Are you ready?” she asked Allie.
“Oh no. I’m not doing this. No TV for me. Not until the Creature from Loch Gargantua lets my body free.” Allie patted her stomach and its resident giant monster affectionately.
“I’m not going to be on, either. But we do have to be there to answer questions. Mom has the party program memorized, but if she has to go off script, she’ll freeze.”
“Evelyn? Allegra? Why are you still here? Shouldn’t you be down at the tasting center?” Lorena’s heels clipped crisply on the kitchen floor as she tucked an earring into one ear. Her lipstick was perfect, not a wrinkle in her linen suit.
“Wow, Mom, you look fancy,” Allie said.
“This is an important event,” she said, eyeing Allie’s yoga pants and stretched out USMC T-shirt. “Someone has to take things seriously here.”
“I’ll drive the golf cart,” Allie said, snatching the keys off of the hook by the back door. “You can tell everyone I’m the soon-to-be-unemployed chauffeur.”
The drive to the tasting center was mercifully short, and they arrived just as the news crew was disembarking from their satellite van.
“Eve, will you make sure that the inside of the center’s ready for guests?” her mother asked before turning to smile warmly at the reporter. Lorena loved this part of things. She was really in her element, greeting the news people and schmoozing, showing off Blue Mountain Distilling and her charity work. For all of her quirks, her mom had it going on there.
Mr. Baker’s truck was still parked in the lot. Had he forgotten something? They’d returned from the spa so late last night, she hadn’t come down to check that he’d finished his last coat of whatever, but surely he hadn’t stayed all night to do it?
The inside of the tasting center was dark when she entered. The windows were shuttered, so it was hard to see much beyond outlines.
“Mr. Baker?” she called. “It’s Eve. The news people are here. Mr. Baker? Raleigh?”
The smell of bourbon from the emptied barrels they’d used for part of the cabinetry was even stronger than usual, held in by the closed-up building, competing with a chemical smell. Some sort of cleaning solvent, she supposed.
“Rrrow! Rrrow!” Franklin appeared from the utility room, where he took his naps.
“Where’s your dad?” she asked, hoisting the little guy into her arms. He licked her face and panted.
The front door of the tasting center opened, admitting light and the voice of her mother— “And if you’ll come in here, you’ll see that— Oh, dear.” She laughed. “You’ll see that our lighting system still has some kinks. Eve?”
“Yeah, Mom. I’ve got it.”
“If you’d like to come on in, we can have a grand unveiling.” Lorena coaxed the news team inside.
Eve worked her way around the bar and felt for the switch. She kicked something—something heavy—along with glass that clattered across the plank flooring.
The sound of the empty bottle faded, followed by a groan from somewhere in the middle of the room.
What the—
There was that light switch. She hit it just as the cameraman turned on his spotlights, showing her, and the whole central Kentucky viewing audience, the barely conscious form of Raleigh Baker, right before he vomited all over her mother’s feet.
Nick was just carrying the first of his mother’s dozens of boxes of classroom supplies into the building when his phone rang. He put the box down and looked at the Kentucky area code. Not his father or Eve—not that he’d expected to hear from her. Or hoped. He’d been second-guessing himself about leaving since he’d gotten in his truck yesterday, and he needed to get over that.
This call was from Mason. Who he hadn’t said good-bye to. Again. Another person he’d managed to fail without even trying.
“Are you going to get that?” his mother asked, shuffling into the room with a stack of file folders under one arm, her always-present cane in the other hand.
“I guess.” He pushed the button. “Hey.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. I just had to make another hasty escape. I meant to call you before I left town, but—”
“That’s not what I mean. You’re an asshole, but I have your phone number now, so I can harass you anytime I want. No, I meant about your dad and that Blue Mountain shit.”
A chill ran down his spine. He’d deliberately not called his dad last night when he got home, knowing that if he did, Raleigh would just complain at him for leaving. “What are you talking about?”
“You don’t know?”
“Obviously not. You wanna clue me in before I jump through the phone and shake the hell out of you?”
“Fuck.” The curse was almost under Mason’s breath. “Can you get YouTube on your phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Look up ‘Bourbon lady meltdown’ and call me back.”
“Shit.” He tried to pull up the app, but the school’s wifi blocked it, and his 4G wasn’t working in there, either. “Mom, do you have some way to get YouTube on your desktop?”
He made his way to his mom’s desk, where she was entering a ridiculously long string of characters to get free of the child-proof blocks the school used to keep its kindergarteners from watching porn.
“What are we looking for?” she asked him, concern in her eyes.
“I’m not sure I want to know, but I have a feeling I need to find out. It’s about Dad. Something happened since yesterday.” He typed in the search terms then hesitated. “You sure you want to see this?”
She waved his concern away. “That old sonofabitch can’t do anything that’s going to shock me.”
The screen filled with the face of a plastically-pretty woman holding a Channel Four logo’d microphone and panned out to show her smiling at Lorena McGrath.
“We’re here at Blue Mountain Distilling today to talk to Lorena McGrath about the exciting bourbon tasting fundraiser event her family is hosting tomorrow night to benefit a variety of charities.”
“That’s right, Paige,” Lorena cooed. “We’re celebrating the opening of the brand new Blue Mountain Distilling tasting and visitor’s center by hosting the first annual Jamie and David McGrath Foundation Open Barrel Fundraiser to benefit local charities.”
The interviewer spent a few minutes asking about Eve’s late father and her brother before the camera moved from Paige and Lorena to pan the distillery grounds. Nick leaned over his mom’s shoulder to peer at the screen, like that would make Eve magically appear. He saw the front of the tasting center, which looked great, and the other distillery buildings in the background. There didn’t seem to be any editing; there were a few bumps and awkward places in the video. This must not have been shown on the news, but somehow released to the internet anyway.
“I understand we might be able to get a sneak peek at the new facility before opening day?”
“Let’s go take a look.” Lorena led the way to the front door, explaining how the center had been designed by members of the family and built by local craftsmen from locally sourced stone and reclaimed lumber. “Come on in,” she said, throwing the door open and stepping inside, the camera following her into near total darkness.
There was some jostling about and some nervous laughter, some words he couldn’t understand, and Eve’s voice crying out in surprise just as the room blazed with light.
The first thing he noticed was the bar. It was black. Fucking black. It looked like someone had poured tar over the carefully restored wood. What the fuck?
But he didn’t have time to dwell on that horror, because a bourbon bottle rolled across the floor, followed by…shit. Raleigh.
Lorena screamed, and Eve ran into the frame, pulling at his father, who was— Jesus, was he getting sick?
Mercifully, the cameraman backed off, but that had the effect of making sure he got a clear shot of Lorena when she kicked at Raleigh, shrieking, “Get off of me, you low-life piece of white trash!”
He had a brief glimpse of Eve’s horrified face before the camera went dark.
In the silence that followed the end of the video, Nick tried to swallow down the fiery lump of despair that rose up and choked him. On the road outside, a truck downshifted and then the air conditioner kicked on in the room, drowning out everything but the chaos in his brain. He didn’t know what to think. How the hell had Raleigh gone downhill so fast? Usually his relapses started off slow, with a drink one day, two more a few days after that… It would take him a few weeks to build up to a complete loss of control like that, and Nick had only been gone two days. He’d figured even Raleigh couldn’t fuck up the few things left on the Blue Mountain job before he went off the rails again.
“Well,” his mother finally said, clicking the browser closed and pushing herself back from the desk to look at him full on. “I guess he can still throw me for a loop.”
“I didn’t know that was going to happen.”
She shook her head. “What are you sorry for? It’s not your fault.”
“I shouldn’t have left him alone. I should have waited until he was completely done out there.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair.
“Nicholas.”
He looked up.
Mom had her teacher face on. “You aren’t your father’s keeper. He was getting better. You’d told me you’d be here to help me get the classroom together. No reason you should have stayed in Kentucky any longer than you did.”
“I—” had a damned important reason to stick around, but I cut and run.
“Who was that girl in the video?” She studied him, as she’d been doing a lot lately. “Is she the reason you jump every time your phone vibrates?”
Nick thought about lying, saying she was just someone he’d worked with while he was there, but there was no chance he’d get away with that. His mother had a double-strength bullshit detector—she was a mom and a teacher. He found that he wanted to tell her about the woman he’d fallen for so hard.
He cleared his throat. “That’s Eve McGrath.”
“Aah. Eve.” She nodded. “She’s pretty.”
And smart, and funny, and has an office supply fetish.
“You hit it off with her?”
To say the least. “We, uh, we got to be pretty good friends while I was there.”
Mom snorted. “So you like her a lot, huh?”
“God, Mom. Yeah, I like her. A lot. But I’m not what she needs, so it seemed best to get out of there before anybody got hurt.”
“Why do you think anyone would get hurt?”
“Because. It’s me. It’s us. The Baker men. We’re fuckups. You can’t rely on us.”
“I can rely on you.”
“Are you kidding?” Nick stepped back and waved. “I did this to you. If I’d been reliable, you wouldn’t have to drag that damned cane everywhere you go!”
His mother jerked as though she’d been hit. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Your stroke. If I’d been here to help you instead of bellied up to a bar somewhere, you wouldn’t have—”
“You hush!” Mom pointed at him. “Have you been carrying that around with you all these years?”
He breathed deeply, the vise around his vocal cords making speech difficult. “It’s my fault.”
“When did you finish that residency in neurosurgery? I must have missed that, because that’s the only way you might have been able to get that clot out of my brain before it screwed up my balance.”
“That’s dumb—”
“Exactly. My stroke wasn’t your fault.”
“If I hadn’t been out drinking, acting like my dad—”
“And here I thought you sobered up because you had a moment of clarity about how short life is.”
“I did.”
“Remember when you got out of rehab, and you came and told me you were sorry for all the wrongs you’d done?”
“Oh yeah.” That had been scary. For no reason. He’d sucked up his courage and thrown himself on her mercy, and she’d said, “Okay, so stay sober, and maybe someday I’ll need you to do something for me.”
“Well, now I need to take you up on that offer. Let this go. Get over it. Move on. Have a life. I moved away from your dad so I could live my own life and not be dragged down by his disease. Don’t make this into a vicious cycle.”
He took a breath. He’d offered his amends to her as part of his recovery, and she’d accepted, but, he realized, he’d never really let her get better—at least not in his own heart, because he still carried the guilt, and it held him captive.
Maybe it was time to grow the fuck up. Time to recognize that not making promises might be as harmful as making them and not following through.
“I think I’m in love with her, Mom,” he said. And the sun didn’t suddenly go out, nor did the clouds part and angels trumpet. Instead, he felt what he’d been feeling ever since he’d met Eve. Terrified and exhilarated.
“How does she feel about you?”
“I’m not sure, but I think she kind of digs me, too.”
“Maybe you should go find out.”
“But, I’m an alcoholic. Her dad was alcoholic, too, and he was a total fuckup, and she’s all up in Al-Anon stuff…”
She nodded. “You’re sober.”
“Yeah, but you know as well as I do that could go pear-shaped any time. And she lives at a distillery.”
“She’d probably move if she was serious about you.”
He couldn’t ask her to do that. Could he? “And what if the worst happens, and I fall?”
“Then you’ll deal with it. You’ll trust her to take care of herself.”
“I-I don’t know.”
“Isn’t there something in that program of yours about fear?”
“Yeah, but that’s—that’s fear for myself. This is bigger than that. It’s fear for her.”
“Hmph. Sounds to me like you might want to give her program a try, too.”
It was too late. Her whole life was about Blue Mountain, and he’d done the worst thing possible—left her hanging so that her mother was embarrassed. He did need to make amends, though. Damned Alcoholics Anonymous and their good ideas.
“I guess I’d better get back to Kentucky. Even if she’s done with me, I have to fix this.”
“I guess so.”
“Let me get the rest of these boxes in here for you—”
She waved him off. “Go. Put them out of your truck on the walkway out there. I’ll get Mr. Light to carry them in.”
Nick looked at his mom, his competent, happy mom, and nodded. “Okay. I guess I’d better make a few phone calls.”