Southern Bombshell (North Carolina Highlands 5)

I help him shrug out of his jacket too. “I think I’ve been in mourning my whole life.”

“Sounds serious.” I meet his eyes.

“I’m ready,” he replies. “To talk about it.”

I lick my lips, feeling my throat tighten all over again. “I’ll light the fire.”

“I’ll pour the whiskey.”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Nate

“I was six when I came home from school to find my mother weeping,” I say to Milly, taking a deep breath. She’s sitting on my lap in a big leather chair by the fire in her living room. One hand is curled around my neck, the other curled around a glass of the whiskey that’s at the center of this mess. “I started to cry too. I’d never seen her shed so much as a tear, not even when my dad reamed her out or disappeared for days at a time. She was the parent Silas and I could always depend on. ”

It had scared me shitless to see her break down that way. I’d told her it would be okay as I hugged her as fiercely as my little arms would allow. I told her that whatever was wrong, I’d fix it.

She smoothed back my hair and managed a smile. Then she told me we were moving to a new apartment that night.

“And we’ll get all new furniture too!” she said, but even back then, I could pick up on her forced cheeriness.

When grim-faced men who reeked of cigarettes carried off most of our belongings a few hours later, I understood why.

Later, I learned Dad lost our house and pretty much everything in it, thanks to some bad bets at a dog-fighting ring out in Jackson county.

“But by some miracle, he managed to hang on to the distillery and the property it sat on throughout my childhood. It was a tiny operation. He couldn’t afford to hire help because he was chronically short on cash. So he put my brother and me to work. We turned mash, popped bungs off casks for taste tests, and hauled water up from the spring on our property (we still use that water to this day—it’s our secret ingredient, and the one that’s most important to Appalachian Red’s flavor profile).

I loved the work from the get-go. For all Dad’s faults, he was a good teacher, and he was a master of his craft, just like his daddy before him.

“I also loved the idea of the distillery saving us somehow. I saw it as a path to our salvation—a legitimate way to a better life, the kind of life y’all lived on the other side of the mountain. You had new coats every winter and money for lunch at school, and your dad was even able to buy a brand new Ford F-150 with air-conditioning and a CD player.”

Milly chuckles. “We thought that was the coolest thing.”

“So did I. I saw it, and I wanted it. Not the new car, necessarily, or the nice clothes. I wanted stability. I wanted basketball camp for Silas and pretty things for Mom. I didn’t want her to have to shop two counties over so no one would see her using food stamps to buy groceries.”

“I can’t imagine how hard that must’ve been,” Milly replies.

It was awful.

It was also the reason I was so inspired by the Beauregards’ success. But Dad? He was jealous. Didn’t help that bad blood existed between our families for over a hundred years before I was even born. I have a theory that the feud came down to one thing: money. The Beauregards had it for as long as anyone could remember, and we didn’t. First, it was a lucrative fur trapping operation they established in the 1700s. Then it was logging. After that, it was football, and now it’s the five-star resort they own and operate on Blue Mountain.

No matter how hard my ancestors tried to keep up, our family was always a step behind the Beauregards. Daddy felt the shame of that acutely. He was determined to even the score.

He couldn’t do that with his whiskey, even though it was some of the best ever made. The man didn’t have a high school diploma. He didn’t know how to grow the family’s tiny operation into a business that turned a profit.

But he did know how to gamble.

Not well, mind you. But it didn’t stop him from trying. In his mind, he’s always one hand of cards away from hitting it big, when in reality, he just incurred big debts, ones we scrambled to cover.

Eventually, those debts ballooned. They became unmanageable, to the point it threatened the distilling operation. Dad’s plan to pay back his bookies consisted of recruiting Silas to play poker alongside him. It wasn’t long before my brother was in deep too, the two of them in debt to the tune of half a million dollars.