“I guess you can just set it on the shelf over there,” Helena Compton groused. “Don’t know why you brought it. You know I only drink gin and beer.”
Sam’s fingers tightened briefly on the bottle of whisky he’d brought with him, carefully nestled on the front seat of his truck all the way from Brooklyn. His whisky, from his first batch, from the distillery he’d created from nothing.
Granted, it wasn’t his first bottle. He wouldn’t waste that honor on her. But somehow he’d thought that maybe, beneath all the bitterness, she’d want a little piece of what Sam had been pouring his heart—and savings—into for the previous two years. So he’d brought her one of the special first bottles, complete with the label he’d designed himself and had carefully applied just that morning.
He shouldn’t have bothered. Giving even a little bit of himself to his mother had always been a mistake.
“I know you like gin, Mom,” he said tersely as he set the bottle on a small beat-up bookshelf that served as her and her boyfriend’s home bar. “But Carl likes whisky, so I thought—”
“Carl likes Johnny Walker, not that overpriced, local organic shit.”
“It’s not organic,” he ground out. “And it’s not overpriced considering I brought it as a gift.”
Actually, none of his whisky was overpriced. It wasn’t priced at all. But he wasn’t about to tell his mom that he wasn’t making money from ROON Distillery. Yet.
Cashing in his 401(k) in order to open a distillery had given his old financial advisor a heart attack, but so far it had been worth it every single morning when Sam woke up and realized he didn’t have to put on the dreaded suit and tie and do the dog-and-pony dance in an office that he hated.
But his savings would only last him so long.
It was time to shit or get off the pot. Soon.
He’d deal with that later.
Sam took a deep breath, only to regret it when the smell of cigarette smoke singed his nostrils. You’d think a childhood’s worth of inhaling the stuff secondhand would have made him immune, but to him the scent was still reminiscent of yelling and disappointment.
“Where is Carl?” he asked, sitting carefully on the edge of a cracked-leather sofa.
“Working,” his mother snapped. “Some people have to do that, you know.”
Some people didn’t include her, though. Sam seemed to remember her getting unemployment checks in the mail more often than she ever got a paycheck. Or alimony from one of her—count ’em—six ex-husbands. Carl at least had had the good sense not to marry her, but Helena had been so desperate to get out of their crumbling house in Brooklyn that she’d jumped at the chance to move upstate even without a cheap wedding ring on her finger.
And it was better for Sam too. Increased distance between him and his mother could only be a good thing.
“Where’s Carl working, still at that bar and grill up the road?”
“It’s not a bar and grill, Sam, it’s a just a bar. A shitty, run-down dive bar. He hates it, but he doesn’t have the luxury to up and quit and follow some piss-in-the-river dreams.”
Piss-in-the-river? That was a new one.
She was always coming up with weird sayings that weren’t actual sayings, but they all pretty much conveyed the same sentiment: Only a loser would quit a promising career as an investment banker to start a distillery in a warehouse in Brooklyn.
The hell of it was, she’d hated it when he was an investment banker. He’d made the mistake of wearing a suit when he dropped by with her birthday gift four years earlier, and she’d accused him of being a yuppie poser.
Best as Sam could t
ell, she just didn’t want him to be happy.
But too bad for her, because he was the closest he’d been in years.
In his professional life anyway. On the personal front …
“Heard from Hannah lately?” she asked, pushing herself out of her recliner and finding a half-empty bottle of Beefeater’s on the shelf. At fifty, she was still pretty. That baffled him. Sure, there were some telltale lines around her mouth from the frowning and the smoking, but otherwise, for a woman who’d thrown away her life to laziness and alcohol and bad men, she was still inexplicably lovely. Granted, her clothes weren’t high-fashion, and they were too young for her age, but her hair was still thick and blond, her eyes still wide and blue, and she’d managed to avoid any middle-aged weight gain.
He watched her, not saying anything about her having unnecessarily shoved his own whisky out of the way to get to her gin. And he certainly didn’t bother mentioning that it wasn’t even two in the afternoon. It’d be a waste of breath.
Sam pushed his fingers into his eyes, wondering, as he always did, why he bothered coming here at all. “No, I haven’t heard from my ex-wife, Mom. I haven’t heard from her since we signed the papers and very amicably parted ways six years ago.”
But thanks for bringing it up.