“Go,” she said, her voice cracking.
After he sighed, Bo disappeared up the stairs and soon returned, completely clothed although he had not put his tie back on. Lila had remained at her spot at the window, intent on standing to see him leave. Bo retrieved his coat from a chair where it had been thrown after their return to the house, draped it over his arm, and moved to the door. Before putting his hand upon the knob, he turned and spoke.
“I’m sorry. I love you. I was wrong tonight. But there’s one thing you’re wrong about, too.”
His taunt finally got her attention and she deigned to look and speak to him. “What’s that?”
“You think that I love that damn distillery more than you,” he said. “And that will never be true.”
Lila wanted to go to him, fall into his arms and forget what had happened, but her pride and her wounded heart wouldn’t let her. She felt exposed, raw, vulnerable, and that cruel teacher, experience, again had taught her that there was no safety except inside herself. Tearing her gaze from him, she once more stared out the window, hoping he would leave and not approach her again. Her resolve to keep him at bay was weakening with the growing realization that this was a not just their first fight, but their first and last fight as a couple. She heard him heave a sigh, open the door, and leave. Lila only left the window when Bo was in his truck and turned the engine. She was not going to watch him drive away because she didn’t need another memory of that painful moment burned into her shattered heart.
Chapter 21
Monday dawned cold and miserable, the perfect reflection of Bo’s inner landscape. He’d tried calling Lila a few times on Sunday, but she was ignoring him, and he couldn’t say he was surprised. But he was starting to get to the point where he was desperate, and beginning to think that he’d lost her forever. They’d been going along so easily in the relationship that he’d never even considered that things might not work out between them, despite the looming reality of the lawsuit. In retrospect, he’d realized his astounding naiveté, but knew that’s what love did to people: it had the power to turn them into fools.
He stood at his office window, looking into the dullness of yet another indistinct winter morning. Only the entrance of Hannah into his office had the power to slightly disturb his thoughts, which were already troubled enough.
“Say, I think we really need to talk about the salting of the visitors’ center parking lot,” she said, and he turned to face her. “The crew today didn’t do a very good job and I’m wondering whether we should hire another service since—” She stopped, mouth opened, and stared at her brother. “And what might be the problem with you?” she asked.
No hiding anything from Hannah.
“Screwed things up with Lila,” he admitted.
Hannah sighed, as if she were a parent deeply disappointed in a wayward child. She took a seat and he sipped his coffee, and turned back to the safety and nothingness outside the window; he knew she was waiting for him to talk and that she wouldn’t leave until he told her the story. He described what had happened in the briefest of terms (definitely leaving out any reference to the bedroom bits), but not much was necessary for Hannah to understand.
“I thought you were beyond trying to get that land,” she said wearily.
“I didn’t see the harm in asking.” Bo moved away from the window to sit behind his desk. “I really thought that she’d—”
“I just don’t have the heart or the stomach to listen to this,” she said, looking truly shaken by his revelation that he and Lila were apparently over.
Hannah stood and left him in mid-sentence, rendering him stupefied by her sudden abandonment, even though Bo knew exactly where his sister was headed.
She was going to tattle on him to Mom.
Bo knew that he would not be able to hide very long from his mother’s wrath and retreated to that place he felt most comfortable, the oldest rickhouse on the grounds and the one closest to the distillery building. The limestone edifice through which the tourists tramped and oohed and aahed at all the barrels was his most sacred refuge. He didn’t get there as often as he liked, but sometimes early in the morning or late in the afternoon, when the tourists were nowhere to be seen and the place was still and quiet, he would slip out and into that sanctuary. He loved the smell of the place—that mellow, woodsy scent mingling with the sharpness of the alcohol. When he sat on an old barrel in the corner of the building and looked high to the ceiling beyond the stacks and stacks of barrels, he always wondered how many angels were there, invisibly enjoying the harvest of the slowing evaporating spirits. And that day he knew he would need any protection the angels might see fit to bestow upon such a foolish mortal.
He heard his mother’s footsteps as she came around the building and entered, pausing briefly before she headed straight to his corner hidey-hole. She stopped at the corner opposite him and gave him one of the coldest looks he had ever seen on her usually calm face.
Bo had always known his mother as a patient and kindly sort. While she was prone to exasperation just as most human beings were, she hid her annoyances and outrages well and did not erupt into outbursts of indignation, in stark contrast to her daughter. In this way, Bo was like his mother, although his ability to suffer fools was not nearly as well-developed. So Bo had rarely seen his mother angry or enraged. He could recall a few incidents; a vague one from his childhood in a bathroom; the time Hannah wrecked a car; and the time his mother got on his father’s case about his health, an outburst which failed to produce the necessary result in that his father still neglected himself, leading to an early death.
When he saw his mother’s face as she emerged from behind a rick of barrels, there was absolutely no mistaking that he was about to see and suffer that rare thing: an infuriated Emma Davenport.
She walked toward him slowly, never taking her eyes from him.
“Don’t hide from me, Bo,” she told him. “You can’t.”
“I know,” he said, and sighed. “It’s just that I wanted to be here. I knew you’d find me, and I figured this might as well go down somewhere that I feel comfortable.”
Emma looked up at the ricks and put her left hand on the head of a barrel.
“It was all about this,” Emma said, and shook her head. “All of these barrels, all of this product,” she said.
“Mom, I know that I shouldn’t have talked to Lila—”
Her hand dropped from the barrel and she took a quick step toward her cornered son.
“I wasn’t talking about Lila, and I wasn’t talking about you,” she snapped. “I was talking about your father. How many times do I have to have this conversation with you, Bo? I know you saw it unfold before your eyes.”
“I know that Dad worked too hard. I get that,” he said, and wondered why they had veered off into the painful topic of his dad’s demise.
“That was the end of the story, Bo. You’ve never been able to grasp the moral, though,” she said. “Do you not remember how many times we all begged your father to change, to slow down, to take care of himself?”
Bo nodded mutely.
“And yet here you are,” Emma said, and gestured to her son leaning against the barrel, “doing the same thing to yourself.”
“I’m not out here working myself to death, Mom,” he countered.
“Looks like you’ve got a good head start, in my opinion. But that’s still not the heart of it, Bo. Your problem was the same problem your father had: you cannot deal with change, especially when it comes to changing your own mind. You will not do it. You’ll accept change on your terms, fine—like getting what you want from Lila McNee, and I’m not just talking about her land, although that’s part of it,” she said, her temper now in full flare. “No, you will not listen to others and take their advice. You will not acknowledge that maybe you don’t know everything, that you really might not know what’s best for yourself, or even for this entire distillery! Do not end up being a stubborn ass like your father!”
“I am no
t like that!” Bo yelled back at her, and stood. “I know what happened, I saw it!”
“Really? Did you? Then let me ask you this: why couldn’t you accept Hannah’s concerns about rehiring Jonesy? She had perfectly valid concerns—other than the horrible one we discovered later—so why didn’t you listen to her when she said you shouldn’t rehire that man?”
“I thought it was the best thing to do,” he said, not really answering his mother’s question.
“So you dismissed Hannah’s extremely reasonable concerns because you wanted to do it your way. And what about Kyle? She repeatedly told you that he was a good person and to lay off when it came to their relationship, but you chose to believe the worst of him. Again, not listening!”
“That’s over and I apologized to Hannah, you know that! And aren’t you being a little hypocritical when it comes to how we both treated Kyle?”
“Maybe,” she said, “but I’m here to discuss your shortcomings, although I’ll freely acknowledge my own, of which I have many.”
“But—”
“And now we really come to it: this desire of yours to keep expanding production. Building those new rickhouses.”
“It’s hardly a new idea, Mom. Dad wanted that.”
“So what? That doesn’t make it a good idea. Use your head, boy!” she chided him. “You’ve lost the woman you love because of that damned scheme!”
Bo fell back against the barrel. “If I’m so full of terrible decisions, why don’t you and Hannah gang up on me and vote me down? Because from what you’re saying, I’m an incompetent asshole that has no business running a distillery.”
“Because you are in control, that’s why,” Emma said. “It’s your job, your responsibility to try to get it right. These are your problems because you’re the boss. Your father gave you this power, and you have to deal with it. It is not my job to save you from yourself by teaming up with Hannah and pulling your chestnuts out of the fire whenever you go astray. How could that possibly work? What kind of management system would that be? It wouldn’t work. You’re my son, but you’re not a child anymore. And if I rescue you from your own bad decisions, how can you ever learn?”
“So you’d let me make the wrong decision and watch me go down with the ship just to prove your point?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. I’ll always give you my opinion on something to do with how this place is run,” Emma said, gesturing toward the barrels to her left, “even if you don’t want it. Because as both your mother and part owner I do consider it my duty to at least try to knock some sense into your head before you make a decision. And I expect you to listen to me—as well as your sister. But I will not force my decisions on you by joining with Hannah to override your control here. That wouldn’t be treating you like an adult, although from my perspective you don’t act like one when you fail to listen to the good advice that you do get from your family.”
“I don’t know what to do, Mom,” Bo said, and looked up at the barrels. “I truly believe that we need to expand, produce more—and I’m not talking about the new products that Walker wants to make. And that means we need more space. I’ve listened to you and Hannah, but—”
“But you think the bourbon has to stay here to be Old Garnet, I know,” she said, sighing. “And that is something I just cannot get my head around. Moving to an off-site storage facility is your only reasonable solution. Do you realize that everything we need to make the bourbon is right here or made here? The water, the mash, the distilling, the filling of the barrels,” she said and whacked a barrel on the side. “So what if it ages elsewhere? It was born here. Are you somehow fundamentally different because you leave this property? No, you’re you because of what happens here, what you do here. That doesn’t get taken away from you when you leave the grounds.”
Bo said nothing and would not look at his mother, who had put a forefinger to one temple and massaged her head.
“I’ve got a headache and I’m going to go home,” she said, and started walking away from her son. She turned once she reached the opposite corner.
“You’ve got to change, Bo,” she said. “You’ve got to think differently. If you don’t, you’re going to lose the two things you love most in this world: Lila and the distillery, and in that order. And mark my words: while you can live with losing the distillery, you will never forgive yourself if you lose Lila. You will never recover from that loss. So change your mind, give in, compromise—whatever term you want to slap on it. Because to get what you want, you have to be prepared to suffer some losses along the way.”
Emma put her hand on one of the barrels and took a deep breath.
“Give the angels their share, Bo,” she said in a much softer voice and with a smile, “because they leave us what really matters.”
Chapter 22
For the first time in his life, Bo did not want to show his face at work the next morning. He had slept poorly after his confrontation with his mother, and her words and accusations had raced through his mind all night long, robbing him of rest. Yet despite being miserably tired and just plain miserable, he pushed out of bed and got ready for the day. His only nod to his less-than-chipper demeanor was that he allowed himself an extra cup of coffee at home before walking to the distillery, and was actually ten minutes later than usual in arriving. Hannah wasn’t there yet, which was typical. He resented her mild lateness (by his standards) but then remembered that, unlike himself, she did have a spouse at home and thus a reason to linger and dawdle. He felt a stab of jealously, and wondered what it was like to wake up with someone you love every day and to have that simple, routine comfort.
Instead of going to his office upon arrival at the visitors’ center, Bo went to the café and got some more coffee and a roll. He had developed a habit of going to the café in the mornings rather than being holed up in his office. It was easy enough to take a newspaper or work into the café and eat and read at the same time. He found that he was starting to enjoy this ritual, that it made him happy, and that it had little if any impact on his ability to get things done in the morning. His father had been a take-charge kind of guy and on the job with little time to spare once he started work. Cass Davenport had raced through every day as though in a competition and Bo knew where that had gotten him—into an early grave, as his mother had reminded him only hours earlier.
By half past eight, Bo decided it was time for him to get to his office, and finished his coffee and roll before departing the café. There was still no Hannah, and his mother had not yet appeared, which he thought odd for her. But then it hit him that the two women were probably off somewhere together eating breakfast, most likely at The Windmill, considering what he knew of Hannah’s preferences. Right now over coffee and waffles with bourbon-infused syrup, they were probably complaining about him. And if that were the case, Bo knew that he was probably in for another round of lectures from his mother and sister.
In other words, it looked like it was going to be just another day at the office at Old Garnet.
The Sunday after her breakup with Bo, Lila hadn’t been at all surprised when Emma called her and requested she come to her house the following morning to talk. Lila had expected Emma or Hannah or both to contact her, offer apologies for Bo’s behavior, and try to worm out of her details about the breakup. She’d resolved to keep these inquiries to a minimum and the conversations short. She was still reeling and hurting from what had happened, and re-hashing the messy affair with Bo’s family would be nothing but a recipe for misery. But when Emma had called, there was something so sad and urgent in her tone that Lila reconsidered her original plan to keep the Davenports at bay. She agreed to go over early to Emma’s house since county schools were closed for a winter break.
Nervous and gloomy, Lila pulled onto the distillery grounds and took the narrow lane south toward Emma’s place. As she passed the point in the road leading to Bo’s home, she automatically turned her head to the right to see anything, although the logical part of
her mind knew that Bo probably had already gone to the distillery and that his home could only be seen upon entering his driveway.
Lila parked and went to Emma’s front door, surprised that Emma wasn’t waiting for her. Standing on the top step, she rang the doorbell, heard the faint ding from inside, and waited but there was no answer. Thinking that the bell might not be working properly, or that Emma had not heard the doorbell, Lila knocked loudly several times. Nothing.
An infectious unease stole through Lila’s consciousness. Emma’s car was there, and if Emma hadn’t been able to meet, Lila knew that she would have called her, apologized, and tried to schedule another time to get together.
Lila knocked again, and got the same big fistful of nothing.
Call Bo?
No, she wasn’t ready to deal with him.
She plucked her phone from her coat pocket and called Emma.
No answer.
Still unwilling to engage Bo on any level, Lila called Hannah.
“Hi, Lila,” Hannah answered, and Lila had to wonder whether Hannah had just deliberately mentioned her name because Bo was within earshot. “You doing OK these days?” she asked sympathetically. “Bo’s been moping about and—”
“Hannah, I’m at your mother’s house. She wanted to meet me this morning but she’s not answering her door or her phone.”
“Oh, no,” Hannah intoned. “I’ll be right there. I’m still at my house. Damn, and Kyle just left.”
Hannah hung up and Lila was left standing alone in the cold on the front steps of the house. She thought about getting back into her vehicle to warm up, but decided to stay put just in case Emma suddenly appeared and answered the front door. Lila considered going around to the back of the house, but figured that someone showing up around there would likely frighten the fritters out of Emma should she see her.
Fortunately for Lila’s chilled extremities, Hannah arrived much quicker than Lila had anticipated. With a screech of tires, Hannah threw her car into park, took the key from the ignition, and was on the porch beside Lila in a few seconds after her arrival. Hannah ran through the same ritual that Lila had observed about ten minutes earlier: ringing the doorbell, knocking. But Hannah went around to the back of the house and still couldn’t raise her mother.
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