“Lu,” Tommy interjects, but she ignores him.
“Before you start getting all out of sorts about this, do me a favor and don’t,” Lu says to me.
My eyes widen at her. “Getting out of sorts?”Is she for fucking real right now?This isn’t some random guy I found her giving a lap dance to, which I might add, has happened before. This is Tommy. He’s been in my life for my entire life. I am all kinds of out of sorts about it.
“Lu,” Tommy says again, but she flicks her wrist at him as she rummages through the desk on the other side of the small room.
“This is—” I blow out a breath.How do I navigate this?
But she finishes the sentence with, “None of your goddamn business, Wynona.”
I shake my head and scoff.
“Tallulah,” Tommy says louder this time.
“You just made it my business,” I bark back to her.
Ignoring me, she turns toward him, visibly annoyed. “What?” Her arms fly out to her sides. “Thomas, what?” she yells. “I’m lookin for my?—”
“Phone,” he says with it held between two fingers.
She tries yanking it from him, but he holds tight.
I tilt my head, observing this wordless exchange between the two of them, and start to wonder how much more I’ve missed. Not when I was gone either, but how much I didn’t see or wouldn’t see when I was here.
When Lu finally pulls the phone away, she barely glances at me when she says, “I’m not interested in your judgment right now.”
“I’m not judging you, Lu,” I huff out. But she’s well on her way through the sliding door and down the path to the house, stomping away like a pissed-off child.
“Could have fooled me, kiddo,” Tommy says, buttoning the second button on his flannel shirt.
“What the hell does that mean?” I rush out. Propping my hands on my hips, I watch as he scoots forward on the worn chair.
With his elbows on his knees and forearm hanging in front of him, he exhales heavily. “It means, what you’re saying isn’t the same as how you’re actin’. I’m sure you think you just walked in on your mother and me fucking around.” He sniffs out a laugh. “Not happening. But she had a hard night. Those don’t happen too often, but even the great pain in the ass that is Tallulah Crowne needs someone to melt into, lean on, and lose time with sometimes.”
“And last night, that was you?” I say, lifting my eyebrows, trying not to smile at how I wouldn’t have guessed it. My father’s brother...
“I’ve always been that for her. Long before you were ever in this picture, Wyn. And she’s been that for me,” he says as he stands and moves past me, through the center of the room.
Have her bad nights been after murdering men in the name of revenge, or has it been the norm of shitty customers and the typical stresses that come with being a woman owning a business and navigating being a single parent?
“Whatever you’re working really hard at in that big, beautiful brain of yours, I’ll just ask that maybe you should give her a break.” He tosses the long copper whiskey thief onto the bench in front of me. “You want to be pissed off at her, I get it, she’s frustrating as shit. Your mother is complicated. Doesn’t mean you have to absorb it or even understand it.”
I wonder how much he really knows. Tommy has been around my entire life and long before it too. “She’s shared some of what that complication looks like,” I say leadingly. But he just listens and waits for me to say more. “I still don’t know how I feel about some of the things she’s told me.”
“Here,” he says, passing me the mallet and stopper. The drill in his hand lets out a loud zipping noise as he tests its battery. This is our routine. A lazy morning, followed by a weekend afternoon in the distillery for a few hours. When he finished the renovations on my place, he had more time and spent it here with me. Walking toward the barrels in the far side of the room, he adds, “Sometimes, sharing things with people makes you feel closer to them. Trusting them with details about the ways that life can be difficult is how we connect.”
How do I ask,Hey, any chance she told you about her passion project of “offing” men?Or,is it possible that she killed my dad and your brother?But I don’t ask either of those things; instead, I sit with the fact that there’s more here. Layers of life that I’ve been so unaware of and closed off to long before I ever disappeared. I settle on asking, “Did she tell you why she had a rough night?”
He gives his head a quick shake. “Didn’t have to. We don’t work that way. Your mother doesn’t need to justify much to me. I’m not built like that. You want to tell me shit to feel better? I’ll listen. But it’s not necessary.” He works the drill through the top side of the barrel, and once that’s cut, I push the long end of the whiskey thief inside. It works as a long tube to siphon out just enough of the whiskey in the barrel to taste. “Explanations, details, excuses, whatever you want to call it—I made the choice a long time ago that when one of the Crowne girls needs something, I’ll be there. No need for any currency.”
The fact that he looked at that as a simple decision says enough about the kind of man he is, and I’ve been lucky enough to have him in my life. My dad wasn’t anything worth remembering, but his brother, my uncle, has always made me feel seen and loved, despite the craziness that swirls around us.
Mint coats my mouth, and on the tail end, I can taste the lime zest—tart and bitter, but it balances out the bite of whiskey that’sbeen sitting in this barrel. It isn’t long enough for what I like, but it still qualifies being called a whiskey, and I want to play around with it. I move toward the center bench to see if my idea might work.
“Not bad,” Tommy says, holding up the glass in the light. “I like the bite, but it’s intense.”
Setting aside the rest of the shot, thinking he’s right, I pull out the glass bottle of mineral water I stored in the mini fridge out here. Shaking it and pressing the spout turned it into carbonated water. It’s an old-school way to make Italian soda. Something I watched Mickey Moonie do hundreds of times as a kid. It isn’t anything original, but with the right flavors, it could be something new. I pour equal parts of the carbonated water into the shot glass and pass it to Tommy. “Now what do you think?”
