First Chapter: Wildflower by Mae Wood
Juliana
"To us," I said, hoisting my pint glass in the air and looking at the three women who were now my business partners. We didn't look like an upstart brewery. No, we looked like we were filming the first ten minutes of a house flipping show with our old clothes and work boots with safety goggles hanging around our necks and our dust masks at the ready. But we didn't look near as cute as anyone on TV.
"Hear, hear," said Tabitha, her long black braids carefully tucked away beneath a bright blue headwrap tied into a rosette.
"To adventure and success," I continued.
"And a 'Fuck you!' to those who think they know best," shouted Kristin.
A big, goofy smile spread across my face at her razor-sharp addition to my toast. "A fuck you to those who think they know best"—yeah, that summed up what we were doing perfectly.
"Now I'll drink to that!" said Whitney, her trademark devilish grin on full display. "Cheers!"
We clinked glasses and drank deeply, a bit giddy that our plan, after years of emails and group texts and late night and early morning calls, was finally becoming real. Business of beer training from our women-in-beer industry group, the Brewster League, had brought us together. And the first outline of what today was becoming Runaway Pond Brewing was a result of that workshop. Tabitha and I had crossed paths professionally for decades at beer fests and conferences and Brewster League events. Whitney and I fled the same brewery to open Runaway Pond. Kristin had been a consultant, helping people set up and run taprooms across the Midwest. We weren't tight, but we were a team.
After two decades brewing beer, I was out on my own. Well, out on my own with these three women at my side and the Brewster League cheering us along the way. We were opening Vermont's first women-owned brewery, Runaway Pond Brewing. And frankly, it would be one of the few women-owned breweries in the country. If anyone was up for this challenge, we were. Together, we were bringing over a half century of brewing experience to the table. Whitney and Kristin were the young guns, Tab and I had experience on our side, and together we had all the ingredients to make this a go. Now it was time to grind it out. We could do this. We would do this. We will do this.
Another sip from my beer and I looked around the old diner we'd bought. The reality of the challenge sank in. We were on our own with no annoying beer bros to boss us around. That freedom came with a lot of pressure—no safety nets and no paychecks until we turned a profit, and I was the one who'd convinced them that we should open a brewery near my hometown in rural Vermont.
I took another sip of what we hoped would be our signature brown ale and closed my eyes, focusing on the malt and hops and the magic of it all. It was damn good. I rolled my shoulders back and exhaled.
Yeah, I could do this.
We were doing this.
We would do this.
We will do this.
"Ready?" I asked.
"Let's get to it," said Tabitha, our ballsy CEO. "Kristin, what's fair game?"
The diner's glass door flew open and my childhood best friend blew in. "Oh, good. I didn't miss the demo. Where's my sledgehammer?"
"Hold up, Mercy. There's a plan," said Kristin. Suddenly the girl who was always in search of a party was dead serious. While the beer was going to be my baby, our tasting room was fully in her zone. "First. We're not trashing it. We want the quaint, old roadside diner vibe. Second—"
"We gotcha," said Whitney as she tucked the pieces of her bob that had fallen from her ponytail behind her ears. "Just tell us what we can hit." She set down her half-empty glass on the battered speckled green and white Formica top, then patted the counter. "Is this going?"
"As much as I'd like to…" said Kristin, with a shrug. "Yeah, it's a goner. We're repurposing what we can. But that, in all of its nineteen forties loveliness, is a goner."
And it was lovely. I'd eaten so many lunches perched at that counter, but this wasn't the time to get misty about what was. What would be stood before us and now we had to go get it.
"There's blue tape on what needs to go," said Kristin. "Nothing's structural. The contractor marked things we can hit. Let's get to it."
"Blue tape?" said Tab with a scoff. "I've got something better." Of all of us, Tabitha had the most at risk. We'd all placed our savings and credit on the line, but Tabitha left her hard-won position as chief operations officer for a highly respected Oregon brewery for this adventure in Nowheresville, Vermont, bringing her two kids with her. It wasn't like any of us were exactly young, but the rest of us didn't have lives that were so hard to uproot. Tab flipped open her ever-present tablet pad and pulled out a stack of papers. "Here," she said, passing them around.
I looked at the sheet she'd handed me. It was the web bio of "Drew-be-doo," my nemesis at Hawthorn Hill Brewery. Stupid nicknames were one of the many reasons I hadn't yet missed that bros' club and I didn't think I ever would.
"What's this for?" asked Whitney, holding up a printed logo for the first brewery she'd worked at, the one where she'd been called a bitch so often that she'd begun to think of herself that way. And Whitney wasn't bitchy. She simply didn't have any problem telling you when you were wrong. She called balls and strikes and bullshit. After so long living by myself, her straight shooter approach made sharing a rental house with her easier because we didn't have to tiptoe around each other.
"Let's hang them up and knock 'em down," said Tab.
"Um," said Kristin, "it seems a bit violent."
"Sure about that, Beer Bunny?" asked Tabitha, holding up a photo of Kristin in a fuzzy pink Easter bunny costume.
We'd all been asked to work the taps as a pretty face at beer fests over our careers, but Kristin had it worse than most before she got into the consulting side of the business. She was a petite blonde with curves that drew beer bros' attention, whether she was in a T-shirt or coveralls. Put her in a dirndl and she'd look just like she was modeling for an Oktoberfest poster.
"Ha! I loved that, actually," she said. "I really wish you'd seen Denny's face when I showed up as an Easter bunny rather than a Playboy one. I cannot believe he thought I'd agreed to a sexy bunny costume. The dude makes great beer, but he's stupid."
"He's a misogynist," said Tab in the same matter-of-fact tone that she used to discuss revenue and expenses. She taped the picture of Bunny Kristin to the thin wall separating the kitchen from the dining area. "Have at it." She quickly taped up a dozen other pages with things like You drink beer? and Girlie Beer and Beer Bitch and diversity hire and Just a pretty face and Is that too heavy for you? printed on them. And we went to town in a rage room of our own creation, girl power anthems blasting and more beer being poured.
"I like your new friends. I like them a lot," Mercy said to me. "But Kristin's a little much." A sledgehammer resting on her shoulder and work goggles over her face, we watched her take a swing at a sign reading Nasty Woman like she was in the batter's box at Fenway. With a crack, the sledgehammer broke through the paneling before a hollow thump rang out.
"Damn, that feels good. But how do I…" Kristin said, her voice rising in concern as she began a wiggle dance with the hammer's handle, trying to get it out of the wall. The wiggle turned into some violent wrenching, and I had to admit that she was a little much. No one was telling Kristin no. Especially not a wall made of paneling. Finally she got the sledgehammer out and attacked the wall again. This time the crack ended with a metallic thump. "I, um, I think there's something in here?"
Whitney walked over with a crowbar. "Something's in there?"
"Whoa, like electrical?" said Tab. "Maybe we've had enough fun. Let's let the contractor—"
"Nah, we're good. The power's cut off," said Whitney, jabbing the crowbar into the opening and ripping the paneling down with a creak.
"Is that a safe?" asked Kristin, bending down to get a good look at what was in the wall.
"There's a handle. Is it a toolbox?" I said, peering over her shoulder. I reached over her to yank it out of the tight space. The handle on the top wasn't metal but leather, stiff with age and coated with decades of dirt and dust. Out came a black lunch box, beaten and banged up, with hints of white through the dirt on its domed lid.
"It's a lunch box," relayed Kristin to the others.
I wiped my palm across the lid, removing a layer of grime and unveiling a name in thick white paint. "C. Riggs?" My heart skipped a beat at seeing Riggs's name. It couldn't be? But I didn't doubt it was. Vermont was small, the Northeast Kingdom was tiny, and Gaskin was microscopic. There was one Riggs family that I knew of, and even if there was another, there was only one Riggs to me. Riggs Lyon, the guy who had been driving in the accident that changed the course of my brother's life, and my lifelong crush.
"Hey, Mercy," I said, passing the lunch box to her. "C. Riggs? Is that—"
"Riggs's grandfather Charles, I'd bet. He was an electrician, I think. Something in construction anyway, if I'm not wrong," she said. I looked at my friend in wonder. I knew she had three kids now but with that level of Gaskin, Vermont knowledge, she sounded like her own mother.
"I wonder what's inside," said Whitney.
"Like a time capsule?" said Kristin, tucking her blond hair behind her ears. "Hey, that would make a good beer name. Time Capsule IPA or something." She pulled out her phone and tapped away on it, lost to the big plans that were no doubt swirling in her head. "No, not an IPA, something old-school. Like old European. A gose maybe," she muttered, mainly to herself, before wandering away.
"Let's open it," said Whitney.
"No, let's wait," said Mercy, setting it on the diner's counter that I hadn't had the heart to wallop with a sledgehammer yet. "We know what family it belongs to. Let me call Riggs."
"No!" I said, glancing down at my dirty jeans, dusty flannel shirt, and patting the mess of a bun and bandana I'd tied my hair up with.
"Oh, really," said Mercy. "Still?"
I looked at the ceiling, exhaling deeply. "Yeah."
"Still what?" asked Tab.
"Juliana's had a thing for Riggs since high school." I scowled at Mercy for telling that secret, warning her not to share all of my secrets with my business partners.
"Oh, like your prom date and the back seat of his car?" said Tab, the tease in her voice unmistakable.
"Ha!" said Mercy. "She wishes. She mooned over him. He rode our bus."
"Fine," I said, owning it. "Yeah, I did wish. Riggs and the prom and some field with a blanket. If you want details of my teenage fantasies, I can keep going."
"Yes!" said Whitney at the same time Tab shouted, "No!"
"Okay, should I text him?" asked Mercy.
This time Whitney and Tab were on the same page: "Yes!" "Absolutely."
"Is this another small Vermont thing where Mercy has the entire town saved as contacts?" asked Kristin.
"Not quite," said Mercy. "My husband and Riggs were friends in high school."
"How did that—" began Tab.
"I think 'It's Vermont' is going to answer a lot of your questions," I said. "Anyway, Riggs was super smart. He went to college in Boston and he's stayed down there. Big stuff in the big city. Last time I saw him was at Mercy and Silas's wedding and that was—"
"That was twenty-one years ago this summer," said Mercy, saving me before I shared that particular Riggs-related embarrassment. I breathed out. She hadn't even given me a knowing look. Mercy was such a good friend.
"Wow. Twenty-one, is that right?" I said as she tapped away on her phone.
"Something like that. And before you ask questions or comment on how my marriage will be old enough to legally buy your beer," she said, looking at my business partners, "yes, I was a child bride."
Tabitha and Whitney's eyes widened in surprise.
"That was a joke," said Mercy. "We didn't start dating until I was in college and we got married right after I graduated. Anyway, Riggs texted that he'll stop by."
I snapped my head toward Mercy in confusion. "From Boston?"
"He's back home." The solidarity I'd felt with her a few seconds ago was shaken. True to my ask, she'd never brought him up since her wedding and I certainly had never asked.
A thousand questions rose in me at once, like why she hadn't given me the heads-up before I ran into him in town and I acted all goofy. Like why he was back. Like when he'd be gone and I'd be able to breathe again. Like whether my brother knew. But I could only give voice to one: "What?" I sputtered.
"Aww, yeah," said Whitney. "It's on."
"It's not on," I snapped. "He's married. He's in Boston. A hotshot real estate guy—"
"Nope, nope, and nope," said Mercy. "You need to keep up with your hometown gossip, Juli."
"You're out of the loop on Vermont gossip?" said Whitney, raising her hands to her cheeks in mock horror.
"Brewery gossip is enough to keep anyone busy, let me assure you," I said.
"No lie detected," said Tab.
"So," said Whitney, "to sum this up for me, we're in the middle of nowhere Vermont—"
"All of Vermont is kind of the middle of nowhere, to be honest," said Mercy.
"Okay, yes, the middle of nowhere Vermont. You're home," continued Whitney. "He's home. You're single. He's single. Sexytimes in a field. Boom."
"It's complicated," I said, dismissing her with a toss of my hand.
"It's not complicated," she continued. "Starry night. Field. Blanket. Insert Tab A into—"
"Yeah, I'm going with Juliana on this one. It's complicated," said Mercy. "As cute as it is that Vermont is small and it feels like everyone knows everyone, it gets not-cute superfast."
"Whoa, that sounds dark," said Whitney. "I wasn't going for dark. I was going for—"
"Does his family own a Christmas tree farm? An apple orchard? Something else charmingly small-towny and he'll win you a bear at the county fair?" said Kristin, who'd rejoined us to look at the lunch box. "Because I love those movies."
"He doesn't own a Christmas tree farm," I said. I wanted the entire conversation to end so that I could figure out how to ask Mercy a million questions while coming across like I didn't care at all about the man who had been the boy I'd had a crush on a million years ago. No, not a million years ago. Twenty-five? Nope. More like thirty. Damn. That was a long time, and a lot of life had happened to both of us in the meantime. "I've got beer to brew. I've gotta go check on Growler."
What I was checking, I didn't exactly know, but as I unzipped my white dust suit, I knew I was done with being teased about Riggs, and checking on my dog or beer was always a great excuse to get away from conversations I didn't want to have.
I'd let Mercy fill in everyone on the nonexistence of me-and-Riggs in any context other than my own damn head. I dusted my hands off on my jeans and walked out the door and around to the barn we'd had built in the back of the property for brewing and canning. It was pretty much completed and so much further along than the tasting room, and that was intentional. If we didn't have beer to sell, there wasn't a point in a tasting room.
Most of the equipment had been installed in the brewing building that, due to Kristin's vision, looked like a classic red New England barn. It was our brew barn. Next week our first big shipment of grains would arrive and I'd get down to business. The canning line was the only big thing missing. With Growler let out from the office and moseying along at my heels, I paced around, looking at the big space, staring at the tall silver fermentation tanks and bright tanks and the stouter boil kettles and imagining what I would create. I took to the stairs and scaffolding that I'd know so well that I'd be able to scale them in my sleep to start the work ahead of me. But this time was different. This time, it was all mine. Well, not all mine, but a solid quarter of it was. And I was going to be calling the shots. I wasn't the quiet, shy girl I'd been when I was growing up.
Hell, if I'd met Riggs when I was twenty and not when I was fourteen, he wouldn't have known what hit him. And that was what made me blush the most—thinking about how I'd stared at the back of his head for the forty-three minutes from when he got on the bus until we arrived at school, and the twenty-six minutes from when we got on the bus in the afternoon until my stop. I'd stared at him and dreamed of the things I'd wished I'd been bold enough to do to get his attention.
One time I'd gotten up my nerve to drop a pencil as I walked past him in the aisle. He hadn't even noticed. He was curled over a book with the headphones to his Walkman on. I hadn't planned for that. In my plan, he was going to bend over, pick up my pencil, hand it to me, letting our fingers brush in a soft-focus slo-mo, and say something utterly heart-melting, like, "Here you go, Juliana."
To hear him say my name. To find out that he even knew my name?
Yeah, that was the stuff fourteen-year-old me dreamed about. I didn't know what to make of the seventeen-year-old Riggs.
But forty-three-year-old Juliana? She knew differently about men. I couldn't help but wonder if he'd know who I was.
It'd been a long time since Mercy and Silas's wedding, and I'd about died at the time when Mercy made sure I was paired with him to walk back up the aisle after the vows. He was nice, pleasant, but clearly not invested in any conversation with me. He'd mainly talked about himself, which I'd encouraged, having learned along the way that men liked to talk about themselves, and letting them talk about themselves somehow translated into thinking that I was cool and they'd want to hang out with me again, so they could talk about themselves again.
I'd nodded along in our brief conversations, during the rehearsal and the wedding, not having a clue what he was talking about. But it didn't work. My encouraging smiles and open-ended questions didn't draw him to me. So at the reception, I drank and flirted harder, repositioning my boobs in my dress so that even more cleavage was showing, and thinking it was finally my chance—probably my last chance ever—to get him to notice me.
My bravado was fueled by booze, or maybe my insecurity was suppressed by it. Either way, it wasn't a good scene.
Plus, he'd brought his girlfriend. The woman he'd marry, and now, apparently, wasn't married to anymore. She had been a stunner. Polished and thin and in finance too. She'd mentioned New York and London and Paris and Bermuda and all those places that this Vermont woodchuck had only really dreamed of.
After Mercy and Silas had left the reception, my buzz faded some, and the swimmies set in as I headed for a crash landing. I was puking in the flower bed along Mercy's parents' front porch when Riggs walked by, handed me a handkerchief—a real crisp white handkerchief, not an old bandana—and said he'd find someone to come help me.
With the fancy job, and the fancy girl, and the fancy handkerchief, he'd become a flatlander. A city person. Someone who'd definitely pushed away all of his backcountry Vermont roots.
But my crush on him didn't really die after the wedding. It just changed. It was the idea of him I'd held on to. The idea that a quiet, smart guy who was great at basketball would see me, would like me, would find me special.
And Riggs was just that to me now. An idea.
The Riggs Lyon who'd be stopping by to get his granddad's lunch box? Well, I didn't know him. And odds were that he wasn't nearly as cute at forty-six as he'd been when I'd last seen him at twenty-five. Probably balding and with a beer belly and a brashness that came with earning more money in a year than I'd see in my lifetime. With that image of him fixed, I set it aside, and I went to work cleaning my new tanks.
Dirty equipment led to bad beer. I wasn't making any bad beer here. This was a new start. A fresh start. I'd decided to be intentional about what I was bringing to Runaway Pond, and it was only the best I had to offer—my time, my talents, my passion. An old crush wasn't on that list, and like any debris that could mess up a brew, it needed to be cleaned out so I could have that fresh start.
An hour or so later, my phone rang, pulling me out of my work. I set down my scrubbing brush, looked at the screen, and when I saw Mercy's name, I silenced the call. I knew what was up, Riggs was here and it was time to meet him and finally put this ridiculous crush behind me. Vermont was definitely too small to let a high school crush linger. "Bed, Growler," I said, leading her back to my small office.
* * *
I stomped the mud off my boots at the diner's front door. Yes, it was a construction zone, but old habits die hard. If there wasn't snow, early March in New England meant mud. And lots of it.
As I stomped, I tried to peer through the plate glass windows, but with the slanting afternoon sun I only saw myself reflected back and there wasn't much to look at. Just another middle-aged woman in jeans, I thought. And that was fine by me. I never wanted to win a sash at a beauty pageant, but I wanted to win every damn medal for my beers.
I pushed through the door and scanned the open space, my eyes landing on Riggs. His back was to me, but he was the only guy in the room. Plus, based upon my years of staring at the back of his head, I knew it was him.
His hair wasn't dark like it'd been the last time I saw him. Silver was woven in amid the waves. That surprised me for some reason. I figured I knew so much about him, but I'd been wrong about something so basic. The close-cropped hair I'd imagined touching in my teens was now softer, shaggy, and mussed. Not neatly combed like it had been at the wedding. The same broad shoulders and towering height that had made him my brother's rival on the basketball court were now covered with a worn brown barn coat and not the navy pinstripe suit he'd worn to Mercy's farm wedding.
"Hey," said Mercy, catching my eye over Riggs's shoulder. "Riggs, you remember Juliana."
I almost laughed because I wasn't sure he would. If I amounted to anything worth remembering to him, I was an asterisk, a footnote of Caleb's little sister and Mercy's sidekick, a woman who drank too much at a wedding.
He turned toward me and, damn, the years—the decades—had been a friend to him. He wasn't a cute boy anymore. He was a hot man. He'd always been on the thin side, but he'd filled out. He looked stronger than I remembered him. His green eyes were bright and his jawline scruffy with more silver than brown. He wasn't the boy I'd dreamed of or the young man I'd thrown myself at.
He was something else and, whatever it was, it set my heart to pounding, my breath to catching, and my face to heating.
"Hey, Juliana. Thanks for finding this," he said, holding out the old lunch box. "It was my grandpop's."
"Glad it found its way to you," I said with a nod. I bit my tongue so I didn't say more. I felt everyone's eyes on me and I didn't want to stammer. I looked away from him and at my friends. Mercy was smiling like she'd eaten a canary. Kristin gave me two thumbs up. Whitney did a little wiggle dance that failed so hard at being sexy that I nearly laughed. And Tabitha, my straitlaced, cut-to-the-chase friend, nodded her approval.
"Jeezum Crow," I muttered under my breath. I'd hoped that my little escape to the brew barn would have given them time to get the Riggs crush thing out of their system.
But I should have known better. Apparently no one gets Riggs Lyon out of their system.
"What?" asked Riggs, his eyes on mine.
"Uh, nothing," I said, trying to fight the heat I felt crawling up my cheeks with his focused attention on me.
He'd said like two sentences and I was fourteen again. I never wanted to be fourteen again. I'd take forty-three over the agony of being a teenager any day.
"Can you open it?" asked Whitney.
Riggs turned around toward my friends and I exhaled in relief. This whole crush-on-Riggs-is-in-the-past thing was working out just swimmingly, it seemed. I'd outgrown acne in the past decades, but not the crush on him. Would I ever? God, I hoped he'd go back to wherever he lived soon. Vermont was too small for this.
"Oh, cool," said Kristin.
"What is it?" I asked, stepping over to the group. Riggs turned toward me and my stupid heart kicked up a few beats again.
"Here," he said, handing me an old beer can. "You found it. And no way it's good anymore."
As I took it from him, our fingers brushed and I felt heat flare in my chest again. I managed to keep my curse to myself as I said thanks.
"Seems like a sign," said Whitney, with a wink at me. "A definite sign."
"Okay, so 'Time Capsule' is definitely going to be a name we're using," said Kristin.
"Mercy said you're starting a brewery?" His eyes were on mine, gentle and interested. No trace of the judgment that came from a lot of guys at the idea of women running a brewery.
"Yup," I said, measuring my words so they were steady. "For the locals and the leaf peepers. Bring some of the beer tourists out this way. Selling it here, and then cans and kegs to restaurants and the like."
Tabitha stepped in to give the rest of our elevator pitch. "The Northeast Kingdom's beer market isn't as crowded as the rest of the state. It's a bit away from Giltmaker and from Liar's Den, both of which are can't-miss destinations. But you can't get from Giltmaker to Liar's Den without passing right in front of our door."
"Smart," he said with a nod.
"Yup," I said, feeling my feet under me. "The diner has that small-town charm folks want and is right on the roadway. Plus, the acreage behind was a perfect site for brewing."
"Don't most breweries do brewing and tasting in the same building?" he asked.
"Yup," I said, challenging him because I'd gone toe to toe with anyone who disagreed with me on this point. "But would you like strangers walking through your office, pawing through your work, trying to log on to your computer, photographing every damn thing? I mean, I'd rather have a G-D FBI raid than the day-to-day grind of trying to figure out what stuff's been messed with by someone who has no business messing with it."
The kindness in his eyes went out and something cool and distant took its place. A growly harrumph was his reply. He thanked us all again for the lunch box and then briskly walked out of the diner, the door slamming behind him.
Well, I thought, that did it for my crush. Handsome I could take, but asshole was a deal killer. I'd had way too many assholes in my life to even dream about wanting one more.
"Why did you say that to him?" Mercy's tone was sharp, and I turned toward her in confusion.
"Why did I say what to him?" Mercy was always Team Juliana, so this was weird, and I began to track back through the conversation, trying to figure out where I'd gone wrong. "He asked about why the brewing space was separate, and I asked him if he'd like strangers in his office. That was it." I held my hands out, palms up, pleading my case.
"That was it?" She was skeptical. Of course, she should be. I wasn't known for saying the right thing at the right time.
"Yeah. That was it. You know I don't like folks in my workspace, taking my shit and snooping around and fucking around with my brews. I told him I'd rather have an FBI raid."
"That. That's what you said." Mercy blinked at me in disbelief, pausing for me to catch up with her.
"Oh, shit," I said, suddenly remembering what had happened to him and putting together why Riggs was probably back home.