Читать книгу The Bourbon Thief - Tiffany Reisz, Tiffany Reisz - Страница 11
ОглавлениеBonnie Tyler’s voice crooned on the radio and Tamara sang along. “It’s a Heartache” was her new favorite song. She was long overdue for one, having worn out her 45 of “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac weeks ago. Tamara sang along softly as she dried off with a plush pink towel. Granddaddy was a smart man. Taking a long hot bath had definitely made her feel better. When Momma came back, Tamara would tell her how sorry she was. Then she’d offer to be grounded from riding Kermit for as long as her mother said. That should take care of that. Kermit could stay and Levi could stay. Tamara would avoid the stables for a month, two months, six months...whatever term her mother deemed sufficient. It would all blow over once Tamara took all the blame.
She heard the door to her bedroom open and shut and she reached out her hand fast as she could to lock the bathroom door. She didn’t even have any clothes on yet.
“You finished, baby?” Granddaddy called out.
“Not yet.”
Tamara pulled on her panties and her nightshirt. The shirt didn’t go two inches past her bottom, so she had to put on the stupid ugly old-lady housecoat she’d gotten for Christmas last year that her mother insisted she wear over her nightclothes. Tamara usually ignored that order. The thing was ugly as sin and it would be a sin to wear it. With a mandarin collar that buttoned at the throat and a hem that landed all the way down around her ankles, it looked like a nun’s habit in pink. But it was either this or go traipsing around the room in her underwear in front of her grandfather. Neither one of them wanted that.
She quickly braided her wet hair and with towel in hand emerged into her bedroom. Granddaddy sat on the window seat with a bottle in front of him and two glasses.
“Is Momma back yet?” Tamara asked as she walked over to the window. The soft rain had turned to a hard rain. It had rained all week and Tamara wasn’t sure if she’d ever see the sun again.
“She’s not coming home tonight.”
“What? Why not?”
Was her mother that angry with her? That wasn’t a good sign.
“She knows you and I need to have a long talk.” Granddaddy uncapped the bottle of Red Thread he’d brought in with him. “She’s going to stay at the little inn in town. Just you and me tonight.”
“Are we safe here? The news said the river’s overflowing.”
He shook his head as he poured a finger of bourbon into one glass and two fingers of bourbon into the other. He set the two fingers in front of her.
“Don’t you worry about that. This house has stood for over a hundred years with the river right behind us. We’ll make it another hundred.”
“If you say so,” she said, not sure she trusted his judgment as implicitly as he did. Granddaddy was the richest man in the state and everyone knew it. People bent to his will all day long—she’d seen it with her own eyes. He’d get pulled over for speeding and the cop would look at his license, laugh and let him off with a warning. Restaurant owners would bring him drinks on the house. One hotel he stayed at in Louisville assigned him his own personal concierge to fetch and carry for him. People were one thing, but something told her the river wouldn’t bend to his will quite so readily. The river had been here before Granddaddy and it would be here after.
“You’ve had quite a day, haven’t you, little lady?” He took up twice as much room as she did on the window seat.
“Happy Birthday to me, right?”
“Want to tell me what’s going with you and ole Levi?”
“Nothing’s going on with me and ole Levi.”
Granddaddy raised his eyebrows and his glass. He took a sip and so did she, wincing. She’d had a taste of bourbon here and there—the house was full of the stuff—but she hadn’t had nearly enough to get used to it yet. She hadn’t even figured out coffee yet.
“Your mother claims she caught you two rolling in the hay.”
She flushed crimson. Bad enough talking about Levi with her mother. If she had a shovel, she would dig her own grave with it right now.
“There was hay, but no rolling,” she said. “I asked him to kiss me on my birthday, and he kissed me on my birthday. Tomorrow’s not my birthday, so he won’t kiss me tomorrow.”
“You sound a little disappointed about that.”
She shrugged and sat back, her arms clutching her pillow. When she exhaled through her nose, the window turned into a cloud.
“You like him?” her granddaddy asked her. He reached out and pinched her toe. How drunk was he? Very, she guessed. Very very. “Tamara, answer me?”
She laughed at the toe pinch. “Yes, I like him.”
“How much do you like him?”
“I don’t know. A lot?” She finally met her grandfather’s eyes. He was smiling, but the smile didn’t make her feel any better. This was the last conversation in the history of conversations she wanted to be having with her grandfather.
“A lot, huh?” Granddaddy sat back and kicked his boots off. They landed on the little pink rug by her rocking chair and left a boot polish stain. She didn’t care. She was so sick of pink she was ready to burn the house down to get rid of it all.
“A lot. More than a lot, whatever that is.”
“I’ve noticed you and him talking before.”
“Only talking.”
“He dotes on you.”
“He does not. He’s mean to me. He tells me I’m lazy and he makes me muck the stalls and he says I’m spoiled rotten. He even calls me Rotten. I don’t think he’s ever called me by my name.”
“I used to call your grandmother Ornery because she was the orneriest woman I ever met. Drove me crazy when she was younger. I couldn’t keep my hands off her.”
“Granddaddy, really. I don’t want to hear any of that at all, now or ever.”
“You’re old enough now to hear about things you don’t want to hear about.”
“I still don’t want to hear about them.”
He sighed and nodded.
“Such a pretty girl you’ve turned into,” he said. “I’m surprised Levi’s the only boy we’ve had trouble with over you.”
“Y’all send me to an all-girls school, remember?”
“It’s a good school.”
“It’s an all-girls school,” she said again.
“I went to an all-boys school, Millersburg Military. Best school in the state.”
“Great. Can I go there instead?”
“And you wonder why we try to keep a close eye on you,” he said, giving her a smile. “Maybe we should have kept a closer eye.”
“Momma’s only mad because she hates Levi for no good reason.”
“She has good reason.”
“I know he’s older than me, but he’s not that much older. And he’s good with the horses. And Momma said either I had to let her fire Levi or she’d give Kermit to the glue factory. I can’t live without Levi. I can’t live without Kermit. Is she trying to kill me?”
“You won’t die without Levi.”
“Maybe I will,” she said. She might. Stranger things had happened. “I don’t get why Momma hates him anyway, other than I think she hates everybody.”
Granddaddy sighed another one of his Granddaddy sighs. She smelled cigar and bourbon in that sigh. She wanted to open the window.
“There’s something you don’t know about Levi you need to know. Long time ago, Levi’s mother used to work for me. She cleaned the Red Thread offices.”
“She was a janitor?”
“Cleaning lady.”
Tamara felt a stab of pity for Levi. Growing up the son of a cleaning lady must not have been easy. She knew his mother was already dead, but he’d never mentioned that she used to clean for Granddaddy. “Momma hates him because his mother used to be a cleaning lady?”
“Tamara, honey, his mother was black. You didn’t know that?”
Tamara narrowed her eyes at her grandfather.
“What?”
“She was.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s light skinned. But he’s not white.”
There wasn’t a word to express Tamara’s shock.
“But how—”
“His daddy was white,” Granddaddy said with a shrug. “Happens sometimes. And you never know which way the baby will go—light or dark or a mix of both.”
“But he’s got blue eyes. That’s a recessive trait. We learned about it in biology. I had to do a Mendel chart on eye color. He’d have to be white on both sides to have blue eyes.”
Granddaddy chuckled again and she didn’t know what he found so funny. She didn’t find this a bit funny at all. Her mother hated Levi because his mother was black? That was the worst thing she’d ever heard in her life.
The worst thing.
Ever.
In her life.
“Most of them have a little white way back. Our doing, of course. That doesn’t make him white, though. My parents were both right-handed and here I am, a lefty. You think my momma was stepping out with the milkman?”
Tamara ignored the question. Her mother had called Levi “boy” and Levi had seemed to take more offense at that than Tamara thought made sense. She got called “girl” all the time, but even she knew there was a big difference between calling a white boy “boy” and a black boy “boy.”
“That’s why Momma hates Levi?”
“She is not very happy about his parentage, we’ll say that.”
“I don’t care if he’s part black or part red or part green. I don’t care who his mother was, or his father. If his father was Hitler and his mother was Diana Ross, I wouldn’t care at all.”
She might care, but only because she really liked Diana Ross.
“But I care who your mother is. And who your father is.”
“I don’t.”
“You do and you know you do. You’re a Maddox and that means something. You’re special, Tamara.”
“I don’t see why. Not like I had any choice in it.”
“Doesn’t matter. The Queen of England was born the Queen of England. She can’t change being queen, but she can decide what kind of queen she’s going to be—a good queen or a bad queen. And you have the same choice.”
“Okay, I’ll be the Queen of England, then.”
“You’ll be something better than that. You’ll be my queen. And you will run the whole kingdom of Red Thread. You and me, Tamara, we’re special. We’re the only two people on this earth with Jacob Maddox’s blood in our veins. Did you know that?”
“I know,” she said, but she still didn’t see that it made them very special. She’d never met Jacob Maddox, the man who’d founded the Red Thread Bourbon Distillery. He’d been dead forever. And apart from starting the family business, she didn’t know anything about him.
“I wish there were more of us. But your grandmother was fragile up here,” he said, tapping his forehead. “And her health wasn’t too good, either. After two sons, we had to stop. Then she had her stroke and I can’t remarry, not that I’d want to,” he said, although she sensed he did want to, wanted to very much. She would if she were him anyway, and God knew half the single ladies in the county were counting the seconds until Granddaddy was back on the market. “Your uncle Eric died over in Vietnam before he could get married and start his family. And your daddy, of course...”
“Right. Daddy.” Daddy was dead and had been dead for three years, five months and sixteen days. But who was counting?
“We’d hoped he and your mother would have a big family, but that wasn’t to be, either.”
“I don’t think they liked each other too much,” Tamara said, which was both true and wasn’t. Granddaddy had liked to tease her mother sometimes about the babies she hadn’t contributed to the Maddox family tree and Daddy would tell him to back off and leave her alone, which Granddaddy would counter with “If you didn’t leave her alone, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.” She’d never figured her mother and father out. They were friendly and yet they seemed like the last two people on earth who should have been married to each other. “He must not have liked me much, either, since he killed himself.”
“He loved you,” he said, although Tamara wondered. Did men who really loved their daughters shoot themselves in the head and leave them to fend for themselves with a crazy mother?
“I loved him, too. I miss him.” She clutched her pink pillow even tighter to her chest.
“I know you do. We all do. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve thought about how good it was to hold him in my arms after he was born. And Eric, too. My boys. My beautiful boys. I’d give anything to have that again—a new son of my own. Anything at all. Do you feel like that about something? That you’d give anything to have it?”
“I’d give anything to have Daddy back.”
That answer seemed to surprise him.
“Well, yes. You and me both, sweetheart.”
She wasn’t sure she believed him and she felt bad about that. Granddaddy talked about her uncle Eric all the time—handsome, strong, smart, the son of any man’s dreams. But Nash? Her father? Granddaddy almost never talked about him unless someone else brought him up.
“I wish Momma would come back, too,” she said. But from the looks of the dark and the wet and the new rain coming down, it didn’t appear her mother was coming back anytime soon. She found her grandfather looking at her, studying her. He’d been doing that more lately, watching her. Sometimes it didn’t feel like his gaze was on her so much as his hands. She liked it when Levi looked at her. But not even he looked at her like this.
“Angel, I know it’s not easy being a Maddox. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to do. Your grandmother wanted to go to college instead of getting married. But her family had money trouble, so she got married. You do what you have to do for your family. Like Jacob Maddox.”
“What about him?”
“My grandfather Jacob Maddox got married for money, too. Married a lady named Henrietta Arden. That’s why this house is called Arden, because we wouldn’t have it but for her.”
“Did we get all our money from his wife?”
“No, ma’am. She got ole Jacob out of debt, but the real money? He made that all by himself. Back before Red Thread existed, Jacob had a hemp and tobacco plantation. That was the original Arden. Jacob, as it sometimes happened in those days, fell in with one of the slave girls. Her name was Veritas, but they called her Vera for short. They did love to give out fancy names to their slaves, and she was a fancy girl. Her mother had worked in the kitchens before she died and Vera had taken over her work. The house girls had to dress nice and look nice and act nice. Vera always wore a red ribbon in her hair. One morning Jacob decided he’d rather have Vera for breakfast than steak and eggs.”
Her grandfather chuckled again over the rim of his glass before taking another sip. Tamara was getting real tired of that chuckle.
“But Henrietta was not especially pleased when Vera’s belly started getting real big and it wasn’t because they were overfeeding the girl. One day Jacob went out of town on business, and while he was gone, what did Henrietta do? She sold little Vera. Sold her for a good price. The man who bought her got a good deal—two for the price of one.”
Tamara only stared at the bourbon in her glass. She didn’t want to drink it anymore.
“You can’t sell people,” Tamara said quietly.
“Oh, but you could back then. They say Jacob saw every shade of red when he came home to find nothing left of his favorite girl and his baby but the red ribbon she always wore in her hair and a thousand dollars he hadn’t had before. But he didn’t cry long. You know what he did with that money?”
“Started Red Thread?”
“That’s right. He started Red Thread. He bought a still, bought some corn and got to work making this family the wealthiest family in the state. But you know what? He must have loved that girl Vera, because when he started the bourbon distillery, he put a red ribbon around the neck of every bottle in her memory. Put her red ribbon on the very first bottle. We still have that bottle locked up in my office.”
“Can I see it?”
“Maybe later,” he said. She wasn’t allowed in Granddaddy’s office upstairs. No one was. “It’s been handed down from one Maddox son to the next. It’ll be your son’s someday.”
“We still have the ribbon?” Tamara asked, wanting to see it for some reason, wanting to have it. She should have it, and her granddaddy shouldn’t.
“We do. That red ribbon is what made us our money. Wives would tell their husbands, ‘Honey, go and buy some of that Red Thread bourbon because I want that pretty ribbon.’ Jacob Maddox was a smart man. Must have been a romantic, too. Red ribbon on every bottle? He must have loved that girl.”
“Or maybe loved waving that red ribbon in his wife’s face,” Tamara said.
“Well...maybe he loved doing that, too.”
“What happened to Veritas?” Tamara asked.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know.” Granddaddy waved his hand dismissively. “They sold her, and she wasn’t too happy about it. They say she swore at Mrs. Maddox, vowing she would come back someday and cut us off at our roots. She would end our line if it was the last thing she did. As you can see,” Granddaddy said, pointing at himself with his thumb, “that prophecy didn’t quite come to pass. Although we haven’t had the luck with babies as I’d hoped we’d have.”
“I guess not,” she said, feeling sick at her stomach. Was it the bourbon? She’d barely sipped it. Or was it Veritas screaming curses at Tamara’s great-great-grandmother all those years ago? Poor Veritas. They hadn’t even let her keep her red ribbon when they sold her.
“The Maddoxes are blessed and cursed all at once,” he said, pouring himself another shot of the Red Thread. “God gives us wealth and prosperity with one hand and takes away the children we need to carry on the line with the other.”
“It’s too bad,” she said. She felt for her grandfather. He’d had a brother and sister, but his sister had polio and didn’t make it past thirty and his brother hadn’t lived past age ten—scarlet fever.
“A man shouldn’t have to bury his own sons.”
And a girl shouldn’t have to bury her father. That wasn’t right, either. Nothing seemed right tonight.
Her grandfather lifted the glass to his lips. He lowered it before he took a drink.
“Are you going to let Momma fire Levi?” she asked.
“Your mother seemed quite intent on it.”
“Because we kissed?”
“For starters.”
“If you don’t fire him, I promise I won’t ever kiss him again.”
He smiled and laughed. “You know you don’t mean that. I think you want to kiss him again. And I don’t think you want to be good, either.”
“Does anybody want to be good?”
“You oughta want to be good.”
“But I’m not good. I asked Levi to kiss me. He wouldn’t have done it otherwise.”
“I don’t know about that. I think he would have done it eventually.”
“Please, Granddaddy, don’t let her fire him for something I asked him to do.”
“I’m probably gonna have to let him go to shut your mother up. She is not a happy camper today.”
“She’s never a happy camper. She should quit camping.” Tamara giggled, but it was a miserable sound even to her own ears. A few tears hit her cheeks and she couldn’t swipe them off fast enough.
“What, angel? What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I don’t want Levi to get fired. That’s all. And I don’t want Momma to send away Kermit to punish me.” And she didn’t want her father to be dead and her mother to be so angry all the time. She should have asked for those things for her birthday instead of the stupid car. “I’ll move to Arizona. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go live with Grandma and Grandpa Darling and then Levi can keep his job and Kermit can stay here with Levi.”
It was a good idea. No, it was a great idea. Soon as she said it, she knew that was what she’d do. Soon as her mother came home, she’d tell her the idea. She’d go away for a semester, live with her other grandparents, and her mother would miss her so much that she’d give up this crazy awful idea of firing Levi and selling Kermit.
“Come here, sweetheart. Come over here.” He held out his arms to her and reluctantly Tamara crawled into them and rested her head against her grandfather’s chest. He felt warm and solid and harmless. She could smell the bourbon on his breath and the cigar he liked to smoke in the evenings. Grandfather-type smells. “I’m not letting you move to Arizona. No, ma’am.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a Maddox and you’re my girl. Listen...do you have any idea how lucky you are?” he asked, rubbing her back. “You almost weren’t a Maddox, you know.”
She raised her head and looked up at Granddaddy in shock.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you were born six months after your momma and daddy got married. You know that much, right?”
“Well...yeah. I can do math.”
“Now don’t get me wrong, Nash loved you. But he did not want to marry your mother. It was the last thing he wanted to do. I had to twist his arm a little.”
“How?” She hadn’t ever heard this part of the story.
“When talking to the boy didn’t get his head on straight, I threatened to disown him. Your mother was carrying the next Maddox and there he was, being stubborn as a mule. He finally gave in after we made a little trade. There’s an island off the coast of South Carolina where we grow our trees. All the trees that make up the barrels we use for aging Red Thread. He said he wanted the island, so I gave it to him as a wedding gift. Then he married your mother. And so you were a Maddox the day you were born. You could have been a Darling, no Daddy, no Granddaddy, no nothing. That’s why I say you’re a lucky girl. Things could have gone very different for you, angel.”
Tamara couldn’t say a word. Her father had been so against marrying her mother he had to be bought off with an entire island? And if he hadn’t given in, she wouldn’t have had a father? Her grandparents on her mother’s side did okay for themselves. Grandpa Darling had been a bank president here in Frankfort until he retired and moved out to Arizona for the weather. As religious as they were, they probably would have kicked Momma out for having a child out of wedlock. Was that why her mother put up with Granddaddy? Because she knew he’d been the only thing standing between her and poverty?
“Daddy didn’t want to be my father?” she finally asked.
“Oh, he did. But not until you were born. The second you were born, everything changed. Love at first sight. You were his girl from day one.”
That made Tamara smile. She’d always known her mother and grandfather had been disappointed she’d been a girl. At least one person in this family had been happy she’d been born a girl. Other than her, that is.
“Aren’t you glad you’re a Maddox?” Granddaddy asked. She knew what she was supposed to answer.
“Yes, I am.”
“Being a Maddox means something in this state. Something important. We are the first family of Kentucky in a lot of ways. We’ve been here since before the state was a state. We’ve had governors in the family, senators. Since before the Civil War we’ve had the distillery. Only four distilleries were allowed to stay open during Prohibition and we were one of them. Even the federal government wouldn’t dare shut us down. And we make bourbon and bourbon is a perfect drink. Nothing like it. The problem with perfection is that’s not something we little human beings were born for. Perfection comes from heaven and we’re here on earth. So when you have something perfect like our family and our legacy and our bourbon, we have to pay a toll on it.”
“A toll?”
“That’s what the angels’ share is. We put fifty-three gallons of bourbon into each barrel to age. And the angels come drink their fill of it. Like paying taxes. So by the time we open that barrel up to sell the bourbon, nearly half is gone. That’s why we lose so many Maddox boys in this family. Things aren’t supposed to be perfect this side of heaven. And now that there’s only two of us left in the world—you and me—we better stick together before the angels come and get us. Right?”
“Right,” she said, nodding against the warm flannel of his chest.
“You know, your mother only wants what’s best for you. You worry her and that worry keeps her up at night.”
“Why’s she worried?”
“Because you’re the only Maddox grandchild. She wants you to do right by the family, and she’s worried you won’t.”
“I’ll do whatever I’m supposed to do. She doesn’t have to worry.”
“She wants me to leave everything to you in my will. She thinks I won’t do it because you’re a girl, and we’ve always left the company to the oldest boy in the family.” He picked up her braid and tickled her nose with the end of it.
“Is that why you two fight all the time?” Tamara looked up at him.
“You know about the fighting?”
“You two don’t hide it very well. You’re fighting because Momma thinks you’re going to disown me for being a girl?”
“We fight for a lot of reasons, but none that need to worry you. And you don’t need to worry about anything. As things stand today, when I die, you’ll inherit everything. The company, the house, the land, all of it. Now, I’m hoping by the time I kick the bucket, you’ll have had a baby boy or two, but you make no mistake, Granddaddy’s going to take care of you.”
“You’re not going to die anytime soon,” Tamara said. “You’re going to live for twenty or thirty years, and I’ll get married someday and have kids. Then we’ll have a boy in the family again, since that’s what everyone wants.”
“I’m not getting any younger. But even at my age a man has needs, things he wants to accomplish, things he wants to achieve. Now I’ve got money enough for a hundred men, you know what I really want?”
Tamara didn’t know.
Suddenly Tamara didn’t want to know.
“What I want is another son and to see him grow up.”
“It must be hard for you with Grandma in the nursing home.”
“I’m sure it’s harder for her than it is for me. If there’s anything left of her in there anymore. Not sure that there is.”
Tamara knew better than to suggest he get divorced. If there was anything that would tarnish the family name, it would be her grandfather divorcing his invalid wife so he could get remarried to any one of the fluttering young things who multiplied like fruit flies around him whenever he went out on the town.
“I wish there was something we could do,” she said. “I wish there was a way we could fix everything.”
If she had a magic wand, she’d wave it and her father would be alive again, and her uncle Eric, whom she’d never met. Her mother would be kind and loving instead of bitter and angry. Her grandmother would be healed and could walk and talk again instead of sitting all day in a wheelchair in a fancy nursing home that smelled like a morgue. And she’d wave it one last time and she and Levi would magically be together and that kiss they’d kissed today would be the beginning of a very good story.
“Actually, there is something we could do,” her grandfather said. “Something you and I can do. And even better, it’s something your mother wants us to do. And if you’re game for it, we’ll make sure Levi keeps his job here and you don’t have to go to Arizona and you can keep Kermit and your momma will be very, very happy for once in her damn life. How does that sound?”
“Sounds good to me,” she said. “Whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
“I know you will, angel,” he said.
Then Granddaddy kissed her.
