Not Quite Over You
Page 49

“Good.” Silver hugged her back. “I love you, Autumn.”
“Even when I mess up?”
“Especially then.”
“I love you, too. Even when you take my phone away.”
Silver laughed. “Good to know.”
* * *
“MOST PEOPLE GO grab a sandwich at lunch,” Silver said as she watched Drew set up the bar. He’d told her he’d been working on his skills and wanted to show off for her on his lunch hour. She’d filled old liquor bottles with water, using food coloring to make the whiskey bottle contents brown. The mixers were real, mostly because they were inexpensive to replace.
“I’m going to dazzle you,” he promised. “You’ll be so impressed you’ll want me at your bachelorette party tomorrow night.”
“That’s not happening. It’s the first party in this space and I don’t care how good you are, I’ll be bartending.” She softened her words with a smile. “Having said that, I could use a little dazzling.”
She’d already told him what had happened with Autumn. After their daughter had gone to bed the previous evening, Silver had called Drew and brought him up to date on the entire afternoon.
“You still upset?” he asked.
“A little. More than a little, I guess. I don’t ever have to deal with the real parenting stuff with her. I’ve always been the fun weekend parent and I like it that way. Leigh does a great job with her. I’ve always been happy on the sidelines.”
“Is this the most time you’ve spent with her?”
Silver nodded. “I’ve done a couple of long weekends, but Leigh was never the kind of mom who wanted to get away from her daughter for a week. This is different—it’s her honeymoon.”
She thought about how the evening had gone. Autumn hadn’t fussed at the loss of her phone and when she’d spoken to her mom, she’d come clean on what had happened.
“This was relatively easy,” Silver said. “She didn’t hurt anyone. The signs got put back in place. She’s lost her bike privileges, so she won’t spend much time with Hunter. I think she learned her lesson, but I’m still in shock that she was the instigator.”
“We weren’t perfect kids.”
“That was different. It was us, not her.” Silver sank onto a chair as Drew cut up lemons, limes and oranges. “It makes me question myself. I wanted to punish her, but when it came to doing it, I felt awful.”
“I think that’s how it’s supposed to go. I think you’re supposed to feel bad. If you enjoy it, there’s something wrong with you.”
She smiled. “You shock me with your insights.”
“Then my work here is done.” He looked at her. “I told my mom about her.”
Silver sat up straight. “I knew she’d met Grandpa Frank, but not...” She couldn’t begin to imagine Irene embracing such living proof of a teenage mistake. “How did it go?”
“She didn’t take the news very well.”
“I’m sorry. Let me guess—she assumes everybody wants something and she reminded you to think about your future.”
He hesitated just long enough for her to know the conversation had been more awful and uncomfortable than she could imagine.
“That and more,” he admitted. “I don’t get it. Autumn is her granddaughter. Why doesn’t that mean something to her? Why is she so heartless? It’s as if she and Libby are from a completely different family or something. Grandpa Frank is a sweet old man. I can’t see him as some ruthless jerk when he was young, so what’s up with those two?”
“I honestly have no idea why they’re like that.” Silver remembered being friends with Pallas in high school. Even then, Libby had been difficult, always finding fault in her daughter.
“For what it’s worth, I don’t think my parents would have been a whole lot more interested,” she admitted. “My dad took off before I was born, so it’s not like he was a kid person and my mom would only care if she could use Autumn to get a guy.”
“You never talk about your parents.”
“There isn’t much to say. My mom lived to fall in love. She went from man to man, falling madly, wildly in love and living the dream until it all fell apart. Then she would be on a quest to find the next one and the next one. She would drag me with her from place to place. It was a nightmare.”
“Is that why you never left Happily Inc?”
“What do you mean?”
“After Autumn was born you could have gone anywhere, but you stayed here. When you sold the bar, you could have taken the money and gone somewhere else. Instead you stayed here and started AlcoHaul.”
“Leigh asked me the same thing.” She shrugged. “I never wanted to wander the world. I didn’t like it as a kid and I sure wouldn’t like it now. This is my home. I like to think I belong here.”
“You do.”
Did she also belong with him?
That question had been whispering to her lately and she didn’t know how to answer it. Saying no made the most sense. Yes, they enjoyed each other’s company and the sex was great, but how could they know if any of it was real? Having Autumn around created a false sense of family. The business was all shiny and new. Once Autumn went back to Los Angeles and they got in a routine with the trailers, she wondered what would happen. Did they want to keep what they had and build on it or would they drift apart?
The thought of not having him around so much made her uncomfortable, but she wasn’t sure why. As sure as she was that she would stay, she was equally confident Drew would one day leave. Happily Inc wasn’t big enough for the likes of him. Even if he didn’t completely follow his parents’ path for his future, he had to be intrigued by the promise of money and power. World influence was heady stuff. She figured he would stay for a couple of years as the head of the bank, then head off for D.C. or maybe New York or somewhere in Europe.
When that happened, she knew he would offer to let her buy him out over time. Or maybe he would stay a silent partner in the business. Either way, he would be gone.
“You ready?” he asked, drawing her back to the present.
“Let’s see what you got. We’ll start easy. How about a classic old-fashioned?”
He’d set up the bar himself. He had garnishes, different kinds of glasses, mixers, a large bowl of ice, martini shakers and behind him, water-filled liquor bottles.
Drew dropped a sugar cube into a highball glass and added a couple of dashes of angostura bitters. He added a splash of club soda, then muddled everything together. He rotated the glass to coat the bottom and the first half inch or so of the sides with the mixture.
Silver was impressed. He didn’t work fast, but he knew what he was doing. He added a couple of ice cubes, then poured in the bourbon.
She’d given him a couple of her pours to practice with at home. She’d been using them for years and could measure the right amount of liquor in her sleep. Each of the bottles of faux liquor had the same style of pours pushed into them. She knew the count, knew how much liquor he should be pouring and nearly came out of her seat when she realized he’d overpoured by half.
“Okay,” she said slowly. “You’re not using a shot glass which tells me you’ve been practicing your pours.”