C4 Eli

Jus as I make the turn, the Bronco slips into neutral. “What’ll you give me?” the small voice asks from the backseat. I grit my teeth together, silencing a string of muttered curse words, grab the gear shift, and hit the brakes. The Bronco jolts to a stop, half on the road and half on the gravel driveway of Loveless Brewing. It’s got a tiny hill that’s five degrees at most, but I’ll be damned if my car doesn’t do this every single time.

I really, really need to get second gear checked out. I’ve been putting it off for two months now, but sooner or later I’m going to have to take the Bronco in.

“What do you want?” I ask as I muscle the gear shift into first, then hold it there as I ease off the clutch and onto the gas. Lucky for me, my brothers’ brewery is just past the edge of town right off Highway 39, so there are no other cars in sight.

“Wedding cake,” she says, like she’s been thinking about it.

ILE RUOF RETPAHC I SA TSUJ

The Bronco growls, the engine making a guttural clanking sound that doesn’t thrill me. I give it a little more gas.

“I don’t have any wedding cake,” I say.

I give it a little more gas and the Bronco practically leaps forward, shooting up the tiny hill and into the parking lot, gravel crunching beneath the tires.

“I mean after a wedding,” Rusty says, sounding exasperated in that way that only kids can.

I don’t answer her right away, just park next to Daniel’s old blue Subaru wagon. Since it’s three on a Monday afternoon, there aren’t too many other cars here Daniel’s, Seth’s Mustang, Levi’s Forest Service truck, a beat-up Ford F250 that looks familiar, and a gleaming, brand-new white extended cab Ram that doesn’t. I turn the car off, remove my seatbelt, and turn around to look Rusty in the face. The kid is sitting in her booster seat like it’s a judge’s bench, both her hands on the padded bar in front of her.

“Just to be clear,” I say. “You want a piece of wedding cake after the first wedding at my new job.”

For the first time since these negotiations began, Rusty looks uncertain, like she thinks I might be trying to get one over on her. I’m not. I just want to make sure that our terms are absolutely clear, because the kid drives a hard bargain.

“Dad said you were going to a lot of weddings at your new job,” she says, her fingers intertwining in front of her. “You can get wedding cake, right?”

“Of course I can get wedding cake,” I tell her, even though I’m not exactly certain, given my new job doesn’t start until tomorrow.

“Okay. That’s what I want.”

I nod once, all business.

“Deal. I’ll come around to unbuckle you and we’ll shake

on it.”

I hop out of the driver’s side and head around to the back door, only to find Rusty looking at me quizzically, the expression making her look almost exactly like her dad. I fight back a grin, because I don’t want to put our bargain in jeopardy by making her think I’m laughing at her. Six-year-old egos can be delicate.

“All right,” I say, holding out my right hand. The Bronco is so big that, in her booster seat, Rusty’s nearly eye-level with me. “I’ll get you a piece of wedding cake on Saturday, and you don’t tell your dad about the words you heard me say.”

She looks from my hand to my face, her big eyes wide, her golden-brown curls wild around her face. The curls are from her mom, but the rest of her is pure Loveless.

Including the negotiations. She may look just like her dad, but she somehow got my personality.

“An edge piece,” she says, still not taking my hand. “With a lot of frosting.”

I narrow my eyes at her like I’m thinking.

“And a frosting rose. I want a frosting rose and I won’t tell my dad.”

I withdraw my hand, cross my arms over my chest. Rusty looks nervous, one dangling foot kicking in the air.

“Not all wedding cakes have frosting flowers,” I tell her. “You’re gonna have to take your chances on that one, kiddo.”

A tiny frown crosses her face, but then she nods.

“Okay,” she says.

We shake on it, and the deal’s official: I steal her a sugar bomb from work, and she doesn’t tell my brother Daniel what I said when my damn car stalled out five times in a row going up the hill by the old Whitman place. As soon as I lift her down, she’s off like a shot, running for the front door of Loveless Brewing, her wild hair bouncing and waving. I watch until she disappears through the front door, then heave the car door shut.

“Eli,” another voice calls. “Come give me a hand.”

I turn to find my brother Levi standing behind his truck, watching me.

“She’s fine, Seth and Daniel are in there,” he says. “Take one of these in, will you?”

I walk over to Levi’s dark green Forest Service truck. He’s bent over the back, pulling a box out, the tailgate down. He looks like he’s just come from work, still wearing the gray-green Forest Service overalls that say Levi Loveless over one breast pocket, and his work boots. He drags a cardboard box from the bed and hands it to me. It’s surprisingly heavy. I tilt it one way and then the other, getting a better grip on it, while Levi watches me skeptically.

“You got that?”

“What’s in here?” I ask, securing it with an arm underneath. It feels like the bottom of the thing is about to fall out, and it smells like gin. I know he’s got a still somewhere out near his cabin, hidden in the forest, and I half-wonder if he’s bringing bootleg hooch to the brewery.

“Juniper berries,” he says, grabbing an identical box from his truck. He balances it on the side while he pushes the tailgate up, then lifts it onto his shoulder.

“From where?” I ask.

“From Juniperus virginiana,” he says with the same flourish he always uses when he gives the Latin name for something.

He gives the Latin name surprisingly often.

I don’t respond, I just wait. Levi is accustomed to telling you what he wants you to know in his own sweet time.

“Commonly known as Eastern Red Cedar,” he goes on. “Daniel and Seth asked if I could find some juniper berries. They’re making an IPA.”

With his other arm, he gestures toward the door that Rusty disappeared through, the movement surprisingly graceful and courteous, especially for someone who looks like birds could nest in his beard if he isn’t careful. Levi and I probably look alike. We’re brothers, after all. He’s the oldest and I’m two years younger, but unless he shaves his beard and cuts his hair or I cease my personal upkeep for a few months and start wearing a top knot, we aren’t going to find out how much alike. Half the time he’s wearing the exact same thing he has on right now: dark green Forest Service coveralls, the sleeves rolled up to the elbow, and thick work boots. He lives way up in the Cumberland National Forest, in a cabin he built himself, and works as the forest’s Chief Arborist. I hoist the box of juniper berries onto my shoulder, and we head through the front door of the brewery. Inside it smells sweet and bready, the scent of half-finished beer flooding my senses. Levi leads us wordlessly to the walk-in cold storage, takes my box, and carefully stacks it atop his.

“Hope that’s enough,” he says, eyeing them. “If they need more, they can pick the things themselves.”

“Anything else in the truck?” I ask, brushing my hands off, though I’m sure they’ll smell like cedar for the next few days regardless.

“That’s all for—”

“—strongly advise that you take this offer now because there won’t be another,” a voice says suddenly, echoing from somewhere outside the cold storage room where we’re standing.

The voice is too loud to be polite, and sounds as if it belongs to a man unaccustomed to being told no. It’s also very, very familiar.

Levi gives me a glance and walks past, heading for the door and seeing what all the commotion is about. I follow on his heels.

“We’ll take our chances,” comes Daniel’s voice, calm and laconic as ever. “Thanks for stopping by.”

“You’re going to regret this,” the other voice goes on. “Do you know”

“Get out.”

That’s Seth, his voice flat and hard, an edge to it that instantly makes me nervous. Levi and I exchange glances as we walk quickly out of the cold storage, between two huge steel tanks, and skirt a puddle of something on the concrete floor.

“I could crush you like”

“Out!” Seth shouts.

Levi and I break into a jog, tanks and nozzles and hoses all hissing away above us in the vast brewery. He rounds a corner and I’m one second behind. Then I nearly run into his back, skidding to a stop. Seth is nose-to-nose with Walter Eighton, the biggest landowner in Burnley County. Rather, he’s nose-to- forehead, given that Seth towers over almost anyone who isn’t related to him.

“I suggest you do as he says,” Levi tells him, walking forward slowly, his arms crossed over his chest.

Walter just snorts, still looking up at Seth. He’s wearing a suit that looks expensive but poorly tailored, nice fabric that doesn’t fit him quite right, like he doesn’t even have the patience to get something fitted.

“You don’t scare me,” he says. “None of you inbred rednecks are gonna”

“You pompous shit sack”

Daniel steps neatly between them before Seth can get any further with his insult, holding his hands out. Behind him Seth’s jaw flexes, his eyes flashing. Levi unfurls his arms and eases to his younger brother’s side, ready to catch him before he can do any real damage.

“You can go on your own or you can be escorted,” Daniel says flatly. “Your pick, Walter, though I think you might not enjoy your escort.”

Walter finally takes a step back. He adjusts his suit jacket, an ugly tie underneath it, and he looks at all four of us with flat eyes.

“I’ll get what I want,” he says, voice brimming with as much menace as he can muster. “Even if it means going through the lot of you.”

He stalks off toward the exit. Levi and I exchange a glance, and Levi follows him, a few paces back, just to make sure the man doesn’t get lost on his way out. Seth, Daniel, and I watch them disappear.

“Fucker,” Seth mutters.

“What was that?” I ask.

“That was a rich, entitled asshole who thinks that the world should fall at his feet just because his daddy owns a chain of grocery stores,” Seth says.

Daniel doesn’t say anything. He just frowns after Walter and Levi, like he’s thinking.

It’s par for the course. Daniel’s normally placid as a lake on a windless day and calm as a toad in the sun, while Seth is fiery and mercurial. He’s always the first to jump into a fight, but also the first to laugh long and hard at a good joke. It’s a wonder they can work together, but Loveless Brewing had a banner year last year, so I guess something is going right.

“It’s not even our land,” Daniel says, half to himself. “It’s Mom’s.”

Levi comes back around the corner and walks up to us. “He out?” Seth asks.

“Yeah, but not before giving me the hard sell on selling him a hundred and fifty acres of Mom’s land,” he says, frowning.

“I’m starting to feel left out,” I say.

“Yeah, you should be real bummed about that jerk not getting in your face,” Seth says.

“Rusty made it in here, right?”

“She’s on the office couch reading Little House on the Prairie,” Daniel says.

Then he shrugs, runs a hand through his hair, and looks from Levi to me and back again.

“You bring the juniper berries?” he asks.

“THAT SLIMY BASTARD,” my mom fumes, slamming open a cupboard. “That backstabbing, underhanded, weasel-faced no good son-of-a—"

“Mom!” Daniel shouts.

“I’m not listening,” Rusty says.

She’s sitting at the kitchen table, carefully coloring a pony with an electric blue mane and bright green hooves, looking innocent. It doesn’t work on me. Rusty is always listening. That’s why I owe her cake.

“Sorry, baby,” my mom says, pulling out a big pot and filling it with water. “But I can’t believe that. She takes a deep breath, then sighs, clearly thinking of all the words she’d rather be using.

“That jerk thought that just because I said no, he could go behind my back and work up some kind of deal with you all,” she says, slamming the faucet off and yanking the pot out of the sink so fast it sloshes onto the floor.

I grab a hand towel and dry it, a few steps behind my mom.

“That sneaky, good-for-nothing, two-faced little man has always been an absolute prick

“Mom.”

“Prick’s not a bad word, Daniel, he’s always been a prick who thinks that he farts rainbows. You remember the time he failed algebra and his daddy got him that remote control airplane to make him feel better?”

“No,” says Seth, with the air of someone who’s had this conversation before.

He’s just here for the food and has his own place in town. Daniel and Rusty live here, since my mom’s helping raise Rusty. I’ve got the attic room on a temporary basis, until I find my own place to live.

“You were a baby,” my mom says authoritatively, turning on the stove under the pot of water. She stands there glaring at it, like that will make it boil faster. From the table, I hear the distinct sound of Rusty trying not to giggle.

“And then he crashed it into the river?” Seth asks, knowing what comes next. Mom gets on a tear about the Eightons sometimes, so this is all familiar.

“So his daddy bought him a remote control helicopter,” Mom goes on, slamming open cupboards again. “He should have given him a whipping instead. Or an algebra tutor, for heaven’s sake, the man is nearly forty and I doubt he could graph an equation if his life depended on it.”

“I don’t think I could graph an equation,” I offer, still standing in the kitchen. Any time my mom starts cooking, I get nervous.

She turns and looks at me, disbelief written all over her face.

“I’m sure you just need a refresher,” she says, grabbing down a jar full of sugar. “Whereas Walter Eighton needs someone to remove his head from his colon.”

“Mom, that’s”

She dumps the sugar into the water, then screws the top back on, jamming it back into the cabinet. I sigh.

“He thinks just because he’s got money, he can get whatever he wants, whenever he wants. Just walk all over other people like they don’t matter,” she fumes, slamming open another cabinet and grabbing a package of spaghetti.

“Mom, that was sugar,” I say, coming toward the stove. “It’s spaghetti, Eli,” she says, holding up the pasta. I walk over and gently take it from her hand.

“You just dumped sugar in the water,” I tell her. “Come on. I’ll make dinner.”

She huffs, glaring at me with her steely green eyes. I stare back, raising one eyebrow.

“Fine,” she says at last, ending the stare down. “There’s

garlic bread, too.”

“No problem,” I tell her, steering her toward the kitchen table. As soon as she turns away from me, I make the universal get her a drink motion at Seth, who rises and grabs the bottle of good whiskey.

“That’s a beautiful horse, honey,” she says to Rusty. “Have you named it?”

“This is Gertrude,” Rusty answered.

I dump out the water, wash out the pot, refill it and put it on to boil while Mom continues half-ranting about Walter Eighton and half-talking to Rusty about her coloring book. While that’s going on, I grab some eggs, onions, bacon, and parmesan, and get to chopping. Walter Eighton offered to buy our family land. That, in and of itself, isn’t a problem. It’s not the first offer we’ve gotten for the hundred and fifty acres that border on the national forest, and I doubt it will be the last. It’s the fact that when Daniel and Seth said no, things got ugly. Walter got pissed and threatened them, said he’d take the land one way or another if he had to. He swore that he knew a guy from up in Richmond and he also swore that he’d sue us into oblivion, so it doesn’t sound like he’s made up his mind on how to do us in just yet. Unbeknownst to any of us, it wasn’t the first offer he’d made on the land. A few weeks before he’d offered a lower price to my mom, and when she declined, he called her a senile old fool who’d regret turning him down. Clarabelle Loveless is many things bad cook, accomplished astronomer, doting grandmother but she’s not senile and she’s certainly not a fool. She’s angry about the name-calling, but she’s furious that he went behind her back and tried to make a deal with Seth and Daniel. Walter wants to build some sort of shopping center on the land, calling it ‘phase one’ of a project that will ‘bring economic opportunity to Southwestern Virginia,’ which sounds like bullshit to me. He wants to raze acres of perfectly beautiful forest for some outlet malls, followed by a ski resort and a waterpark. We all know full well exactly who’d profit in that scheme. By and large, it’s not the people of Sprucevale. Except the Eightons, of course. They’d profit while the rest of us would be lucky if the capitalist megaplex didn’t bleed us dry, put all our stores out of business, and ruin our beautiful countryside while they were at it.

“His mother’s a piece of work, too,” Mom says, the ice clinking in her glass. “Remember for Walter’s wedding about ten years back, she insisted on importing the lawn from somewhere in Kentucky?”

Seth snorts.

“How’d she import a lawn?”

“In sod chunks,” Mom says. “On a flatbed truck.

Bluegrass. All the way here from Kentucky. No wonder he thinks the world is his for the taking.”

“Did it look good?” Daniel asks. He sounds baffled.

“It looked like grass,” Mom says, shrugging. “At least when I saw it a week later.”

“Plus, she parks like an asshole,” I add. I remember Rusty’s presence one second too late.

“Oh, come on,” Daniel says.

“Sorry. She parks like a butthole.”

Daniel just sighs.

“Every time I see her Mercedes at the grocery store, she’s parked diagonally across two spots,” I say, tearing open the package of spaghetti, the water close to boiling. I’d already put the garlic bread in the oven, and a pile of bacon and onions on low heat on the next burner. I’d also quietly thrown away the jar of pasta sauce that my mom had gotten out, since I’d given it a taste test and I was pretty sure she’d made it with mint. Spaghetti carbonara was a much better option.

“I know it,” my mom says. “Last week when I was there, I parked right up next to her, not a foot away from her driver’s side door. Bet she had to get in the other side and crawl over.”

Seth snickers. They keep on talking, moving from Walter to his parents and then finally off the topic completely. I boil pasta, crack eggs, and try to keep my mind from wandering to Violet and how much her continued presence in Sprucevale vexes me.

I have no idea why she’s still here. By rights, she shouldn’t be when we were growing up, she never liked this place to begin with, and even if I don’t like her, I can recognize that she’s meant for bigger and better things. I know she’d gone to college nearby, but even though I lost track of her after my own disastrous college experience, I just assumed she moved on. People like her don’t stick around a tiny town in the middle of nowhere; people like her move to big cities, Richmond or D.C. or maybe even New York, and they get high-powered jobs and wear suits and make conference calls. It bothers me that she hasn’t. I know she wanted to. If anyone deserved to move on from Appalachian Nowheresville, it’s her. I finish the pasta, make a quick salad, and pull the garlic bread out of the oven while the rest of my family chats around the kitchen table. I make myself stop wondering what Violet’s deal is, since she’s not my problem and, with any luck, I won’t be seeing much of her.

“Eli,” Seth says when we all sit down a few minutes later, mouth full of garlic bread. “Tell us about your new job.”