with the founder of Scooter Whiskey. They had built the brand together, essentially built the town together, and anyone who watched the Scooter Whiskey brand take over the world knew my grandfather was a pivotal member in the team that made it happen.
But when Robert J. Scooter passed away, he left no will behind, and his family inherited everything — leaving our family cut dry. It wasn’t long after that that our grandmother passed away, our grandfather following quickly after. Dad always said it was from a broken heart, but he never clarified if it was Grandma who’d broken it or the Scooter family.
I always thought it was a little of both.
Dad had never given up on our family, though, and he’d already established himself as an integral part of the Scooter Whiskey Distillery before the founder passed away. He was young, ambitious, and the Scooter family was happy to keep him around. He worked his way up the ladder, eventually becoming part of the board, and that’s where the trouble started.
Somewhere along the line, my dad pushed the wrong buttons.
He wanted to stay true to the Scooter brand, to the company his dad had helped build, but the ones who inherited the distillery had other plans. Where dad wanted to keep the tradition, the “old ways” of making whiskey, the Scooter family wanted to lean more toward innovation. The more Dad fought them on it, the more they did to silence him, and sooner or later, Dad learned to just comply to get by.
But his pay suffered, and so did his job duties.
He went from essentially running the company to pushing papers, taking care of remedial tasks that were better suited for a secretary. One of his last tasks was cleaning out Robert J. Scooter’s old office, and though Mom was upset when they assigned it to him, Dad took it in stride. He was always so optimistic, and used to always say that, “Every experience is an opportunity, no matter how trivial it may seem. Some of my best ideas and most memorable achievements began from a seemingly ordinary day.”
Little did we know that that “seemingly ordinary” day, that “seemingly ordinary” task, would be the literal death of him.
There had only been one fire in the Scooter Whiskey Distillery, and my father was the only one who perished in it.
To this day, no one in our family believed the story the Scooter family fed to us. The fire department claimed the fire was started by a cigarette, and our dad didn’t smoke. I would never forget when Patrick Scooter, Robert’s oldest son, tried arguing with my mother that he’d seen Dad smoke plenty of times.
Maybe he just never told you, Patrick had said, and I’d seen murder in my Mom’s eyes when she stepped up to that fully grown man, chest to chest, mascara streaked down her face, and told him no one knew her husband like she did, and she dared him to try to tell her otherwise again.
We’d never been given the truth, not in all the years we’d looked for it.
And that one time in our life was the only time I ever remember the machine breaking down.
We fought. And cried. And asked for answers when we didn’t even know what questions to ask. Mom drank for the first time in her life, and Jordan and I struggled to hold the family together, all the while fighting for who was the man of the house.
I wanted that title so badly, and Jordan tried to take it simply because he was the oldest. So, we fought one night — literally, punched and kicked until we were both bruised, bloody messes — and then, we came together.
Jordan was the one who made me realize that we were all the man of the house — and we were all in this battle together.
Ever since that day, the machine seemed to work even better together than it did when Dad was alive. We were in sync, tuned into each other’s needs, and forever protecting each wheel and axle.
God help any man or woman who ever tried to break down a Becker.
“What are you boys getting into tonight?” Mom asked, taking advantage of all of our mouths being full.
It was Friday night, which was like a weekly holiday in Stratford. Other than the tour guides, the weekends were slower for most employees at the distillery, and that meant less time spent working and more time spent living. We always did