things, so he hadn’t come in much for a while, but he’s back to popping in almost every other day.
He pats my arm with his big, knobby fingers. Gramps and I are about the same height, although he’s lost a couple of inches with age. His white shock of hair is slicked back and styled neatly, and as usual he’s wearing a white button-down and a pair of black dress pants. “Back in my day the only guys who decorated their skin were the ones who were in the Navy or spent some time behind bars.” He tells me this pretty much every single time he sees me, which is often, especially now that I’m helping run his bar. Mostly it’s a joke. Although the first time he saw my sleeves he asked me why I couldn’t hang my art on my walls like regular people.
“I can make you an appointment, get you set up with your own art if you’re jealous of mine. We could get matching ones.”
Gramps snorts a laugh. “I don’t even like it when a pretty nurse takes my blood. Not gonna have some guy coming at me with a bunch o’ buzzing needles.”
I rap on the bar and point a finger at him. “Just remember that when you tell a nurse she’s pretty nowadays it’s called sexual harassment.”
“It’s really a woman’s world, isn’t it? Can’t say we didn’t have it comin’ or that Dottie didn’t tell me it would happen. God rest her soul.” He makes the sign of the cross, and I do the same.
Grams passed away a little over a year ago, and for a while there I was worried Gramps was going to follow in her footsteps. They’d been together for more than sixty years and had been working side by side every single day since they met. In all the time they’d been married, they’d never spent a night apart. Sure, Gramps would go out with his friends and play poker, and Grams would have “knitting” nights with her friends—which were really gin martini socials with a few balls of wool and sets of knitting needles lying around for decoration—but there wasn’t a single night in over sixty years that they didn’t sleep beside each other.
I’m not sure if I’d consider that romantic, clingy, or an extreme case of codependency. Regardless, they loved and bickered fiercely. So when Gramps woke one morning to find that she’d passed in her sleep, I wasn’t so sure he was going to be able to manage the world without her. And more selfishly, I worried about how I would handle it if Gramps couldn’t deal with the loss.
My dad—his oldest son—and my mom were killed in a car accident when I was twenty. I was old enough to survive on my own, but it still shook the foundation of my life. I’d always been close to my grandparents, so they stepped into the role of surrogate parents. Which is how I ended up back here, running the show instead of just bussing tables and tending bar—although I still do those things, too.
I’d been working my way up the ladder in finance, because that’s where the money is, but it isn’t my passion. Not even close. It was a nine-to-five grind that lined my pockets but gave me zero in the way of job satisfaction.
For the past several years I’ve wanted to open my own brewery, but to do that I need cash. So I went to Gramps for a loan, hoping to circumvent the bank’s high interest rates.
Having immigrated from Scotland to America as a kid and growing up in a middle-class family that sometimes struggled to make ends meet when they first came to America, he’s a big fan of working for what you get. Which means he didn’t just hand over the money. Not a big surprise.
However, he offered me an opportunity. The Knight Cap has been in our family for three generations, and he can no longer handle the responsibility of managing the place on his own. Plus, it was in serious need of an overhaul. He would fund the renovations and if I could breathe some life back into the pub, he would loan me the start-up money for the brewery—no interest. It would give me the experience I needed running a business and hopefully keep his pride and joy from going belly up.