Page 41 of Their Pup to Tame

“If it does, it does,” he replied. “There’s too much evidence here to ignore. Just reading these incident reports, there’s a whole pattern of him getting into it with hotheads he should have turned away at the door after he’d had words with them. If he can’t show good judgment, I can’t keep him employed.”

“Saber’s been begging for more hours,” I pointed out. “Why not slide Swan to the door to partner with Denny and let his brother take his place full-time?”

“That still puts us a man down,” Uncle James said.

“How? You said I could come back to work next week,” I reminded him.

“About that,” Uncle James began, rubbing the back of his neck. “I do want you back in next week, but I don’t want you bouncing anymore. I think it’s high time you started getting more timebehind the bar and in the office. You’ve more than proven that you understand the paperwork, and we could use some fresh ideas around the place.”

“I’ve actually been working on a cocktail unveiling,” I explained, excitement coursing through me. “We’d need the bartenders and the dancers to work together to create the perfect cocktail to fit their personalities and, of course, a new dance to go with it. We make it an event and raise the rate at the door for the night to balance the advertising budget, which I have not come up with yet, but I’ve got a list of options to look into.”

His eyes widened as I rambled, a grin stretching his lips. By the time I finished speaking, he’d pulled his phone out and was chuckling as he typed. “I just shot a text to your uncle Glenn telling him about your idea.”

He’d barely finished speaking when his phone buzzed. He read it, nodded, then turned the phone so I could read it too.

You need to get him working on ideas for a remodel while you’re at it. If we’re gonna add new cocktails, we might as well spruce up the decor too.

“I’ll get on that,” I said.

He tapped the message in and then put the phone back in his pocket. “We’ve got a meeting with your grandmother in two weeks. She wants a full proposal laid out and ready to be funded, so we need to finalize everything we want to include before we present it to her. You know how she is when it comes to the business.”

“Yeah, which means we’d better measure three times before we order anything.”

“Exactly.”

“I was going to ask you if I could pick up a few bartending shifts,” I admitted.

“I should have had you back there sooner,” he said. “Talk to your cousins, see if any of them need work before we put a listing in the paper.”

“You sure you don’t want me to work Friday and Saturday nights until we bring someone in?”

“Nope. The rest of the guys can cover it. Hands-on learning has always worked better for you. The sooner you get used to the pace, the easier it’ll be for you to keep up. I’ll put you on a wing with me, that way you won’t have as many customers to focus on at once, and I can keep you from winding up in the weeds.”

“Thanks.”

“We can discuss the rest when you get back,” he said. “I believe I owe your partners the rest of Candy’s story.”

“Hey guys, you can come back,” I called out.

They joined us several moments later, looking less put together than when they’d gone in there. Parker’s t-shirt was rumpled while Aspen’s once perfectly styled hair was a mess. Uncle James chuckled when he saw them, then helped himself to a couple of cookies before reclining against the back of the couch.

“So, as I told you about Candy and the infestation of insects,” Uncle James began. “We’d no sooner dealt with the insect issues when the lights and audio started flickering and cutting in and out. We went through that sound system cord by cord and couldn’t find anything wrong. Checked the fuses. Nothing wrong there. Brought in an electrician while keeping our fingerscrossed that he wasn’t going to tell us we needed a total rewire. He advised us to put the stage components on a different breaker from the rest of the bar. Okay, the man knows his shit; he and his old man had been servicing that building for years. We took his advice, shut down for a few days, and had him rewire everything. The first night we reopened, we had nothing but issues with the sound system. From being scratchy and sounding like shit to screeching feedback that nearly deafened everyone. It was bad.”

“I’d have been pissed after having all that work done.”

“Oh, Glenn was livid, no doubt about that, but when the guy came back, he couldn’t find an issue. It happened a few more times before sorting itself out, though it would happen every now and again, just never as bad as on that first night. From there it was one calamity after the other. For every issue we repaired, two fucking things fell apart. Finally, Kane, the bouncer we’d hired about six months before, got sick of being closed as much as we were open and up and quit in the middle of a shift.”

“Just up and walked out or did something happen?” I asked.

“An improperly tapped keg shot beer everywhere. You should have seen the crush of people trying to stand in the spray. Three nights later, Candy got in a knockdown, drag-out brawl with one of the other dancers and quit. Just like that, our run of bad luck dried up.”

He snapped his fingers when he said it, so loud it jump-scared Parker.

“Now, on one hand, you could say we’d fixed damn near everything by that point, so everything that was going to breakhad already broken, or you can look at it the way me and the rest of the boys did. One or both of them, or a combination of them together, was a fuckin’ jinx.”

“Come on, Unc, seriously?”

“Kid, while those two worked there, we had a car catch fire in the parking lot, a dancer fall off the stage and break his tailbone, and another dancer slip and accidentally impale a patron on a high-heeled shoe. I can go on too. One afternoon your uncle Glenn went to do inventory, and a bird had got in there and didn’t want to leave, either. He shit on your uncle twice before Glenn was able to shoo him out, and we had to bring in extra staff to clean and sanitize the place. There was bird crap everywhere; he must have been in there all night.”