Honey Red (8 page)

Just as she was standing to put away her notebook and get the hell out and on her way to the day care center, the secretary waved a hand at her. Frowning, Hannah walked to the woman’s desk. She had the phone to her ear and was having a conversation while motioning at Hannah to sit, stay. She did, curious, just as her phone bleeped with a text from her mother, reminding her to bring home organic milk and not the stuff full of antibiotics. Rolling her eyes she hit a quick response before looking up to see the secretary with her finger on the phone’s mute button.

“It’s perfect ,” she whispered, leaning in. “Let me just hand this to you now, before I have to post it.”

Hannah shrugged. She’d been interviewed for more “perfect” jobs than she cared to remember. The whole thing had lost its luster and had become a long, daily trudge of disappointment, peppered with anger and frustration that she’d agreed to let her mother live with her. “Why? What’s so great about this one,” she said as she reached over to take the receiver.

“It’s local and so cool, the Ypsi Brewing Company, you know, over in the empty Ford plant?’

Hannah frowned. “I don’t know shit about beer.”

The woman waggled the phone at her. “Just take it. Trust me.”

“Hello?” Hannah flopped back in the chair unwilling to even try to sound like she cared anymore.

A deep, masculine voice filled her ear, curled around in her brain and nestled in her psyche. “Hello, this is Ian Donovan. I’m the head brewer and part owner of the YBC, over here in the old Ford plant?”

She stayed silent, not because she wanted to but because every ounce of spit she possessed had dried up at the sound of Ian’s voice. She gulped, stood and turned away so the secretary couldn’t see her looking like an idiot. After about ten minutes of his talking, her listening and trying to form coherent sentences, she handed the receiver back to the pleased looking woman.

“Well?”

“I, uh, have an interview, Monday – group first with other candidates, then one-on-one with the owners, the Donovan brothers.” She picked up her purse, still in a daze from the odd phone call.

Men had zero effect on her. She had barely even looked at herself in the mirror since her life had essentially fallen apart six years ago. Then, she’d been the prototypical college co-ed, happy and carefree and focused on a future with her medical-school bound boyfriend. In quick succession, about a month before she graduated her father died of a massive heart attack, leaving behind her mother, who had spent her life being taken care of, and barely enough money in the bank to pay for a funeral.

Her mother had no answers for the “where is all Dad’s money?” questions. She had never even written a check in her adult life, in a bizarre throwback of a relationship where Hannah’s father did everything, up to and including nurturing a gambling habit that left his wife and daughter high and fucking dry after his death. While attending her father’s expensive funeral, her boyfriend pulled her aside, kissed her forehead and said he needed “space” to “think about their relationship.” These two things mysteriously involved the intimate assistance of her roommate it seemed. Last Hannah heard they were married. She had not been on a date, kissed or even held hands with a member of the opposite sex since.

Now, her mother sat on the couch with her cat and watched expensive cable television from the time she woke until she slept in Hannah’s small apartment in Depot Town. Hannah was incapable of making her leave—where would the woman go? She didn’t drink or smoke or even really eat that much, but her inherent frailty that had been enabled by Hannah’s father and his over the top masculinity seemed an impossible barrier to her having a real life. Hannah sat with her at times, taking in the various news shows and pseudo news shows, doing her homework, and waiting on her mother in an early care-taker role reversal. Other than her constant nagging about Hannah needing to “find a man” and insisting on organic milk, she barely made a peep.

As she drove home, Hannah did her usual prayer to the gods of rust bucket cars and the women who drive them that it would make it one more day. Realizing she’d forgotten the milk just as she was unlocking the apartment door she sighed and shoved it open, needing to process the recent turn of events. She had an interview for a job that would not force her to relocate and drag her emotionally invalid mother with her, but the man who would interview her possessed a voice that had her practically buzzing with something she could not identify.

She ground her teeth, made apologies to the small woman on the couch and jumped in the shower, hoping the proverbial cold water would calm her suddenly revved up libido. Ignoring men in favor of slogging through school and getting top grades while working thirty hours a week had been easier than she expected. A few cute guys tried to get friendly, especially in classes that required group work, but she kept it professional, cool to the point of frigid, and merely put one foot in front of the other, daily, for five years, until she had that paper in her hand. The paper that claimed her as “hire-able” with a Master’s in Business Administration double focus in marketing and accounting, but that had become about as useful as the stacks of paper on her kitchen counter demanding money she simply did not have.

This twanging, nervous jangling of her nerves, replaying Donovan’s voice over and over in her head as she let the thin trickle of water sluice down her face and body was pissing her off to no end. The guy had a voice made for radio, so was probably some nerdy, bearded, fat guy—which was her mental image of a man who brewed beer for a living. She toweled herself dry, shivering in the super cooled air. Her mother kept the air conditioning cranked non-stop, yet another drain on her slim budget, but she had no energy to fight it.

She tugged on jeans and a sweatshirt and yanked her thick hair back in a ponytail. There were children to be minded and a small paycheck to be earned. Hannah surprised herself at how good she was at this job, how many kids clamored to be with her during the hours they spent away from their parents. She made a perfunctory look in the mirror long enough to take in the slight lines she’d developed alongside her eyes and the worry creases in her forehead.
Frowning, she touched them, remembering how many hours she once spent as a girl rubbing at her freckles, hoping to make them disappear and for her hair to turn a normal color, not the wild auburn riot that it was. Her flat, blue-green eyes stared back at her, and a shiver passed down her spine at the memory of the voice on the other end of the phone: “See you tomorrow, Hannah. I’m looking forward to it. You sound like a great fit.”

Chapter Nine

The day dawned with an inauspicious gloom. Hannah sat straight up, sheets in a tangle around her legs, nerves on fire and her body buzzing with a clearly remembered dream. One where Ian Donovan, he of the sexy disembodied voice, was holding her, twining his fingers in her hair, pulling her close and kissing her like nobody’s business. She passed a hand down her damp neck, across her breasts, which mocked her with their painfully hard nipples. Allowing herself to flop back for just a few more minutes she worked her hand lower, passing across her stomach and down into the flannel pajama bottoms.

She rubbed and stroked and pretended she knew what she was doing until giving up. The erstwhile boyfriend in college had been a virgin too, and between them, they hardly figured out more than how to mutually masturbate and had only managed to achieve actual penetration by accident, which had scared her silly. By her own estimation, according to the few pop culture magazines she’d read in waiting rooms, she had never actually experienced “true orgasm.” Yet one more thing to put on her someday list she supposed, although at nearly twenty-seven she figured it would be more likely that she’d discover an oil well in the backyard than her own g-spot.  Hannah groaned and rolled over, pretending she was not the most pathetic excuse for an adult female on the planet, then rose and hit the shower, ignoring her still thrumming body in favor of focusing on maybe, just maybe landing a job today.

“Honey! I made some breakfast,” her mother’s thin voice floated down the short hallway.

Hannah fixed a smile on her face, adjusted the one decent suit skirt she possessed, and brushed her usual minimal amount of make up on her face. “Coming mom, hang on.”  She ate, let her mother fuss over her hair that she had pulled tight into a bun to, hopefully, minimize the shocking effect it sometimes had. “Thanks, Mom, really.” She stood and kissed her mother’s cool cheek, took her plate to the sink, and stood there trying to stay calm. She’d been through so many interviews; this one should not be rattling her so. The thought of getting in front of ‘Ian the Voice’ was making her weak in the knees, and the eggs she’d just eaten threatened a second appearance.

God, Hannah, you are lame as shit. Get a grip.
She jumped when her mom touched her shoulder. “Honey,” she tucked the ubiquitous strand of curly red hair behind Hannah’s ear. “Don’t worry. You’ll find something and hopefully there will be a nice man there you can meet and….”

Hannah shrugged away from her, furious and unwilling to guard her tongue for fear of hurting her mother’s easily bruised feelings. “Shut up about men, Mom. You had a man and what, exactly did he do for you? Hmm? Die, that’s what, after he gambled away every fucking dime he had. Please, do not tell me one more time that finding a man is the answer…to anything.” She stomped out, immediately sorry but unwilling to back down, grabbed her purse and second hand leather portfolio. Hesitating a split second before opening the door, she sighed, then walked out in to the warm morning, putting on her “hire me” face one more time.

The Ypsilanti Brewing Company was in its sixth year of business, but it had already broken more sales records than Hannah could count. In her due diligence research she’d discovered that jumping on the craft beer bandwagon when he did had been a stroke of genius on Gavin Donovan’s part. The guy she’d talked to was Gavin’s twin brother, Ian, who’d joined the company a few years ago as head brewer. While the thought of twins with that voice made Hannah more than a little wobbly in the knees, she forced herself to focus on the tidbits she’d memorized about the company and the industry in general.

With an increasing market share of “malt beverages” currently around ten percent, the craft beer segment was now more than some bearded dudes in basements concocting stuff
.
Hannah knew less than zero about beer generally, didn’t even really drink alcohol that much at all because it was too costly. How she could parlay her expensive marketing degree in some sort of organized, “professional effort” as the panty-dropping voice had implied, escaped her even after all her research.

She did have a new working knowledge of how beer was sold in Michigan and how adversarial and challenging relationships with distributors could be for breweries. There were a few names she could drop, like “Dogfish Head,” “Stone,” and “Bells.” She’d watched about fifty YouTube videos of beer being made, so at least she could point to a fermenter and know that it was not a mash tun. She sighed, squared her shoulders and put on a light coat of lipstick. The giant parking lot was deserted, but she knew the place only had about six employees, even as successful as it was. So, that would account for the eight cars in the lot, four of them late model pickups.

A wave of terror made her grip the top of her car. Staring at the giant red brick and glass façade of what was once one of the busiest and most successful plants for Ford Motor Company, she forced herself back under control, and she got her first whiff of the most amazing, rich, breakfast-y smelling odor she’d ever encountered. It got stronger as she approached the side door, and when she opened it, the amazing aroma wafted around her, seeming to hold her in its embrace before rolling out into the warm morning air.