Ruin Me, Daddy novel · Chapter 4 of 32
Chapter 4: Rickhouse C
"I have a job," I said.
Lettie looked around the lobby, at the fountain and the brochure rack and my name tag.
"You have a desk."
"I don't have a car."
"I have a cottage. Stone, one room, woodstove, quarter mile from anybody. You'd live on site till it's done." She slid a business card across the counter. "Twelve thousand. Half up front."
Half up front was six thousand dollars.
Six thousand dollars was ten percent of my freedom.
"Does your brother know you're here?"
"My brother doesn't know what day it is." She tapped the card. "I own forty percent of that place, sugar. I hire who I want."
I had eleven vacation days I'd never used. I'd been saving them for nothing.
At five o'clock I put in for all eleven.
Wednesday morning Marlee drove me out to Woodford County in her silver Civic with a rattling muffler and three microphone stands in the back seat.
The stone cottage sat at the bottom of the hill, near Rickhouse C.
It had a porch with two chairs, an iron bed, a woodstove and a slow kettle.
The kettle took nine minutes to boil.
I timed it.
Lettie walked us through the rickhouse herself.
Barrels sat on timber racks five stories high, all the way to the dark rafters.
The air was sweet and cold and smelled like a cake left in a cellar.
"Angel's share," Lettie said. "Whiskey breathing through the wood. You lose a little every year."
Marlee stopped dead in the middle aisle and clapped her hands once.
The sound died instantly in the barrels.
"Oh, I love it," she whispered. "It eats echo. It's a closet the size of a church."
By noon she'd built me a booth between two racks out of hay bales and moving blankets.
She set one good microphone on a stand and a milk crate in front of it.
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