Page 97 of The Barkeep and the Bro

“It’s more complicated than that,” I said half-heartedly.

“Is it, though? Let me guess; you’re going to use your typical excuse that you had a child to raise, so you couldn’t leave. That story is bullshit. You didn’t want to leave. You didn’t want to give this up. And you’ve felt guilty about that ever since.”

“How’d you get so perceptive?” I tried to manage a sliver of a smile, but Charlie was getting under my skin in a non-sexy way.

“I listen to a lot of people all day. It was a good thing I minored in psych.” Charlie paced around the tiny office quarters. “So what are you going to do when you sell? Retire on some beach? Read books in coffee shops? That’s not you, Mitch. You’ll be bored within your first day. You’ll miss the rush and the hustle.”

“The hell I will!” I burst out of my chair, my frustration hitting a fever pitch. “Managing this place has been a lifelong, seven-day-a-week slog. There’s never a break. Making sure I have staff to dealing with customer complaints and staying up to code, and having to scramble to make payroll and pay the bills. It’s a never-ending struggle, and it’s been time away from my friends and my family. Hustle and grit sound nice until you realize you can never take a break. Now finally,finally, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.” My heart throbbed in my ears. The years and years of working my ass off rattled in my bones. “You’ve been working here for three months. Come back to me in twenty years, and we’ll see if you’re still singing the same tune.”

“This has been your life’s work, and you’re just going to sell it to some dickhead in a suit who’s going to turn it into some overpriced tourist trap?”

“If the price is right, he can do whatever he wants with it.”

“You don’t mean that.”

I gathered my papers into a file and grabbed my jacket from the wobbly coat rack. “One day, you’re going to realize just how idealistic you sound.” I brushed past him, and as I walked down the spiral staircase I had descended a million times over the years, he called out to me:

“And one day, you’re going to realize you’re making a mistake.”

* * *

A few days later,Vince and his buyers came to Stone’s Throw in the morning to do a walkthrough. They wanted to check out their investment in person.

Chad and Brett were two guys representing Alpha Bravo, a private equity firm based in San Francisco. They were younger than I expected, wearing Patagonia sweater vests and Bonobos pants. They had the confident stride and air of two men who believed in their own hype.

“This town is super cute,” Chad said while popping his gum. “Sometimes, I get so tired of the Bay Area. It can be a scene, and I just need to get away to Napa or something.”

Brett rolled his eyes. “Dude, even Napa’s becoming too much of a scene.”

“Sourwood’s a great little town. It’s one of the fastest-growing towns in the state,” Vince said. “Lots of potential growth amid the prime demographic.”

“So, uh, what is private equity?” I asked, and their reactions made me feel like a rube.

“We buy and invest in organizations and make them better,” Chad said. “More efficient. More profitable.”

I didn’t love that the new owners of Stone’s Throw would be across the country, but that was corporate life. I’d met chain restaurant owners whose management was based overseas. That was the way of the world.

“We have a small but loyal customer base,” I added, and my comment fell on deaf, uninterested ears.

“Oh, we’ll change that.” Brett flashed me a cocky smile that, unlike Charlie’s, made me recoil. “We’re going to cast a much wider net beyond the town drunks. Kidding.”

“I love this space,” Chad said. “There’s so much potential. You own all the land up to the falls?”

“We do. My parents had a chance to buy the property outright decades ago.”

“Smart peeps.” Chad popped his gum.

Peeps. I clenched my fist as I heard my parents rolling in their graves.

“Part of the appeal of Stone’s Throw is the woodsy view against the falls,” I said.

“We’ll bring in a landscaping team to preserve that feeling,” Brett said. “Vince, I’m thinking we would knock out this wall and expand closer to the bank. That would give us the space we need for the ball pit.”

I stopped in my tracks. “Ball pit?”

“As part of the kids' playroom,” Chad said.

“You want to bring kids into a bar?”

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