However, as with everything else in this trippy town, this particular liquor store was different. Instead of avoiding eye contact like respectable patrons, the shoppers here gathered and gossiped in aisles. Employees wore hideous holiday sweaters and Santa hats with mini liquor bottles attached where the requisite white puffball usually was.
Just when he thought it couldn’t get more annoying, everyone in the store paused what they were doing to half-sing, half-shout “Fiiiive golden riiings!”
He gritted his teeth. One bottle of decent whiskey, and he could go back to Carson’s and drink until he could pretend this entire week had never happened.
Usually, he had a much more proactive approach to problem-solving.
Ryan’s Regular Problem-Solving Plan
1. Analyze the problem.
2. Identify the obstacles.
3. Outline potential solutions.
4. Choose the most efficient option.
5. Craft and execute an action plan.
But being stuck in this holiday nightmare with a blurry family emergency while someone else tried on his chair and his clients for size called for a more intensive method.
Ryan’s Emergency Disaster Plan
1. Drink until he couldn’t see straight.
2. Pass out.
3. Be so hungover he would forget about any and all problems for the 48 hours it took him to get over the hangover.
4. Feel like an idiot.
5. Humbly move on to Regular Problem-Solving Plan.
He’d only had to enact his Emergency Disaster Plan twice before. Once when he’d failed one of the sections of the Certified Management Accountant certificate. And then again when he’d been passed over for his first promotion at work. In both cases, he’d redoubled his efforts (after the hangover, of course) and accomplished what he’d set out to do.
He ignored the aisle of cheerfully labeled wines with names like Bohemian Riesling and Dirty Hippie Chardonnay, heading instead for the Whiskey/Bourbon sign. It was a popular aisle.
A woman with waist-length, silvery dreadlocks and a Peace of Pizza T-shirt winked at him as she passed with a bottle of Lagavulin. She had good taste, not that he was ever inclined to make small talk with a stranger.
Instead, he gave her a nod and then tried to maneuver around a couple so mismatched it was almost comical. The man was in Dockers and a starched button-down under a dreidel tie. The woman had jet-black hair in pigtails secured by skull clips wearing Santa hats. Instead of a sensible wool coat like the guy, she was wearing a floor-length, dark purple cape embroidered with silver thread. Her boots looked like they were less for snow and more for mosh pits.
The nerd and the goth princess.
They were being questioned by a skinny man of indeterminate age wearing a homemade Support Your Local Exotic Dancer T-shirt and breaching what Ryan considered to be the common decency standard of personal space. “So, if I build a shed over my bunker and store some of my used paperbacks and G-strings in there, can I write it off as a work expense?” he asked.
“Well, maybe,” the nerd hedged. His glasses were fogging up. “I’d need more information. Like if you were also using the structure for personal use. And what the ratio between personal and professional usage would be.”
Ah, the nerd was a fellow accountant. Ryan thought he’d recognized the resignation of a professional being pounced on in public for free advice.
“Why don’t you make an appointment with Mason, Fitz?” goth girl suggested sweetly.
“Ha! Good one, Ellery! Then I’d have to pay him for his time,” Fitz the exotic dancer fan, or—God forbid—the actual exotic dancer, chuckled.
“You know, tax preparation is a deduction,” the accountant hinted.
Ryan skirted the free advice dispensary but accidentally made and held uncomfortable eye contact with the goth queen. Her dark purple lips curved up. Another smiler. What was it with this town?
Finally, he made it to the whiskey shelves. It was a decent selection for a town that was barely a blip on the map.
He was debating between a scotch and a bourbon when a very small redhead clutching a very large bottle of tequila bumped into him. In fuzzy pajama pants, pink boots, and a Pierce Acres sweatshirt she’d clearly stolen from an adult, the kid looked like the kind of student elementary school teachers hoped didn’t land in their class.
“Oopsies! Sorry,” she said, beaming up at him.
“Aren’t you a little young to be buying tequila?” he asked.
She threw back her head and laughed until her tangled curls shook. “You’re funny!”
“Aurora!” A guy with a nice suit, nicer wool coat, and a familiar-ish face rounded the corner.
“Hi, Bucket!”
“Short Cake, how many times have I told you not to wander off in here? Sorry,” the man said to Ryan. “Last time I brought her in here, I found her behind the register asking to see Old Man Carson’s ID.”
Ryan let out a rusty, short laugh. Small towns meant small worlds, he guessed. “Carson is my great-uncle,” he said, then wondered why he’d willingly volunteered the information.
“You must be nephew Ryan. I’m Beckett Pierce, attorney and mayor of this circus. This is my daughter, Aurora.”
“Technically, Bucket is my stepdad,” Aurora explained. “But we don’t like to use that label in our family. He’s my real dad just like my other real dad because s-e-x doesn’t always equal family.”
Beckett—or Bucket—looked a little misty-eyed over the whole “real dad” thing. Ryan didn’t feel like he was up for an emotional family moment.
Thankfully, Santa’s overanxious twin bustled around the corner into the aisle and interrupted. “Mayor Pierce!”
“Shit,” Beckett said under his breath. Aurora looked delighted.
“Bruce, how many times do I have to tell you to call me Beckett?” the mayor said. “Aurora, put the tequila down.”
“You know how I feel about disrespecting your office,” Bruce, the Santa look-alike, insisted.
Beckett bit back a sigh. “Have you met Carson’s nephew Ryan?”
Bruce glanced at Ryan. “Of course I know Ryan. He’s from Seattle, even though the rest of his family is in Pennsylvania. You really should visit home more often, you know.”
“Uhhh.” Ryan didn’t know what to say to that.
“We’ll catch up later,” Bruce said to him with confidence. “Mayor Pierce, I have a dire situation that I must discuss with you immediately.”
Beckett closed his eyes for a moment. “Bruce. You are the town supervisor. I have complete faith that whatever crisis arises, you can handle it on your own tonight. Because I am spending the entire night alone with my wife while my saint of a mother takes the girls for a sleepover and Evan is with the debate club in Corning.”
“I’m afraid some situations are a bit more urgent than a quiet evening at home,” Bruce insisted as he fidgeted with the zipper on his coat.
Beckett gripped the man’s shoulder. “Bruce. Nothing. I repeat. Nothing is more important than getting home to my empty house where my beautiful wife is waiting for me to show up with a bottle of wine.”
Santa Bruce opened his mouth, but Beckett cut him off. “Nothing,” he repeated. “Now, if you’ll both excuse me, I need to get Aurora home to hand her off to my… Mom?”