Christmas in Wine Country

by Addison Westlake

  Instead, here she was, feeling the pull but not the ache. He’d been nice that day at the vineyard, great with Gram. No doubt he was super hunky and intriguing.

  Equally obvious was the complete radio silence of the past few weeks; Jake wasn’t exactly pursuing her. And last but maybe most important, there was his girlfriend, the vicious viper. Vanessa, Lila mentally added, realizing she’s just cooked up quite the alliteration. The latter factors of absence and attachment at least balanced if not cancelled out the former positives.

  As for Lila, she had storytime to plan. Tomorrow she was featuring trucks, including the classic My Truck is Stuck. Mr. Meows had a lot to say about roadside assistance. Plus there was the small matter of a café to start running in just over a week. Smiling into the darkness, Lila said softly, “This is what it means to be happy.”

  And crazy, talking to herself, she recognized that, but maybe it was the yoga, or the muted fog horn, or the cashmere scarf, but she felt so light and optimistic and calm. Or maybe it was a Zen moment? she wondered. If it were, would she be conscious of it or would she simply be In The Moment? Could you think “this is so Zen” and be Zen simultaneously? She’d gotten the worst grade of her college career in what was supposed to be a blow-off seminar called the Tao of Pooh so she knew she was no expert on Buddhist enlightenment. She supposed she was too attached to things and stuff. Like her new pink and green striped flannel pajama bottoms, for example.

  But there was no denying this one moment of feeling full and grateful and strangely free. With one more smile to herself and the ocean, she began heading home to pull on those flannel pajamas.

  * * *

  Definitely blue, Lila thought as she ran along the coastline, ocean crashing to her left. Joyce, Marion’s partner and master potter, had stopped by the bookstore yesterday to talk glazes. They needed to plan the interior décor so everything would be coordinated. Lila was voting for blue. Maybe different shades of blue? The mugs could be a dark, dusky blue of the sea at twilight. Plates the brilliant azure of the summer sunshine. Bowls the deep gray blue of the water today in the mid-morning October fog.

  A huge creature suddenly leapt at her out of the mist. Lila screamed and tried to jump to the side. Her ankle twinged as her foot dug in off the trail at an awkward angle. She tumbled onto her hip, still managing to grab a stick to fend off what might be a coyote, a mountain lion or even a bear.

  “Are you OK?” the creature asked in a voice much like Jake Endicott. Lying on her side, adrenaline pumping through her limbs, Lila turned, still wielding the stick. “Are you going to beat me with that?” Jake asked, pointing to her weapon.

  “I might,” she answered, the fight or flight response still coursing through her veins. “You scared me to death.”

  “Maybe you should try watching the trail instead of the ocean.”

  “Maybe you should try…” Lila trailed off, her desire to give a snappy retort stronger than her ability to think of one.

  With a laugh, Jake said, “That’ll teach me,” and then offered his hand. “Let me help you up.” Lila grudgingly accepted his help, only to realize that she really needed it. A sharp stab of pain shot through her ankle when she tried to put weight on it. Seeing her grimace, Jake brought his hand around her waist and told her to sit down again.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Lila protested as she complied because it really didn’t feel fine. Not a break, either, it felt somewhere in-between. Jake knelt and cupped the calf of her injured leg in his hands. In response to him asking if she could move it she gave her foot a half-hearted flex, but it prompted another wince of pain.

  “OK, it’s a sprain,” he said, now holding her muddy sneaker in his hand and looking closely at either side of her ankle.

  “You don’t need to—” Lila gestured at his hand. “My shoe’s filthy.” The first rain of October had hit yesterday and the ground was still recovering.

  “Think you can walk on it?” Jake asked, looking up at her with what Lila had to once again admit were fantastic golden-chocolate eyes. “Because I think you need to ice this and I don’t live too far from here.” Pointing the way he’d come, he said, “there’s a footpath off this trail that leads to my house.”

  “Really?” asked Lila, forgetting her ankle pain in a momentary drool over his location.

  After he assured her that it was only about a quarter mile from them, that it was not a big deal, that he had no plans she was going to ruin, that he had both ice and ice packs, and insisted that her sprain wasn’t ‘nothing’, Lila ran out of lame protests and found herself leaning on Jake’s arm and limping up to his house. Railroad ties led them up, up, up a knoll covered in sea grass and coastal scrub. Lila didn’t look around, focusing on hobbling up the stairs without causing any more damage to her ankle or accidentally taking Jake out in a dramatic pratfall.

  But once they crested the hill, reaching the walkway to a modest Craftsman cottage, Lila had to turn and check out the view. Breathless from the climb, she found herself gasping even more at the expanse of coastline they could now see. It was all there, the coves and rocky outcroppings and tiny beaches she’d grown to love over the past months running her favorite trail. Even the sea lion den. Her mouth literally hanging open, Lila looked out over it, speechless.

  “I love it here,” Jake agreed, standing at her side, hand still wrapped around her waist. “I’ve been renting it for about a year now.” A seabird glided in the distance on a breeze and Lila watched it seemingly suspended in mid-air.

  Snapped out of her reverie by Jake’s insistence on getting her inside so she could prop up her foot and start icing, Lila accepted his help down the walkway. The cottage was small and rustic with wide, wooden floor planks and exposed beams overhead. It definitely felt like a guy’s place. The main room was furnished with just an old, beat-up sofa and a faded braided rug under an overturned wine crate/coffee table. The walls were almost entirely bare save what looked like antique wooden snowshoes hung over the fireplace. Gram would surely have been appalled at the lack of chachka and throw pillows.

  Oh but the view. Settling on the sofa as Jake instructed while he went to get some ice, Lila looked out four large windows, two on either side of the fireplace, offering a direct view of the water. Thankfully, the couch looked so used and threadbare that she didn’t feel bad propping up her injured foot on a pillow. Her ankle had hurt quite a bit as she’d made it up the stairs, but now it began to subside into a dull throb.

  “Here you go,” Jake announced, back from the small adjacent kitchen with some Tylenol, a plastic bag of ice and a kitchen towel. Arranging the bag on her ankle, he handed her the towel, explaining, “In case it gets too cold.”

  “Thank you,” Lila said, flustered by all the attention.

  Back in the kitchen, he stood with an arm on the refrigerator door. “What can I get you? I’ve got water and…water. No, wait, I think I have some Coke in the garage. And beer and wine but I guess it’s only around 11.”

  “Water’s fine,” Lila agreed, trying to reassure herself that she wasn’t imposing too overly much. Good thing she’d managed not to attack him with a stick back on the trail. She’d come close. Looking down at her body-hugging tank top and calf-length leggings, Lila wished she had on more clothes. Zipping along a trail the outfit felt normal. On Jake’s couch, she felt like she was wearing a bra and tights. At least she wasn’t dripping with sweat; she’d stayed relatively cool out there in the overcast October day.

  Outside, the gray ocean churned and swirled. Lila couldn’t decide when she liked the coastline best. In sunshine, it sparkled and glittered like treasure. Under clouds, it roiled and swelled with mystery. Some of her earliest memories were of the beach, discovering seashells and rocks and scrunching the sand between her toes.

  When Jake returned with two water glasses, he had on a fresh t-shirt and jeans.

  “How do you ever leave your house with a view like this?” Lila asked, marveling at it.

  “Glad you l
ike it.” He settled on the opposite side of the couch. “I love it here. It was the best place to grow up.”

  “The Cape wasn’t bad, either.” Reminiscing with Jake about finding sea urchins in tidepools and chasing down hermit crabs as kids, Lila found herself relaxing a bit. Jake described his summers growing up essentially as a member of a pack of wild dogs. His mother had let him bang out of the house in the morning to head off with other neighborhood kids, only returning for dinner. Lila could picture him riding bikes and exploring caves and nearly getting trapped by incoming tides.

  “Now that I’m back, I don’t know why I stayed away so long.” Jake remarked.

  “How long were you gone for?”

  “17 years.”

  “17?” Lila did some math in her head, never her strong suit. The magazine article had said he was 32, so he left when he was…

  “I left for boarding school when I was 14.”

  “And you never came back?” Lila couldn’t grasp the concept of 17 years; that would have meant being away from home since she was 11.

  “I did, at first. School breaks and stuff.” Jake shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable. “But then I got in the habit of staying with friends from school and working there over the summer.” He shrugged.

  “17 years is a long time.” Lila knew she was stating the obvious, but it seemed to her that 17 years was more than just a “one thing led to another and before you knew it” time lapse.

  “I was really angry,” Jake acknowledged with a big exhale. Lila listened as Jake explained—quickly and without emotion—that his mother died of breast cancer when he was 13 and his father sent him off to boarding school. “Not the happiest time for me,” Jake grimaced. Apparently the tony, coat-and-tie private school had specialized in eating small town hippie California kids for breakfast. For the first couple of years he’d been known throughout the student body as Farmer Fred.

  “Nothing’s worse than a happy teenager,” Lila offered as comfort, aware that must have been a horrible time for him, having lost his mother, sent away by his father. “If you’re happy as a teen, it means you’ve peaked. There’s nowhere to go but down. It’s been clinically proven.”

  Jake gave a crooked smile. “Yeah?”

  Lila nodded. “But if you were lonely and miserable, you have nowhere to go but up. Plus you have rich material. And tremendous depth.”

  “Do you have a lot of depth?” he asked, amused.

  “Oh, I’m very deep,” Lila assured him. “In high school I basically dated the local library.”

  “I had a relationship with my school’s library as well,” Jake reminisced. “But it would never commit.”

  Lila’s laugh turned into a wince as her ankle gave a painful throb. She re-adjusted the ice pack. “I’m so sorry to impose on you like this. I’m sure I’ll be good to go soon.”

  “It’s no problem. You need to rest it.”

  “But I’m sure you have somewhere you need to be. I can call Annie or Zoe and see if they can come pick me up.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve been on the road for two weeks straight. There’s nothing I’d rather do today than hang out at my house.”

  Was he inviting her to hang out with him at his house? Both took sips of their waters.

  Clearing his throat, Jake asked, “So, when did you move out to California?”

  Lila gave him the brief history of how she’d headed out after college with Annie. “I was hell bent on leaving behind the small, coastal tourist town where I grew up and climbing up the corporate ladder in the big city.”

  Jake looked at her as if unsure as to whether she was aware of the irony. “So you left behind a small, coastal tourist town?”

  “Yes, I put all that behind me.” Lila gave him a smile.

  “Clearly,” Jake observed. “Because none of that could be said about Redwood Cove.”

  Lila laughed. “I guess I’m not that original. Or it’s something corny like it feels like home to me.” She shrugged, feeling slightly self-conscious. “I grew up in one. And now I’ve ended up back in one.”

  “Hey, you’re talking to a guy who thought he was boldly leaving home. And ended up working in a vineyard.”

  “The one in France?” Lila remembered him mentioning it to her Gram the other day. He nodded. “The lost years of your 20s?” she couldn’t help tease, recalling the magazine spread.

  “Ah, my angry, misspent youth.” Jake gave a pompous sigh. Propping his feet up on the overturned wine crate, one ankle crossed over the other, Jake explained that after graduating from college his father had wanted him to come home and learn the family business. Naturally, he had headed further away. “It was straight out ‘you didn’t want me then? I don’t want you now.”

  Lila listened, caught up in the romance of it as he described his nomadic twenties, out of touch and off the radar working in vineyards in the Chianti region of Italy and the Champagne region of France. She could easily picture him out there in the fields in the warm, pastoral sunlight. Perhaps sometimes he took off his shirt.

  Where had that image come from? Lila flushed and took a sip of her water. Yes, she liked listening to his deep voice and she’d noticed those golden flecks in his brown eyes and the stubble on his jaw and wondered how rough it would be to the touch. She liked his self-deprecating humor. She liked learning more about him.

  Damn it. Someone else’s boyfriend, she reminded herself. No, Lila, No. She took another sip of her water to firm up her resolve. There was no harm in chatting but she was Not Falling For Him. She shifted slightly further back on the couch.

  Jake stopped his stream of talking. “I’m sorry, I never talk about any of this and now I can’t seem to stop. I’m sure you’re sitting there bored and hungry—”

  “No.” Lila disagreed, but resisted elaborating on how much that was the opposite of how she felt.

  “Let me see what I can find for us.” Jake got up from the couch and rummaged around in the kitchen. He returned with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, two glasses, and a packet of chips. “Sorry, I don’t have much food in the house,” he apologized, setting down the booty.

  “Well, I barged in on you,” Lila apologized once again.

  Watching him as he poured, Lila noticed a small scar above his left eyebrow. How had he gotten it? Realizing she’d almost just reached out and lightly traced it with her finger, she sat on her hand.

  Jake offered one to Lila. “Here’s to barging in,” he said with a smile.

  After taking a sip, she forced herself to bring up the subject she least wanted to talk about. “So, you’ve been traveling a lot lately? With Vanessa and your dad?”

  “Yup. It was a busy trip. Non-stop meetings. Except for one morning when we were in France.” Jake smiled at the memory. Lila braced herself for hearing how he’d proposed to Vanessa on a bridge over the River Seine. “I got my dad to tour the region where I used to live.” Jake laughed and shook his head. “Picture Big Bob. You’ve seen him, right?” Lila nodded. “6’5”? With his huge cowboy hat? Now picture him surround by all these tiny French men. I think they thought he’d stepped out of a movie.”

  “That’s perfect,” Lila could see it. “Like a guy out of an old western.”

  “Seriously. Like a caricature of a cowboy.” Jake described the clash of cultures. Whereas his father marched to the steady drumbeat of BIG MORE NOW, the French vintners cherished their time-honored traditions and sustainable agricultural practices. “My dad, of course, loved every minute of it,” Jake laughed. “Because the French really do have attitude.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Lila pictured tiny, graceful Axelle in her wee slip of a red dress.

  “What was most interesting?” Jake ran a hand through his hair and stretched out, propping his feet up on the wine crate. “This time around, I saw things more from my father’s perspective. There’s a lot of bureaucracy over there. Everything’s controlled by the government. I happen to agree with a lot of their mandates, but it’s really restri
ctive. Someone like my father could never have grown the kind of business he has now.”

  Lila didn’t know much about checks and balances between government and business, but she did know a thing or two about perspectives shifting over time. “So, you saw things differently when you lived over there?”

  “Oh, God,” Jake exhaled. “When I was 24 I thought I was one of the peasant farmers working to overthrow the capitalist regime through grape cultivation.” Lila laughed, able instantly to picture a young, scowling Communist Jake. “Now I see everything from all sides,” he continued. “It kind-of sucks.”

  “It is so much easier to just be mad at stuff,” Lila agreed.

  “There’s a gift to being a kid. You see things in black and white.”

  “Oh, I know,” Lila agreed, recalling how clearly she used to chart a course for herself. “I used to be so sure about what I needed to do to be a success.”

  “Were you working for the revolution, too?” Jake smiled at her and Lila shifted, unconsciously working her way closer to him on the couch.

  “Nothing so noble,” she admitted. “I’ve been more like a mouse in a maze after the cheese. First, the goal was straight As so I could get a scholarship to college. Then, it was straight As to keep my academic scholarship at Colgate. And then, it was climbing the corporate ladder at an ad agency in the city.” She pictured herself, worried, pinched, too thin, miserable. Could that have really been her? And yet not even a year had passed since then.

  “Did it make you happy?” Jake asked.

  “I tried. I tried really hard.” Lila looked at him to emphasize how hard.

  “Why?”

  “I guess I didn’t want to fail.” That had gone well.

  “No, I mean, why were you there? Why did you decide that’s what you should do?”