Christmas in Wine Country

by Addison Westlake

  “Right.” Lila sank back, taking a sip of wine and smiling at the question. She’d given it a lot of thought in the past few months, yet somehow had never asked it of herself during that phase of her life. “I think I felt like I owed it to my mom,” she admitted. “She had me when she was 19 and never had those chances.” Lila explained how much her mother had sacrificed—her career, her education, her own life, in many ways, to raise Lila.

  “Guilt is a powerful thing.”

  “And so subtle,” Lila agreed. “At least to me. But maybe I was just really dumb. I don’t even think I realized how miserable I was. Honestly, if everything hadn’t fallen apart, if I hadn’t lost my job and gotten dumped I think I’d still be there. If I hadn’t wound up failing so fantastically…well, you saw it,” she remembered, looking down as she rubbed the bridge of her nose.

  “What, at the holiday party?” he asked.

  “Well, the company was doing layoffs,” Lila recalled. “But I don’t think the karaoke helped.”

  “It was pretty impressive,” Jake agreed. “It made quite an impression.”

  Lila wondered what, exactly, that impression had been. Fearing the worst, she returned to her theme. “If they hadn’t kicked me to the curb, I’d still be there.”

  “I know what you’re talking about,” Jake agreed. “Guilt is big for me, too.”

  “Really?” Lila didn’t see it. “But you’ve been so independent. You stayed away for so long.”

  “That’s why I feel guilty. I got so good at giving my father the finger from across the ocean. I built him up into a comic book villain,” he admitted, messing with the back of his hair as Lila noticed he did when he was thinking. “Then I came back for my grandmother’s funeral.” Jake explained how a year and a half ago when he’d returned to Redwood Cove he’d been shocked to see how much his father had aged. “He has a heart condition now. He needs help. I hear his third wife was a nightmare. She’s out of the picture now, but you should see some of the people around him, or hanging off of him. They suck.”

  Lila was reminded of Shakespearian plays and the dangers of kings surrounded by sycophantic advisors. “Does he know he needs help? Is that why he wants you working with him?”

  “He wants me to take over the business for him when he retires.”

  “What about Oliver?” Aware she might be treading into sensitive territory, she still asked, figuring, hey, they’d been sitting there talking nonstop for she didn’t know how long sharing things she wasn’t even sure she’d talked about with Annie and the bottom line was, she wanted to know.

  “Oliver,” Jake sighed. “Oliver is…”

  “Different from you?” Lila suggested, realizing she sounded somewhat hopeful.

  Jake laughed and explained how different Oliver’s upbringing had been than his own. Too young to be sent away to school, Oliver had been raised by Big Bob and his first trophy wife. He’d had a taste of the high life, found that he liked it, and tailored his life toward becoming a successful businessman. Naturally, this led to Big Bob favoring Jake to take over the family business.

  “So your dad thinks you’re a tree-hugging lunatic,” Lila recapped. “But he wants you to take over?”

  “On his terms,” Jake said, “without my tree-hugging bullshit.” Lila looked at him, confused. “Oh, it doesn’t make sense,” Jake agreed. “But he’s a stubborn man and I was away so long I think he got fixated on bringing me back. Plus, I think he likes that I struck out on my own and didn’t come running home to daddy—even though he wanted me to. And he says I’m the only one who’s honest with him. Which is true,” Jake acknowledged, pouring them some more wine.

  “That’s complicated.” Lila sipped her wine, thinking how families almost always were.

  Jake shook his head. “It’s crazy. I spent so many years wanting more of him. Then I guess he spent a while wanting more of me.”

  “My dad wasn’t around when I was growing up either.” Surprising herself that she’d shared that, Lila looked down and didn’t elaborate. She’s devoted so much energy her whole life to wondering where her father was, what he was like and how he could be happy with no involvement in her life. If she were brutally honest, she had to admit that had been part of the relentless drive that had pushed her through her unhappy teens and early twenties—the misguided hope that if she achieved enough, became enough of a success, he’d be lured into her life.

  “That’s hard,” Jake said. Lila could have sworn he nearly reached out to touch her hand but seemed to catch himself, bringing it, instead, up to his hair.

  Lila shrugged. “I guess now the good thing is I can see it more from his side. He was 19, like my mom. He thought he was just having a summer fling. He wasn’t ready to be a father.”

  Jake shook his head. “Seems like you’re doing a really good job seeing his side of it.” He exhaled and there was that crooked smile again. “But doesn’t it suck? Having to be all mature about things?” Lila smiled, knowing what he meant. “You grow up and realize we’re all human, everyone makes mistakes, we’re all trying our best, that kind of thing.”

  “You liked it better when your dad was a comic book villain?” she asked, amused.

  “No, I’m just saying, in some ways it was easier. Here I am, neck-deep in biz dev—” he turned to her conspiratorially—“that’s business development to you laypeople.” In a self-mocking tone, he continued, “I’m running around in a suit and tie, kissing people’s asses so we can expand our market share and maximize our profits. And I don’t even agree with how he’s running the business!”

  “You could always pull out that middle finger again,” Lila suggested, laughing. “You said you got really good at doing that all those years.”

  “That’s the problem.” Jake described how he felt he’d spent so long in that defiant extreme, he now felt trapped in the other. Lila got the image of a pendulum, Jake on the end of it.

  Lila took a sip of her wine and blocked yet another dangerous impulse to touch. This time it had been his hand. After gesturing around with exasperation at himself and the predicament he’d gotten himself into, Jake rested his arm along the back of the couch, his hand merely inches away from Lila’s shoulder. He had long fingers. Tan and calloused, he had a few minor scrapes and cuts. She bet he always did, prone as he was to digging around in the dirt. Damn if she hadn’t nearly reached out and touched it.

  She decided that it was time. The ice had melted. The bottle of wine sat nearly empty. The sun was going down, taking with it any last illusion that Lila was simply pausing for a brief respite with her injury. Their conversation had ranged wide and barely paused. It also had never touched on his girlfriend.

  Sitting up straighter, Lila ventured, “So, does Vanessa live here with you?”

  “What?” He nearly spat out his sip of wine. “What would give you that idea? No.”

  “OK,” Lila held her hands up defensively. “I was just wondering.”

  “We’re not even dating.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Well, we were for a couple months. But it wasn’t anything serious. I ended it in March. Just a week before that damn magazine article came out.”

  “But you went on that trip together?” Lila asked, remembering Vanessa’s toe-tapping at the vineyard.

  “Business,” Jake explained. “She does all kinds of events at the vineyard and my dad sees her as this great resource. He’s hired her on as a consultant.”

  “One of those great people he has around him.”

  “One of the best.” Jake matched her wry smile. “Sometimes I think he wishes he were dating her himself, but that’s too weird even for my dad. She’s just his type, though, all business. He loved it when we were together—a good business partner, the foundation of a good marriage he told me. As if he would know.”

  “But you’re not together now?” Lila asked, feeling a giddiness bubbling up within and wanting to hear it again.

  “No,”
Jake confirmed. “It was never a serious thing, we were just around each other all the time and she can be,” he paused, looking for the right word. “Relentless. She was around a lot and one thing led to another and then I ended it.”

  “She still seems to be around a lot,” Lila observed, wondering if the same tactic might work on him again.

  “So, tell me,” Jake sat up, gleam in his eye. “You’re proud of everyone you’ve dated?”

  “Well,” Lila squirmed a bit. “I wouldn’t exactly say…”

  “The guy back at Ted’s with his arm wrapped around you?”

  “He’s not…It’s…” She struggled for a good defense, unable to completely dismiss the reference to Trucker Tom.

  “I rest my case,” Jake concluded, resting back against the sofa.

  “OK, we’ve both made mistakes,” Lila acknowledged, tucking a curl behind her ear.

  “But maybe not so much anymore?” Jake asked, looking at her with a smile.

  “Maybe not,” Lila agreed, smiling back.

  “I think we need some more wine,” Jake announced and rose off the sofa to head toward the kitchen.

  “Because no one makes mistakes when they’re drinking wine,” Lila observed.

  “Get your mind out of the gutter, Clark,” Jake reprimanded from the kitchen. “I was thinking we needed to make a toast.”

  “Of course you were,” Lila laughed and looked out the window, wondering what was coming next.

  * * *

  Standing naked in Jake’s bathroom, Lila wiped a circle clear in the fogged mirror. Heart thumping in her chest, her cheeks were as red as an apple and only partially due to the two glasses of wine she’d had and the hot shower she’d just taken. I’m sooo Zen, she thought mockingly, rolling her eyes and recalling that moment just a couple of weeks ago on the bench at the ocean. So calm and unattached.

  At that moment, Jake was downstairs making dinner. OK, so it was potatoes with gigantic tubers they’d had to break off and some sausages out of the freezer that had had more ice on them than meat, but still. They’d spent the last six straight hours of talking on his couch as she ‘iced her foot’—though, of course, all icing had pretty much stopped after the first twenty minutes—before a pause when her stomach had given a loud rumble. “You need food,” Jake had declared.

  So here she was, standing with a wet mass of hair that, washed without any conditioner, would slowly dry into an insane curly tangle of a lion’s mane. There was also the issue of undergarments, or the lack thereof. She’d been wearing leggings a running tank and shorts with built-in bra and panties and was now facing the prospect of commando. Pulling on his sweatpants, about a foot too long, and buttoning up his shirt which she realized was just as soft and yummy as she’d imagined, she decided to just go with it. Because when a gorgeous man told you to go change out of your running clothes and take a hot shower while he made you dinner, the correct answer was “all right.”

  Giving herself one last look in the mirror, she took a deep breath and headed out toward the kitchen. Her ankle felt OK, not 100% but not causing much of a limp. A few days taking it easy and she’d be fine.

  Downstairs, Jake had started a fire. Small and cozy, the cottage felt positively toasty. He’d also hooked up his iPod and was currently thumping a wooden spoon against the countertop to the beat of “Eye of the Tiger”.

  “Good song,” Lila said, entering the kitchen.

  “Thought you might like it.”

  “So, how can I help?” Lila asked, surveying the kitchen. Picking up the butter knife he’d apparently used to slice up the potatoes, she asked, “Do you cook a lot?”

  “Nope,” he said with a grin. “You?”

  “More than I did in the city.” She approached the stove and saw that he had the sausages and potatoes along with some sliced onions simmering in a sauté pan. Pouring in a healthy slug of white wine, he displayed a confidence that suggested he actually did know something about cooking—or at least about wine. Lila gave it a stir.

  “Should be edible,” he declared, looking into the pan.

  Taking their steaming plates and refilled wine glasses back to the crate in the living room—the largest surface he seemed to have to eat off of—Jake said, “I’ve been thinking about what you said. How you would still be in that job, stuck in that life that was making you so unhappy if you hadn’t gotten fired.”

  “It’s true.” Lila sat onto the couch, plate in her lap, knowing she hadn’t painted a flattering picture of herself. She also knew it was accurate.

  Jake settled onto the couch closer to Lila than before. In fact, their knees touched. And he didn’t move his knee away. Lila surreptitiously looked at the spot where they were touching, wondering how so much heat could be generated from what couldn’t be more than a two-inch patch of physical contact. Through jeans and sweatpants. Looking away, she knew she was flushed. Maybe Jake wouldn’t notice. Or would chalk it up to the wine and the warm glow of the crackling fire.

  “So, I’m feeling kind-of stuck,” Jake said, apparently able to continue the conversational thread even with knee-to-knee contact. “And I’m wondering, what’s your advice for me? Should I really screw things up? Maybe the next time my dad and I host a big investors’ dinner I should break out the karaoke?”

  Lila nearly spit out the bite she was finishing as she burst out laughing. “Yes,” she agreed. “That is exactly what I’m saying.” They debated what would be the worst song he could do. Lila voted for an emotional version of “I Am Woman”, but only if he could manage real tears. She had to acknowledge, though, that Jake would hit gold with his suggestion: The Divinyls’ “I Touch Myself.”

  As they both ate more of their dinners, Lila wondered how much of a real question lurked behind his joke about screwing things up. “So,” she began, still feeling shy but remarkably less so than hours and hours before when she’d first arrived on his doorstep. “Are you really that unhappy about things?”

  “I’m not trying to complain.” Jake brought a hand to the back of his hair, starting to mess with his curls. “There’s lots of good things…” He looked vacantly into the fire. “My dad…when I came back, I didn’t plan…I didn’t think my life…”

  The stumbling pauses said it all to Lila. She remembered how miserable she’d felt in years past without even knowing why. Testing out her newfound confidence, she ventured, “You know what I think?”

  “What?”

  “I think you have a really good idea of what you want to do. I mean, you can’t seem to stop working in vineyards even when you try.”

  Jake laughed. “That’s true.”

  “And I think you’ve got a clear idea of how you want to do it. With the bluebird houses and the drip irrigation…the slow growth. I don’t really know how to describe it.”

  “No,” Jake encouraged her. “You’re doing a good job.”

  “So, I think you need to do it.”

  “That simple, huh?” Jake looked at her, smiling.

  “I didn’t say it was simple.” Lila tucked a curl behind her ear, thinking things through. “I’m just speaking as someone who spent years and years trying to please other people while making myself completely miserable. And I can tell you, it doesn’t work.”

  “No?”

  “If you’re miserable, then you’re miserable. And you make other people miserable. And what’s the point?” Lila recalled her pinched and worried stomach ache years, tortured and torturing. Her boss had been right. Hell, even Phillip had been right—it hadn’t been the right fit.

  “So let me get this straight.” Jake put his finished plate on the wine crate and settled back looking directly at Lila. “You think I know what I want to do.” He counted it out on his fingers. “And I know how I want to do it. So I should just…do it.”

  Lila laughed, realizing how stupidly simplistic her advice sounded. “Jake, I don’t think you’ve realized yet, but I’m very insightful.”

  “No, I’m not making fun of you. I’
m making fun of myself. When you lay it all out, what exactly am I bitching about?”

  As they smiled at each other, Lila said, “Well, I’m glad I’ve cleared everything up for you.”

  Jake added a log to the fire and it sprang into lively crackles. Back on the couch, this time his arm went around the back, closing even more distance between them. They fell silent for perhaps the first time that day. Lila brought her fingers to her damp hair. Jake hadn’t exactly had Bumble and Bumble curl conscious calming crème in his shower. All those years of intense ironing and blow drying and now here she was, sitting so deliciously close to Jake, and she knew her hair must be curling up into corkscrews.

  As it turned out, it was a corkscrew curl through which Jake made his initial approach. After nine hours of talking, a bottle of wine and a dinner, Jake leaned closer and lifted one of her curls, twisting it around his finger. He said something about it. Lila couldn’t be sure what, though, since all thought processes stopped at his touch. Jake didn’t seem to have much more control over his verbal faculties as he murmured, “It’s, um…” He swallowed. “Pretty.”

  Realizing that he might actually be leaning closer still and that she could think of very little else she wanted more at that moment, Lila naturally blurted out the first thing that came into her head. “Godfrey says I look like Mr. Meows. You know how people start to look like their pets? I guess I’m starting to look like my hand puppet.” Jake sat back a barely perceptible inch. “Our act is about to get a much wider audience now, you know,” she babbled on, propelled by nervous energy. “We’re about to expand into the space next door and open a café. It’s been months in the works, but Marion—she owns the bookstore—she finally came around and now we’ve made an offer and we’re about to close on the lease.”

  “The space next door?” Jake asked, sitting fully back now. “That’s been vacant for a while, hasn’t it?” As Lila continued on about the plans, Jake collected their plates and brought them to the sink. Following him in, Lila glanced at the clock on the stove and noticed it was going on 9 o’clock. “I can’t believe I’ve crashed at your house for so long!” she exclaimed. “I’m so sorry. You probably had a million things to do and I turned up lame on your doorstep and ruined everything.”