Prosecco Heart

by Julie Strauss

  Mark and Liz glanced at each other and grinned.

  “Speaking of your ex-husband, you ready to help me yet?”

  Tabitha stopped walking and leveled a gaze at him. “We weren’t speaking of him. Is that why you invited me here? To get me drunk and try to get me to talk? Isn’t that some kind of illegal coercion for reporters or something?”

  “I invited you out for a beer, and then asked a simple question. But now that you mention it, I shouldn’t have to get you drunk for you to do the right thing.”

  “I have nothing to tell you other than what I already told you. I mean, didn’t tell you. And I’m still not going to tell you.” She dropped both of their arms and stumbled forward toward her car.

  “Where are you going?” he shouted after her.

  “Home.”

  “Like hell you are.” In two strides, he caught up to her and turned her around by the shoulders, propelling her to his car. “Get in. We’ll drive you home. You can Uber here tomorrow to pick up your car.”

  Sighing dramatically, Tabitha settled into the back seat, leaned back, and closed her eyes. She would never have driven in this state, but it felt good to act petulant at the moment. Her burst of drunken energy and infusion of love for the world was gone. She was suddenly tired of everything. Tired of working so hard, tired of dodging Royal around the winery, tired of navigating their divorce while he lived it up in luxury. Tabitha wondered if his new girlfriend knew about the trove of bush pictures that Royal the Weed-Whacking Slime Minister kept on his phone. This thought made her laugh, but she was too tired to open her eyes and explain the joke to Mark and Liz. Tabitha wondered if it was her moral duty to tell Royal’s new girlfriend everything she knew, but even the thought of a moral duty exhausted her.

  She opened her eyes and regarded her friends in the front seat. Mark steered with his left hand, and his right rested on Liz’s crossed knee. Liz reached over to turn on the radio, then dropped her hand on his, and her thumb tapped along with the music. Tabitha was tired of this, too, these happy couples surrounding her. Gabrielle and Doug finishing each other’s sentences; her parents’ knowing glances that excluded everyone else in the room. She could not remember if she and Royal ever had this ease, this comfort, that other happy couples seemed to have. Had Royal looked at her like there was no one else in the room? Had he ever rested his hand on her knee, without even thinking about it, just out of comfortable habit and a subconscious need to touch her? Did their bodies fit together, seek each other out in crowds like ions attracted to each other?

  No.

  When she and Royal sat next to each other at dinner parties, they each talked to the person on the opposite side of them, never to each other. They didn’t lean in to share inside jokes; their hands didn’t drift over to find each other. She had never once shared a friend with Royal—never, now that she thought of it, even considered him a friend. He never looked at her with anything like affection. Lust, maybe. Pride, but only when another man flirted with her. Possession, usually. He was her boss, then suddenly her husband. He was always in charge.

  And he was never a friend.

  Liz pointed at something on the street. Mark nodded and smiled. A silent conversation between them, a history, a shared vocabulary. Such a tiny, unguarded moment that Tabitha felt embarrassed, as if she’d intruded on something profound. Their intimacy caused hot tears to sting Tabitha’s eyes. Do not start crying, you dumbass. Whatever you do, do not be a thirty-five-year-old woman who gets drunk and says she loves everyone in the room and then cries in the back of a car. Please do not be that woman.

  She bit her lip hard and tasted blood in her mouth. The coppery tang stung her, made every sense come alive. She balanced on the edge of a decision, her toes over the precipice, almost ready to fall in, hoping that her friends would catch her. But she backed away. She was drunk enough for bad decisions, but not drunk enough for that one.

  “I can’t tell you anything, Mark,” she said, her voice low in the quiet car. “I can’t do it.”

  His eyes met hers in the mirror, but he did not reply.

  “You are right, though. What you want to write about him. It’s all true. It’s even worse than what you suspect. But if you link it back to me, I will deny everything.”

  “I am publishing it with or without your input.” He spoke calmly, but he lifted his right hand off Liz’s leg and back to the steering wheel, and his knuckles whitened when he gripped it. “I’ll find it all out eventually; you know I will. If you don’t help me, he’ll keep this up. He’ll keep cheating, and he’ll keep winning things he doesn’t deserve. I can’t even imagine what he’s doing with the money.”

  “He’s buying bigger computers to look at bigger pictures of naked women who he is not married to.”

  He paused before replying, seemed to consider his words. Perhaps he was internally debating the value of negotiating with a drunk woman in the back seat of his car. “I know you’re angry. You’ll always be angry. But you can help me stop him.”

  “And ruin my career in the process.”

  “You’ll be a whistleblower.”

  “A whistleblower who doesn’t have a job.”

  Tabitha kept her gaze on the window for a long time, unwilling to meet his eyes again. They had not invited her out tonight to get her drunk and pry information out of her; that had been an unfair accusation, and Tabitha knew it. Mark wanted her to tell the truth because it was the right thing to do. A person with his moral code could not understand what was stopping her.

  She stole a glance at his face again and had to look away quickly, because she didn’t think she could bear the disappointment she saw there.

  “You have to understand. Taking down the Royal and destroying the reputation of the winery won’t make me happy again.”

  Liz turned to face her.

  “What would make you happy again?”

  Tabitha stared out the window at lights of the passing buildings, all of the images of the night colliding in her head with that question. People came to California’s Central Coast for the peaceful vistas and the wine, but tonight it was just a chaos of business and commerce. She couldn’t hear the waves crashing, and she couldn’t smell the salt air. Her brain pounded with metal music and slasher movies and skeletons having sex.

  Nothing made sense.

  There was no answer that she could think of, no job situation or person that offered her peace.

  But there was a place.

  23

  She dreamt of a bar with skull taps dispensing blood into ebony steins.

  She dreamt that Mark drove in circles around the valley wineries, while she sobbed in the back seat, strapped in with a belt buckle she couldn’t unlatch. I know you know the answer, he repeated. You’re not getting out of here until you tell me what you know. He kept driving, circling the city, passing each of the wineries she knew and loved. She saw the familiar facades in the night and put her hand on the cold glass, feeling a pulsing bass beat come through her palms, thinking of the people she knew inside. It was the middle of the night, but she was sure her friends were working inside, bottling wine, unable to hear her. And Mark drove, his face impassive while Liz played the drums on his hand.

  Tabitha jerked awake from a sleep as heavy as a coma and wiped the saliva from the corner of her mouth.

  “Signore e signori, ci stiamo preparando al decollo all’aeroporto di Treviso, pertanto vi invitiamo a controllare che la vostra cintura di sicurezza sia correttamente agganciata, che il tavolino sia sollevato e bloccato e che il vostro sedile sia in posizione verticale. Benvenuti in Italia, e vi ringraziamo per aver volato con Alitalia.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re beginning our descent into the Treviso airport, so we ask that you make sure your seatbelt is properly fastened, your tray table is raised and locked, and your seat is in the upright position. Welcome to Italy, and thank you for flying Alitalia.”

  She stared at the airplane seat in front of her. Her body was drenched in stick
y sweat, and she still had the foul taste of last night’s beer in her mouth. Had she put anything in her stomach since Mark and Liz dropped her off at Gabrielle’s?

  Crackers. She’d eaten a sleeve of crackers dipped in a jar of peanut butter while she scrolled her phone for a plane ticket. She’d chugged a bottle of water while she stood in the dark outside her sister’s house, waiting for the taxi to take her to the airport. As soon as she sat on the plane, she’d popped an Ambien and passed out. Now her stomach growled with a combination of hunger and nausea. The flight attendant slipped a water bottle to her. “We’re past service time,” he said under his breath, leaning over her seat to adjust the tray table next to her. “But you look like you could use this.”

  “Thank you,” she mumbled. “Did we fly super fast, or something? How are we here already?”

  He grinned. “Usual time, bella. You slept pretty hard. All out of your system?”

  “Is all of what out of my system?”

  “Whatever. The booze. The man.”

  She couldn’t think of an answer for him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “It doesn’t even matter. Look.” He patted her hand and then pointed out the window. “Look where we are. This place can solve everything for you.”

  She gazed out the window at the rolling green and gold hills below her. Italy. The murmur of the other passengers, the rolling vowels and the staccato bursts of the Italian language washed over her.

  “You can have the world,” she mumbled, almost, but not quite, to herself.

  “…if I can have Italy,” he finished, and she looked up at him in surprise. He smiled and squeezed her hand, then continued up the aisle, checking tray tables and gathering trash as he walked. Leaving her to wonder, as she did with nearly every person she’d ever met, what heartbreak had put him here. And what redemption he had found in Italy.

  “You didn’t even wake me.”

  “I know, I’m sorry.”

  “You couldn’t even wake me up just to say, ‘Hey, I’ve flipped out and am leaving the country’? You can’t even say something that basic to your twin sister? No, instead you just get on a plane and leave.”

  “It was impulsive, I can give you that much.” Tabitha knew immediately that this was the wrong thing to say when she heard her sister’s sharp intake of breath.

  “Impulsive? That’s what you call this?” Gabrielle’s voice caged a tremor that stopped Tabitha in her tracks. It occurred to her that Micah had better not ever step out of line, because her fierce sister had a tiger living in her ribcage.

  “G, listen. I get it. Not impulsive. It was stupid. I had a rough night.”

  “What could be so rough that you jumped on a plane out of the country?”

  “I went to this crazy-ass brewery with Mark and Liz.”

  There was a long pause before Gabrielle replied,

  “Aaaaannnd? What? They kidnapped you and made you their sex slave? There had better be some Pulp Fiction shit happening to you right now. Otherwise, I cannot think of one good reason why you would walk into my house and pack your bags and leave at four in the morning without so much as one word to me or my husband or your nephew.”

  Tabitha pulled her phone away from her face to giggle, knowing that if her sister heard her laughing, she’d lose her mind. Tabitha was the emotional one; Gabrielle was strong and rational. It had been this way since the day they were born. When her sister did flip out, like now, it was so surprising to Tabitha that it almost always made her laugh, half out of comic shock and half out of terror.

  “Okay, no. Nothing like that. We went to this weird brewery and had too much to drink. I had too much to drink. They had a normal amount.”

  “And then you left?”

  “Yes. Well, no. It wasn’t that.” She looked around the airport now, the other travelers passing her on the concourse. She gripped the handle of her rolling suitcase, letting the waves of people part and move around her. She closed her eyes and tried to recall the moment, the feeling when she knew that she had to get out of the Central Coast and out of her head, do something that might change her life. “It was more like, everything hit me, G. All at once. I was sad and angry and lonely, and they’re so happy, and you’re so happy, and I couldn’t take it anymore. What am I going to do next?”

  “How is this going to solve anything?”

  Tabitha dropped her suitcase and sat on it, resting her head in her hand. “I don’t know. It won’t solve anything.”

  “Then come home.”

  “To what, exactly? No personal life. One crap job with a shifty ex-husband. One great job that I can’t keep up with. No home of my own. No award for my hard work. Everything is in flames.”

  “You have ways to put these flames out, you know.”

  Tabitha couldn’t answer.

  “Did you talk to Mark about anything important?” It was the first time Gabrielle had hinted that she knew about the scandal involving Royal. The thought of her sister’s disappointment nearly knocked the breath out of Tabitha’s chest.

  “Mark asked. I didn’t talk. I can’t do it, G.”

  Gabrielle exhaled a long, slow breath. It was a long time before she spoke again.

  “So, you flew to Italy. Because you are sad.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you left me a note to pick up your car in the parking lot of a meatpacking district.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to dump all of your wine in the bathtub and take a long soak in it.”

  Tabitha laughed. “That’s fine. I hear it’s good for your skin.”

  “What are you going to do there, Tab? I mean, you have to come back here eventually. And everything is still going to be here. Royal and his girlfriends. Mark and his story. Your job situation. It’s not going away just because you are pulling a Britney-style flip-out.”

  “I just need to get out of that crazy, obsessed, nonstop world of chasing prizes and selling shit to people and always looking for the next award. I need to think.”

  “Fine. You think. Think all you want.” Gabrielle paused again, and Tabitha waited for the benediction. Finally, Gabrielle sighed. “I’m here if you need to talk. Take care of yourself.”

  It hadn’t been fair; Tabitha knew that. It seemed spontaneous at the time, but in retrospect, she knew it must have been quite a shock for Gabrielle and Doug to wake up to an empty bedroom and instructions to pick up a car.

  Well, she’d never been known as the sensible twin.

  Still sitting on her suitcase, she composed an email to Cori, explaining where she was and that she needed the time off work. Dread sank low in her belly as she wrote—she didn’t have any events or trips planned for Cori in the next couple of weeks, but there was no way skipping the country was going to look good on her résumé. Next, she wrote a list of instructions and copied Gabrielle and Emil. She sent a blunt one-line announcement to Royal—Out of the country—without any further explanation. She tried to think who else she could give instructions to in order to ease the burden of her sudden disappearance, but she knew in her heart that her sister and Emil could handle the day-to-day winery operations.

  Her finger hovered over Mark’s contact button for a long time. She didn’t know what she could possibly say to him. She would have to start with an apology. But where would she go from there?

  It made no sense to confirm his suspicions without some proof in the form of documentation, receipts, vineyard timelines, anything. She couldn’t give him anything concrete from the airport floor, so there was no point telling him she shared his suspicions. Mark said he had a paper trail, but as far as Tabitha knew for certain, it was all speculation. Gossip, even.

  There was always the slight possibility Mark was wrong, too. Throughout her marriage, she had brushed off any negative talk about Royal as jealousy. Now, Mark was dancing around some of her suspicions—things don’t taste quite right, the math doesn’t add up, there has been talk. But what if she tried to find proof for Mark and came up
empty-handed? She would destroy whatever tentative business relationship she actually had with her ex-husband. Royal had always dismissed her concerns—she didn’t appreciate his palate, he said, or she didn’t understand the market. Now that she thought about it, where had she ever gotten the idea that she knew how to taste wine?

  She removed her finger from the contact button and turned her phone off.

  She started walking again, slowly, letting herself be guided by the crowd to the outside of the airport. She didn’t like making her sister angry, but she knew that out of anyone, Gabrielle would forgive her, and that part of her, somewhere, already understood. Gabrielle grew frustrated by her sister’s impulsive acts, but always, ultimately, could forgive it because their hearts beat together with a matching ferocity.

  Tabitha stepped out of the airport and into the dusky evening light and took a deep breath. The airport was full of cars and travelers, everyone hurrying to find their family and make their connection, get somewhere. She looked up at the late afternoon light, cast with that special olive-gold that streaked the Italian sky. She took a deep breath; her shoulders relaxed and her heartbeat slowed. Why did she ever leave Italy? She was different here; she moved differently, breathed differently. At the first sign of distress from now on in her life, she would come to Italy and breathe for a few minutes. Just to land here and know that no matter what other kind of fuckery there ever was in the world, Italy was always here. It was almost enough to make her feel alive again.

  A voice interrupted her reverie.

  “I have Prosecco waiting for you at my home. Ti accompagno?”

  She opened her eyes and looked to her side, her jaw dropping in shock.

  “Giovanni?”