Prosecco Heart

by Julie Strauss

  “Of course he’s not lying. I think it is all true.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want to do nothing. I want to throw my phone away and forget all about the winery and Wine Life Magazine and being a somm. I want to live here in this village and help you make that beautiful wine and serve it to people who love to drink it just because it’s delicious, not because it’s a label. I want to make out with you every single day and make love to you every single night and eat pasta for dinner and learn to speak Italian and watch your daughters grow up.”

  She blurted it all out without thinking, and then stopped in astonishment. She could not remember a time when she’d been so nakedly honest with anyone, except perhaps Gabrielle. She watched his face to see if she’d gone too far, but she knew she hadn’t. With Giovanni, she could speak the truth.

  “What do you think I should do?”

  “All of those things,” he said. “Especially making love every night.”

  They smiled at each other, and Tabitha stopped to consider the possibilities in front of her. For the first time, she had a dream that made her happy. Not just professionally happy, not just accomplished enough to impress her mother, but a vision of a life that seemed to include everything. She could see that dream in front of her now, on the shabby couch with her feet tangled up with this handsome man in front of a crackling fireplace. Happy children slept in the rooms down the hall; perhaps more children in the future. Maybe this was the vision of her life she’d always wanted, but never allowed herself to recognize: this contentment, this feeling of being loved without expectation, this sense of being a valuable part of a family who accepted her for who she was and not what she could provide. It was all here, in front of her, and she had been living it these past two weeks like a daydream.

  But it was only that: a daydream. As real as this life felt to her, as a part of it as she thought she was, she knew that it was illusory.

  “I only worry about your phone,” Giovanni continued. “If you throw your phone away, how long will you be happy with me?”

  “I think I would be happy with you forever.”

  “I would make sure of that. But you are not a woman who could be happy if her friends are hurting.”

  She turned from his gaze and stared into the dying fire. As soon as she said the words out loud, everything would change. She thought about saying goodbye to the girls, and an ache formed in her throat. She couldn’t even think about saying goodbye to Giovanni.

  “What happens in these cases?” Giovanni finally asked. “Can you simply call them, and tell them what you know? Then these people who are in court will know that Mark tells the truth?”

  She shook her head. “Yes, but there will be more to deal with. Royal is suing Mark on the winery’s behalf. That means I’m involved. If I find any evidence that Royal has done something wrong—and I’m not saying I can, but if I do, I don’t know what will happen. Will we lose the winery? Will the winery be stripped of all the medals they won under him? I don’t know how this works. I just know that those people trusted me, and I let them down because Royal gaslighted me. I trusted him more than I trusted myself.”

  “What does this word mean—gaslight?”

  “It means I knew he was lying. I knew it, Giovanni. Every time I brought up a concern. If I suggested the Mourvedre tasted awfully sweet, for example, he’d convince me that I was inexperienced.”

  “When did you realize he did this gaslight?”

  “When Mark started telling me about all of the inconsistencies, everything I used to ignore at El Zop made sense. It was already humiliating that he’d been cheating on our marriage for years. And I never once suspected that. I was too proud to admit that I was accidentally ignorant about our marriage but willfully ignorant about our business. I thought if I came after Royal with what I knew, I would look like a vicious shrew. A scorned woman, only out for revenge.”

  He thought about this for a long time.

  “And what now? Can you change anything?”

  “I can tell the truth, but I will look stupid when I tell it. Who is that blind to her own husband’s criminal behavior? But I’ll tell it anyway. We might lose the winery. But I can get someone out of trouble that he doesn’t deserve.”

  “Mark?”

  “Mark. The one person in all of this who doesn’t have any blood on his hands. The one person whose only goal was to tell the truth. And I stopped him, just as much as Royal did. It’s nice to think that I’m the honorable one, but in reality, I acted just like my ex-husband. I didn’t want to look bad, so I let Mark suffer in my place.”

  “You are not like Royal. You are different than him in every way. Your ex-husband is a man who cheats on everything and every person he meets. It would not occur to him to fix something that he has done wrong. It eats at you every day. I can see it in you even when you don’t know that you are thinking about it. You are not truly happy if you have been a part of something wrong or incorrect or ugly.”

  “I am happy here.” She turned back to him and looked into his eyes, eyes that had become so familiar to her that. In Giovanni’s eyes was the promise of the home she’d always wanted, the life she’d craved. The love and stability that she’d never had, though she’d fought with everyone she met to create it.

  He put his book on the coffee table in front of them and moved over her, pulling her into an embrace. “I am not Royal. I do not want half of you. The ambitious half, the half that looks beautiful on my arm, the part of you that is only for the outside world to see. I want all of you. I want your heart that is not divided by sadness or regret. I want you completely.”

  “I can’t say goodbye to the girls. I can’t say goodbye to you.”

  “In Italian, we say spero di vederti presto. I hope I will see you soon.”

  She met his lips in a kiss that stopped time. They had that, at least. They had another night together, a kiss that could make them forget the impending sadness, two bodies that fit together as if they had been carved from the same piece of wood. Their grain, the whorls and burls of their skin matched each other; their flaws fit into each other’s strengths; their pleasure could erase their pain. They had tonight.

  28

  Tabitha could not keep still. She twisted her hands in her lap, crossed and uncrossed her legs, stood to refill her water for the third time. When she sat down again, Jillie looked up from the screen in front of her and regarded Tabitha with a cool eye.

  “Stop fidgeting.”

  “I’m sorry. I have some sort of reverse jetlag or something. I have jet hyper.”

  “You are distracting me. Go sit in the living room with your father.”

  “No, I’ll be quiet.” Her mother looked down at the computer and continued reading. The only things that moved were the index finger of her right hand as she clicked through the document, and her eyes, which ran across the page without forming an expression.

  To Tabitha’s knowledge, Jillie Jones Lawson had never in her life fidgeted, slouched, or leaned. She remained still, composed, assured, no matter the chaos that surrounded her. Now she read with a ramrod straight spine, not touching the back of the seat, her head erect, chin parallel to the floor. Tabitha could see her mother’s legs through the clear glass dining room table, slanted to the side and crossed at the ankles.

  Tabitha tried to hold the same position, to will her body into stillness, but she’d guzzled gallons of coffee on the plane from Italy; now her body buzzed with so much manic caffeinated energy that she could almost hear her blood pumping through her veins. Her right foot tapped against the opposite ankle and her fingers trembled in her lap.

  Jillie looked up at her again, and Tabitha stopped tapping.

  “I can tell you wrote it on an airplane.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly professional.”

  “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?”

  “What do you expect of me?”

  �
��Goddammit, Mother.” Tabitha stood up from the table, strode to the guest bathroom and slammed the door. She turned on the tap and let the cold water pour over her hands before leaning down to drink out of her palm; long, cold draughts of water that filled her belly and cleared her thoughts. She splashed water on her face and took several long breaths before she dried it off and left the bathroom. At the end of the hall, her mother stood at the open front door.

  “Let’s walk,” Jillie said. “You look like you need some fresh air.”

  Tabitha glanced at her father, sitting on the couch. She thought she saw the tiniest smirk at the corner of his mouth, but Felix didn’t look up from the baseball game. Jillie knotted a scarf neatly around her neck, and Tabitha followed her outside, where they walked the stone path that edged the golf course.

  “You’ve just arrived from Italy.” Tabitha nodded in response, though Jillie had said it as a statement, not a question. Jillie continued. “You came to a decision while you were in there. You spent the flight home writing a passionate, disorganized screed about Royal Hamilton’s nefarious business dealings. You showed up at my door, with your suitcase in your hand, and asked me to read it. Which I have. So now, I will repeat my question. Please, for once in your life, don’t get angry at me and stomp away. Just answer me. What do you want from me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jillie seemed oddly satisfied with this answer.

  “Could it be that you want permission? Condemnation? Approval? I won’t give you any of those things. I think you already know that.”

  “I think,” Tabitha spoke slowly, trying to figure out the answer for herself. “I think I want your advice. I want to know what you think I should do next.”

  “That list of his offenses goes back to before you were even married. You won’t be able to prove anything that happened at El Zopilote based on what you are suspicious about now.”

  Tabitha nodded. “I just wanted to write it all down. Everything I could think of that I have ever wondered about. To see if there were patterns to his behavior, to see how it all made sense.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “I think I can prove a pattern of paying off judges at competitions where our wines were sub-par. There were years when the wine was stellar and deserved medals. But there were other years where it wasn’t, and it objectively didn’t deserve awards. I’m willing to bet that if I examine all of our expenditures in those years, some of them will have connections to wine judges. I also think I can prove a pattern of lying about the wines he produces. False labeling, for the most part. If I can prove capitalization, it will lead to some pretty serious questions about tax evasion.”

  “That won’t reflect well on you, personally or professionally. If it happened before you married Royal, you would look like an idiot. If it happened while you were married to him and in business with him, you would look like a guilty idiot.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going to be okay with that?”

  “Do you know what’s weird? I never even wanted to be a winemaker.” They paused their walk and stayed quiet as a golfer on the green near them prepared to swing. After he’d shot, they walked again, and Tabitha continued. “Not a winemaker like that, I mean. I never wanted to be a part of that high-stakes, high-money world that he loves so much, and you love so much.” She could see her mother open her mouth to object, but she kept talking. “There’s nothing wrong with it, and I’m not comparing you to him, Mom. Some people, like you, can thrive in it. Some people, like Royal, cheat their way into it. But either way, it’s not for me. I just want to give people good wine. I don’t care about the five hundred dollar bottles, or international prestige, or any of it.”

  “You sure acted as if you cared about it.”

  “Fair enough. Maybe the right way to say it is, I cared about it for a while, until I realized it wasn’t making me happy. Now I don’t care anymore.”

  They walked in silence until they reached a small bench near the fifteenth green and sat quietly until a group of golfers finished their putts.

  “A lot of those accusations you made will hurt people I know,” Jillie said. “People I worked with for many years.”

  “I’ve never once accused you of anything.”

  “And you won’t. I have a sterling reputation in the wine industry.” Jillie spoke sharply, but Tabitha didn’t reply. She felt her mother watching her, but she kept her eyes on the golfers, who climbed into their cart and drove away. Finally, Jillie spoke again. “I suppose I have a much better reputation in the wine industry than I do in the parenting industry. So be it. In my day, you had to choose.”

  Tabitha couldn’t keep her mouth from dropping open in shock. Her mother smiled at her expression. “At least, I thought I had to choose. It never occurred to me that I had options.”

  Tabitha digested this information for a moment, then asked, “So how did you do it? How did you keep your hands clean? Because there is no way this is the first time you’ve come across dirty business practices.”

  “You know why I’m considered such a dragon? Because I never backed down. I never once took a bribe. I never shut up when I saw something underhanded. I fought back when the men had a meeting and didn’t include me. I deserved to make decisions, and I deserved to be in the boardrooms, because I worked harder than any of them to get there. So they called me shrill, and intimidating, and a bitch. That’s what they do to women who don’t back down.” She paused and then corrected herself. “That’s what they used to do. Now, women who speak out are admired. You’ll see.”

  Jillie stood and started walking back down the path, but Tabitha could only stare at her retreating figure. Had her mother paid her a compliment? Sure, it had been in that back-asswards way she had of never really saying anything kind to her daughter. Still, it had been almost encouraging. She jumped up to join her mother, who kept talking as if she hadn’t noticed Tabitha’s shock. Which, Tabitha knew from experience, she probably hadn’t. “The way you see it,” Jillie said, “You have two options. You can leave El Zopilote and let him continue doing whatever it is you think he is doing. You’ll take a hard financial loss, but the business will probably continue for the foreseeable future.”

  “My friends and sister will keep their jobs.”

  Her mother shrugged. “That’s their problem, not yours. What will you do with yourself if you leave El Zopilote quietly?”

  “Move to Italy and work as a full-time rep for OWNS,” Tabitha replied without hesitation.

  “Your other option, as you see it, is that you can expose him and his business practices, probably destroy the winery in the process, and ruin his reputation along with your own.”

  “If it goes down that way, my friends and sister will lose their jobs.”

  “Once again, not your problem. Though I do admire your newfound integrity. I can see a third option, if you’d like to hear it.”

  “I’d love to hear it.”

  “Buy him out and run the business on your own.”

  Tabitha chewed on the inside of her cheek while she pondered this option. “Mom, I am not cut out for owning a winery. That much should be obvious to you, of all people.”

  Her mother stopped walking and faced her. “You’re not cut out for owning a winery the way Royal Hamilton owns a winery. That much is clear to me. But you’re also not cut out for living like a hermit in Italy and ignoring everyone you love.” She put a hand on Tabitha’s shoulder in a move that almost resembled affection. “Maybe there is something in between?” Jillie raised an eyebrow, then turned and kept walking.

  “You’d better be careful,” Tabitha called to her mother’s retreating back. “If you keep acting like this, people will start to think you are nice.”

  “Well, they’d be wrong,” her mother called back. “I’m still a dragon.”

  She quickened her steps to catch up and was surprised and pleased to see her mother smiling.

  “So, I go forward with the information
I have, and take Royal down? Even though it will expose some of the people you know? If I trace some of Royal’s payments to industry big shots, I’ll name names.”

  “As long as you tell the truth, I’m behind you. I’ll even help you, if I can. So will Dad, and so will your sister. You can count on us. Me. You can count on me.”

  “What the hell’s gotten into you, Mom? Offering me motherly advice and acting supportive? Did you have a stroke while I was in Italy?”

  “You asked my advice, and I gave it.” Her mother pulled the scarf off her neck and opened the door of her condo for Tabitha.

  “I mean, that’s great advice. Terrifying, but great.”

  “So is everything in life that’s worth doing, Tabitha Lawson. It’s about time you realized that.”

  29

  “So what I am providing here is a copy of my accounting records for all of the years I have worked at El Zopilote del Mar winery. As I understand it, the numbers are very different than the books my ex-husband Royal Hamilton provided you.”

  She handed a stack of papers over to the row of besuited people sitting across the table from her.

  “In addition, I’ve outlined the make-up of every vintage that was created while I have been employed there. If I had questions about the provenance of the grapes involved in production, I marked that, and cross-referenced it to our purchases from the same time, to highlight any discrepancies. Sometimes I put my objections in writing to him, in an e-mail or text, but not too often. Since we were married at the time, most of our disagreements just happened in conversation. But I’ve been able to pinpoint some pretty significant differences.” She handed another sheaf of paper across the table and glanced down at the volume of paper in the crate next to her. She’d been home for two months and had spent that entire time buried in El Zopilote’s back office, tracking down every single piece of paper she could find about the production of the wine.

  “If we can verify this—and it shouldn’t be hard, given the amount of information you are providing—it could well strip the winery of some titles. Are you aware of this?”