Eight Hundred Grapes

by Laura Dave

  “I do, but I don’t have a car.”

  “You want a ride?”

  I laughed, shaking my head.

  “The proper response is thank you. Or, thank you anyway. Only two options.”

  He wasn’t wrong, even if I couldn’t stand him.

  I turned back toward The Tasting Room. My mother was walking outside to make sure I was okay. She caught my eye and started walking toward me.

  Which was when I saw Henry. He was standing in the parking lot across the street, waiting for my mother, for wherever he was planning on taking her.

  Had my mother told him to stay out of sight so my father wouldn’t see him? Was she going to run to their meeting spot now that my father was distracted? Was I going to have to see them kiss hello?

  Jacob tilted his head, following my eyes across the street. “Who’s that guy?” he asked.

  “Let’s just go,” I said.

  Jacob looked surprised. “Okay.” Then Jacob paused, remembering something, looking like he didn’t know how to say what he’d remembered. “Thing is, my car’s back at my place. In Graton. We could walk to it. And then I could drive you home.”

  “It’s five miles!”

  “More like seven,” he said. “Remember your choices. Thank you or thank you anyway.”

  My mother was getting closer.

  I glanced at Henry. He hadn’t yet noticed my mother. He looked like he’d spotted me, though, like he just might decide to come over to introduce himself again. Fully clothed.

  This was when I started walking.

  Grown, Produced, and Bottled

  My father’s favorite varietal of his wine, Concerto, was an ode to my mother’s musical roots—and an ode to the word itself. Concerto. My parents loved what it meant. It originated from the conjunction of two Latin words: conserere, which means to tie, to join, to weave, and certamen, which means competition, fight. The idea was that the two parts in a concerto, the soloist and the orchestra, alternate episodes of opposition and cooperation in the creation of the musical flow. In the creation of synchronization.

  Which was, precisely, what was required of wine.

  Which was precisely what I had lost. Any cooperation. Leaving only opposition.

  Jacob wanted to avoid downtown, so we wound up Sullivan Road into the hills—into the deep remoteness of the old apple orchards, stunning farmhouses, renovated barns. This route exemplified the very quiet I had run from as a teenager. It suddenly felt comforting to be back in it. It felt comforting and completely unchanged. Which maybe, at the moment, was the same thing.

  I’d taken this walk with Ben one of the first times I had brought him to Sebastopol. Ben had immediately fallen in love with it—the hills, the crisp quality of the trees and the faltering terrain, farmhouses harboring stories.

  Jacob and I walked quietly, neither of us anxious to talk, at least not to each other. Then, Jacob broke the silence.

  “This is going to be a long walk if we don’t call a temporary truce,” he said.

  I motioned toward the hills, the naked landscape around us. “It’s going to be a long walk anyway.”

  Jacob nodded in agreement, which was about as close to a truce as we were getting. “It must have been weird growing up here,” he said.

  I turned toward him, startled to hear out loud the opposite of what Ben had said.

  “Most people assume that it was idyllic.”

  “Because it’s so pretty?”

  “Something like that.”

  Jacob put his hands in his back pockets. “Growing up is never idyllic, is it? Or it’d be called something else.”

  I turned away, not wanting him to see how that made me smile. “My mother would say you had to use your imagination raising kids here because there wasn’t much going on. It would force us to make our own fun. Turning the old apple orchards into mazes. Doing a weekly relay race that would end at the ice cream shop and with two scoops of their homemade ice cream. At ten in the morning.”

  “I grew up in New York City. Our relay races would involve a nanny. And end on the 4 or 5 subway heading downtown for a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya.”

  “Sounds idyllic.”

  He smiled. “It wasn’t bad.”

  Jacob bent down, picked up a handful of rocks. He started throwing them, one at a time.

  “I remember coming to visit my grandparents when I was a kid. Of course, they lived in Napa, but they had this barn and I’d lie there staring at the stars,” he said. “It’s weird to live somewhere where you can’t see the stars. I told myself when I was old enough, I’d get my own barn.”

  “Your own stars?”

  He nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “Kind of how you want your own skyscraper. You’ll have plenty of those in London.”

  “Or if I stay in L.A.”

  It was the first time I had said it out loud. What I might do if Ben and I couldn’t get past it, in a world that went on for me Ben-less.

  Still, I felt my breath catch in my throat, thinking of London. My new office was in a small building near the Chelsea Arts Club, a short walk from our house, a short walk from Ben’s architecture firm. Ben had done the walk when he had been in London the month before—in the morning and the evening—noting the places we’d most want to stop together. A coffee shop in a converted garden, a rooftop art gallery, every theater on the West End.

  “Why would you stay in L.A.? I mean, if you didn’t go to London. Would it be for your job? I only ask because I hated being a lawyer. I really hated it.” He paused. “The five minutes I was one.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t practice,” I said.

  “No, I practiced. After I left Cornell, I moved to New York and joined a law firm in the corporate restructuring division. But it was literally five minutes. I quit before lunch.”

  I nodded. I had friends from law school who felt like Jacob did, who absolutely hated the law. I didn’t. That wasn’t the same as saying I loved it. Suzannah loved it. She loved it because she loved confrontation and she loved being right—and law allowed her both of those things on a daily basis.

  I didn’t love it, but it had always felt like the right path. And when I doubted it, I thought of my law school graduation. My parents had driven to L.A., proudly treating my then boyfriend, Griffin Winfield, to dinner after. At dinner, my father made a toast saying that he was glad I was going to have an easy life. Griffin had given him a look, as if deciding how rude he wanted to be. Then he decided he wanted to be very rude. He told my father that climbing the legal ladder was hardly easy. Though he hadn’t understood what my father meant. My father meant that law provided a path. If you worked hard, you’d be rewarded. You’d have a career you could count on.

  Griffin didn’t agree with that either. He thought it was talent that separated out the most successful lawyers. Though that was the main thing he didn’t understand. My father never measured success the way he did—reaching the tip-top of something, as if there was an objective tip-top. My father measured it by how well you figured out what you wanted for your life—what you needed to be happy.

  And this was where my mixed feelings came in. Recently, I had to admit I didn’t feel happy. Maybe I was distracted by the wedding planning, or our move to Europe. All I knew was that I needed a change. And I was hoping London was going to provide it.

  “So you want to stay in L.A.? For your work?” Jacob said.

  “There may be a world in which I do that,” I said.

  “The world in which you tell me what made you walk out on your dress fitting?”

  We reached the main strip of Graton, which wasn’t really a strip at all, just two restaurants across the street from each other. But they were great restaurants, farm-fresh food from the gardens behind them. Spaghetti nights on Monday. With all the great food in Los Angeles, I still missed spaghetti on Monday.
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  “You tell me first,” I said.

  “About my botched wedding?” He shrugged. “My fiancé would say that she felt like I prioritized my work over her. We were getting married at City Hall, the week before we headed out here. Just a couple of friends and family at this restaurant in Tribeca afterward. Then, the morning of the wedding, she said that she didn’t want to get married the way we were getting married. That she wanted a wedding that counted more, with a fancy dress and a ten-piece band and an expensive cake.”

  “You don’t buy it?”

  “She hates cake.”

  We passed through the entire town and were heading up the hill in the direction of my parents’ house.

  He paused. “We weren’t in a good place,” he said. “And it’s hard to get married when you’re not in a good place. It feels fake.”

  That I could relate to. It was what made me sad about finding out about Maddie the way I had. It would be locked in with the wedding, what I knew about Ben, what Ben had left out about himself.

  “Do you guys still talk?” I said.

  He pointed back in the direction of town, pointing out a house over on State Street, a barn to the side. “We live there,” he said.

  “You guys are still together?”

  He nodded. “Yep. We are still together. Very much so.”

  I started doing the math in my head. He had a girlfriend he’d referred to at the bar: a free-spirited, vegan type.

  “She’s the one who loves chia?”

  “She’s the one who loves chia.”

  It was blocking me up, reconciling the two things about her that Jacob had shared. “The one who wants a big, fancy wedding?”

  He nodded. “We are all complicated people,” he said.

  There was that word again, used as an excuse, used to justify something that felt like love.

  He smiled. “As are you, I’m guessing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know Ms. L.A. Law, but you seem pretty connected to Sonoma County. Unless that’s your thing, storming into people’s offices and demanding they not steal your home?”

  “Very funny.”

  “Just saying . . . building a life so far away from a place you love so much? That’s complicated.”

  I smiled, a bit surprised at the insight.

  “Lee, that’s my girlfriend, doesn’t like it here so much,” he said. “I was hoping you could help with that? Show her what makes it so great.”

  “My father says people either love Sonoma or they feel trapped here.”

  “They should put that on the brochure,” he said.

  Jacob looked back in the direction of his house, then kept moving.

  “So why did you leave? Sonoma, I mean?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Too complicated?” he said.

  I tried not to laugh. “No, it’s just, our family saw a bunch of really tough harvests. I wanted a life that felt more stable.”

  He nodded, considering. “It’s kind of ironic though, don’t you think?”

  “What?”

  “Well, you still ended up in a bar, in your wedding dress.”

  I looked at him, disconcerted. Why did Jacob think he knew me well enough to say that? Why did it bug me if he wasn’t right?

  I sped up, Jacob hurrying to keep up.

  “What happened with Ben?” Jacob said. “Tell me. I have a gift for it.”

  “For what?”

  “For telling people the reasons they shouldn’t be as mad as they are.”

  “You talk too much. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you have trouble answering questions?”

  “Just yours, and that’s probably because they go on and on!”

  He smiled, but he stood there waiting for an answer. “So . . . what happened?”

  I tilted my head, considering what to say. Which was when I realized why I was so hurt that Ben hadn’t told me about Maddie. It wasn’t just that he’d kept his daughter from me—it was the explanation as to why. “I think Ben doubted me.”

  He was quiet. “We all doubt each other,” he said.

  “My parents didn’t. My father saw my mom in a car and that was the end of the story.”

  “Was it the end of the story?” Jacob said.

  “No. What does that say?”

  Jacob paused, and I could see him deciding to tell me that he knew there was something going on with my father and my mother.

  “That there is no one way,” he said.

  We headed down the long driveway, quietly, Jacob looking up at the sky, the clear blue of it.

  “It’s been dry,” he said. “All harvest. Not sure your father told you that.”

  My father rarely gave me details about the harvest when I wasn’t home, or maybe I shouldn’t be letting myself off the hook like that. I rarely asked him the specifics about his work and he had stopped offering them. Which was starting to feel like a fitting punishment for the fact that soon I wouldn’t be able to ask him anymore.

  “It makes me nervous,” he said. “I think we’re going to get soaked, and your father’s most valuable grapes are still on the vines.”

  I followed his eyes up to the sky, which was cloudless and calm. “It doesn’t seem that way,” I said.

  Jacob started walking again, slowly moving toward the house. “It never does.”

  He paused.

  “I feel like we’re going to get all the way to your parents’ house without me saying the thing I think would be the most helpful in regards to Ben,” Jacob said.

  “You have a thing?”

  “I have a thing,” he said.

  “Go for it.”

  “If you’re not careful, you run out of time.”

  I tried to figure out what he meant.

  He pointed straight ahead, down the driveway. And I realized what he meant was he had run out of time to tell his thing because we were no longer alone.

  On the doorstep was the cutest girl in the world. Wearing heart leggings. The girl who looked exactly like her famously beautiful mother.

  And Ben. Her father.

  Part 2

  The Crush

  Ben and Maddie and Georgia and Jacob

  The day I met Ben, he was wearing glasses. Tortoise-rimmed. Glasses he never wore, but he had forgotten his contact lenses. If I had seen him without those glasses, it would have been too much. He was take-your-breath-away good-looking. Suzannah said he looked like Superman: the same strong jaw and cheekbones, the same ridiculous shoulders. But he had one up on Clark Kent as far as I was concerned because he had these great eyes, green and deep and honest. And when he focused them on you, he seemed like he was going to do it. Make everything okay.

  Ben had come out to Los Angeles for a profile Architectural Digest was running. He and a handful of other architects had been included in their “New Talent” issue—a title Ben thought was hilarious, considering he had been a working architect for a decade by then. But he was glad to take the work that came with it. He had an hour after the photo shoot before he had to head back to New York. We were sitting in a hotel bar near the airport, drinking watered-down martinis. Ben wanted to go over contracts—that was what he’d said. But he also said, out loud, that he was doing something else. Ben said that was finding out if the girl on the phone matched the idea of her in his head.

  “It’s a lot of pressure,” he said.

  “For me?”

  “For me,” he said.

  Ben looked like he never felt pressure. He sipped his martini, looking sexy in a button-down shirt and jeans, a sports jacket.

  “Why pressure?”

  “Why pressure?” He smiled. “You know why.”

  He paused.

  “Th
at woman, on the phone, is the best part of my day. She makes me laugh and she makes me feel happy. She makes me feel like everything is going to work out as soon as she says hello to me.”

  My heart skipped a beat. I nodded, my way of saying I felt the same way.

  “If she is the best part of my day, in person, I’m going to have to do it.”

  “What’s that?”

  He smiled. “You know, change everything for her.”

  Then he reached for my hand. He reached for my hand—his palm cupping my fingers, his fingers running through mine—like we were touching for the thousandth time—and he still had no intention of ever letting go.

  How could I not be his after that? This was how he said hello.

  It would be too simple to say that I never felt good about myself until Ben. And it wouldn’t be true. But everything I was trying to reconcile—who I’d been growing up in Sonoma County, who I was trying to be as a woman building a life in Los Angeles—he was my partner in it. Maybe it was that he grew up similarly to the way I did: in a small town outside London—his father a carpenter who worked around the clock, Ben helping his mother raise his little sisters. He’d received a scholarship to study architecture at the University of London, had built a career for himself there, and then in America.

  I understood the thousand steps between where he’d started and where he’d ended up. And, more than that, I understood the versions of him he contended with along the way: the version of him that was proud of what he’d built and the version buried far beneath that still felt like an outsider. Which might have been why all the versions of me I’d ever been—all the versions of me that I hoped to be—made sense when I was with him.

  Deep in my soul I felt we understood each other, we loved each other. So—despite all the reasons I maybe should have—I didn’t feel threatened by Michelle. I didn’t feel threatened by any of Ben’s previous girlfriends. The thing was, I was in. The first drink together establishing it for me, every day proving it. Ben was my yellow buggy.