by Laura Dave
“You want to take it? We could let someone take over the vineyard for a year.”
“We’d be back before then. I’d go next week. And we’d be back before the grapes finished coming in. You’d only miss part of it.”
“The quiet winter.”
She nodded. “The quiet winter.”
Though of course nothing was quiet these days. It was an exciting time to be in Sebastopol. It was the boom. Everyone was coming to Sebastopol. Winemakers were buying land, making Pinot Noir, people moving up from San Francisco to open restaurants, to open music stores. Sebastopol was getting a hotel. It was the community he’d always wanted. He didn’t want to leave it.
“You don’t want me to take it,” she said.
“I didn’t say that,” he said. Then he used the only ammunition he could think of. “But it will disrupt things for the kids.”
“They’re not kids anymore. They’re in high school. It won’t be the worst thing for them to experience school in New York. Your daughter will love it. She’ll never want to come back.”
He relented. “They’ll be fine. What are we really talking about?”
She shook her head. “You won’t like living in New York. You didn’t even like living in Burgundy. It made you queasy living away from here.”
What made him queasy was Jen bringing up the south of France, Marie standing in front of him. What he’d almost thrown away just to touch her. He had walked out of the room, though. Didn’t that count for something?
“Jen,” he said. “Why don’t we talk about this tomorrow? We can sit down and see how we can work it out. Because if you want to do this, we need you to do this. That’s important.”
“I have to tell them tonight.”
“Okay. So you do want this?”
She shook her head. “It is flattering that they want me still.”
“Of course they do.”
“There is a version in which I go alone. And you come and visit. We could do that too.”
He wasn’t going to separate again, not after what had happened last time. He didn’t think he was strong enough. Marie, standing before him.
“I’d rather go with you.”
She smiled, but it wasn’t loving.
“What?”
“That’s not the same thing as you saying you want to come, Dan.”
“I said I’ll go. I’ll go. What do you want from me, Jen?”
“What do you want from me?” she said.
She waited. It was clear that she wanted everything. She wanted the devotion that she gave to him. She wanted him to stop standing there, pretending he didn’t know these things.
He watched as she walked away from him. He should have stopped her. He should have insisted that they go because he knew how much she wanted it, even if she wasn’t saying it. She wanted to go back to New York if for no other reason than to remember how much she didn’t need to be in New York anymore. Having a taste of that life again would show her she had picked the one that mattered more to her.
What was there to debate? There was one thing for him to say. The details don’t matter, we’ll figure it out.
He was ready to say it, what she most needed to hear.
“Jen,” he said.
But when she didn’t hear him, he didn’t say her name louder. He said it softer, like that was the very same thing.
Home
I didn’t want to go back into the house—not until Michelle was gone—so I headed toward the vineyard, toward the winery, calling Suzannah on the way.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I ended it.”
“What?” She sounded shocked. “What do you mean, you ended it? You’re getting married in five days!”
“Maddie’s mother showed up here and she’s still in love with Ben.”
“So I take it that you didn’t listen to my turtle analogy?”
“How does that apply?”
“Someone opened the door for her!”
I moved deeper into the vines, wanting to feel something besides what I was feeling. “How could he not tell me she wanted to be with him again?”
“How can you let her win?”
“I didn’t know it was a contest.”
“Of course it is!”
I thought of Michelle, stunning and sure of herself. She wasn’t particularly fond of me, though she was great with Maddie. And I could see how, given the chance, she’d be great to Ben.
“Then I’m going to lose.”
“No you’re not. So she’s a little famous. A little gorgeous.”
“Can someone be a little gorgeous?”
“So she’s more than a little gorgeous,” she said. “She’s incredibly gorgeous. You’re not so bad either.”
I laughed.
“Seriously, you’re smart and successful and the most loving person I know. Not to mention gorgeous in your own right. Michelle Carter has nothing on you.”
“Says my best friend.”
“And the man you’re supposed to be with,” Suzannah said.
She was quiet.
“It’s not too late to work this out with him.”
“Why are you pushing me to forgive him?”
“Because you did the wrong thing.”
My heart dropped. “Why are you saying that?”
“Because I have to.” She paused, as if considering how to convince me of that. “Charles cheated on me in high school. Have I told you that? I’m sure I’ve told you that.”
She had told me a hundred times. It was the first story Suzannah had shared, my first day at work, or, after work, when she’d taken me for a welcome-to-law-firm-hell drink. Law firms like to make enemies out of their female lawyers, she said. Let’s be best friends instead. Then she proceeded to prove her friendship by telling me that her husband had been unfaithful. Only halfway through the story did it become clear that Charles had cheated on her in high school. That she remembered it like yesterday, walking in and seeing him with the head of the drama club and clocking him in the head.
“If I hadn’t forgiven him, I would have given up an entire life with him. Our family. All the good things. I was rewarded for forgiving him. That is what I’m trying to say. Forgive Ben. You will be rewarded.”
“There is a difference here. Charles was fifteen when he lied to you.”
She paused. “Details. The point is, you guys are supposed to be together. You have the kind of relationship that is hard to find and even harder to keep. Just like ours, me and Charles.”
I shook my head, feeling like the opposite was true. Otherwise, how had we ended up here?
She was quiet. “Why don’t you come home?”
I thought of Los Angeles and my empty house there. I thought of London, which felt impossibly far away. I looked around at the beautiful vineyard, which was about to belong to someone else.
Suddenly, I had no idea where that was.
The History of Wine
My father liked to say that to understand how to make wine, you had to understand the history of wine. And wine’s history was long and deep, moving from its quiet beginnings in the fifth century BC in Southern France to the rest of the world. A history that archeologists had constructed from the scrapings of 2,500-year-old pottery containers holding the world’s oldest wine, flavored with thyme, rosemary, basil—the Roman invasion, hundreds of years later, introducing wine across France.
It was a long time before winemaking touched down in America. Early vineyards failed in Ohio and Kentucky. California had only gotten into the game two hundred years ago, with Sonoma County housing the first commercial winery, Buena Vista Winery. John Patchett followed suit and planted the first commercial vineyard in Napa Valley. Prohibition had nearly knocked out those early efforts. The wine revolution brought it back in a broader, more o
rganized manner, leading to the modern era of winemaking—the pioneers of the 1960s and ’70s putting California wine on the map, readying it for the blind tastings in Paris, California wines the winners, prying open the hold that French wine had on the world.
My father said the history mattered, mostly because it explained the first thing you had to understand about wine: Wine came from itself. Even wine that was supposedly indigenous to its land still utilized grape clones from Europe, mined everything that had come before to try to get somewhere better.
I found my father standing by the sorting table, a worker beside him, the two of them going through the grapes. They were picking out the whole clusters that he was going to use. When you used whole clusters, stems and all, it added something to the wine—a richness, but a tartness too. The tartness was something that my father strove for, so he wasn’t throwing much away. This wasn’t a harvest for throwing away.
“You look frantic,” he said.
“I need a job to do.”
“Let’s hurry up and give you one, then,” he said.
My father pointed at the open-top fermenters, the destemmed grapes resting inside.
“The grapes may need to be pumped.”
I got up on the ladder and looked down into the tank. The red grapes were spitting, almost bubbling, like a stew.
“They look good, don’t they?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, afraid everything with Ben would come pouring out.
My father motioned up at me. “I have more jobs, if you come down.”
I sat down on top of the ladder, several feet above my father, looking down at the winery below, moving along, beautifully, as if to music. It calmed me, helping me to take a much-needed breath.
“Or you can just sit there, lazy.”
“Dad, why aren’t you angry at her?”
My father’s eyes narrowed. “Careful, kid . . . I’m not going to start into this with you.”
“I’m just trying to understand.”
“Which part?”
“What are you going to do when you leave here?”
He paused, deciding whether he wanted to say it, whether he was going to tell me the truth about what he was doing or push it off. “You remember the harvest I spent in Burgundy?”
I nodded, the difficult time moving to the front of my mind: the harvest of my father’s absence, the two awful harvests that forced my father’s absence. My mother was so sad that winter without him, distracted and lonely. I was so desperate to make her happy that I initiated dance parties on Friday afternoon—the two of us jumping around the kitchen to Madonna. Though her heart wasn’t in it. She was almost dancing well, which gave her away.
My father nodded. “I’m heading back there to visit a friend.”
I was shocked to hear him say that. I wanted to ask him what friend he was talking about, but—remembering my mother’s sadness—I didn’t really want the answer.
“I’m going to travel the world. I’m starting there. I’m renting a yacht from someone who my friend knows.”
“You hate boats.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Mom. That was the answer. She loved boats. And she loved the ocean. But she wasn’t going with him. So why would he go without her? He was planning the dream trip, her dream trip. Like the sky and the rain and the soil, was this something else he thought was going to line up—that it would be enough to make her want to come back to him? If not, would he just take this other person instead?
Synchronization. You get into the wrong yellow buggy and build a life with someone. You do everything in your power to build a new one when that life falls apart.
My father climbed the opposite ladder, moving toward the top of the second fermenter, from the opposite end.
Then he motioned toward the compost piles, Bobby and Finn standing by them, ignoring each other, working on the feed. He was happy, looking at his sons. “They’ve been working all day, not saying a word.”
“Why are you smiling, then?”
“People get more work done when they don’t talk.”
He bent over the grapes, kneading them softly. Which was when I saw it, sneaking out from beneath his white shirt. A scar, white and winding, in the center of his chest.
I moved closer to him. “Dad, what is that?”
“Nothing.” He pulled up his T-shirt, blocking my view. “It’s nothing . . .” he repeated.
He kept studying the grapes, not taking his eyes off his task.
“What happened? Did you hurt yourself working?”
He was getting more and more irritated. “Georgia, can you drop this?”
“You want me to drop everything these days.”
“Not everything. Just this.”
“And Henry,” I said.
He drilled me with a look, angry that I had the nerve to bring up Henry when he so clearly didn’t want to discuss it. Except that I was angry too. I was angry at all the secrets around here, at all the things that we weren’t talking about: my mother’s relationship, the fact that the most beautiful woman on the planet was in love with my fiancé.
“Henry isn’t even about Henry. It’s about a car going off the road.”
“What are you talking about, Dad?”
He looked up at me. “Do you remember when your mother and I were driving into town a few years ago and the pickup went off the road? Do you remember? Neither of us was badly hurt, but we had to go to the hospital.”
“Of course. Mom called me hysterical.”
He motioned toward the scar on his chest. “When this happened, when we got in that car accident, it changed things. When I lost control of the car that night, it changed things around here . . . and really it changed things for your mother.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “It scared her when I got hurt like that. And I think your mother had to consider that one day she was going to be without me, and what was her life going to look like then.”
“Her answer was Henry.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“So you’re letting her do that. Even if it costs you the vineyard?”
“Even if it costs me the vineyard,” he said.
My father stepped down the ladder, moving back toward the destemming machine. Then he looked out at the vineyard, at everything he was giving up. Which was when I understood: My father didn’t want to be here without my mother. If he was going to be anywhere without her, it was going to be somewhere far from here. It was going to be far from everything he was proud that they had built.
“Dad, we can figure out another way.”
He shook his head, angry. Angrier than I had seen him about all of this—angry that my mother was putting them in this position, angry that he was competing with someone for her affection, and just angry. It both relieved and scared me.
He headed toward the door.
“This is the other way,” he said.
Then, he was gone.
Note by Note
My mother was in a towel in the corner of the bedroom, standing in front of her cello. Dancing. She was dancing around the cello, swaying, happily, or trying to stop from tripping over her feet, or both.
This was her first minute free from her grandchildren, from Maddie. She was getting ready to go to Henry, and I watched her for a moment, thinking of my father’s words. He thought that he understood what was happening in a way she didn’t: She was scared. She was scared that if she didn’t get out of this version of her life now, she never would. My father would leave her, one way or another, and all she would be left with was the fear she already had. That she had chosen the wrong life.
You become your mother in the oddest ways, at the oddest time. Today, I had become her because I was afraid of the same thing.
She pulled her towel up. “We have
to stop meeting like this.”
Instead of yelling, she sashayed toward me, trying to get me to dance with her.
Though instead of dancing, I reached for her, and held her to me as I started to cry. The two of us fell to the floor.
“What is it?” my mother said.
“You still love Dad.”
She nodded. Then she paused, before answering. “With all my heart.”
“So what are you doing? Covering your bases?”
“That’s not the reason,” she said.
“Then what?”
My mother shrugged, trying to decide whether she was going to keep me as her daughter in this moment, or if she was going to trust me with something she wasn’t going to be able to take back.
“When I met your father, I fell madly in love. Head-over-heels, turn-my-whole-life-around in love. When I look at him, when he touches me, I still feel that way.” She shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain how Henry makes me feel.”
She shook her head, like it was the last thing she wanted to do. She motioned toward her cello.
“Henry loves it when I play the cello.”
I wanted to tell her that Henry already said that, in a way that I wished I could get out of my head, how much he loved that. But I could see in her face that if I said a word, she was going to bolt, so I stayed quiet.
She shrugged. “Henry loves it when I play the cello in a way that is hard to explain. He stands there watching like I’m the only person in the world, listening, note by note, like each note matters to him. Because it does. And it’s not just that he loves music, or that he loves me. It’s this third thing, where those two things meet. It makes me feel . . . understood.”
She paused.
“I understand everything about your father, but your father doesn’t understand me the way Henry does. And I don’t fault him for that. But it is an amazing thing to be with someone who really sees you.”
She paused, and my heart started racing, trying to reconcile what she was saying with what my father said.
My mother sighed, looking down. “I see your father and I love who I see.”