Christmas in Wine Country (6 page)

“Lila Clark,” Annie said with a grin, setting down two mugs and settling into the opposite side of the couch. “Have some of my sipping chocolate.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

“Glad to see you still allow yourself a treat every now and then.” Just the hint of an edge sharpened Annie’s comment. 

“Oh, of course,” Lila agreed, though in honestly she’d pretty much cut sweets out entirely. Plus she hit the gym six days a week. The seventh she took off, but she still did a half-hour of stretching at home.

Wow, that sipping chocolate was good.

“Slowly, now,” Annie cautioned with a laugh. “It must be savored.”

“Oh my God.” Lila closed her eyes to fully enjoy the rich, dreamy liquid chocolate. “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

“Yes, it is,” Annie agreed. Over dinner, she’d explained that she was now working at a chocolatier. She planned to own her own shop some day. “A few more sips and you won’t even care that you lost your job.”

“Oh my God.” Lila closed her eyes again, this time reeling from nausea.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you sick over it. Listen, maybe it’s not that bad. Why were you still working at that advertising agency anyway? Wasn’t it just a copy editing job while you figured out what you really wanted to do?”

Lila sighed, remembering that was indeed how she’d felt when she’d first taken the job.

“And why were you in charge of that party?” Annie continued. “I have to say, I don’t see you as an event planner.”

“It made me a total wreck,” Lila admitted. 

“What a drag you got fired from that.” Annie nodded, deadpan.

“Still, I feel like such a failure.”

“Listen, you’ve got to get over your never-satisfied-mother-absent-father syndrome.”

Smacked by a cold whack of truth, Lila took a moment to assemble something witty in response. She wasn’t used to spending time with someone who knew her so well. “I love how you sugarcoat everything, Annie. Such a kid glove approach.”

“Hey, then get yourself a new best friend.”

So she still was? Lila wondered, turning once again to her sipping chocolate. 

After a pause, Annie asked, “And Phillip? He’s not in the picture anymore?” 

Somewhere in the chaos of dinner—sharing the meal with a 1-year-old didn’t leave much time for in-depth conversation—Annie had asked if she and Phillip were still seeing each other. Lila had found herself tearing up and simply nodded ‘no’ as she focused intently on her fork. She and Annie hadn’t discussed Phillip in about a year. The last time they had had been a phone call during which Lila had been chatting incessantly about his hair, his Porsche, the little quirks that made him so… Phillip. How he said “zed” instead of “z”, or “pro-cess” with the o pronounced like the letter o instead of the boring way everyone else said it. Doing graduate school in England had really left its mark on him. Less enchanted, Annie had informed Lila she didn’t want to hear any more about such a pretentious jerk. 

“It ended a couple weeks—well, right when I got fired, actually,” Lila explained. Annie arched an eyebrow and invited more detail. Losing her self-consciousness—it didn’t seem to make sense when talking to one’s best friend, now did it?—Lila dove in, giving her all the grizzly detail about Axelle in her red dress and Phillip’s cold dismissal. “The worst of it is I can’t even say my boyfriend dumped me because he denied that we ever were dating. We were just ‘having fun.’”

“Rat bastard. And he’s dating someone now named Excel?”

“Ax-cell,” Lila corrected. “Or something like that, I can never pronounce it right.”

“That’s because she’s named after a spreadsheet,” Annie declared. Lila heartily appreciated her indignation.

Thankfully, as the evening progressed Annie never asked Lila ‘So, what next?’ Nor did she point out how lame it was that Lila was more than willing to drive the hour and a half out to Redwood Cove for a romantic getaway with her so-called boyfriend but had done it less than could be counted on one hand to visit Annie in the past five years. Instead, recognizing Lila was in pain, Annie practiced the ancient art of cutting a friend some slack. 

“So what’s up?” Pete joined them, settling in on the armchair and cracking open a beer.

Struck with familiarity so strong it verged on déjà-vu, Lila remarked, “I think that might be exactly what you said and did the first time I met you.”

“What, in our dorm room?” Annie asked with a laugh. Pete had come to visit during the spring of their Sophomore year. They’d had a great view of the main quad and Pete had devised what he called “the rich kid drinking game.” You took a sip every time you spotted a guy wearing pink. Nantucket red was the correct term, Annie had insisted, drawing upon her upper middle class roots in contrast to Lila and Pete’s lower middle origins. Of course, as a native Cape Codder, Lila was well acquainted with all shades of the faded, preppy spectrum. Whatever you called it, the fact remained that it hadn’t taken long for all of them to get pretty buzzed.

“I think so,” Lila nodded. In a baseball cap, t-shirt and jeans, Pete maybe had a bit more around the middle but otherwise didn’t look all that different even though now he had to be about thirty. “So Annie tells me you’re a licensed contractor? Congrats.” For the guy who had taught Lila the term ‘chillax’, she had to admit, she was both impressed and surprised that he’d achieved his goal.

“Thank you.” Pete nodded and took a sip of his beer.

“Do you like it?”

“Yeah.” He gave a casual shrug.

“He runs into some real gems though sometimes,” Annie said. Pete told Lila about a job he’d just finished up at one of the local vineyards. A vanity project owned by a retired real estate mogul and used largely as a vehicle to appease his thirty-years-younger trophy wife, the vineyard was never expected to turn a profit. Instead, the owner poured money into things like a deluxe dog run and spa area instead of anything as mundane as the cultivation of grapes. 

“I read about that!” Lila exclaimed.

“What, the dog run and spa?” Annie asked. “Because I guess the lady was trying to get someone to come do a story on it, but I didn’t know she’d done it.”

“No, I mean vineyards and how some are vanity projects and some are businesses. I just finished this book.” Lila adopted the requisite movie trailer drama voice “CIVIL WAR: Napa vs. Sonoma.”  

“That seems a bit much,” said Annie.

“It was.” If a book could have used a slow-motion camera and a melodramatic soundtrack, this would have. After rattling off some facts about varietals and the lifecycle of the average vine, Lila noted their blank expressions and brought herself to a stop.

“You had insomnia last night, didn’t you?” Annie asked. Well accustomed to Lila’s nighttime affliction, in college she’d been subjected to many breakfast lectures on topics such as travel in the Siberian wilderness and Amish quilting techniques. “But it’s true, there’s some Sonoma-Napa rivalry. Our biggie around here is Endicott. Big Bob’s in charge and he’s been growing it aggressively.”

“He’s about 6’5” and wears a huge cowboy hat,” Pete added. Lila recalled spotting such a man at the holiday party, towering over the board chair.

“They just announced that Endicott’s hosting the Sonoma County charity auction next fall.” Annie said. “That thing’s getting big. It’s nothing like Napa’s, but I heard this year Ben Stiller came.”

“Tiny man,” said Pete.

“They all are,” Lila agreed.

“Big heads, tiny bodies,” Annie added. “Speaking of,” she turned to her husband, “Lila’s no longer with Phillip. He’s gone off with some French witch.” 

“What’s up with Phillip?” Pete made a face. “What’s wrong with Phil?”

“He’s not like that,” Lila quickly jumped to his defense, a well-worn habit. 

“P-Dawg,” Pete offered as an alternative, making Annie laugh and even Lila crack a smile at the impossibility. “OK, but I have a question.” He sat forward, serious. “Can he handle the truth? Or did you have to tell him ‘You can’t handle the truth!”

Lila sat up, alarmed. Why was he quoting Jack Nicholson/drunk Lila Clark doing karaoke? Pete laughed and threw a pillow at her. “Oh come on! I loved it! You were hilarious.”

“Pete!” Annie exclaimed. “I hadn’t mentioned… Lila didn’t know we’d seen the YouTube—”

“You saw the YouTube video?” Lila nearly yelled, tamping down her panic only in deference to sleeping Charlotte.

“Just because it happened at the vineyard here next to town,” Annie said dismissively. “We never would have otherwise.”

“It was awesome, Lila.” Pete laughed again, kicking back in the chair and taking another sip of his beer.

Sitting on the couch, gasping for air like a fish tossed up on a rock, Lila wished intently she’d never drank champagne or never listened to music or something else that would have prevented her performance, like the Butterfly Effect.

Annie steered the conversation toward safer ground, asking after Lila’s Gram. She’d hosted Annie for a couple of Thanksgivings during college. “Remember she invited the mailman?” Annie recalled with a smile.

“She did again this past Thanksgiving,” Lila said, willing herself to save her freak out for the privacy of her hotel room.

“She loves a big holiday table,” Annie said. Lila agreed. Gram would have done well with a large family, but she’d only been able to have one child herself, who, in turn, only had one child. Together with the fact that her husband had passed away 14 years ago, Gram did an admirable job of surrounding herself with chaos. Just last month when Lila had flown home for Thanksgiving she, her mom and her mom’s boyfriend Rodger had been joined by a recently widowed neighbor, a 50-something “singleton” as Gram had called her from the rotary club, two dog rescue enthusiasts, a recently divorced mom and her Goth teenage son, and, of course, the mailman.

Christmas had provided a quiet contrast. Lila had stayed in California; she had that romantic getaway with Phillip, of course. Shellshocked and marooned on the West Coast, she’d accepted a coworker’s offer to join her and her parents. They’d had a quiet Christmas, the four of them eating in silence in front of the TV. Grim and impersonal, it had suited Lila just fine.

“You should have joined us!” Annie chided her. Lila realized it hadn’t even occurred to her. She’d been so caught up in her loss spiral.

The evening ended early. Annie made apologies but admitted that she pretty much had trouble staying up past nine. Charlotte was a harsh taskmaster, waking with
predawn ferocity regardless of when she was put to bed. Lila didn’t protest. Those romance novels back in her empty hotel room weren’t going to read themselves.   

*
             
*
             
*

Walking down Redwood Cove’s main street, Lila buried her chin down into the warmth of her dark green scarf. The thick fog felt almost palpable as it enveloped her and the surrounding town. It muffled the noise, with only the clanging of a buoy and the rhythmic blare of the foghorn cutting through. Not much traffic made its way down the street, either cars or people, and Lila took her time ambling along.

A gem in the crown of the Northern California Sonoma County coast, Redwood Cove took the downtown charm of Carmel—minus the highest-end shops—and blended it with the foggy, dramatic coastline and relative sleepiness of Mendocino—without the billion-dollar marijuana industry. About an hour and a half northwest of San Francisco, it was far enough away to embody relaxed, country living, yet close enough to lure the city’s foodies, wine enthusiasts and outdoor adventurers and maintain a thriving economy.

A right off Highway 1 led to the downtown: essentially a five block long, four block wide grid dotted with shops, restaurants and offices. The town community center, a giant red barn converted into a multipurpose room, sat in the midst of the town green which also boasted a newly-constructed playground and park benches. A large parking lot at the end, between the green and the ocean, hosted the town’s seasonal Farmer’s Market.

Main street, Lila’s thoroughfare at the moment, had shops all along one side. Along the other, a white picket fence demarcated a rocky decline. Less steep than at
the B&B, it was still a fair drop into churning surf. The stretch Lila walked was covered in cobblestone, dating back to The Gold Rush she learned from a plaque. Historic cobblestone. She remembered how adamantly she’d fought with the man she’d thought was the groundskeeper at the vineyard, and his total indignation. So smug and superior, as if she were some kind of crazy lady.

Slipping a bit on a stone, Lila murmured, “see” as if proving her point to Jake Endicott of Endicott Vineyards. Just because you had a vineyard named after you didn’t give you the right to look down at all the little people. He’d probably like Axelle, too, Lila thought. At least she had a spreadsheet named after her.

A hat in the window of a store caught her eye. It looked the sort a flapper might have worn in the 20s, with a bit of netting. The whole store was filled with hats, pillbox hats and cowboy hats and big Russian military-style faux fur hats with flaps. The next store was all maps. A giant one on display featured the local region’s hiking trails. It looked as if you could set out on a different one every day for months and never repeat a mile.

Annie’s chocolate shop, or at least the one she worked at, was a bit further down but she wasn’t working today. She had every Sunday and Monday off, she’d explained, and Pete was usually able to arrange his work schedule to have Tuesdays and Thursdays off, and then his mom looked after Charlotte the remaining days. Lila hated to admit it, but she felt a pang of envy. Annie had it all wrapped up: the cozy little house, the gorgeous daughter, the loving husband who’d adored her ever since she was 19.