Eight Hundred Grapes (11 page)

My father smiled.

“None of us would be here. Not without Dan Ford. Not without Jen Ford. And we are grateful.” He held up his glass. “Even if you’re cashing in your chips and getting the hell out. Though I can’t quite believe you’re selling out to the Murray Grant empire . . . How many chips did they give you, exactly?

Everyone started laughing, but there was an edge to it. No one in the room was a Murray Grant Wine fan. I turned to Jacob, who forced himself to smile, playing it off.

“What’s the big plan, Dan?” Brian Queen called out. “Second honeymoon?”

Louise laughed. “You should be asking Jen that.”

My mother stared anxiously at my father, asking him silently how to answer. No one knew that when they left here, they wouldn’t be leaving together.

She pulled herself together and held her wineglass up, tipping it in my father’s direction.

“Whatever Dan wants!” she said.

The Dorks cheered as my father awkwardly put his arm around my mother.

Bobby headed to the front of the room, Finn staying by the back door.

My father took my mother in, forcing a smile. I watched as he struggled. It was too much. I grabbed for another glass of wine, downing it as my father held up a bottle of unlabeled wine, faced his friends.

“I don’t know if any of you all remember, but at one of the very first Cork Dork meetings, we sat around talking about it, doing the math on it, how much work a single grape requires. From vine to finish. A single grape the start of it, this unlabeled bottle right here in my hand the end of it, the eight hundred grapes inside.”

He looked out at his group of colleagues and friends.

“We know the secret, right? It’s not just eight hundred grapes in this bottle. It’s everything else that makes it heavy. Patience and focus and sacrifice and . . . fucking boredom.”

The Dorks laughed.

“Let’s just call it time. This bottle holds the endless time that I was lucky to spend with all of you.” My father nodded. “Thank you, guys,” he said. “Thank you all, for today, and for everything. It has been a really good run.”

Then, as was tradition, he uncorked the bottle and took a sip right from it. The Cork Dorks cheered.

My father didn’t look sad. He looked happy, maybe for the first time since I’d been home. My father looked truly and seriously happy. He took a sip of his wine, nodding, appreciating what he had accomplished with this wine, with all of his wines. Lost in it. My mother looked up at him, their eyes meeting, sharing that moment, both of them having the same experience of the wine.

In spite of Henry.

In spite of what was happening between them.

Bobby was standing near my parents, smiling. Finn was by the back door, smiling.

I, on the other hand, chose this moment to drop my wine, the glass shattering on the ground.

Everyone turned toward me, just in time to see the tears streaming down my face. The winemakers froze, drinks midair. Bobby and Finn looked at me with mouths agape. My father’s smile, disappearing. My mother’s eyes going wide.

As I moved as fast as I could. Toward the exit.

The Ride Home

I
ran out of The Tasting Room, needing air. I knew someone would head out after me, so I went directly to Finn’s truck, opening the unlocked front door, searching for the spare key where he kept it under the driver’s-side visor. I planned to drive myself out of there. I planned to keep driving until my father’s last tasting was far behind me, until I could pretend it wasn’t happening.

“I don’t think it’s there.”

I looked up to see Jacob standing by the driver’s-side door, holding a cup of water.

I wiped at my tears. “I don’t want to talk to you,” I said.

“I don’t want to talk to you either,” he said.

Then I took the cup out of his hands, drank it down.

“Uh . . . I brought that out here for myself.”

I handed him the empty cup.

He looked down at it. Then he turned it over, no drops coming out.

“I was thirsty,” he said.

I tried to focus on taking deep breaths. I couldn’t calm down, though. Apparently when your parents split up, it didn’t matter if you were a grown-up, it turned you into a five-year-old again: wanting them to promise you that everything was going to be okay. And wanting to make everything okay for them, the way you could when you were five, just by saying you loved them.

Jacob tossed the cup into a trash can. “You seem like you need to get out of here.”

“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

M
y 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.

“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.