Eight Hundred Grapes (12 page)

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

T
he 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.

“That 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.

Ben opened the refrigerator to get Maddie some milk. He handed me the bottle, trying to get me to talk to him. I couldn’t seem to meet his eyes.

Maddie was sitting at the kitchen table having an enormous piece of chocolate cake, her arm protectively blocking the plate as if she were afraid someone was going to take it away from her before she could finish.

Jacob sat across from her, his eyes focused on those bites. He didn’t look toward Ben and me, standing by the refrigerator, getting the milk. But I knew he was trying to listen.

“What happened to you not showing up here?” I said.

Ben poured the milk into three of the glasses. “We needed to talk,” he said.

“So you bring Maddie?”

“I also brought you a suitcase full of clothes including a dress for the harvest party, the purple one that looks so pretty. What about a thank-you for that?”

“I’m serious.”

“Yes, we needed to talk and we needed you not to kick me out.” He held up the empty glass. “I still can’t tell if you want the milk or not. The cake is going to be much better with it.”

He flashed those eyes at me, and I wanted more than anything to let it all go—to just decide that everything was okay.

And maybe I would have, but he headed back toward the kitchen table and took the seat next to Maddie, leaving me the one between him and Jacob.

“She’s serious about that cake,” Jacob said as we sat back down.

He wasn’t wrong. Maddie was precise in her bites, not like the twins, who would tear through that cake in the time it took Maddie to eat one bite. She moved slowly, savoring it.

Maddie felt my eyes on her and looked up. “Would you like some?” she said.

Her tiny, British accent could make you melt it was so cute. And there was this: She held out the fork to share, which looked like it pained her to do, to share anything with me—the cake or her father.

Who could blame her? She had just found him for herself. And now she was being forced to meet the woman he was going to marry? Who might want to take her father away from her. And her cake.

I smiled at her, anxious to relieve her anxiety. “That’s all for you, Maddie,” I said. “But thank you.”

She nodded, relieved. “You’re welcome.”

Then she turned back to her chocolate cake.

Ben looked between us. I kept my eyes on Maddie, avoiding looking at him or at Jacob, who watched me, amused.

Ben gave Jacob a look. “So catch me up. How do you know Jen and Dan?”

“I’m a local winemaker,” he said.

“Kind of,” I said.

Jacob gave me a smile. “I own Murray Grant Wines,” he said. “We’re based in Napa Valley.”

“I know Murray Grant Wines.” Ben smiled condescendingly. “Everyone near a grocery store knows it.”

Jacob ignored Ben’s insulting tone. “I guess that’s true,” he said.

“You’re Murray’s son?”

“Grandson.”

Ben took a bite of Maddie’s cake, winked at her. He didn’t turn back to Jacob when he spoke next.

“I didn’t know Murray had much to do with Dan,” Ben said.

“He didn’t, but I do.”

“Why’s that?”

“We’re purchasing The Last Straw Vineyard,” Jacob said.

Ben turned toward me, shocked, compassion filling his eyes.

“We’re planning to keep the vineyard in the tradition of Dan’s work, to offer a biodynamic option to our customers. The vineyard will be run exactly the same.”

Ben smiled, tightly. “If Dan’s not here, it can’t be run exactly the same.”

“Dan isn’t worried about it,” he said.

Ben leaned in. “How much money did you have to pay him so he wouldn’t be?”

The tension between them was thick. I should have enjoyed it, neither of them in my good graces. But I didn’t want to watch it either, which maybe Jacob sensed.

“I should probably get going . . .” Jacob said. It was less a statement, more a question. Did I want him to go or did I want protection from the talk Ben would demand we have as soon as we were alone?

I didn’t meet his eyes. I didn’t want protection from Ben, at least not from Jacob.

“You need us to call you a cab?” Ben said.

His eyes were still on me. “No,” Jacob said. “I’m going to walk.”

“Who’s walking where?”

Margaret walked into the kitchen, more like breezed into it, smiling, animated. She wore workout clothes, a sun visor, her long hair swept beneath it. She looked around the table and noticed Ben.

“Ben!” she said. “When did you get here? Did you come up for the family dinner tonight?”