Eight Hundred Grapes (21 page)

“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 par
ties 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

M
y 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.”

“But Henry sees you?”

She nodded, looking back up, meeting my eyes. “But Henry sees me.”

She stood up and started getting dressed. Without further explanation. And I understood what my father didn’t get about my mother. It wasn’t about her fear of losing him. It was about her fear that she had lost herself. It was about what she had given up for him. Henry didn’t just see my mother as she was. He saw the girl who was sitting in the yellow
car, her cello the most important thing in the world to her. He saw who my mother would have been if she had told my father to get out of her car—the imagined life she would have led then.

Who could blame her for wanting a second chance at that? Suddenly, not me.

I stood up and walked up behind her, wrapping my arms around her.

“Mom, I just want you to be happy.”

She nodded. “I am happy.”

Though she was crying when she said it.

Falling Out of Sync

D
esynchronization. Your fiancé lands his dream job on the other side of the world only to find out he has a daughter down the block, her mother still in love with him. Your mother is tired of doing too much work in her marriage at the exact moment someone returns to her life promising to do all the work instead.

Everything seemed to be lining up so the wrong people were together. So the right ones were apart.

In all my years growing up in Sonoma County, the drive over CA-116 had never felt so fast. In fifty minutes, I was in the Murray Grant waiting room, staring up at the pear. I’d planned on waiting for Jacob to walk out of his meeting, but Jacob wasn’t going to walk out of any meeting. There was a note taped to his office door.
AT THE FACTORY
.

I got back into the car and hit the gas, moving fast toward the large Murray Grant Wines facility, where they bottled and shipped all their wines.

There was a security guard outside too busy watching ESPN to notice or stop me.

I stormed past him, opening the wooden door and entering the factory. It was angry and cold. A large conveyor belt was bottling the wine bottles. Cranes were pulling crates of wine toward the shipping area. I thought of my father bottling his wines by hand, waxing each shut.

On the second floor was a hallway with several large glass offices. Through the glass, I could see Jacob standing in one of them. No cozy white couches there.

He stood before a group of four men in expensive suits sitting around a conference table. Were they having a meeting about how they were turning Sebastopol into the new Napa Valley? Selling factory wine. Making them a lot of money to buy more small vineyards, turn them into something other than what they had been. Someone’s home.

I ran up the stairs toward him and stormed into the office.

Jacob looked at me in the doorway, the men in the business suits staring.

I knew I was being crazy. I knew it even before Jacob’s look of confusion and outright irritation confirmed it.

“Hey, Georgia. Could you give me a minute?”

“No.”

He looked at me, then back at his meeting in progress.

“I need you to give me a minute, okay?” he said.

The security guard had made his way up the staircase. “Everything okay?”

Jacob tried to wave him off, trying to stay in control, to make it less of a scene. “We’re fine, Caleb,” he said.

Jacob turned toward the businessmen. “Would you guys excuse me?” he said. “I’ll be back in one second.”

Jacob quickly steered us out of the office, past Caleb, the security guard.

“You want me to escort your friend outside?” Caleb said.

“I’m doing that myself, Caleb,” Jacob said, moving us down the stairs, keeping his voice low, now trying to control his temper, in addition to everything else.

Jacob slammed through the front door of the factory, leading us back out to the parking lot, toward his Honda.

“I can’t believe you,” he said.

He was moving so fast I was basically running to keep up with him.

“What makes you think you can just walk in here like that?” he said. “That was my board up there. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was to have that meeting interrupted?”

“You need to sell me the vineyard, Jacob.”

He stopped walking. “What?”

“I want to run it.”

Jacob stared at me, dumbfounded. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt the weight of their truth. It was what I had been feeling from the minute I returned to Sebastopol. This was my family’s home, and I didn’t want to give it up. I didn’t want to give up how I felt being back at the vineyard, despite everything that was going on with my parents and my brothers and Ben. I felt like myself here.

He shook his head, and started moving again, faster than before.

“You have no idea how to run a vineyard.”

“My father will stay on and teach me. That’s not your problem.”

“Except you keep making it my problem when you show up demanding I do something I’m not going to do. My grandfather ran this company for fifty years. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the board to take his grandson seriously? Even without crazy women interrupting my meetings?”

We got to his car and Jacob opened the trunk. It held several boxes of files. Jacob began searching through, reaching for a file.

“Look, I understand you’re having an emotional reaction to the vineyard’s sale, but . . .”