Eight Hundred Grapes (29 page)

He didn’t look at me, keeping his eyes on our vineyard, the sun not yet lighting it. The fog still dusting the vines, laminating them in frost and half-light.

Bobby stared straight ahead, glassy-eyed and confused, the stare of someone who had been up all night. “You may as well sit down,” he said. “There’s half a beer left, and I don’t think anything is going to collapse.”

He moved over and handed up the bottle of beer. I had a sip, taking a seat.

“Long night,” he said. “We got half of the grapes. We can use half of them.”

“It could have been worse, then,” I said.

“It also could have been better,” he said. He paused. “Mom back?”

“Yeah. She went upstairs to go to sleep.”

“Good. She must be exhausted.”

Then he took his beer back, even though I was mid-sip, which was when I noticed he had Band-Aids on his fingers, over the nails.

Bobby shrugged, looking down at them. “You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”

Then he took a sip, turning back to the vineyard. The morning glaze holding in the sky, intoxicating him. It was comforting, the way this place
got more beautiful every day. Wasn’t that the gift of a home? You looked at it the same way, but then when you needed it to, it showed you all over again the many ways you’d been during the time that you had been living there. The many ways it had brought you back to yourself. The many ways it still brought you back to yourself.

“Margaret went back to San Francisco with the twins just a few minutes ago. They were asleep but I helped her load them in the car. They didn’t make a move. We’re good at that. The two of us. You’d be surprised how much skill that takes.”

I reached for the beer, took a small sip, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to say, and I didn’t want to upset him more than he had already been upset these past few days.

He took the beer back. “We talked before she went. We decided I would stay here for a minute with Mom and Dad. We decided to take a minute apart to see if that would help us remember how much we used to love being together. That’s the plan at least.”

He was holding the beer or I’d have handed it back to him, just so he could have something to do besides sitting there, telling me his family was falling apart before him.

“I made a mess of things,” he said.

“I don’t think you should be blaming yourself.”

He laughed, a little angry. “What should I be doing?”

I shrugged. “Drinking?”

He smiled, took another sip. “She’s not wrong. I stopped paying attention to her. I stopped doing the things that someone does for the person he loves. Because I was tired. Because other things always seemed to matter a little bit more.”

He paused.

“That doesn’t happen overnight, you know. It happens slowly. You should be careful of that. You should be careful not to take the person you love for granted. Not only because they’ll notice. But you’ll notice too. You’ll think it means something it doesn’t.”

“Like what?”

“Like that’s how much you care.”

He looked like he had lost everything. If Margaret saw that, would
it be enough? Bobby loved his wife in a way she couldn’t feel, but he loved her all the same. Shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t the effort, no matter how misinformed, be enough to keep people together—especially at the moment they might otherwise decide it was easier to be apart?

He took a swig. “I’m mad at her. It doesn’t help, but I am mad at her and him.”

“Me too.”

“That really doesn’t help.”

I moved closer to him. “What are you going to do?”

“Make it up to her if I can. Forgive her if I can. Help her forgive me.” He shook his head. “Something like that.”

“That sounds like a plan.”

“What choice do I have?”

He put down the beer, rubbed his hands together.

“You don’t give up on a family. Not without trying to put it back together.”

That stopped me. My brother, who always said the wrong thing, had said the most important thing of all.

His words vibrated in the place that had gone vacant the minute I’d seen Ben on the street in my wedding dress. With Maddie. With Michelle.

I hugged him. “Thank you.”

He looked confused. “For what?”

“I wasn’t sure what to do about Ben, and you just made it feel very clear. Thank you for that.”

“You should marry him. You’d be an idiot not to.”

And then there was that. I laughed, even though he wasn’t kidding. And leaned forward, squeezing into my brother.

“Hey, guys. What’s going on?”

We looked up, and Finn was there, holding a six-pack of beer. Finn stood there, Bobby stiffening at the sight of him. I made room anyway, for my good brother, who had behaved very badly.

Finn sat down on the other side of me, and maybe this was all that Bobby could do, but he did it. He didn’t get up. I tried to reward him for that, handing him the beer.

Finn cleared his throat. Maybe so we would look at him.

Which was when I noticed that he was holding a paper in his hand: an entire folder, a blue folder, UCLA Law School’s insignia on the front.

He handed it over.

“I stayed up looking for it. It wasn’t easy to find. But there it is.”

The contract. It was the contract we had signed saying we would never take this place over. I looked down at it. There were the signature lines I’d made. Bobby had signed the first one, Finn the third. But on the second line—saved for me—there was nothing.

“I never signed it?”

He shook his head. “You never signed it,” Finn said.

Bobby looked over, as if to confirm it. He nodded. “No signature.”

There was meaning to derive from that, probably that everyone is too busy in law school to do anything well. But maybe there was some other meaning too.

Finn put his arm over my shoulder. “You should frame that,” he said. “It was like the younger you telling the older you something.”

“But what?”

“But what? That is the question.”

It was Bobby who answered.

“Maybe that you’re a pretty crappy lawyer.”

Then he took the contract and ripped it into a thousand pieces.

We sat there quietly, the early morning coming up over the vineyard, the fog moving away. Slowly but surely. Leaving a glistening in its wake. Leaving sunshine. From the half-burned winemaker’s cottage, it couldn’t have been more beautiful.

“I still don’t want this place,” Finn said.

“Me neither, I have no interest,” Bobby said.

He didn’t look at Finn when he did it, when he agreed with him, but he agreed with him all the same.

I looked at Finn, tempted to explain what had just happened, Bobby moving toward him, though I kept my mouth shut, in favor of trusting what I had learned this weekend, in the face of everything falling apart, and maybe coming together in a greater way than I could have hoped for. You couldn’t always work so hard to fix it. Even if things didn’t
always go the way they should, sometimes they went exactly where they needed to.

Bobby took a sip of beer. “I don’t want the responsibility,” he said. “But it’s more than that. I’m not really sure I would be good at it. I think you have to believe you’d be good at it.”

“That might change,” I said.

“Well, it only changed for you because it’s too late,” Bobby said.

Finn looked over.

“Maybe too late,” Finn said. “Maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” Bobby said.

Then Finn reached over and held out his hand to Bobby.

Bobby took it.

And the three Ford children got drunk and watched the sun come up.

The Other Line

B
en was lying on my bed, awake. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”

I stayed in the doorway, not because I didn’t want to go to him, but because it felt bizarre, looking at him in my childhood bedroom. This room, more than any place since, felt like my home.

“What are you smiling about?” he said.

I shook my head. “Can’t answer that, at the moment.”

He smiled. “I’m just glad you’re smiling,” he said. “Is she okay?”

I tilted my head. “Don’t you mean
he
?”

“No, I mean
she
. Your mother. I knew your dad was going to be okay. He’s the toughest bird I’ve ever met.”

“They’re both fine. They’re going to be fine.”

“Good. Then come here, already.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, and Ben put his arm on the small of my back.

“Maddie went to the hotel with Michelle,” he said. “But she asked when she could come back. She asked if she could have pancakes with us in the morning. Isn’t that cute?”

“That’s nice.”

“I told her we are working on keeping the vineyard, which she was thrilled about, but maybe because it’s close to the pancakes. Fine by me if that’s the reason. I feel good with her happy being in Sebastopol.”

I smiled. Then I looked at him, really looked at him, trying to figure out how to say it. “You can’t stay here, Ben.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You can’t stay here with me. Even temporarily. You need to go and start your life in London.”

He looked at me, taking in those words. “And you’re not coming?”

I shook my head, definitive. “I can’t.”

He paused as if considering how to fight this. “I thought we made a new plan.”

“It doesn’t work. You need to be with your kid. Down the street. To take her to soccer. To pick her up from school.”

“She hates soccer.”

I shrugged. “That’s who you are.”

He sat up. “You’re who I am too . . .”

I leaned down toward him, tried to figure out how to explain it. “It isn’t about Maddie. It’s about the part of you that didn’t tell me about Maddie when you could have fit us together.”

He shook his head. “We’re back to this?”

“That’s why you kept them a secret from me, Ben. You didn’t want me to see what I see when I look at you now.”

“And what is that?” he said.

“That part of you wants to work things out with Michelle.”

He was quiet, looking down at the pillow, trying to control his anger. He shook his head.

“Except I decided on us. Isn’t that the important part?”

“Part of you wanted to go the other way. That doesn’t seem like a problem?”

“That seems like reality.” He paused. “We are presented with options and we either take them, or we remember why it isn’t worth it to take them. Why what we’re giving up is too much.”

I nodded, knowing he believed that, and knowing he was wrong. Ben hadn’t picked one option, which was why I sensed the intimacy between Michelle and Ben: They had been living a life together in which that intimacy was all there was.

Ben sighed. “I don’t want to be with Michelle.”

“No, but she is your
have-to-have
.”

“Michelle isn’t my
have-to-have
and what does that even mean?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. He realized that I wasn’t talking about Michelle. I was talking about Maddie.

He nodded, not arguing with that. It was the truth, after all. From the minute Maddie had walked into Ben’s life, she was the only thing he could see, as she deserved to be. The rest—me, Michelle—was secondary. As we deserved to be. The problem was that if we were fighting for second place—and who wanted to fight for second place?—the tiebreaker was still to be determined, wedding or no wedding, London or no London. And maybe that was the bigger thing. Suddenly, I understood our life together—so far from my family, with someone who didn’t feel like my family in the way he needed to—was my second place too.

Ben looked at me. He couldn’t argue, so he said something else, which he knew to be true. “And you need to be here?”

I didn’t answer.

“You need to be here,” he said. No question attached. “And not temporarily.”

He always got there, though this time I was there before him. I needed to be in Sonoma.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t have a vineyard. I don’t have a family intent on staying. They’re working it out. My parents. My brothers.” I shrugged. “I guess the reasons I want to stay are more complicated than I think they are.”

“Or maybe they’re simpler.”

I pushed his hair out of his face. “I’m not trying to punish you. I’m not mad.”

“I know,” Ben said. “That makes it worse.”

He reached for my hand, laying me down beside him.

“This still feels, in this moment, like where we belong. How do you account for that?”

Ben’s face was so close to mine. He smiled at me, that smile I loved. Those lips, soft and sweet. And I agreed with him. There was a world in which we moved back toward each other, but I couldn’t help but have another image locked in my mind. Another moment. Not tomorrow, but one day. Ben walking down the street with his daughter and her mother.
His wife, his hand on her back. An image like the one I had seen in Silver Lake.

But this time I’d be walking toward them. Michelle in town for work, Ben and Maddie tagging along. He’d complain that he still wasn’t used to the cameras, to the scrutiny around their lives, and how much Michelle cared about those things. But he would complain in the way that showed that he was also amused by it, the way we got to be amused by the things we did for love. It would be good to see them. Hearing how Maddie was doing, how they all were doing together. Ben smiling, the charge gone, something kinder there. Something like friendship.

We lay back on the bed, hand in hand. My wedding dress was hanging on the door, still ready to be worn.

“Why do I feel like you’re trying to do the right thing?” he said.

“Because I am,” I said.

Ben turned toward me. “Who says there is a right thing?”

Synchronization. Everything lines up like a sign of where you are supposed to be. But what do you give up? Because you give something up. As simple—and complicated—as the other line, the other way your life could have been if you had taken a different path. If you had gotten into the right car. If you hadn’t gotten out of the wrong one.

“Do not close your eyes. If we fall asleep, I won’t be able to convince you,” he said.