Eight Hundred Grapes (3 page)

I lowered my gaze from the photographs, looked down. My mother caught my eyes, held them. Then she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t stand there in judgment of me,” she said.

It didn’t seem wise to tell her I was sitting in judgment.

“There was a naked man coming out of your bedroom, Mom,” I said. “Who wasn’t Dad.”

“Well, who shows up at midnight unannounced?” She shook her head. “It’s our fault for not redecorating your room. You think nothing here is supposed to change.”

“I think you’re not supposed to be shtupping someone who isn’t Dad.”

“Well, I’m not shtupping him.”

I looked at her, confused. “What?”

She shrugged. “Henry is impotent, if you must know.”

I covered my ears. “I must not know. I must go back in time and know anything but that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m just saying . . . I’m just trying to explain to you that things are more complicated than they seem.”

Complicated
. That was Ben’s word too. The problem was that they were both using it passively. When the truth was that they had made things complicated. Actively. That was the important part they each were leaving out.

“Where’s Dad?”

“Dad and I are taking a little time apart,” she said. “He’s been staying in the winemaker’s cottage for the last couple of weeks. Not that he doesn’t do that every year during the harvest.”

There was an edge to how she said that, which I chose to ignore.

“Because of Henry?” I asked.

“Because we’re taking time apart,” she said.

I looked through the bay windows to the lantern-lit vineyard, the lantern-lit path that led to the winemaker’s cottage. My father was asleep in one of the two bedrooms inside. When I was a little girl, I’d beg to sleep in the other room and go out with him first thing in the morning to help pick the first grapes before school. I told him that when I was older my brothers and I were going to take over the land for him—to keep his legacy running. I meant it. Running the vineyard was what I had wanted more than anything when I was a little girl. Now I had left him there alone. Each in our own way, we all had.

“How could you not have told me what was going on?” I asked.

My mother reached for her coffee. “We were waiting until after your wedding. We didn’t want to ruin it for you.”

I met her eyes. Apparently Ben and I had done that all ourselves.

“I’ve tried not to burden Finn and Bobby with this either. They both have their hands full with other things.”

I thought back to the bar—Finn acting weird when Bobby came up. Bobby nowhere to be seen. “With what things?” I said.

She shook her head. “I can’t get into all of that right now. They should be allowed to be here to offer their side.”

How had we gotten to the place where everyone in the family was on different sides? I had been home for the last harvest, I had been home another time since—everyone had seemed fine. Now though? I felt like I was going to cry. And Ben—usually my first call when I felt this way, the
one person who could help me find perspective on this—was the reason I had none.

My mother cleared her throat, seeing an opportunity to change the subject. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” she said.

I shook my head.

“Did he do something unforgivable?”

“What kind of question is that?”

She leaned in. “A bad one, probably. What’s a good one? Tell me and I’ll ask.”

Ever since I’d left the bridal shop, I’d envisioned sitting at this table with my mother and my father, talking it out. The way we had when I’d needed to figure out what college to go to, how to pay for law school, how to get over a thousand broken hearts. Now my concern was that the three of us were never going to be sitting here again.

“Georgia . . .”

I looked up.

“Did you do something unforgivable?”

“Stop using that word. No.”

“Well, is there someone else?”

Normally, my mother was the first to think adultery went into the unforgivable category.

“Yes, there is. And she’s four-and-a-half years old.”

My mother looked confused.

“He has a daughter. That he’s kept from me.”

She went silent, the calm before her impending storm. My mother couldn’t stand dishonesty. She was wisecracking and irritable and stubborn. But, beyond all that, she was remarkably genuine. And she demanded the same of the people she loved.

She reached for her coffee. “I’m sure Ben has an explanation for this,” she said.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “I just told you that Ben has a child with someone, and he didn’t choose to share that information. I found out at my dress fitting when I saw him walking down the street with the mother of his child.”

“I understand. It’s awful. Particularly that he didn’t tell you.” She
paused. “I’m just putting it out there that he may have an explanation for keeping this to himself.”

This was what she had to offer me? Pre-Henry, my mother would have demanded blood from Ben. She would have stormed around the dining room talking about values, the way she’d done when my best friend in high school had used her parents’ restaurant to throw herself an open-bar birthday party. Even when I explained how that had happened, she had said there was no explanation. You either were truthful or you weren’t, and that defined you.

Where was that mother now, screaming about Ben’s lie of omission? Why couldn’t she take on that role so I could find my way to the other one—the one where I got to find sympathy for Ben in her outsized protection of me. That was the mother I knew.

I stood up. “I can’t deal with this right now. I’m going to bed.”

“Then go.”

I headed for the door, completely exhausted and ready for the night to be done.

“Henry is an old friend,” my mother called out after me. “We knew each other back in New York. And he recently was named the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony.”

I turned around, but stayed in the doorway.

She shrugged. “He’s only been out here a few months, but it’s been nice. Just . . . to be a part of that world again.”

Part of that world.
She looked defeated saying the words and remembering it—who she used to be,
how
she used to be. It made me want to convince her that she was still a part of it: She had been the music teacher in town for decades. But that wasn’t the same thing. And what was the point in trying to convince her it was, anyway? As if anyone could convince you of the one thing you didn’t want to see.

“What does that have to do with you and Dad?” I said instead.

She looked up at me.

“I’m not talking about Dad. I’m talking about you and me. You have always tried to take care of everyone in this family, just like I have. As opposed to figuring out what you want. Not what you’re supposed to want, but what you truly want.”

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.

“You can’t seriously think you’re in a good position to offer me advice on my romantic life at the moment.”

She met my eyes. “I think I’m in a great position, actually,” she said. “No one sees what an incomparable person you are more than I do. Except, perhaps, Ben.”

She paused. And then she said it simply. “Be careful what you give up.”

I crossed my arms over my chest, trying—in spite of myself—to hear what she wasn’t saying. “Because you can’t get it back?”

She stood up, walking past me in the doorway.

“No.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Because, eventually, you get it back any way you can.”

I waited for her to disappear up the stairs before heading that way myself. But before my mother was gone, she called out a final good night. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re home.”

That made one of us.

The Contract

I
woke up to the sound of a Bach cello sonata, the sun heaping through the windows, joining the music in an intense wake-up call. It was how I woke up most every morning as a kid—my father wanting us to get up with the sun, my mother reserving the first half hour of each day to practice, to keep her hand in.

I used to love the sound of her cello, the warm tones greeting me. Post-midnight run-in, though, her cello had another connotation, images of a naked Henry running through my head, dancing along with the music.

I rummaged through my suitcase, searching for a decent pair of jeans and a sweater, lamenting how little clothing I’d brought from Los Angeles. Nothing to battle the early morning fog, nothing to battle the late afternoon heat. The only shoes I had with me were a pair of ballet flats. My favorite boots left behind, my favorite everything left behind.

In my rush to get out of the house before my mother finished playing, I almost missed the note she had left on the countertop: “Coffee on. Banana muffins in fridge. Made yesterday, but delicious.”

I took a cup of coffee and a muffin, and headed down the hill to the winemaker’s cottage to find my father.

It was just after 9
A.M.
—a gorgeous time in the vineyard. The sky was intensely blue, the early morning fog starting to burn off, letting in the sun, the morning heat. I passed through the gardens that served as cover crop, their wildflowers snaking between the vines, the land all purples and greens.

I stopped to study the vines, touching the shoots, feeling it come over me. It was a feeling that I only knew when I was back in the vineyard. A potent mix of happiness and excitement and something I couldn’t name except to say that being back in Sebastopol, back at my parents’ house, was like seeing a lost love again.

Until I was fourteen, I couldn’t get enough of the vineyard. I’d followed my father around to do the most mundane tasks: to trellis the vines, study the grapes, make teas to feed the soil. My father would dig into the compost, and I would join in, just to be a part of it. Before school, after school, we discussed vines and vintages. My father would even take me down to the wine cave and give me a taste of the racked wine, a taste of the wine still waiting to be racked. He never said it, but he was thrilled I wanted to be a part of it.

Then came the day I wanted nothing to do with
any
part of it.

The same vineyard, the same fifty acres that had brought me so much joy, became suffocating as opposed to freeing.

It coincided with two awful harvests in a row. The first harvest had gone awry due to weather, the rain forcing the grapes off the vines long before they were ready. The second had been the result of rolling forest fires, the smoke drying out the Sebastopol air, searing the vineyard. After years of everything going fairly smoothly, the two bad vintages—the only two my parents ever had in succession since early on, since before I remembered—had threatened to put us out of business.

It was still hard to think about how awful those winters were. My parents had tried to shield us from how scared they were about losing everything they had built together. But late at night, after we were supposed to be asleep, I’d hear them talking quietly in the kitchen, a pot of coffee between them. It would have been better if they had screamed it out loud as opposed to what it felt like, sitting on the other side of the door, thinking about all the ways I couldn’t fix it for them, thinking about all the ways our family’s life was about to fall apart.

I started going into San Francisco every chance I had. One night I convinced my father to take me to see an art exhibit of light installations. The truck broke down on the way and we took a cab the rest of the
way into the city. Afterward, we walked the streets downtown, past the Ferry Building and the pier, up into the ritzy hills of Pacific Heights. We passed a small jazz club, a ninety-year-old woman singing Gershwin. If that sounds ridiculously romantic, it was. And I was completely hooked. I loved the noises of the city, people fighting and laughing in the streets. The old woman singing Gershwin. It’d be easy to say that it was the energy of the city that pulled me in, but it wasn’t. It was the noises. Suddenly, it felt like everything I had known before then had been too quiet. My parents’ sadness, the vineyard, Sonoma County itself.

I spent the next summer staying with my cousin who ran a law office downtown. She was beautiful and elegant and she took me under her wing, introducing me to city living: coffee shops and skyscrapers, streets and bookstores, fancy shoes and cigarettes at parties. She even gave me an internship at her law firm.

She warned me that it would be boring, but it was a relief. Law was specific. It was concrete. The soil and fruit and wind and sun and sky didn’t have to cooperate for work to go well. After years of watching my father struggle at the mercy of the weather patterns, that type of control felt empowering.

When the vineyard worked, it was beautiful. But two years of fallow crops were decimating. And they were especially decimating when I realized they weren’t the first. After I left for college, I learned that my parents had narrowly escaped previous disasters, previous moments when it had seemed the only option was throwing in the towel.

My chosen path was far less unpredictable, which felt like a good thing, a different thing.

Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.