Eight Hundred Grapes (30 page)

Then he did.

Everything Worth Doing

I
t was 9
A.M.
, so I went back to the hospital to see my father. He was sitting up in bed, his color back. He looked like himself, which was an enormous relief, the tears rushing to my eyes.

He stopped me with his arm, with a quick wave of it. My father had never liked tears and he didn’t want to watch mine now, not on his watch, not when he didn’t have the energy to stop them.

“I hate it in here,” he said.

This instead of hello.

“I really hate it,” he said.

“Then leave.”

“Working on it. Your mother is getting me checked out as we speak. She’s talking to the doctors and the administrators. Or at least, that’s what she said she’s doing.”

“You think she’s lying to you?”

“She could be running to get a sandwich.”

I laughed and took a seat on the edge of the bed, took hold of my father’s hand. Scare or no scare, I never wanted to be sitting there again.

“Are the brothers working?”

“Yes, the vineyard is all good.”

“Good.” He paused. “Do they still want to kill each other?”

“Yes, but the normal amount.”

“Also good. Though it’s really about the grapes. Remind them of
that. If anyone loses perspective again, remind them that the most important things don’t involve that much talking.”

“Of course.”

He closed his eyes. He was tired. There was no denying that. He needed rest. And all of this time, he’d had trouble asking for it. Now he was going to get it. “Thank you.”

“For someone who says he doesn’t care about that place anymore, you seem pretty concerned.”

“Who said I didn’t care? I’m just getting ready to care about something else.”

That was the truth, wasn’t it? We had so much space in our heart. My mother was tired of giving it all to our family, so she gave it to Henry. Until she realized that wasn’t the answer either. My father realizing the same thing in time to save them.

“It’s time for me to get out of here, kid,” he said.

“You like to go out with a bang?”

He laughed.

He reached for my face, holding my cheek. “What happened?”

I shook my head without answering.

“You left Ben?”

I nodded, trying not to think about where Ben was now, what was happening with him. Maybe he was talking to Michelle, but probably he was letting it sink in for himself that he was going to London, that he was doing what he needed to do. We both were.

My father nodded. “It was the right thing,” he said.

I smiled. “Now you tell me.”

“You needed to get there yourself. Or it wouldn’t have been. You get that?”

“Well, if you say so.”

He smiled. “I think you’re going to be okay, kid. He wasn’t the person.” He shook his head. “Or maybe that’s just what I’m telling myself now so I don’t feel responsible.”

“Responsible for what?”

“Responsible for you. You don’t understand your worth. That was my job.”

I reached over and took his hand, my father, whom I loved more than anything in this world. My father. My mother.

“Daddy.”

“Oh no, you’re bringing out the big gun.”

“I’m moving home, not because I’m scared, but because I’m not anymore. I want to be here.”

He nodded because he could see that I meant it. Then he got sad, thinking about something else.

“It’s too late, baby.”

I nodded. “For our land, but I’ll find new land. And I’ll make Jacob give it back to me, the Last Straw name.”

“He won’t do it. He’s not going to be allowed by his board, even if he wants to.”

“Then I’ll fight him to give me B-Minor, unless you don’t want me using it.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll ask Mom.”

He shook his head. “You’re the most stubborn person that I’ve ever met. And if you think I mean that nicely, I don’t. It’s not a compliment, even if it sounds like one.”

“Will you help me?”

“If you tell me why you want to be here so badly?”

My mother’s words came to mind.
Be careful what you give up.
In a way, that was what I had done. I had focused on other things, on my relationship, on a life far from here. And I was glad I had. It had altered me in the ways that made it possible for me to want to be here. To know what that meant. I had given away a love that felt too dangerous, too risky, and being back here was the greatest reminder that it was real love. How I felt waking up here in the morning, and how I felt sitting on the winemaker’s cottage porch at night. How the smells and sounds and people seemed to grab hold of me every time I let them in. How the wine still did.

The wine. And the fearless piece of me that wanted to be a part of it, even if I couldn’t control it. The fearless part of me knowing that just maybe it was the way to build a life that I wasn’t only good at, but that I loved.

He smiled. “You remember when you were a little kid, and you came into the winemaker’s cottage and announced that you wanted to be a winemaker? I was relieved when you changed your mind.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a life you have no control over. You do everything in your power and ultimately you have no control.”

I moved in closer to him, trying to avoid sounding ironic when I said it, what I knew to be the truth. “Didn’t you just describe everything worth doing?”

He smiled. “Not everything, wiseass.”

“Give me the exception.”

“Making clocks. That, you can control.”

“Why does that sound familiar?”

“I tried to convince you to become a clockmaker. I even took you into San Francisco one afternoon to go to the oldest clock store in the city, to watch the clockmaker do his work.”

“Seriously?”

He shrugged. “You had trouble telling time. I thought at the very least it would help.”

“Did it?”

“Not really.”

He closed his eyes. He was getting tired. I patted his hand, getting ready to leave him, to let him rest, to let my mother come inside and rest with him, the two of them quiet together, the way they belonged.

“So you’re staying? And I’m going. I’m going boating. I’ll hate every second of it, but I’m going.”

I laughed. “Why are you doing that to yourself?”

“It’s the only way to get where we want to be.”

He looked at me, making sure I heard him. They weren’t coming back to Sebastopol, or if they did, it wouldn’t be on the terms I was imagining. The vineyard saved, my father’s legacy, the way it had been, intact.

Then he smiled. “But you’ll be okay. You’re going to be a great winemaker for the same reason you’re a terrible driver.”

“Why is that?”

He shrugged, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “No one else has a clue what you’re doing, but at the end of the day, you get to where you want to go.”

I smiled, leaning in toward him, starting to cry.

“Okay, let’s not get dramatic. You really do have to work on the driving.”

He motioned toward the doorway, where my mother was walking down the hall toward us. “Are we not going to talk about the other guy?” he said. “Before your mother gets here?”

“What guy?”

He tilted his head. “Your mother will make a big deal about it.”

“Who?”

“Jacob. I’m talking about Jacob, of course.”

I pointed at him. “Don’t cause trouble.”

He smiled. “Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, just say that,” he said. “Just say, ‘Shut up, Dad.’ ”

“He’s not the reason.”

He shrugged. “In a way, he is. Actually, he’s the reason for all of it. A guy decides to buy a vineyard from a winemaker. Weddings get cancelled. The daughter goes crazy.”

“You’re talking crazy.”

“I’m not saying you’re going to marry him or anything,” he said. “Calm down.”

“That’s good.”

“We do have that tent, though,” he said.

I leaned in and hugged my father. I hugged him and felt it. The strength that came from him, that you couldn’t get from anywhere else.

My father leaned in close. Then he smiled, pushed my hair back off of my face. “Can I tell you, you’re my favorite kid.”

“You say that to all of us.”

“Well. That doesn’t make it any less true,” he said.

The Wedding

T
here was supposed to be a wedding at our vineyard. And in the end, there was.

Five days after my wedding was to take place, my parents stood there together under a homemade altar. My father wore a sports coat and jeans. My mother wore a blue beret, the blue beret she’d been wearing the day she’d met my father, the day he’d gotten into her car and never gotten out.

It wasn’t an official ceremony. They were never officially divorced, but it felt official: Finn married them, and all their friends from town—from the life they’d built in Sebastopol—stood with them. All the local winemakers were there, Jacob included. Suzannah and Charles flew up to be there too.

I was by my mother’s side. Bobby, my father’s best man, stood by his. Margaret and the twins, eager flower boys, completed the circle.

“There is nothing for me to say that I haven’t said,” my father said, talking to everyone, his eyes held fast on my mother.

“Except
bon voyage
,” my mother said.

He smiled. “Except
bon voyage
,” he said.

With that, he kissed her. Everyone cheered. And we opened wine, more and more wine, as they spoke about leaving there, closing up the house. They told us they were going on a trip around the world, boating to the south of France and the Mediterranean, the gorgeous coast of South America. That part of the plan they kept: my father buying
that wristband that he thought was going to stop the seasickness that he wasn’t even worried about coming. There was no worry. Just excitement. The two of them were heading off to be together on a new adventure. Though this time instead of following, my mother was leading the way. My mother was leading him.

Suzannah and I walked away from the crowd, up to the top of the hill, the very top of the hill that looked out over the entire vineyard. The fifty acres that had taken my father his adult lifetime to accumulate: the original ten, the house and gardens he and my mother had built on them, the forty that followed.

How long ago had my father been the one standing here, looking over this land? How had he known what to do with it? How had I not figured out, before it was too late, how much that mattered?

“It’s a good thing you listened to me and decided to stay here,” she said.

I laughed.

“So is this your new look?”

She pointed at my curls falling over my shoulders, no makeup, none of my Los Angeles armor.

I smiled. “Much less refined?”

She shook her head. “Much more . . . happy.”

She gave me a kind smile.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Apparently not return phone calls,” Jacob said.

We turned around to see him behind us, his hands in his pockets, a button-down shirt on, wine running down the front of it.

“Am I interrupting?”

Suzannah smiled at him. “Of course you are,” she said, irritated.

Suzannah walked away, turning back and making the so-so sign with her hands. I laughed, looking away from her, looking back at Jacob and his wine-covered shirt.

He shrugged apologetically, pulling on his shirt. “I’m a mess,” he said.

“What happened?”

“The twins. They were fighting each other for my licorice.”

I smiled. “Who won?”

“Not me,” he said. “I had to take off my vest.”

He moved closer so he was looking where I was looking, over the late-day vineyard. His vineyard now, The Last Straw, a subsidiary of Murray Grant Wines. And it was starting to feel like that was okay. I had lost that fight, which was hard to accept. But my parents were happy again, my brothers were on the mend. In the ways that mattered, I had won so much.

“They’re leaving on their boat trip tomorrow?” he said.

I nodded. He knew the answer, but he was trying to ask me something else, maybe why I hadn’t called him back. Maybe if it meant that I was staying here.

“You’re okay with that?”

“As long as they’re going together,” I said.

“I told your father that the boat is a good idea,” he said. “It will take them to the place they want to go next.”

“How do you know?”

He shrugged. “I know some things.”

I smiled, wanting that to be correct, that my parents would dock somewhere, call it Big Sur. Somewhere surrounded by water and trees. Somewhere they would make their home.

Jacob crossed his arms over his chest. “Lee’s gone,” he said.

“I heard something about that.”

“I’m doing okay. Thanks for asking.”

I laughed.

“She left the day after the harvest party,” he said. “She moved to Seattle to take a job with Tim O’Reilly. And to get away from me. It was the right thing. She’s happier there.”

Jacob kicked the ground beneath him, soil rising up. Soft and damp. November soil, ready for a quiet winter, its well-earned rest.

“What about you?” he said. “What’s next?”

He looked at me, held my eyes. It was too much, though, to meet his gaze. So I looked away, to the vineyard.

“I’m going to get a plot of land. I won’t be able to afford much. But I’m going to start with a small plot of land. Five acres. See what I can do.”

“Make some wine?”

I nodded. “That’s the plan.”

“You’re going to need a winemaker to teach you,” he said.

“Yes, and my father isn’t available. He’s so out of here.”

He smiled. “You’ll find someone good.”

“Well, first I’ve got to get the land.”

He pointed to the vineyard. “What if I told you I could help you with the land?”

This was when he did it. He handed me the deed. For The Last Straw Vineyard. My father’s original deed. For the original ten acres.

I looked up at him. Then back down at the deed. Ten acres. That was where we were standing. It held the house and some of the gardens. And a half-burned wine cottage. And five beautiful acres of vineyard. Enough for me to get started.

“You’re giving it back?”