Eight Hundred Grapes (8 page)

Bobby made a beeline for the bar, saying hello to everyone he passed. The partygoers stared at him, confused, but they didn’t really care too much. They were at a wedding in wine country, drinking Murray Grant’s rosé blend, thinking it was good.

Bobby made a face as he downed his first glass, then ordered another.

Then Bobby pointed to the bride. “She looks beautiful . . .”

The bride had flaming-red hair and makeup running down her face. She might have been beautiful earlier, but now she was a wet mess, someone having thrown her in the pool. She was happy about that. She didn’t care that she was a wet mess. That was how a bride was supposed to be. At least that was what Bobby said, toasting to the happy bride, before he walked right up to her.

Finn shook his head. “This isn’t going to go well,” he said.

But, the bride seemed to like Bobby, the two of them gabbing.

As we walked over to join them, the bride gave Finn a flirtatious smile, newly married and checking out Finn, striking a pose for him.

“Hello there,” she said.

Finn nodded. “Hello.”

Then she motioned toward Bobby. “He’s getting married tomorrow,” she said, her wild red hair flying.

“We know,” Finn said.

Bobby leaned in to her, a little too close.

“The thing is,” Bobby said, “I’m a little young to be getting married. You know? I love Margaret. I really love her. But maybe that’s part of it. You look a little older. You probably are more sure.”

The bride looked at Bobby, irritated. “Did you just call me old?”

“Older, not old.”

The bride looked like she was going to cry, which was when the groom came over. He was also redheaded, and large. He smelled like a brewery. “What’s wrong?” he said.

She pointed at Bobby and Finn. “They called me old.”

Finn put up his hands in surrender. “No, we didn’t.”

“Are you calling Catherine a liar?” the groom said.

“Who’s Catherine?” Bobby said.

Bobby put out his hand, which the groom slapped away. A group surrounded us, the happy couple and the Ford siblings, who had upset them.

“Easy,” Finn said. “Let’s take it easy here.”

He put his arms out, trying to keep the group from closing in.

Bobby moved closer to Catherine as though she couldn’t hear him, as though that were the problem. “I said you looked older, not old. Can we move on to whether I should get married tomorrow?”

This was when the groom threw a punch at Bobby’s face.

Finn jumped in to protect Bobby, and pushed the groom onto the ground. He wasn’t trying to fight him, just trying to get him away from Bobby.

“Get him out of here!” Finn yelled. He was thinking only of Bobby and his upcoming marriage. Protecting both.

As I ran with Bobby into the woods, the cops showed up, sirens blasting.

Bobby stopped where he was. “I have to go back for him,” Bobby panted.

And he wanted to, he really did.

He started to race back toward the fight, toward the cops. But, even from the woods, we could see it was too late.

Finn was on top of a rich, redheaded groom—and the cop who was pulling him off was not there to save him.

I kept going over the night before Bobby’s wedding—as if it held the secret to how I should feel, seven days before mine.

I was getting nowhere fast—lying on my childhood bed, staring at a photograph of Culture Club taped on the ceiling above. It had been there since I was a teenager, placed at my eye level, so Boy George would be the one to say good night.

It felt like he was taunting me with all the answers I didn’t seem to have—when my phone rang.

I looked down at the caller ID, a happy Ben staring back. I wanted to pick up and tell Ben what Finn had just told me—I wanted Ben to be my person again, the one I told everything to. Ben always said the thing that revealed to me what I should do. Ben said that was giving him too much credit. It never seemed to me that it was giving him enough.

“Hey,” he said when I picked up the phone. He paused, not sure what to do now that he had me there. “Thanks for picking up.”

I kept my eyes on the ceiling, on George’s face. I wasn’t going to make this easier. Maybe I was done making it harder, but that was different.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Staring at Boy George.”

He laughed. “That bad of a day?”

“You have no idea.”

He cleared his throat, asking me a question that encouraged me to answer him.

“You want to tell me?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You going to?”

I shook my head as though he could see that. “How would you describe Bobby and Margaret? Would you describe them as happy?”

“Yes, I would.” He paused.

“What?”

“I would describe him as happier than her,” he said. “She seems a little lost.”

That broke my heart for Bobby, for the reasons why Ben was correct, for the reasons it didn’t matter.

“And my parents?”

“That is more even. That is blessed,” he said. “I mean, next to you and Boy George, I’d say they are the happiest couple I know.”

I laughed for the first time that day, some of my anger melting. Ben felt like Ben again, the two of us talking gently in a dark room, the world safer and more lovely for it.

“You still need to take that poster down. It’s creepy. Milli Vanilli creepy.”

“That’s not a battle you’re going to win, Ben.”

Except that it was. I would have to remove everything from this room before this house was sold. The house. The vineyard. My childhood.

“So I oversaw the move today,” Ben said. “Everything is on its way to London.”

His accent crept up on me and warmed me to him.

“I guess you heard that . . .”

“I did,” I said. “Thomas called looking for you.”

“He mentioned something about that,” he said.

“Considering what’s going on between us, did you think that maybe you shouldn’t have sent my stuff to London?”

“I did. I thought you might not want me to send your stuff anywhere without talking to you first. I thought that was the right thing to do. But I decided to move everything anyway.”

“What would you call doing that?”

“Hopeful.”

I covered my eyes with my elbow. “Ben, I should get some sleep.”

“I had them leave the guest room mattress. I’m sleeping on that. Though I forgot to tell them to leave sheets. So it’s a bit of a sad situation. Empty apartment. Old mattress. No pillow for my head.”

“You could check into a hotel.”

“That’s sadder.”

He paused. We both did. The silence between us was exhausting.

“I haven’t shown up there. I’ve tried to give you space. But you do need to talk to me.”

“I’m listening.”

He got quiet. “I was ready for you to argue. Now I’m not sure where to start.”

“How about with Michelle Carter?”

“I’ve told you about Michelle Carter.”

What he’d told me was they had dated briefly the summer before we met—three months of briefly while she was filming a movie in New York. And that Michelle had crushed him.
Eviscerated
him. That was the word he used. Then she went back to London and got back together with her boyfriend. The famous actor—and often her romantic costar—Clay Michaels. The couple was tabloid fodder, glossy red carpet photos of them falling into the hands of girls at nail salons on a regular basis.

Ben had never even been photographed with Michelle at an event. He liked to joke:
If you weren’t photographed with a movie star you were dating, was it like it never happened?

And so Michelle became an anecdote for Ben to share about his dating life. The time he dated one of the most famous women in the world. How she completely and totally disappeared on him.
How else was that going to end?
Ben laughed. The way we laugh about the people who slayed us, when we’re talking about them with the one person who never would.

“Does Clay know the truth?”

“Yes. He’s always known that Maddie wasn’t his.”

“He isn’t furious?”

“Apparently he has a kid that isn’t Michelle’s.”

I was getting a headache. I pulled the covers up higher, contemplating Michelle’s odd arrangement with her boyfriend, contemplating what else I knew about Michelle: her gorgeous house in London recently photographed for the cover of
Architectural Digest
, her gorgeous face chosen for
People
magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People.”

Boy George stared down at me, laughing. He was laughing and not doing anything to save me. What could he do?

“When Michelle moved back to London, that was it,” he said. “She got back together with Clay, and an old friend of mine, the guy that introduced us, said that they were having a baby at some point. But I never heard from her again.” He paused. “Until I heard from her again.”

“What did she say when she called you?”

“She said our summer fling resulted in a little girl who she was finally ready for me to meet,” he said.

“When was that, Ben?”

He paused. “Five days after I proposed to you,” he said. “Timing’s a funny thing, isn’t it?”

That was five months ago. Ben had proposed to me during a trip to Paris. He had known about Maddie for five months? That was longer than he had said yesterday. Had time collapsed for him? His engagement, the realization that he had a little girl. Everything melding into one long day. On one side there was our life, which we considered happy. On the other was this brand-new blessing, which could tear that life apart.

“I started to tell you that very night, but you were working late on the Porter case. And when you came in, you said, and I remember, get me a bottle of B-Minor and don’t say a word until I’ve had half of it. You fell asleep after half of it.”

“So it’s my fault?”

“No, I was just trying to pick a time that it wouldn’t hurt you.”

“What happened?”

“You have this wide-open face. And we were having so much fun planning the wedding, getting ready for London.” He paused. “And then I guess I couldn’t find a time that seemed like it wouldn’t hurt you.”

I took a breath, softened to him. He probably should have stopped talking then. But he didn’t. We never stopped talking, did we? It was what allowed us to say the thing that stuck. In the moment before we said the wrong thing.

“I know it’s hard to understand why I kept Maddie from you. But it’s hard for me too. It’s hard to understand why Michelle kept Maddie from me for so long.”

“Doesn’t it make you mad, Ben?”

“It makes me fucking furious and it has been rather difficult for me to deal with.”

Which was when I remembered seeing them on the street, Michelle’s hand on Ben’s back. He didn’t look furious.

“I look at Maddie and I think, regardless of what Michelle did, I don’t want to lose another second with her.” He paused. “And I’m grateful to Michelle that she did tell me.”

He cleared his throat.

“And now I’m telling you. I love you. And I’m going to do whatever I can to make things right for us.”

I could hear how much he meant it—and I felt myself moving toward him, toward understanding. Which was when he started to talk again.

“Let’s figure out how to get past this. I didn’t do anything intentionally deceitful. It’s not like I was unfaithful,” Ben said.

Unfaithful
. What a choice of word. As if there were one way to make someone lose faith. Adultery. That was Ben’s measure of what was unforgiveable. It was what my mother was doing—with an impotent man. It was what my good brother was running away from so he didn’t allow himself to do it to my other brother. Ben wasn’t guilty of that. Except weren’t there other unforgivable things you couldn’t turn back from?

Last week I had known Ben. I had trusted him to tell me the truth, to ask me the questions that made me feel like I was moving closer to the truth. That was the trust between us.

“You still there?” he said.

I told him I wasn’t.

Then we got off the phone.

I went downstairs and made a cup of hot water with lemon, then I went upstairs and into Finn’s room, but it was dark. Maybe he was still at the bar. Either way, he wasn’t there now—his bed made, his bag on top of it.