Once Upon a Wine (22 page)

T
he next morning, while she fended off a flock of starlings that were eating the unripe grapes, Cammie heard the distant rumble of an engine.

It sounded like a tractor. A fully functional tractor.

She shook her hat to scatter the birds and warned them, “You're going to be sorry you were ever hatched!”

Then she walked along the row of vines until she could see the barn. Josh and Kat were standing next to the rusty red tractor, which was shuddering as the engine roared.

“You guys!” Cammie yelled. They couldn't hear her. The two of them were so absorbed with their project that they didn't notice her until she was practically on top of them.

“Hey!” She waved her arms until Josh saw her and turned off the engine.

“You did it.” Cammie tried to keep the shock and disbelief out of her voice.

“Of course we did it!” Kat, drenched in sweat, looked ready to run a victory lap around the vineyard. “Well, Josh did it. The engine wouldn't start, so I thought the battery was dead, and I was like, how the hell are we going to replace a tractor battery?”

“Luckily, we don't need to.” Josh puffed out his chest beneath his sweat- and oil-stained shirt.

“Yeah. He said that before we spent money on a new battery, we should check all the . . .” Kat turned to consult her husband. “What are they called again?”

“Terminals,” Josh supplied.

“Yeah, you know, where the wires connect to the battery.”

“Okay,” Cammie said.

“So we did, and it turns out that there was a bunch of dirt and grease caked on one of the cables. Josh cleaned it off, and voila! We're in business.”

“Nice,” Cammie said.

“He teaches philosophy
and
fixes tractors.” Kat gazed adoringly at Josh. “Such a Renaissance man.”

Josh feigned modesty. “I had the idea, but you did all the dirty work.”

“I live for dirty work.” Kat breathed in the exhaust fumes as if relishing the freshest mountain air.

Cammie sneezed as a dust mote swirled up from the dirt beneath the tractor. “How did you know to check the terminals?”

“I had a crappy old car in grad school that used to do this all the time,” Josh said.

“We already had everything we needed. All we had to do was clear out the connection,” Kat marveled. “So simple.”

“You guys are the best. I can't wait to get rid of the dead vines.” Cammie hugged them both, giddy with relief. “Kat, if you're interested, we're having a marketing summit meeting at the Whinery in half an hour.”

“I'll make the next one,” Kat promised. “Right now, we're bonding and figuring out how to work the clutch.”

“At the same time?” Cammie asked.

Kat and Josh looked at each other, both of them brimming with excitement. “We're nothing if not multitaskers.”

•   •   •

“Here's what we've got so far.” Cammie slapped a yellow legal pad on the glossy black bar top. “Wine, spa treatments, the best room at the bed-and-breakfast, a gift certificate to the Naked Finger, and the private jet. Oh, and a skateboarding lesson, if they want it.”

“People were surprisingly helpful,” Ginger reported. “Once we showed them Jacques's Instagram account.”

“Who doesn't love an Internet-famous dog? This is brilliant.” Summer Benson inspected the notes Cammie had jotted. “I love everything about this.”

“It was Cammie's idea.” Ginger smiled at her niece. “My little marketing genius.”

Jenna had mentioned that Summer was the head of the Black Dog Bay Historical Society, although the bright-eyed blonde with a platinum pixie cut and moxie to burn didn't look like the type to hang out with dusty books and board members all day. But Cammie had started to accept that nothing in this town was as it first appeared.

“It sounds like you're doing just fine without my help, but I'll make Hattie Huntington throw in some goodies, too,” Summer said.

“Who's Hattie Huntington?” Cammie asked.

“She owns that hideous purple eyesore on the far end of the bay.” Summer pointed out the bar's front window.

“Ah. I was wondering about that.” The eyesore, as Summer put it, was a sprawling purple mansion complete with a private beach and a pool.

“Hattie Huntington is the meanest, pettiest woman since . . .” Jenna trailed off. “Ever.”

“That's why we love her.” Summer snagged a clean wineglass and poured her own drink, to Jenna's evident dismay. “I'll make her cough up some of those fancy truffles she imports from France. Or, ooh, she can have her private chef prep a fancy picnic on the beach to go with the wine.”

“That sounds amazing.” Cammie was writing madly.

“I know.” Summer brushed back her hair. “Which is great, because I'm totally going to win the contest. I don't mean to brag, but my breakup story can beat all y'all's breakup stories.”

“My fiancé married a stranger,” Brighton reminded them.

“My boyfriend left my restaurant for a hotter kitchen,” Cammie said.

“Amateurs.” Summer rolled her eyes. “My boyfriend dumped me after I almost died in a plane crash.”

Ginger seemed suitably impressed.

“And he was the pilot.” Summer seemed perversely smug about all this. “He dumped me while I was still hospitalized with a head injury. I win.”

“You can't win.” Cammie shook her head. “No one here can win. This is for random strangers only.”

“Boo.” Summer stuck out her tongue.

“We're wasting some top-tier tales of woe!” Brighton said.

“You can be judges,” Cammie decided. “Someone needs to pick the finalists that people will vote on. Jenna, you can be a judge, too. You must have heard every breakup story under the sun in here.”

“Pretty much.” Jenna nodded.

“We'll get Kat to call up every journalist and publicist she's ever met,” Cammie said. “I'll take point on the grassroots marketing
campaign. Jenna, do you have a mailing list? Some way to contact your customers?”

“No, but Marla does. She sends a holiday card to every guest who's ever stayed at the bed-and-breakfast.”

“The historical society has a pretty sizable mailing list,” Summer offered.

“So does the Naked Finger,” Brighton added. “And we've had some customers that could definitely medal in the Bad-Breakup Olympics.”

“Okay, so we'll send out postcards and e-mail to everyone we can,” Cammie said.

“What about me?” Ginger cried. “What can I do?”

“Make more strawberry wine,” Cammie ordered. “Vats of it. Stockpile like the apocalypse is coming.”

“Consider it done.”

Cammie had vowed not to get emotionally involved in another food-and-beverage venture. She knew better than to go down this road again, and yet, here she was, envisioning grand plans and opening up her heart. With Ian and with the vineyard. But whatever. She'd worry about that later. Right now, she had an empire to build.

B
y Friday, the contest was basically good to go. Kat and Cammie secured air travel, lodging, meals, spa services, a shopping spree that included both clothing and accessories, and a VIP wine tasting.

“What's VIP about it?” Kat asked when Cammie announced it.

“Our charm and hospitality?” Cammie raised a glass of strawberry wine to their future. “All we have to do now is send the e-mails, plaster our message all over Twitter and Instagram, and wait for the breakup horror stories to roll in.”

•   •   •

“Damn, dude. Listen to
this
one.” Summer whistled as she scanned an e-mailed entry. “This woman was dating a guy and they were talking about moving in together, but he kept leaving the lids of metal cat food cans right at the top of the recycling bin. She kept asking him to wrap them in newspapers or bury them under a cereal box or something, but he kept forgetting.”

Cammie looked up from her iPad, where she was perusing her share of the entries. “Eh, that's not so bad.”

“Hold on. I'm not done yet.” Summer cleared her throat. “So finally, one Sunday morning, this chick cuts her finger so bad on the metal edge that she has to go to urgent care. Blood was spurting everywhere. That's a direct quote: ‘Blood was spurting everywhere.'”

“Gross.” Across the bar, Jenna wrinkled her nose.

“But her boyfriend kept insisting it was just a little cut and she was being dramatic, so she had to drive herself to the ER. Then it turned out she had to get surgery.”

“Well, that's bad,” Jenna allowed. “But it's not the worst thing I've heard today. Or even this afternoon.”

“Still not done.” Summer held up her hand. “Then the whole thing got infected and she lost her fingernail. She says it took months to heal and she had to quit her job because she couldn't type, and now she has to think about him every time she gets a manicure.”

“From a cat-food can lid?” Cammie was horrified. “Can that actually happen?”

Summer lifted up her laptop to display the screen. “She attached a photo.”

Everyone recoiled in horror.

“I give it an A-minus,” Kat said. “Would've been a run-of-the-mill B, but the photo puts it over the edge.”

“B-plus,” Brighton said.

“You give everything a B-plus,” Summer said.

Brighton shrugged. “When I hear an A story, I'll give it A.”

“Well, I give it an A,” Summer said. “The woman has to live the rest of her life with nine fingernails because some dumbass couldn't figure out that sharp edges are sharp.”

“Yeah, all right.” Jenna glanced at the chalkboard over the bar and handed a piece of pink chalk to Kat. “Put her on the short list.”

Kat added “cat-food chick” to the short list, which was rapidly
turning into a long list. When she'd brainstormed this idea, Cammie had thought it would be fun. But after days of skimming increasingly horrifying tales of heartbreak, Cammie no longer considered this entertaining in any way. “Guys, we need to stop.”

“We can't stop.” Kat didn't even look up from her screen. “These entries aren't going to read themselves. Look, here's one from a woman who had her breakup live-tweeted by a famous blogger who was sitting at the table next to her at a restaurant.”

“But think about what this is doing to our hearts. To our souls! Think about what this is doing to our dating expectations.”

“Well, you don't have to worry about me and Brighton,” Summer said. “We don't have dating expectations. Although I feel like I lived half these stories before I met Dutch.”

A male voice interrupted all the laughing and chattering. “Cammie?”

Cammie whirled around to find Ian just inside the bar's front door. “Oh! Hey! We were just . . .”

She glanced around at the short list and the photos of cat-food-lid injuries and the onlookers watching them with rapt attention. “Let's step outside,” she suggested.

He walked with her to the little white gazebo in the town square. “You look busy,” he said.

“We've spent all day reading breakup stories.” She filled him in on the details. “It's just one romantic disaster after another.”

He sat down on the shaded steps of the gazebo. She sat next to him. They watched the tourists strolling on their way to the boardwalk. The weathered bronze dog statue stood watch over the proceedings.

“It makes me think about how important perception is,” Cammie said. “Like, two people can go through the same breakup and have completely different takes on it.”

“Like what happened with us,” he said quietly.

She tried to figure out how to respond to this. They hadn't talked about it yet, not in any depth or detail. No matter how much time they spent together or how close they felt, this was the one thing that she hadn't been able to bring up.

“Yes.” She inclined her head. “I'm sure that you and I have very different versions of what happened and why.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “How does your story go?”

Her first impulse was to protect herself—and him—by being vague and circumspect. But she couldn't shake the stories she'd spent the day reading—all the pain, the hilarity, the bravery of people who'd fallen in love and then fallen apart and pulled themselves back together. So she told the truth—her version of it, anyway. “In my story, I was the bad guy. I'm the one who left.” She settled back against the wooden slats and stared out at the ocean. “I was the villain because I had a choice to stay or go, but you didn't. You had to stay, but I chose to go. So I'm selfish by default.”

“That's the end of the story,” he pointed out. “What's the beginning?”

“Oh, well, the beginning is all empty gas tanks and strawberry patches and hormones.” She tried to sound detached. “Remember all the hormones?”

He smiled. “I remember.”

“The beginning was so sweet and the middle was so good that it made the end so bitter.” She took a breath. “But I also know that the story couldn't have ended any other way. I couldn't be the girl you wanted me to be.”

He absorbed this, quiet and still. Cammie stared at the whitecaps cresting on the horizon. Finally, she asked, “What's your version?”

“In my story, you were the girl who was too good to settle down with a twenty-two-year-old farmer in a tiny town in Delaware. You were meant for bigger and better things.”

“I assume you're being ironic.”

He shook his head.

She kept looking at the water. “You're the one who predicted—correctly, I might add—that my restaurant would fail.”

“I should never have said that. You dreamed bigger than I could. It's one of the things I love about you.”

And there it was. The
L
word. In present tense, too. This was her chance to ask all kinds of questions, open all kinds of doors.

She remained silent.

“In my story,” he continued, “I'm the guy who didn't do anything. That's worse than being the villain. I just stood there and let things happen.”

“I had no idea you felt that way.” How could she? They'd never talked after she'd left.

“Revise your story,” he urged her. “You weren't the bad guy. You had a choice, but so did I.”

“Not really,” Cammie said. “Family legacy and all that.”

“I had options, but I didn't see that until after you'd left.”

“And you'd sworn you'd never ask me to come back.”

“But you came back, anyway. I'm glad you did.” He leaned over and pressed a soft kiss against her temple. “Even though you're not staying.”

She didn't realize she'd expected him to ask her to stay until now. No matter how many times she left, he would let her go. No matter how many different ways they spun their stories, he would never change that part. He'd asked her to stay once, and he'd never ask again.

He had his sticking points, and she had hers.

“I thought about you,” she confessed. “After I left.”

“I thought about you, too.”

They watched the waves for a few more minutes, and then her phone's alarm beeped.

“I have to go.” Cammie got to her feet. “The grapes call, and I must answer.”

He stood up, too. “You're doing a great job.”

“I'm trying.” She reached out to touch his arm. “I'm trying to love farming. Truly. I'm trying.”

“But you don't.”

She shook her head. “It's just not who I am.” Part of her wanted to apologize, but she stopped herself.

He walked her back to her car. “Hey.”

“Yeah?” She matched his pace and stride.

“We still have options.”

“You think so?”

He took her hand in his. “Always.”