At least three different tables in Sol, the appropriately sunny restaurant, were eavesdropping. The story of the handsome young winemaker and the Alvarez girl had reached a frenzied pitch, thanks to the Olympic level gossiping of Stella’s client Esther, who had left the salon the previous week with beautiful highlights and juicy tidbits. For five years, they’d all waited patiently for details about the private young Microsoftie (although weren’t they all young?) who’d bought the Folkner place for an obscene amount, then plowed crazy money into it. There were rumors of light fixtures flown in from Paris. A marble bathtub. A Dale Chihuly chandelier. Nobody would have cared if he’d been some pot-bellied retiree with a bad weave. But Evan Hollister had a way of attracting interest.
Stella studied her friend with her fork poised in the air. Carmen was grateful that Stella had canceled her two o’clock balayage appointment, praying her client wouldn’t spot her in town. She was supposed to be at the vet with a sick cat. “Are you sure Paolo is really that bad?”
“They’re two of a kind. They both have one thing on their mind. Making me feel inadequate and stealing my father’s land.”
“That’s two things.”
“You get the point.”
“Buying is not exactly stealing.”
“Whose side are you on anyway?”
Stella studied her friend’s wineglass. “Maybe I should give you a ride home.”
Carmen arched her eyebrows. “Excellent idea.” She took a sip. “I know you’re trying to help, but a wedding is a well-dressed military operation with crudités. And this weekend, I’m trying to beat my opponent.”
“You both have weddings booked for this weekend?” Stella raised her eyebrows.
Carmen nodded. “At almost exactly the same time. Hopefully he’ll put a sign on his driveway.” She put down her empty glass. “I don’t know why I thought he’d help me in the first place. His goal is to put Blue Hills out of business. Do I seem like I’ve lost it?”
“Before you started drinking like a sailor you seemed perfectly rational.”
Carmen accepted another glass of wine. “Thank you.” She took a sip. “That man is driving me to drink.”
“He likes you, Carmen. Accept it.”
“Now you sound like the crazy one.” Carmen raised her wineglass, dismissing her friend’s comment with a shake of her head. “To covert operations and subterfuge.”
Stella lifted her glass, clinked and took a small sip. “It’s going to be an interesting weekend.”
The bride was drunk. Not tipsy. Blasted.
Her well-intentioned mother had brought the nervous bride several seemingly innocent flutes of champagne, not knowing that the make-up artist carried bourbon in her kit for exactly this purpose. Bourbon got many a skittish bride down the aisle—unless that bride first gulped champagne.
The untouched cheese and fruit platter, along with a comment about a missed breakfast, gave Carmen all the information she needed.
The girl needed food.
Stat.
Luckily the bride in Evan’s winery’s first wedding had proved to be a poster child for movie bridezillas. Evan had called that morning, begging for help. It was incredibly satisfying, hearing his rising panic and profuse apologies for his previous behavior. She’d listened with growing sympathy as he described last-minute wedding frenzy. When the best laid plans fell like dominoes. Where could he find a two-foot-wide pale pink satin ribbon? The caterer was threatening to quit. His voice trailed off as he described the bride, who’d woken up on her wedding morning not with gratitude or thoughts of her soon-to-be husband. Her first thought was that her wedding menu was boring.
“She’s serving deconstructed foie gras.” Evan had sounded tired.
“Is that edible?” Carmen had asked.
“It’s strips of pâté on duck fat,” Evan had sighed.
“First of all, yuck, and secondly, nobody wants to eat that. Simplify it. Tell the caterer to put the pâté on a bun. Simplicity is chic.”
“I don’t think I can use the word ‘chic’ in a sentence and not spontaneously explode.”
“You just did.”
Thankfully, the two winery weddings were staggered by one hour, in a sequence which favored the Alvarez sisters. Adella had arrived late the night before to help. Lola, accustomed to her recent art school life, was sleepy but eager to help. While Carmen poured cups of coffee for the tipsy bride and ransacked the kitchen for Cool Ranch Doritos, the only snack the bride would eat, her sisters were available to help pass hors d’oeuvres.
The caterer had dashed into the kitchen half an hour before the guests were slated to arrive, cussing her head off about two waiters who both said they were sick.
“They’re water skiing!” the caterer had screeched. “I can see them out on the lake!”
Adella, an elementary teacher until she had the twins, had chided her for using such language on a job. Lola had grabbed a platter and started scattering it with parsley, gulping coffee, confiding that she’d been fired from three catering jobs in the course of her life. By the time the bride had devoured the Doritos so quickly she nearly choked, the guests were arriving. The make-up artist repaired the damage from Doritos dust and Carmen ran downstairs to make sure the wine was properly decanted.
As she walked up the short path edged in flowerbeds to the heart of the Blue Hills Vineyard—the tasting room, cave and winemaking room, all housed in one glass-fronted building overlooking the lake—Carmen felt a tinge of regret. Evan stood on his patio, waving his arm, yelling into his cell phone. Carmen couldn’t hear him, but guessed it could be wedding guests calling from up lake. If they’d followed the signs to the wedding, customized with the last names of the bride and groom, they might have been led astray. Each flower-festooned sign was mysteriously pointing to the Twenty-Five Mile State Park. Once inside the park, guests could potentially drive in looping circles looking for the wedding for hours. Especially if they saw more signs.
Lola, thought Carmen as she entered the cool dark blue cave, might have had a little too much fun with that one. In fact, Lola had seemed a little too thrilled with all this from the get-go. As if she never wanted it to end. Carmen couldn’t wait for it to end. Despite her very strong desire to stop Evan from buying Papi’s vineyard, she couldn’t help but relate to his struggle.
All thoughts of Evan and his Alvarez-related troubles disappeared as soon as Carmen slipped into the cave. The beauty of the room, shadowy with flickering fake candles in tiny white votives, took her breath away. Her father had worked until midnight last night with Adella and Lola to turn the dark, barn-shaped cave, flanked on both sides with walls of oak casks, into a fairy land. The oak cask tables, which a friend of Lola’s had made for a song, were topped in white tulle, leftovers from another friend’s wedding. Each table had a mason jar of wildflowers. Fairy lights swung from the rafters, crisscrossing to highlight the natural wood beams.
It was magical. Like stepping into a dream. A shiver went across Carmen’s skin as she inhaled the familiar scent of oak, pine and hay from the bales tucked into the corners, covered with canvas for seating. Carmen walked between the tables, her sandals quiet on the stone floor. She heard a noise and saw her father in a white shirt, a string of fairy lights illuminating his face. He studied the lights, as if searching for something.
“Papi?” Carmen called.
Papi turned, surprised. “Oh, mija. It’s you. I keep expecting your mother.”
Carmen’s heart clenched. “Papi, Mama’s gone.”
He walked slowly towards her. “Oh, I know. It’s just, this is where I feel her the most. She’d come here when you girls were little.” He smiled. “To get some quiet. Cool down.” He reached for her hand, patting it. “You girls were a lot of work.”
“I know.”
“She had patience, that one.”
Carmen squeezed Papi’s hand. “So did you.”
He shook his head. “Not like my Mercedes.” He swept his hand around. “S
omeone must be getting married.” He frowned. “It’s not one of you girls.” He looked at his clothes. “I need to get changed.”
“No, Papi. We rented out the place. To raise money for the winery. We’re going to make sure this cru is great so we can sell it and save the business.”
“Save it?”
“From the bank.”
A dark shadow passed over her father’s face as he remembered. “I don’t know what happened.”
Carmen wasn’t sure exactly what the confession meant. Which part he didn’t understand. She put her arms around her father, kissing his leathery cheek. The old man was still handsome, his high cheekbones and crinkled brown eyes still proud. He hadn’t lost his hair like most of his friends. The black was salt and pepper now, thick and wavy. He often combed it in front of his friends as a joke, holding out his comb. “Remember what this is?”
Carmen leaned her cheek on her father’s shoulder, grateful for the moment. “It doesn’t matter. It’s going to be fine. We’re going to keep the Alvarez name alive and produce great wines. Like we always have.”
Her father craned his neck to look into his daughter’s eyes. “Oh no, mija, you’ve caught it, haven’t you?”
Carmen tilted her head. “What?”
“It’s in your blood. Making wine. It’s not something you think about until you wake up one day and realize it’s all you think about. You worry about your vines like your children. You check on the fruit more than you need to. You think about the cru like it’s the only thing that matters.”
Carmen’s first thought was to disagree. She realized she wasn’t thinking in exactly the way her father did. Hers was a more boots-on-the-ground mentality. Get through the weddings, keep Evan at bay, search into the wee hours on the computer, finding information on winemaking. She’d been slightly horrified to learn that her alma mater, Washington State University, offered a major in viticulture and enology. Had she taken that path, her life would be much simpler.
There was so much that needed doing right now, she didn’t have time to walk the vines or do more than make sure the fruit was ripening on time. With that thought, her mind was off and racing. As soon as the wedding was over, they’d need to do inventory on the barrels. Make sure the entire cave was as obsessively clean as possible. Wrangle field workers. With the immigration laws changing by the day, it was an extremely tight market. Also, maybe one of her sisters could help with their display at the First Crush Festival. Make sure Adella could be there for every wedding. Help Lola collect the last boxes from her former roommates apartment in Seattle.
So. Many. Things.
And yet.
She loved it.
That’s when it hit her.
Papi was right. It was in her blood all along. Waiting.
She was a winemaker.
In the quiet beauty of the cave, with the sparkling lights, the blushing flowers and the man who had started it all when he’d crossed the border with nothing more than a backpack, Carmen felt more vibrantly alive than she had in her entire life.
She’d learned something that would change things forever.
Carmen Alvarez was a winemaker.
Nine
The Deal
“Oh my god, Carmen, there are sixteen little goats headbutting the flower girls. Two of them were pushed into the pool by a goat trying to get their bouquets. We kept yelling ‘let go of the flowers’ but the last thing those kids had been told was not to let them go. She was supposed to drop off one goat.” Evan was frantic.
Carmen heard people yelling in the background. Her own ceremony had been flawless. It had brought tears to people’s eyes. Afterwards, they’d sampled the Blue Hills wines.
People had asked if they could buy cases to take home. Carmen had plucked an impossible price from thin air. Five cases sold.
“Don’t let them eat the bouquets!” Evan made a strangled noise. “They’re eating the decorations!” He yelled at someone: “Don’t feed it to them!” He came back on the line. “It’s like an invasion. They’re starving.”
“Maybe the goat herder thought you needed them to eat invasive plants?” Because maybe that’s what someone ordered.
“At a wedding?!”
Carmen put a hand on her phone receiver. “Shhhhhh!” she said to Adella and Lola, who were doubled over on the small stone patio outside the cave, which provided a perfect view of the mayhem they’d visited on the less fortunate Hollister Estate guests. It was like a watching the aftermath on a football field where the play called for splits and double-backs and utter chaos.
Looking down the hill, Adella lifted her wineglass. “Take that, Mr. Millionaire.”
“I’m so sorry, Evan. Is there anything I can do?” The words slipped out. She couldn’t help it. She was her mother’s daughter.
Lola angrily mimed cutting a line across her throat.
“Do you know anything about goats?” Evan asked.
The wedding guests were eating at tables by the pool with the air of disaster survivors. Shoes were kicked off. Ties removed. There was a general consensus that after being headbutted by goats, trampled by hysterical flower girls and witnessing a formal occasion unravel into a barnyard melee, the rules went out the window. Several flower girls were splashing in the pool in borrowed T-shirts and underwear. Trays of appetizers had been taken from waiters and placed on tables where gossiping relatives caught up, gnawing with abandon on food they’d barely noticed when they’d been properly dressed.
Carmen arrived to find a shell-shocked Evan trying to shoo goats away from the patio, finding little success since the goats had moved onto the flower beds, recently planted with apparently delicious blooms. One goat stood on top of a table, munching wedding cake. The bride watched with a zombie-like stare, her face streaked with mascara. Her mother patted her hand, shaking her head. Carmen heard the mother whisper, “Well dear, no one will forget your wedding,” which caused the daughter to break into fresh tears, muttering, “That goat is eating pâté imported from France.”
At which point, the mother took a swig of champagne. “The goat does bear a passing resemblance to your Aunt Martha.”
The bride smiled, sharing her mother’s bottle.
Evan’s face lit up with hope when he saw Carmen coming down the path, holding up her dress as she slid down the embankment from the Blue Hills Vineyard where the path ended. “Thank you so much for coming over. I didn’t know who to call. The goat herder is out of cell phone coverage. I need to do damage control, but it’s impossible without getting rid of these goats.”
Carmen took out her phone. “Thank you, Google. “
“Are you kidding me?”
Carmen read what came up when she typed in “goat behavior”. “We need to look for the leader. A female. Apparently, the queen.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Because you were in the middle of a home invasion.”
Evan threw up his hands. “Did you see it?”
Carmen felt flushed with guilt, not wanting to point out that she was hosting a storybook wedding down the hill where Adella was filling orders for cases of wine to be shipped across the country, including one to a man who ran a grocery store chain. “I can imagine. Right, let’s find this queen goat.”
Evan looked around his patio. They both pointed at the same time to the goat on top of the table. “There she is,” said Evan. “Probably.”
“We need to get her to follow us.”
“Okay, assuming we can get sixteen goats to follow us, where do we put them?”
“You’re not going to like the answer.”
“At this point they can raid my fridge and watch the NFL channel all day.”
Carmen looked over her sunglasses at Evan, whose mouth opened in shock.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
The goats were corralled in the expansive living room, climbing on the furniture, chasing one another around the couch, rubbing up against the long velvet curtains that lo
oked, to Carmen, like they cost more than her car. At first, they’d tried to get the goats down the long dark hallway to the garage, but the queen kept turning around, forcing the herd to scatter throughout the house. One of the more ambitious goats scrambled upstairs and had to be enticed down with a bunch of carrots, although he fell down the last half of the stairway, causing Carmen some concern until he jumped up and started eating carrots out of her hand.
They’d turned over chairs as a barrier, but the goats easily climbed or jumped over them, heading for the kitchen. While Evan pushed larger furniture towards the two exits flanking the oversized stone fireplace, Carmen kept the queen in the living room, using blocking tactics, singing, anything she could think of to attract the goat and keep her away from the space Evan was working to fill.
Outside, the wedding planner was serving dinner while all available hands cleaned up the chaos the goats had created. Some of the wedding guests had even pitched in, saying they didn’t mind, it was fun. A trio of little girls, their hair damp with pool water, had snuck around the side of the house and were peering in the windows at the goats. By the time Evan had shooed the last goat from the kitchen and into his makeshift corral, the goats seemed to have settled in, enjoying their luxurious surroundings.
The tile floor was scattered with richly patterned carpets. The tables were marble and brass. On the pale, hand-smoothed stucco walls were black and white photographs from around the world that Carmen suspected were of places Evan had actually traveled to. It was the perfect place to spend a hot summer day, or to curl up on one of the vast couches and watch the snow fall while a fire crackled in the majestic fireplace.
Carmen shook her head, clearing all thoughts of cozy winter fires. A bleating goat snapped her back into reality.
“I’m sure my, um, interior designer will love my new tenants,” Evan said as he pushed aside a bookcase to enter the living room.
Carmen wondered if a former girlfriend was what he meant by “interior designer” and how far back in the past she was, before chiding herself for caring. She was here for one reason only.
Summer at Orchard House: An utterly compelling and heart-warming summer romance (Blue Hills Book 1) Page 9
