“Okay, well, looks like things are under control.”
Evan waved his hand around the room. “Right. This is what having things under control looks like.”
Carmen sighed. “I don’t know what you want from me, Evan. I came over. I am hosting my own wedding, which I left. For you. Did you ever think that maybe you’re not cut out for this?”
Evan lifted his hands. “I’m sorry. What do you mean, not cut out for this?”
She waved her hands around wildly. “This. This life. I mean, how long have you been here?” Without waiting for him to answer, she kept talking. “Have you been here for a real wildfire? Spent three days in a row without sleep, spraying your vines with water so they don’t catch on fire. You haven’t had to burn your own vines to prevent disease from spreading. You haven’t been staring at the ledgers all night like my family, hoping you have enough money to get people to pick the fruit that for once is healthy enough to produce a bumper crop.”
He held up his fingers. “Five years and yes I have seen wildfires. I might not have been here running the winery day to day but I lived through it.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I’ve owned the vineyard for five years, but someone managed it for me until I could move here full time.” He pushed a goat off his sofa. It immediately scampered back up.
“You had a winery manager?” Wouldn’t that be heaven?
“Yes! It’s what people do. I wanted to be here for two long years instead of splitting my time between Seattle and Chelan, juggling a stressful job and running the winery remotely, driving six hours roundtrip to Chelan every other week, but it didn’t work out that way.” He flexed his fist. “Why are you so mad at me?”
She fell into the sofa. “What?” Because you can buy your way out of anything?
“When we first started talking in the grocery story, I thought we’d, I don’t know, develop a friendship. Maybe more. That night.” He shook his head. “Never mind. I thought you were different. Small town people are supposed to be salt of the earth, but you know what you are? Bigots. Look it up. Doesn’t mean racist. Means you don’t like people who aren’t like you. No, I haven’t experienced that kind of hardship, but you don’t know what kind of things I’ve experienced, do you? You have me in a box just because I’m not from around here. Just because I come from the tech world and don’t drive a beat-up old truck. Do you know what happens when I walk into the Apple Cup? People stare at me. They don’t say hi. Except for your father, but I bet you’ve turned him against me, haven’t you?”
Carmen didn’t know what to say. Everything he said was true. “I didn’t…” But her next words didn’t come.
“Yeah, you didn’t.” He left, leaving her to survey the damage.
Carmen was hot, tired and ready for a glass of wine by the time she got home. After watching Evan circulate amongst his wedding guests like a seasoned pro, apologizing and offering weekends at his personal home, saying he’d ferry people around in his boat, Carmen had hiked down his rocky driveway to the lake and spent a few quiet moments throwing stones into the turquoise water, wishing she had time to swim. Watching the circles expand in the water after each stone sunk to the bottom had the same effect it had when she was young. Her mood lightened. The beauty of the lake, the surrounding hills and the soothing sounds of the water lapping at the shore were balm to her soul. She was a lake girl. A winemaker.
Who hated losing.
Evan might be ambitious, but he didn’t stand to lose anything.
Carmen thought about his comment about being friends, maybe more, and shoved it to the back of her mind.
Her sisters were waiting at home. They had a plan.
She strapped on her sandals and crossed the street a few yards to the right of the Hollister Estate drive, marked by a colossal stone and marble plaque. The Blue Hills Vineyard sign was wooden, simple and elegant. Evan might be struggling today, but he could hire someone to clean up the mess and buy half of Restoration Hardware. What was a little goat poop compared to her father’s life?
Carmen strolled up the driveway through their orchard, heavy with sweet-smelling pears ripening in the sun, buzzing with thousands of bees. She looked up at the fields overhead, climbing above Orchard House, stopping only when the rocks reached into the sky, deep orange against the softening blue. This place reached into the very core of Carmen’s being. This place wasn’t just home.
This place was part of Carmen.
She wouldn’t lose it.
Not for anyone.
Carmen knew there would be a thousand things to clean up and sort out before their next wedding. The first wedding alone had been exhausting beyond belief. She knew she should have been cleaning instead of helping Evan, but she intended to get stuck in with the cleaning now. Her sisters had other ideas.
When she rounded the corner from the driveway, her sisters stood up from the patio table like angry hornets.
“Why are you helping him?” said Lola.
“¡Dios mío, Carmenita! Why go to all the trouble of messing things up if you’re going to come in like the savior? What are we doing here? We need to get things straight if I’m going to spend time here instead of paying some teenager I barely trust to watch mis hijos,” Adella said, arms crossed, a vivid reminder of Carmen’s old boss, her old life.
A stark reminder of what she’d left behind.
Lola shook her head, pointing at the patio, where nothing remained from the wedding except some stacks of chairs and folded rental tables that would be picked up in the morning. Bags of dirty table linens hunched like goblins near the driveway. “We cleaned everything up. That wedding coordinator was next to useless. We had to tip the caterer because she ran out of checks. I suppose you stayed to clean up the mess? Because he can’t afford a cleaning crew or anything.”
“I helped him corral the goats.”
Adella scowled. “Aye, chica, the whole point was not corralling them.”
Carmen wanted to stomp upstairs, slam her door and escape this tribunal. But something told her they’d just chase her. She was their point person. She was also a person without a job who needed the support of her sisters. She couldn’t do this alone. “Okay, habla.”
Adella threw her hands up in the air, pacing. “Enough. Enough. Tell the truth, hermanita.”
Carmen sat down, locating a bottle of wine and a glass that wasn’t very clean, but it didn’t matter. If it belonged to a sister. “I shouldn’t have answered the phone.”
“No, you shouldn’t have,” said Adella angrily, but at least she sat down.
“You have a crush on him, don’t you?” asked Lola, ever the romantic. Leave it to her baby sister to focus on the drama.
Carmen lifted her hands. “No, I do not have a crush on him.” She angrily pointed up at Evan’s house. “There’s a herd of goats in his living room right now. And a completely trashed wedding on his patio. I didn’t do anything to help him other than suggest putting the goats in his house.”
Adella clapped a hand over her mouth. “His house?”
Lola giggled. “And he listened to you?”
“They’re in his massive living room right now, munching on velvet pillows that probably cost more than my couch.”
Her older sister visibly relaxed.
“Can we talk about the First Crush Festival now? We really need an awesome booth or something.”
Adella nodded. “Sure. I’ll ask Bob if he can take the kids. I can’t be here for next weekend’s weddings, but I think you can handle it.”
Lola sipped from her glass. “I’m here.” She narrowed her eyes. “I have lots of ideas.”
Adella grinned. “When you watch a lot of telenovelas you learn a lot about double-crossing.”
“Hey!” Lola said good-naturedly. No one could accuse Lola of being a workaholic.
Adella absentmindedly texted her husband. “So, we have a booth at First Crush and do what?” Everyone knew that besides attracting sales, the goal of First Cru
sh was to come up with clever gimmicks to get visitors. It was carnival for wine lovers.
Lola jumped up, knocking down her chair. “I’ve got it!” She lowered her voice to a whisper, worried that Evan might be out on his patio. The caterers could be seen in silhouette on his property, cleaning up the last of the wedding disasters. “We let people get into a vat and crush grapes with their feet.” She lifted her glass. “I did see it on a telenovela. It turns out you can actually use the wine if they clean their feet first.”
Adella wrinkled her nose, opening the US Fire Service app as she talked. “It sounds super unsanitary.”
“Google it. People do it all the time,” Lola said in a smug tone, crossing her arms.
Adella looked up from her phone. “Hey, have you guys heard about the Mile Sixty fire?”
Lola shrugged. “I heard it was contained.”
“For now,” Carmen said.
There was an uneasy silence as the sisters cleared the table. Two summers ago, wildfires ravaged both sides of the shore, wiping out homes and businesses, causing the town to evacuate. They’d contain one growing fire only to discover a new one spreading along the arid mountains and hills. It was a collective nightmare that caused even distant fires to seem threatening now.
As they entered the kitchen, Lola turned on the lights. “What if this doesn’t work? What if Papi loses the winery?”
The sisters locked eyes in a shifting triangle across the tile island. Eventually, they turned to Adella, as they had after Mami died. Their reluctant leader in the six dark months before Papi had found his feet as a single parent.
“Por favor, don’t make this any harder than it already is. We have a plan.” Adella rinsed her wineglass in the sink.
Adella left for home. Lola went to her room after a halfhearted offer to help clean up. Carmen wanted time to think. She loaded dishes into the ancient Sears dishwasher, still marked with a dent where Lola had kicked it as a teen. What would happen if they failed? What was left here for her? Making wine was in her blood, this was her shot. She wouldn’t start over on another winery. She wanted to make wine here, at Blue Hills. She wanted her father’s journey to continue with another generation. She wanted her children to swim and play with the same freedom that she took for granted. The growth of the town could be the beginning of a whole new chapter in the Alvarez family winemaking business.
Without thinking about it, Carmen found herself climbing the hill into the vineyard, checking the fruit on the vines. She wished she’d brought the refractometer to check the brix level of the fruit to see if the sugar was rising. Too low, she’d learned from Paolo before his fit, and the wine wouldn’t have enough alcohol; too high and the fruit would over-ferment, interfering with the flavor. After talking to Paolo, Carmen asked her father where he kept his refractometers. He couldn’t remember. After a long search, they’d finally located one in the back of his pick-up and another stashed in his desk in the winery. Having one in her back pocket made her feel like she belonged in a winery. The fruit hung deep purple and heavy on the vine. Now they just had to get it into the shed.
Carmen had been on the phone up and down the valley trying to book crews for harvest time, which was always tricky, given the competition would all have grapes ready at the same time. Farmers helped one another by sharing crews. Carmen had gotten lots of phone calls returned based on her last name, but most of them had the same answer: immigration quotas had caused a shortage of pickers. Everyone was close to panicking.
Carmen looked back down the hill and studied the moon on the water, wavering in brilliant glittery shards, flickering as wispy clouds floated across the inky sky. Somewhere along the lake, a boat buzzed. Something splashed.
A noise startled Carmen. It came from down below.
Evan had slammed a door on his way out of his house. Carmen stayed still, her breath catching in her throat as Evan shucked his bathrobe and dove, with an elegant arc, into the pool. She watched, enraptured, as he effortlessly swam a few lengths, his lean torso catching the moonlight. His legs flipped in a kick turn that would have impressed teenaged Carmen. He must have swum in high school, Carmen thought.
¡Dios mío! Those shoulders. The way he owned the water. Suddenly, she was back in the pool with Evan. They’d laughed so hard. It was the most carefree she’d been since coming back home. If that night was the first time he’d been in his own pool, this must be the second. Carmen found herself wanting to go back to that night. Eating dinner on his patio. Gazing down the lake, hearing about Evan’s life in Seattle. How it had been everything until—poof—it was nothing. They had more in common than she’d realized. And a deep love of Chelan. Clearly, he felt he belonged. They both wanted to start and end their days looking at this lake, walking their land, seeing the grapes grow and ripen on the vine.
Was Evan thinking about being in the pool with her?
The perfume of the grapes, lush and heavy on the vine, must be playing with her emotions.
Carmen shook her head. She needed to focus. Evan would have Paolo booking crews of pickers. He could pay more than anyone in the valley. Winning was his aim, not saving money.
Carmen needed every penny. Staring out at the lake, she thought that what she needed was people who wanted to learn about wine. What if she could find someone who cared more about wine than earning money, who would pick to be part of the process? She gasped when the idea came to her.
She could host students and people who wanted to be part of the harvest and get them to pick the grapes. She’d advertise in hospitality programs at Western Washington University and see if she could get people in Seattle, food and wine people, to come help out a local winemaker. Maybe reach out to food and wine bloggers across the mountains. Find people who wanted to experience winemaking at the root level.
Drink local and meet the winemaker. They could hire a yoga teacher to help untwist knotted muscles and sore necks.
She could offer them a case of the wine they helped make. And pay the bank.
And keep going.
This was it. Carmen knew she’d struck something that could potentially lift them from the clutches of the bank. Her vision of making wines, award-winning wines, establishing her own legacy, bringing people to Chelan for wine tasting and food experiences, maybe even opening a small restaurant that featured local cuisine like the places she’d read about in Napa. Make Blue Hills take the next step. This was the chance of a lifetime. She was going to take it and run.
Carmen was halfway down the hill before she realized she’d forgotten a bunch of grapes she needed to bring back in order to check the brix level. She scurried back up, forgetting all about Evan.
She was so busy making plans in her head that she didn’t notice Evan at the edge of his patio, watching her hurrying towards Orchard House. Her mind was far from her handsome neighbor. She was busy making plans to save Blue Hills Vineyard and in doing so, create a life and a career for herself.
Everything was riding on her success.
Failure, Carmen thought, wasn’t an option.
No matter how she felt about Evan Hollister.
Ten
Wedding Encore
Evan ended the call with the sales representative from Restoration Hardware. Replacing the pillows was out of the question. How could a single pillow cost two hundred and fifty dollars? Was it stuffed with cash?
His first wedding had been such a disaster. The goats. After the wedding, he’d waited morosely with the goats, who had finally huddled on couches and floor, bleating plaintively at the windows, like little children who didn’t want to go to bed. Evan had grabbed some leftover champagne and drank a few glasses. Finally, a boy who hardly looked old enough to drive, let alone work, had chugged up the hill with a trailer. When he’d appeared at the opening to the living room, the goats had rushed towards him like teens mobbing Taylor Swift. They’d followed him meekly down the driveway, all sixteen of them pushing one another to get close to the boy, clattering up the wooden ramp.
The boy had turned to him with a casual shrug. “No hablo ingles.”
Sure.
Evan took his coffee outside now, bringing the handwritten bill for the sixteen goats that had been shoved into his mailbox. No stamp. Hand delivered. Why should he pay for this, when they’d destroyed his house and the wedding? When he’d asked Carmen how so many goats could possibly have been delivered to his house when he’d requested one, she had said they had probably switched orders. Lots of people ordered a herd of goats to chew away unwanted blackberry bushes or invasive plants. It wasn’t unusual to drive down the lake and see a herd of cloven-footed goats happily munching away. Yes, it was possible that the order had had been switched.
Evan looked at the bill. Four hundred dollars. He wasn’t going to pay for a bunch of goats he’d never wanted. They’d eaten five hundred dollars’ worth of pillows. He called the number on the bill. It was a landline with an answering machine. Who had answering machines? Just as he was leaving his message, a voice came over it, swearing a little as the tape played on.
“Just a minute! Hang on!” Finally, after much fumbling, a woman’s voice came over the line. “This is Crystal Huttinger.”
Of course, the goat herder was called Crystal.
Evan explained his predicament. He’d asked for one goat. Not sixteen.
“Most people want the entire herd.”
“Why would I have ordered so many goats? And no one to look after them?”
Crystal paused. “Hang on. Oh wait. I know. Because you ordered them. Look man, I know you’ve got plenty of dough. And I just assume people want the goats for cleaning up their land.”
Evan had a pretty good idea of what Crystal looked like. Stringy grey hair and Birkenstocks. A lifetime of smoking pot and staring out the window. He had nothing against the type, he just didn’t want to pay for goats with expensive snacking habits who pooped on his Spanish tile floor. Grout and goat poop, he told her, were a bad mix.
Summer at Orchard House: An utterly compelling and heart-warming summer romance (Blue Hills Book 1) Page 10
