by Donna Ball
He kissed her hair tenderly. “I couldn’t have said it better.”
She said, “What do you think we’re going to do?”
He was quiet for a time. “One thing is for sure. You can’t leave here. You’ve worked too hard to get back here and …” he turned in her direction, and she could see the flash of a teasing smile in the dark. “Right now you’re the only one with a job offer.”
“We’ll see how Dominic feels about that when he finds out all I learned how to make in Italy was really bad coffee.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I’m a pretty good teacher. And I was surprised how much I like it.”
“You could teach at UVA,” she said, and her expression was cautiously excited in the filtered dark. “It’s practically next door.”
“Maybe, after a while. I’d have to get a doctorate degree. Meanwhile, we’ve got to pay the bills.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll support you.”
“Sweetheart, I appreciate the offer, but I got a quick look at the books this afternoon, and on what the winery can afford to pay you, you can’t even support yourself—and that’s with free room and board.”
He was thoughtful for a moment. “I can get a teaching certificate, high school or middle school level maybe. Of course, this time of year it won’t be that easy to find a job opening.” He glanced down at her. “It might mean I have to leave for a while. Maybe even go out of state to find the right graduate program and job. It wouldn’t be for long. Two years max. And I’d be back here every chance I got.”
She was silent for a time. Then she reached for his hand, and laced her fingers through his. “Since you pulled me out of that bar in Siena, you’ve done nothing but worry about how to make my dreams come true. Do you really think I wouldn’t do everything in my power to help yours come true now? Whither thou goest,” she whispered.
He brought her fingers to his lips. “We’re going to figure this out, babe.”
“I think we already have.”
They were quiet for a time, holding each other, and then he dropped another kiss on her hair. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you really have to go.”
“I know.” She smothered a groan and turned over, reluctantly pushing back the covers. “It’s got to be forty degrees in this room. The window is covered with frost.”
“Here, take my sweatshirt.”
He started to sit up to pull the shirt over his head, but Lori suddenly bolted upright beside him, staring at the window. “It’s covered with frost,” she repeated, and she forgot to whisper.
“Lori, what …”
She leapt out of bed and raced to the window, pressing her hands flat against the glass. She whirled back to him, her face streaked with distress. “The grapes!” she cried. “They’re still on the vine!”
Before he could stop her, she rushed past him into the hall, down the stairs, and out of the house.
~*~
Chapter Twelve
Rising to the Occasion
By the time Kevin got his sneakers and his glasses on, Cici and Bridget were already in the hall, squinting in the lights Lori had turned on in her wake and looking as confused as he was. The front door stood half open and the dog was barking wildly. “Something about the grapes,” was all he could offer, and he bounded down the stairs and into the cold night air, calling after her.
He followed the glow of Lori’s flashlight down the path to the vineyard, followed closely by Cici and Bridget. A thin layer of patchy snow scattered across the grass, dusting the vines and the bushes. He found Lori, in her nightshirt and a pair of cowboy boots, standing stock-still at the edge of the path, the flashlight pointing straight down at the ground. She was staring at something that looked like a pebble in her hand. She lifted the flashlight and opened her hand to reveal a single grape. When she transferred it to him, it was ice cold and as hard as a rock.
“Frozen,” she said dully. “They’re all frozen.”
“Lori, for heaven’s sake!” Cici had a flannel jacket in her hand, which she quickly wrapped around Lori’s shoulders. “It’s got to be twenty degrees out here! What’s the matter with you?”
“The grapes!” Of all of them, Bridget was the first to figure it out. She was out of breath from running, shivering in her robe and slippers, and her face was marked with horrified disbelief as she looked around the darkened rows. “We forgot about the grapes!”
Kevin took the flashlight from Lori and directed the beam to cluster after cluster. Amidst the yellow, withered leaves, the grapes were so shiny they were like wax, plump with juice and sugared with snow. It was clearly too late to save them.
Cici’s hand went slowly to her throat. “The temperature must have fallen after midnight,” she said. “I haven’t listened to the forecast in days.”
“Are they all like that?” Bridget said a little desperately. “Surely they can’t all be frozen! We never have a hard freeze this early in the year! How could it have gotten so cold so quickly? I mean, there are valleys and temperature pockets and …”
“Why didn’t I listen to the forecast?” Cici’s voice was tight and high. “We might have saved some of them.”
“Why this on top of everything else?” Bridget sounded as though she might cry, and Kevin put his arm around her shoulders. “Why is it always, always something?”
“Well, it’s too late to do anything now,” Kevin said. His breath frosted on the air, and the cold crept down the neck of his sweatshirt. “Let’s get back inside.”
Lori murmured, “Twenty degrees.”
Cici reached for her. “Come on, Lori, you’re going to freeze.”
Lori spun suddenly to her mother. “Mom,” she said quickly, “there’s a weather radio in Dominic’s office. Run turn it on, and see how much longer it’s supposed to stay below freezing. And find a thermometer—make sure it really is twenty degrees out here! ”
“What?”
She turned quickly to Bridget and Kevin. “Open the doors to the cellar and drag the press as close to the entrance as you can get it. We’ll have to de-stem outside and get the grapes directly into the press. The tractor has lights, doesn’t it? Does anybody know how to drive that thing?”
Kevin said, “I can drive anything with wheels, but—”
“Then hurry!” She gave him a small shove. “Hook up the wagon and drive it around to the far side of the vineyard. We’ll start with the Cabernet Franc and work our way up.”
“Lori, honey.” Cici took her arms, her expression filled with compassion and regret. “It’s too late. The grapes are gone. There’s nothing we can do.”
Lori pulled away. “Mom, please! You’re wasting time! We’ve only got a couple of hours before the sun hits those vines!” She started running toward the winery.
Cici cried, “Lori, what are you doing?”
Lori called back, “Making ice wine!”
~*~
They worked with knit gloves on, cutting, plucking, and de-stemming, not to protect their hands but to keep the heat from their fingers from thawing the grapes. They sweated in their polar jackets and fleece pants, then shivered when the cold air dried their sweat. By the time the rising sun shot rays of gold through the knotty lines of vines, they had harvested a little over half the grapes and Lori insisted they abandon the effort.
“But all those grapes!” Bridget protested, shouting over the chug of the tractor engine. “We worked so hard—Dominic worked so hard—we can’t just leave them!”
Lori shook her head adamantly. She was wearing a pair of her mother’s sweatpants, rolled up at the waist and stuffed into her boots, and one of Bridget’s wool jackets with a knit cap pulled down to her eyebrows. “The radio says thirty degrees by nine o’clock,” she called back. “We’ve got to get these grapes into the press while we still can!” But when she cast a glance around the remaining rows, so forlorn and abandoned-looking in the yellow-gray shadows of dawn, her expression was almost as bereft as Bridget’s.
T
he wagon was almost full, despite the partial harvest, and they stood outside the winery with frozen feet and chapped lips, fingers clumsy with cold and fatigue, to strip the frozen fruit off the stems and into five-gallon buckets, which they transferred as soon as they were full to the big basket press just inside the open door. The radio forecast changed to thirty-five degrees by nine a.m., thirty-two in low-lying areas. Kevin moved the wagon to the shadow cast by the open doors and they worked faster.
“Just be sure not to get any bruised or damaged grapes in the mix,” Lori said, sifting through a double-handful in the bucket. “I know it was hard to see the good clusters in the dark.”
“What difference does it make?” Cici said wearily. “They’re frozen. When they thaw they’re going to turn to sour mush, anyway. Lori, honey, are you sure about this?”
Lori didn’t look sure at all as she turned to lug another bucket of grapes to the press. It was Kevin who pointed out simply, “I don’t really see that you had any choice.”
The press, which was designed for a full harvest of crushed grapes, was filled to capacity when they poured in the last bucket of hard frozen grapes. Kevin helped place the metal plate and Lori screwed it down. Hugging her arms and shivering, Cici looked at it anxiously. “What do we do now?”
Lori said, “We wait.”
Bridget said, teeth chattering, “Do you think it would be okay if we waited in the house?”
Cici started toward the press. “Lori, nothing is happening. Are you sure you know how to work that thing?”
“Mom, it’s okay.” Lori adjusted the pressure with another half-turn of the screw. “That’s the whole point of pressing frozen grapes. The water is left behind as ice crystals and all you get is a few drops of concentrated juice from each grape. It will take a while to see any juice flow.”
Bridget stared at her. “A few drops? Do you mean we did all of this for a few drops?”
“No, of course not. We’ll get ten or twenty gallons if we’re lucky.”
“Ten gallons?” The astonishment on Cici’s face slowly turned to horror, and then, inevitably to despair. “But … we need two hundred gallons to break even this year. I know I heard Dominic say that! Oh, Lori, all this work. Why didn’t we just take the loss?”
Kevin looked at her oddly. “Aunt Cici, do you know how much ice wine sells for?”
“No, it’s okay,” Lori said quickly, “she’s right. It’s a risk. It might not make at all.” She adjusted the pressure again. “Why don’t you all go back to bed? There’s nothing more you can do here.”
Cici looked at her for another moment, and then said wearily, “Sounds good to me.”
“The lights are on in the kitchen,” Bridget said, turning toward the house. “Ida Mae must have breakfast ready.”
Cici dropped her hand onto Bridget’s shoulder and leaned against her as they started up the path. “I don’t even care.”
Bridget glanced back. “Kids? Aren’t you coming?”
“Right behind you,” Kevin said. “I’m just going to put the tractor away.” He looked at Lori questioningly.
“Go to bed,” she told him. Her smile was tired. “You can’t help. I have to stay and watch the pressure.”
Cici turned back to her. “In the cold?”
“It won’t take long,” she assured them, trying to look confident. “Really, go on. The hard part is done.”
And so, looking reluctant but too weary to fight very hard, one by one they left her alone.
Ten minutes later Lori looked up from adjusting the pressure again to see Kevin crossing the lawn with a large basket in his hands. “Ida Mae sent you a care package,” he said when he reached her. He set the basket on the ground and began to unpack it, first bringing out two medium-sized rectangular objects wrapped in dishtowels. “Hot bricks,” he said.
“For my feet?”
“To sit on. Save one for me.” He put them on the ground and handed her two smaller, foil-wrapped objects that smelled like bread.
“Breakfast?”
“Hand warmers,” he replied. “Actually they’re hoe-cakes. Confederate soldiers used to put them in their pockets in the morning before they went on maneuvers to warm their hands and keep their trigger fingers nimble. When lunch time came around, they ate them. Trivia courtesy of Ida Mae. She said you’re supposed to put them in your gloves.”
Lori did so, and breathed a small moan of appreciation. “Oh, that’s nice. I’d forgotten what my fingers feel like.”
He took out two more foil packets, but this time handed only one to her. “Breakfast,” he said, and the last thing he took out was a thermos of coffee.
“I guess Ida Mae has done this before,” Lori said.
“She didn’t have any questions about what we were doing out in the vineyard all night, if that says anything. I get the feeling there’s not too much that woman hasn’t seen before.”
They unwrapped their ham biscuits and sat on the warm bricks in the doorway, facing the press. Kevin poured coffee into the thermos cup and passed it to her. Lori took a sip, and handed it back to him. “I’ve been trying to think how we could have saved the rest of the grapes. Even if we’d filled every freezer in the house it wouldn’t have meant more than a couple of bottles.”
He nodded toward the press. The sound of dripping grape juice was slow—very slow—but steady. “So. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was heavy. “Maybe we did waste our time. It really needs to be below zero for a good ice wine, and this was a freak freeze, the temperature is going to be back up in the sixties this weekend, which will affect the fermentation, and there are really only a couple of other wineries that even make Cabernet Franc ice wine, and what do I know about it anyway?” She sighed. “Even with the best case scenario, Mom might be right. We might not break even.”
He sipped his coffee, and handed the cup back to her. “I’ll try to get into the computer this afternoon and run some figures. It might not be as bad as you think.”
She took the cup. “I don’t think my mom has much faith in me.”
“Honey, one day they’ll erect a statue to you. Meantime, they’re both asleep.”
Lori sighed. “I feel bad about waking them up and making them work all night. I hate to say it, but I think they may be getting too old for this.”
Kevin bumped her shoulder lightly. “I hate to say it, but I think I’m getting to old for this.”
She smiled.
They ate ham biscuits and sipped coffee from a shared cup, and listened to the ping-ping-ping of grape juice into the metal trays. Twice Lori got up to adjust the pressure. She blinked and strained and struggled to keep her eyes open, even though her feet were like blocks of ice and her cheeks were raw with cold. And then Kevin said softly, “I get it now.”
She looked up at him questioningly, mildly surprised to see that the sun had risen high enough to paint his face in shades of gold. He took her chin in his fingers, and turned her face away from the cold interior of the winery and toward the vineyard, where the rising sun had painted a winter fairyland across the frozen vines. Melting snow sparkled like diamonds on the curve of the vines and the grass. A few cumulous clouds hung low on the horizon, their bottoms painted pink and outlined in gold against a cerulean sky while the mist that breathed off the thawing hills and vines rose upward to meet the light. The profile of the vineyard was graceful and strong, even as the hills seemed to melt into the horizon. The air tasted as fresh and new as Christmas morning, and against the permeating background scent of grapes there was an acrid smell of a wood fire mixed with something wonderful baking in the kitchen. Lori said softly, “Oh, my.”
She leaned against him, and together they watched morning come to Ladybug Farm.
~*~
“Ice wine, you clever little minx,” Dominic said, grinning. “Of course you did. What was your yield?”
“Twenty-five gallons,” Lori said, though she looked a little uncertain. “It was more than I
expected. I’m afraid some of it may be water.”
“Did you watch the temperature?”
“I stopped pressing at thirty degrees.”
“Then you’re fine.”
“I’m worried about the sugar.”
“We can adjust that with yeast. But let it sit for a few more weeks, then test the brix.” He smiled. “My, you look good to me, girl. It’s good to have you home.”
Lori relaxed for the first time since coming into the room, and she grinned back. “You look good too. When are they letting you out of here?”
Dominic’s hospital room looked more like a cheerful little apartment now, with colorful quilts from home and bright cushions brought by Paul to “cozy up the place,” books and magazines, baskets of fruit and baked goods, and of course the perennial clusters of get-well balloons and potted plants. There was even a giant poster print of Dominic and Lindsay in one corner, scrawled with the signatures of well-wishers. Though his face was perhaps not as tan as she remembered, and no one looked particularly robust in a hospital robe with his arm in a sling, Lori had been relieved to see that Dominic was much further along the road to recovery than she imagined.
“Tomorrow is the plan,” he replied, “and it can’t be too soon for me.” He gave a small shake of his head. “I’ve been feeling like such a damn fool since this happened, lying up here in a hospital bed being fussed over while everything we worked for all year went to ruin … but sometimes things do have a way of working out, don’t they? If I’d been there I would’ve harvested early last week. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to leave anything on the vines for ice wine. You don’t do that in Virginia, and who could have predicted a freak freeze like that in the middle of October?”
“I could have,” Lindsay said, coming into the room with two coffee cups in her hand. There was a vending machine down the hall that made sweet frothy caramel lattes and even added whipped cream, and she had become addicted to them. “If there’s one rule about Ladybug Farm, it’s that anything that can go wrong, will.”
