Spectrum

by MJ Duncan

  Bryn turned to give Kendall a disbelieving look. “Why should I give her a break? She’s the one who’s responsible for this mess.”

  “I’m not saying that this doesn’t suck for you, but her insurance company will pay for all of the repairs you’ll have to do. I mean, her brand new car is going to be in the shop for weeks, her friend is hurt pretty badly judging by the fact that they had to call an ambulance out to take her to the hospital, her insurance premium is going to skyrocket...”

  Bryn nodded, knowing that Kendall was right, and waved a hand at the vines surrounding them that had escaped the Audi’s onslaught. “Do you honestly think I care about her insurance premiums? She should be grateful that she has premiums that will go up—otherwise I would be asking you to file suit Monday morning for willful negligence and destruction of property.”

  “Bryn…”

  “Don’t,” Bryn growled, holding up a hand as she shook her head. “Don’t. You, of all people, know what this vineyard means to me, and you also know that I am being impossibly controlled about all of this after the week I’ve endured. But I refuse to waste one moment caring about how her life might be impacted by this accident.”

  “Okay,” Kendall murmured. She sighed and looked up at Anna, who was making her way back to where they stood. “You’re right. Let’s just get this thing taken care of, and then you’ll never have to see her again.”

  “Here you go.” Anna held out a scrap of paper with a name and phone number scribbled messily on it. “This is my insurance agent in town. I’ll call her in a few and let her know that you’ll be contacting her.”

  Bryn took the card. “Thank you.”

  “Ms. Fitzpatrick?”

  Anna glanced back at the officer who called her name and was waving her over to take her statement, and she gave Bryn one last apologetic look before she turned and headed over to the spot where he was waiting for her. Bryn watched on as Anna told her tale, her hands waving in the air as she spoke. When she was done, the officer made his way toward her, and Bryn answered the few questions he had before taking the business card her held out for her as he assured her that the report would be available within the next twenty-four hours.

  With their statements given and Anna’s injured friend no doubt already at the hospital, all that was left was the removal of Anna’s car. It seemed to be no trouble at all for the tow truck driver to attach a cable to the back end of the coupe, and Bryn closed her eyes at the sound of the vines wrapped around the car audibly protesting their further mistreatment as the car was hauled back toward the road.

  Bryn knew that it was petty of her to find satisfaction in seeing how badly damaged Anna’s car was from the accident—but the sight of the car’s mangled front end and scratched paint did make her feel a little bit better. She nodded once in response to Anna’s final apology, and then turned to assess the full scope of the damage surrounding her.

  The tow truck’s engine revved throatily behind her, but she did not turn to watch it rumbled away. Her attention was focused on the trunk that had been the one to ultimately stop the Audi’s progress, and she swallowed hard as she made her way toward it, unaware of anything beyond her line of sight. She dropped to her knees in front of the plant, and reached for it with a trembling hand. The wood was splintered but not broken, and Bryn closed her eyes as a small measure of relief swept through her.

  At least this one could be saved.

  Three

  Bryn set a bottle of Pinot Noir onto the kitchen island and looked out into the great room where Kendall was standing in front of the television with the remote in her hand, scrolling through Bryn’s playlists in search of some music that they could both agree on. While Bryn preferred modern classical compositions that featured a beautifully played piano, Kendall liked “music with words, for fuck’s sake!”, which meant that there was very little middle ground for them to settle upon.

  She smiled as the opening chords of Gravity began to play, and swayed with the music as she went to retrieve a couple wine glasses. She sighed as she caught sight of her reflection in the cabinet’s glass doors, and rubbed at the lines at the corner of her eyes that were more prominent than usual—physical evidence of exactly how hard the last week had been on her. The golden streaks in her eyes were dulled, and the corners of her mouth were pulled tight, making her look far too much like her mother for her comfort. She ran a hand through her hair, letting the short, thick strands slide through her fingers, and sardonically wondered if this was the day that would succeed in giving her her first gray hair.

  She shook her head as she pulled the cabinet door open, and clasped the stems of two large goblets between the fingers of her left hand as she reached for the corkscrew that was sitting out on the counter with her right.

  “Need help with anything?” Kendall asked as she slipped onto one of the barstools at the island.

  “It’s okay. I’ve got it.”

  “Okay.” Kendall leaned back in the chair. “So, are you going to call Gerald and ask him to go have a look at everything?”

  Bryn shook her head. Gerald Altier was the vineyard’s manager and head winemaker, and he would know better than anyone how they should go about beginning to recover from the accident. “He’s in Montana visiting his daughter and won’t be home until midday on Tuesday.”

  Kendall frowned. “But it’s Saturday. Can you really afford to wait three days before you start making repairs?”

  Bryn closed her eyes against the memory of how much damage Anna Fitzpatrick’s little coupe had managed to do. “I will have to.” She opened her eyes and shrugged as she peeled the foil from the bottle and tossed it onto the counter. “I can begin clearing out some of the mess myself—like the smaller sections of broken trellis, the wires, and some of the vines—but I’ll need to wait for him to deal with removing the roots of the vines that can’t be saved and rebuilding the trellises.”

  “Do you want me to stay longer to try and help?”

  “No, it’s fine.” Bryn shook her head. “I’ll manage,” she said as she began twisting the corkscrew into the cork. “I believe there is some extra irrigation tubing in the maintenance shed that I can use to cobble together something to make sure that the vines on either side of the broken ones are properly watered until a more permanent system is put into place.”

  “Don’t you have somebody who can do that?”

  “I’m sure I do,” Bryn said with a wry smile, “but I’m honestly not sure who that is. Gerald is the one who organizes the day-laborers; I have no idea where to even begin when it comes to all of that.”

  “Why don’t you call him?”

  Bryn shook her head. “His daughter is getting married tomorrow. I’m not going to call him to help me deal with this.”

  “He doesn’t have to come back, he just has to tell you who to call.”

  “You’re right. But I don’t want him to worry. He has been looking forward to walking Elise down the aisle from the moment her fiancé called him and asked for permission to propose, and I am not going to ruin that for him. This—” Bryn shrugged, “—this is my problem to deal with right now.”

  Kendall sighed. “You really know how to fix the irrigation stuff?”

  “Yes.” Bryn smiled and pulled the cork from the bottle. “It’s not rocket science,” she added as she began to pour the wine into their glasses. “It’s just a matter of connecting the tubing and turning the timer back on.”

  Kendall did not look convinced, but after a moment, she just shrugged and shook her head. “Okay.” She picked up her glass and gave it a swirl. “So, what fine concoction of yours are you treating me to this time?”

  “A 2009 Pinot Noir,” Bryn said, picking up her own glass.

  “That was the first year you made a Pinot, right?” Kendall asked as she lifted the glass to her nose.

  “It was, yes.” Spectrum had only Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes when she purchased the property, but she had made the bold decision to tear out the Me
rlot vines from the southwestern quadrant—the one that Anna had crashed into—and replace them with Pinot Noir, a grape that was notoriously difficult to grow due to its thin skin and susceptibility to disease.

  Kendall hummed and took a sip, swirling the wine around her tongue for a moment before swallowing. “This is incredible. You’ve been holding out on me!”

  Bryn smiled and tipped her head in a small bow. “I’m planning on releasing half of the inventory that I have down in the cellar this year as a special reserve.”

  “Put me down for a case.” Kendall took another sip of the wine and moaned decadently. “Fuck, Bryn, this is amazing.”

  “Thank you.” Pride swept through Bryn as she took a slow sip, savoring the stronger black cherry notes and subtler hints of cinnamon and vanilla that danced across her palate. Pinot Noir had always been her favorite type of wine because of the complexity of its flavor composition, and she knew, as she took another sip, that no matter her many failures, she had done this one thing perfectly well.

  Four

  Rearing back and slamming the toe of her boot into a mostly-flat tire was surprisingly cathartic, so Bryn did it two more times for good measure, practically daring Murphy and her sadistic set of laws to punish her again.

  The last five days had been absolutely hellish, spending long hours in the sun trying to repair the damages from the accident while the entire universe seemed to be stacked against her. As if having a car crash into her vineyard were not enough to deal with, the vines she needed to finish the repairs were backordered, the farm supply store had sent over the wrong irrigation tubing three different times before they delivered the correct order, and then today, she had sliced her palm open on the wire she was helping Gerald and his men string along the newly rebuilt trellises. It was one disaster after another punctuated by a half-dozen stitches, and she had hoped—rather foolishly, as it turned out—that these stitches signaled the end of her bad luck.

  And then this happened.

  Her trusty Range Rover decided to get a flat when she was driving herself home from the emergency room.

  “Shit,” she muttered as she kicked the tire again.

  The repeated sales pitch she was being forced to listen to while on hold with AAA only made her frustration and annoyance grow. She already knew that AAA offered 24-hour roadside service—that was the whole reason she renewed her membership every year. She had already described her situation; she just needed the person on the other end of the line to tell her about how long it was going to be until a tow truck could get to her.

  The line clicked, and Bryn sighed with relief when the sales pitch was replaced by an actual human voice on the other end telling her, “A truck should be at your location in fifteen minutes.”

  “Great. Thanks,” she said into an already dead line. Apparently the AAA attendant had better things to do than talk to her.

  She yanked open the passenger door and climbed into the car to wait. She leaned her head back against the headrest as she tenderly massaged her injured palm. The local anesthetic the emergency room doctor had injected into her hand before closing up the wound was starting to wear off, and it was beginning to throb.

  While deep, the cut was not the type of injury to require prescription painkillers, so Bryn dug in her purse for some Advil, and nearly choked in the middle of swallowing them dry when she spotted Anna Fitzpatrick pushing a neon orange mountain bike down the sidewalk toward her. Anna’s hair was pulled back into a sloppy bun, with loose tendrils hanging around her heart-shaped face in a way that should have looked unkempt and slovenly but instead managed that kind of careless beauty Bryn had never been able to achieve.

  The week that she had been certain could not get any worse did just that the instant keen blue eyes locked onto her own and one hand lifted toward her in tentative greeting.

  “Of course,” Bryn muttered to herself. She shook her head as she returned the gesture, her ingrained manners demanding she at least acknowledge Anna’s greeting, and tried her best to not look too put off by Anna’s presence as she approached.

  “Flat tire?” Anna asked.

  Bryn sighed. On any other day, at the end of any other week, she probably would have been able to keep her sarcasm in check, but she was too tired, too sore, and just too done with everything to manage it. “No. It’s just resting.”

  Anna must have been a real glutton for punishment, because she just laughed and propped her bike against the glass window of the copy shop that Bryn was parked in front of. “Do you want me to change it for you?”

  “While I appreciate the offer, your assistance is not necessary.” Sitting and looking up at Anna made Bryn feel like she was at too much of a disadvantage, and she shook her head and climbed out of the car to stand in front of her. It irked her that she still had to look up slightly to meet Anna’s eyes—probably more than it should have, to be honest, considering the fact that at just a couple inches over five feet tall there were very few people she did not literally have to look up to. She gave Anna her best dismissive smile as she added, “I have already called AAA, and they assured me that somebody would be out in the next few minutes to take care of this.”

  Anna shrugged. “I’m sure they will. Mind if I take a look?” she asked as she crouched in front of the flat.

  “Go right ahead,” Bryn muttered. She pressed her thumb into the sensitive skin along the edge of her sutures as she watched Anna inspect the tire, and sighed under her breath. Why won’t she just leave me alone? Have I really done something so awful to be cursed with her continued presence?

  “It’s definitely flat,” Anna declared, rubbing her hands together to get the dirt off.

  “You don’t say…”

  “I do say.” Anna grinned, and Bryn did not know whether to be amused by the fact that she could not take a hint, or annoyed by it. “But, you don’t have lock nuts on here, so it’ll be easy to change. Spare in the trunk?”

  “I’ve never needed to look for it, so I’m assuming that it’s wherever it’s supposed to be. But, again, Ms. Fitzpatrick—” Bryn waved her injured hand at Anna’s tailored charcoal slacks and pale blue oxford, “—the auto club is on its way. There is no reason for you to do this and risk ruining your clothes.”

  “These old things?” Anna drawled, smiling as she looked down at herself. “They’ll be fine. I promise. Call it a drop in the reparations bucket.”

  “Your insurance company sent an adjuster out yesterday. Reparations are already being made.”

  “Yeah, well, as someone pointed out to me the other day—I didn’t just crash into a stupid cornfield or something, and throwing money at the problem isn’t actually going to fix it. What happened to your hand?”

  Bryn shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “Clearly, it’s a little more than ‘nothing’,” Anna said as she popped open the hatch. “Stitches?”

  “How…?”

  Anna smiled and lifted the full-size spare from its compartment beneath the floorboards. “Lucky guess.”

  The ease with which Anna lowered the spare to the ground was impressive, and Bryn had to bite her cheek to keep from smiling when Anna turned to her and made a show of flexing her arms like a bodybuilder. “Honestly, Ms. Fitzpatrick…”

  Anna laughed. “Please, if I’m going to risk ruining my new slacks changing your flat, you can at least call me Anna.”

  “However, as I have repeatedly told you that your assistance is not necessary despite your insistence to help, you’ll remain Ms. Fitzpatrick.”

  “Fitz?” Anna asked with a hopeful smile as she pulled a jack and lug wrench from the compartment that had held the spare tire.

  Bryn laughed, though she was not sure if it was because Anna was actually amusing, or if she was delirious from the pain that was beginning to radiate up her forearm from her injured hand. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Eh, it was worth a shot,” Anna said, completely nonplussed. She shoved the jack into position in front of the flat and pu
mped the lever enough times that the brace fit snugly against the frame of the car, but not enough that it was actually lifted from the pavement. She picked up the lug wrench and tapped it against her other hand a couple times. “Right, now the fun stuff.”

  Bryn took a step back as Anna fit the wrench onto the first bolt, and she frowned when, after a few pushes down on the steel bar, Anna stood up and gave it a solid kick. “Ms. Fitzpatrick!”

  “Huh?” Anna tucked those few errant tendrils that had escaped her bun behind her ears and looked at Bryn.

  “I…” Bryn shook her head. “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to loosen the nut.” Anna gave Bryn an appraising look. “I mean, I know I have a couple inches on you, but I’m actually not that big. I gotta generate a little extra oomph to get it to turn. Haven’t you ever changed a tire before?”

  “No. That would be why I pay for my AAA membership.”

  “Yeah, well, my dad insisted I learn how to do this kind of thing myself before he would let me get my license.” Anna kicked at the wrench again, but it still refused to budge. “Great.” She scowled at the wrench and then looked up at the SUV. “I’m just gonna…” She did not finish the thought as she braced one foot on the arm of the wrench and hopped up to grab onto the SUV’s luggage rack.

  “Ms. Fitzpatrick!” Bryn waved her hands in the air incredulously. She had no idea what Anna was planning on doing, but she was certain that it was going to end in injury, and she would be damned if her already awful week ended with Anna Fitzpatrick killing herself because the infuriating woman insisted on playing the Good Samaritan. “Please.”

  “Almost…got it…” Anna muttered as she bounced on the wrench.

  Bryn huffed disbelievingly and ran her uninjured hand through her hair. “You’re insane.”

  “That has not been conclusively proven,” Anna retorted with a grin as the wrench beneath her feet finally gave way a little. “One down, four to go.”