The Vineyard

by Barbara Delinsky

  Hugging her middle, Olivia watched that pad of paper as he wrote down the answers to his questions. Typing and editing skills. Writing from notes. Mornings with Natalie, afternoons alone Monday through Friday; weekends free. Living accommodations in a separate wing of the house. Food included. Pets? No. Children? Yes. Stipend?

  Olivia held her breath long after Otis had written the answer. Natalie was offering twice what Otis had guessed. It was a windfall for someone like her—an incredible amount by any measure. She pressed her fingertips to her mouth to keep glee in check.

  Otis seemed likewise stunned. He asked Natalie to repeat the figure, and tapped the paper with his pen to confirm that the amount he had written was correct.

  Olivia heard bits of the remaining conversation, things like “very generous … yes … history lesson … clear the air,” but the words sailed past her. Excited beyond belief, she had let her thoughts loose in a new direction. Up to that point, she had been thinking about money for a tutor. What Natalie was offering opened a whole other door.

  By the time Otis hung up the phone, Olivia had pulled out the bottom drawer of her desk and taken a booklet from her personal stash. Returning to Otis’s desk, she put it down for him to see. It was the catalogue from Cambridge Heath, a private school that was known to cater to the learning-disabled children of local college professors.

  Olivia wasn’t a college professor—not by a long shot. She had never even been a college student, having graduated from high school by the skin of her teeth and gone straight to work. She considered herself an artist now—Otis’s description, long before hers. That was how she billed herself on the job queries she had sent out. She guessed that any school in the Cambridge area would have a handful of parents like her.

  Besides, Tess was the daughter of a college professor. Hadn’t Jared been on the faculty of UNC at the time of his death? That had to count for something.

  And if not, there were other schools. In fact, she realized excitedly, there was a school like Cambridge Heath in Providence. Providence was an up-and-coming city. Olivia had sent résumés to museums and art galleries there. Providence was only a short distance from Asquonset. It would be nice to be near Natalie when the summer was done.

  And, of course, there was the possibility that if things worked out at the vineyard, the summer job might evolve into something else—permanent gal Friday, social secretary. It was very promising.

  Not that she was counting on all that, but it never hurt to dream.

  Otis picked up the book and thumbed through, turning to the pages with Post-its. There he read what Olivia knew by heart. Yes, he could tell she had been dreaming. She had been dreaming far longer than she had known of Natalie Seebring.

  “Well, this is fine,” he said dryly. “You’ll be able to afford this school for one year. Then what?”

  Olivia refused to be deflated. “Either Tess will get a scholarship or I’ll take out a loan, but she has to be there first. Otherwise, I’m a nobody. I don’t have connections. The state says Tess is getting everything she needs in public school, but she hates it there. There’s a good teacher for next year, but I have no guarantee she’ll get that one, and the teacher she had this year has set her so far back emotionally that the teacher she gets next year will have twice the job to do—and that’s assuming I can convince them to promote her.” She put a firm hand on the catalogue, feeling determined as never before, now that what she wanted so badly for Tess was within reach. “Tess needs to be in a school like this one. Don’t you see, Otis? I need this job. It’s our chance.”

  But there was still a major hurdle to cross. It was all fine and good to talk about the job, all fine and good to think about private schools, all fine and good to think that maybe, just maybe her luck was turning—but Natalie still had to hire her.

  “I can make it happen,” Otis said, which was what Olivia was thinking herself.

  She nodded, then waited, barely breathing.

  “I want the money for you,” he said. “It’s the other that worries me. The dreaming.”

  “I’m not dreaming. I’m going after this job with my eyes wide open.”

  “And you wouldn’t love to be part of that family?”

  “Of course, I would. Who wouldn’t? But I’m not a Seebring. I’ll never be a Seebring.”

  “As long as you understand that.”

  “I do, Otis. I do. You said it—this is a summer job. It’s a bridge between your job and … something else. If it turns out to be fun, I’ll have good memories, but that’s not the best part. The best part is that my daughter will have something she needs but wouldn’t otherwise have. I want that for her, Otis. Wouldn’t you, if she were yours?”

  Four

  TWO WEEKS LATER, wearing new white shorts and sneakers, and a green and a blue blouse, respectively, Olivia and Tess set off for Rhode Island. They left behind a law student delighted with her summer sublet, a retirement-bound photo restorer, and, at curbside, a perturbed Ted.

  “He has his hands on his hips,” Tess reported, looking through her side mirror. “Why is he so angry?”

  Olivia refused to look back. She made a practice in life of not doing that. Once a decision was made and a course of action set, the only way to look was ahead. That said, she was sad saying good-bye to Otis and felt a twinge of regret on leaving the apartment. What she felt leaving Ted, though, was pure relief.

  “He’s not angry,” she told Tess. “He’s hurt. He wanted us to spend the summer here with him.”

  “Doing what? Riding the swan boats? That’s all Ted thinks I do. It wouldn’t occur to him that I like to shop.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Olivia, either. In their household, shopping had always been more functional than fun. But Olivia had an image of what people wore summers in Asquonset—especially summers of parties preceding a wedding—and it wasn’t what hung in her closet. She didn’t want to embarrass Natalie, and the fiancé might be even more fashionable. He was still a big question mark. Olivia had pictured a wine baron from the vineyards of France, until Otis said that his name was Carl Burke, at which point she ruled out France. The name was Irish. Since she hadn’t ever heard of any Irish wine families, she made him the Irish American head of a California vineyard. She imagined a dignified, elegant, classy man. Men like that surrounded themselves with dignified, elegant, classy people.

  Since that circle would temporarily include Tess and her, Olivia loosened the purse strings and took Tess to the stores. Suddenly the daughter who wore nothing but T-shirts and jeans was a whole new creature. She tried on colorful shorts and halter tops, short skirts and sundresses—not only tried them on but modeled them—and she looked adorable in everything, because she was smiling. In different clothes, she was a different person. Olivia didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell her the meaning of that.

  Asquonset was a new beginning, and she had Otis to thank. She hadn’t even had to go for a personal interview. Natalie had hired her on his word alone.

  Ted was appalled. “But don’t you want to see where you’re going? Okay, so you’ve seen photographs, but they can’t tell you what you need to know. Photographs don’t tell the truth. She’s clearly sending ones that show the place at its best—that’s how it’s done.”

  Olivia didn’t think that arguing was worth the effort. Ted’s pessimism was pure sour grapes. He refused to see that their relationship was ending, and continued to talk about calling her each night, meeting her for dinner midway between Cambridge and Asquonset, even driving down to visit. She tried to put him off gently with pleas of needing to get to know the job, of finding out how demanding it would be. When he didn’t take the hint, she was more blunt. She was feeling stifled, she said. She needed space.

  Even then he didn’t listen. Ted didn’t hear what he didn’t want to hear, and that was his problem. But Olivia wasn’t letting him rain on her parade. She refused to let him disparage Asquonset.

  “The pictures I’ve seen aren’t marketing photographs
,” she informed him. “They were taken before anyone even knew what marketing was. Some of them are snapshots from a Brownie camera. They’re the real thing.”

  Otis had confirmed it. When pushed, he had confessed to being at Asquonset a number of times. Had he ever met Carl Burke? He didn’t recall it, but he did recall the Great House. He said it was even more beautiful than the photographs—quite a concession from a man who had been spurned.

  Besides, Olivia and Natalie had talked on the phone. Natalie had no problem with Olivia’s lack of a college degree. She liked what Olivia had done with the Asquonset pictures and claimed that the letters she had written on Otis’s behalf showed sufficient writing skill. She liked that Olivia asked questions while they talked, and insisted that being organized, personable, and devoted—as Olivia had been to Otis—was more valuable to her than formal credentials. Finally, she said that she had learned to trust her gut and that her gut spoke of a rapport between the two of them.

  Olivia’s did the same. Over the course of three conversations, she came away with the conviction that Natalie wanted to hire her as much as she wanted the job. The skeptical part of her nature didn’t know whether rapport had been the deciding factor, whether Natalie was feeling guilty at having shafted Otis so many years before, or whether she simply wanted the hiring over and done. Olivia did know that talking with Natalie was easy, much as she imagined it would be to talk with a good-natured grandmother. Natalie was easygoing and enthusiastic. She was flexible. She was eager to please.

  The best part, though, was that she seemed delighted by the prospect of having a child around.

  “And you believe that?” Ted had asked with a snort.

  If this man wasn’t already history with Olivia, the snort would have clinched it. Tess was her pride and joy. She resented his suggestion that the child was a bother to anyone. “Yes, I believe it. She’s gone out of her way to make things come together for us. She found us a tutor. She found us a tennis teacher. She even made arrangements for Tess to take sailing lessons at the yacht club.”

  “Did you interview the tutor? For all you know it could be a high school kid wanting a few extra bucks—same with the tennis teacher—and if she absolutely has to sail, she can do it with my parents in Rockport.”

  If nothing else, I’m thankful for sparing her that, Olivia thought. She had met Ted’s parents. Taking them to a restaurant had been a nightmare of complaints—spotted stemware, poor service, food that was undercooked, overcooked, or misordered. They were as uptight as their son. Olivia didn’t want her daughter anywhere near them.

  “And take the mother angle,” Ted charged, pounding the last nail into his own coffin. “How can you cart your child off without scoping out the place you’re carting her to—for that matter, how can you take off for the summer when you don’t have a job for the fall? If it was me, I’d be staying right here, pounding the pavement. And if you don’t care about it for your sake, that’s okay, but you ought to be caring for Tess’s sake. Responsible mothers don’t do this—it isn’t smart.”

  Isn’t smart? Olivia, already sensitive enough about not having a college degree in a town where most people had three, was offended.

  “Tell you what,” she snapped. “When you have kids, you can do what you think is smart. For my kid, I’ll do what I think is smart.”

  And she was doing just that. Some of Ted’s arguments might have had merit if she hadn’t felt such conviction that what she was doing was right. It was a feeling she’d had from the minute she first read Natalie’s letter.

  Besides, trust was a big issue, and in this instance it went both ways. If Natalie could hire her sight unseen, Olivia could accept the job the same way.

  THEN CAME THE DREAM. The first part was real—growing up in a Vermont town that catered to a ski crowd from New York, the only child of a woman who herself was little more than a child. Olivia was raised by neighbors until she was old enough to wear a key around her neck. By that time, Carol Jones was working with a local realtor and interacting closely with that ski crowd from New York. In her dream, Olivia relived the nights at home alone, afraid of the dark, afraid of the angry sounds coming from the landlord downstairs, not knowing where her mother was, and fearing she would never return.

  The second part of the dream was the interesting part. In it, Carol Jones returned one morning not with a paramour, but with her own mother.

  Olivia had never met her grandmother. She had been told that the woman was dead, which was the easiest thing for Carol to say, but Olivia kept the flame alive. During the loneliest of those childhood hours, burrowed in her hideout in the corner of a dark closet where she felt safe, she concocted dozens of stories to explain a grandmother’s absence. Likewise, she imagined a dozen different reunions.

  In this dream, the grandmother who came from nowhere one sunny day was a woman of means. She had spent years looking for her daughter—her headstrong, rebellious, pregnant daughter—who had run off to spite her parents, and then had been too frightened to return. One private investigator after another had given up on the job, but the grandmother had stuck with it. Now, all these years later, her perseverance had paid off. Thanks to an old photograph of Carol that had been painstakingly restored and looked exactly like Olivia, the older woman had tracked her down.

  That sweet, stubborn, at long last successful grandmother had Natalie Seebring’s face.

  OF COURSE, it was only a dream. Thinking about it, though, as her aged Toyota carried them south, Olivia took it as an omen. Her excitement grew.

  Unfortunately, so did Tess’s anxiety. The questions came one after the other in steady succession. “Where will we live?”

  “In the Great House. There’s an empty wing of the house. We’ll be there. I’ve told you this, Tess.”

  “Empty? Like, haunted?”

  “It’s okay. They’re nice ghosts.”

  “Mommm.”

  “No ghosts, Tess. No ghosts.”

  “How old’s the man she’s marrying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if everyone there’s old? Old people don’t like kids.”

  “They do, as long as the kids behave.”

  “What if I get on their nerves anyway? Who else is at Natalie’s house?”

  “Please, Tess. Not Natalie. Mrs. Seebring.”

  “You call her Natalie.”

  “Not to her face, and besides, I’m an adult.”

  “Does Carl live there?”

  Olivia sighed. “It’s Mr. Burke, and I don’t know whether he lives there or not.”

  “Is there a cook? A maid? A butler?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be very good at sailing.”

  “Of course you will.”

  “Did you call Cambridge Heath?”

  “Yes. They’re processing your application.” Olivia had talked to the admissions officer just that morning. Not trusting that something wouldn’t be lost, she had a folder with her that contained copies of Tess’s application and medical records. A second folder contained brochures from Braemont, in Providence, and schools in three other New England cities, all of which had museums where Olivia might find work. A third folder contained copies of her résumé and of the letters that she’d already sent. She planned to send a follow-up letter with her summer address. It was as good an excuse as any to remind them that she was alive and looking for work.

  “What if I don’t get in?” Tess asked.

  “If you don’t get in,” Olivia rationalized for the umpteenth time, “it’ll only be because there wasn’t an open spot in the fifth grade. Right now, the class is filled. They’re expecting a dropout or two over the summer.”

  “Why would someone drop out?”

  “They move. Their parents take jobs in other parts of the country.”

  “What if they don’t?”

  “If they don’t, we’ll apply for next year.”

  “Then what’ll I do this year?”

>   If they moved to a different city, there would be another public school, with the possibility of a better teacher and a better program for someone like Tess. If not, Olivia just didn’t know. Her conference with Nancy Wright hadn’t gone well. It’s the demographics, the woman had claimed with more than a little arrogance. Our student body is ahead of most. We can’t hold all of these children back while we cater to a few who lag. Olivia had had to go to the principal of the school and lobby hard before they finally did assign Tess to a fifth-grade class, but it was clear that they did so reluctantly and that they would hold Olivia responsible for the move. If something went wrong, they said in so many words, the school wouldn’t be to blame.

  And that, in a nutshell, was the problem with the school Tess was attending. The mentality was adversarial—them against us. There was no sense of partnership, no sense of working together for the good of the child. The process had left Olivia more convinced than ever that Tess needed something different.

  OLIVIA WAS FOCUSED on that thought when they turned off the highway and, following Natalie’s directions, headed down the local road. She was wondering what would happen if she screwed up and couldn’t do this job. Writing letters was nothing compared to writing a book. Her computer would check spelling and grammar, but it wouldn’t express ideas and connect one with the next.

  The truth? This job was a reach for her. If she lost it in a week, there would be no summer by the sea—no iced tea on the veranda, no picnics, no sailing. There would be no hours of being lost in the past. There would be no glowing reference from Natalie, no California connections from Carl, no good word put in to a powerful friend who might know someone on the board of directors of a museum that had an in-house restoration department. If Olivia screwed up, there would be no stipend, and without that stipend she could kiss good-bye the dream of sending Tess to Cambridge Heath.

  So maybe it was irresponsible of her as a mother to have raised the child’s hopes. But how not to? Tess had had to be interviewed and tested. Olivia couldn’t have submitted an admissions application for her without her knowledge.