Eight Hundred Grapes

by Laura Dave

  “Your mother just texted me that she may not be coming.”

  He reached in his pocket, showed me his phone like proof.

  “I’m meeting my son instead, actually. He’s never been to La Gare.”

  “You have a son?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “You’re divorced?”

  “No, I’m not technically.”

  I looked at him, confused. Henry was married? He had a wife somewhere, wondering where he was, two homes breaking up so he and my mother could run off?

  “I have a son, but I was never married to his mother. We were close friends. We still are.” He pointed at the menu. “Would you like to join us for a bite to eat? My son is a winemaker. He’s relatively new to the area. I think you’ll enjoy each other.”

  “No, Henry, I think that may be the last thing I’d like to do. No offense.”

  “None taken.” He paused. “It’s nice to see you again,” he said.

  He looked like he wanted to see me as much as I wanted to see him. Which did the strangest thing. It warmed me to him.

  Then he leaned forward, looking me in the eyes, and a weird thing happened—suddenly, I was the one standing at attention.

  “It’s easy to think you understand what’s going on between your mother and me,” he said. “It’s always easy from the outside looking in.”

  I gave him a look, warning him to avoid suggesting I was on the outside of anything involving my mother.

  “What I’m saying is that I do love your mother very much,” he said.

  “And you think that makes it okay to break up a family?”

  He shook his head. And I saw it, his edge. The kind that meant he wasn’t going to play nice. “That’s her choice, not mine.”

  He paused, softening, but pressing on.

  “Your mother has taught me a little about winemaking. It’s fascinating to me. Perhaps because it isn’t unlike music. Timing is everything.”

  I was unsure what he wanted me to take from that.

  “When your mother walked into rehearsal for the first time, she had on this green jumpsuit which she thought looked sophisticated but she looked ridiculous. She was the most ridiculous and beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”

  He shook his head fondly.

  “I’d just had my son, though. And by the time I left his mother, she had already met your father.” He paused. “So if you want to understand why your mother’s with me, you have to ask someone else. But for me, I’ve been waiting thirty-five years for the two of us to fall into rhythm.”

  I was floored, hearing him talk about my mother that way, and seeing what happened in his eyes. There was an intensity there. It was intoxicating to witness that kind of intensity—that kind of passion, really—­honest and raw and irresistible at the same time. Irresistible in how sure of itself it was. And my mother was on the receiving end of that intensity. How could she turn away from it?

  “What makes you think I want to hear any of this?”

  He smiled. “Because you came to find me tonight,” he said.

  “To tell you to go away.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”

  Again, that edge—and worse, a certainty. He was certain that my mother and he were a done deal. He was certain that they belonged together—the way my father was certain of the same thing.

  It made me want to ask him a question. Not if he understood what my parents’ love was like—what it had been like to grow up in the glow of it—because how could he? And he didn’t care as much about that as he cared about being with my mother.

  But that wasn’t my question. I was wet and freezing and exhausted. I wanted to ask him if he could lend me twenty dollars so I could get home.

  Then the restaurant door opened. And he was standing there.

  In his sweater vest glory.

  Jacob. I started putting pieces together. Jacob grew up in New York. I only knew Jacob’s mother, not his father. Was Henry his father? I didn’t know Henry’s last name, but he had moved here from New York. I knew that. I knew Jacob was a winemaker. Maybe this was the story. These two men, father and son: Henry destroying my parents’ marriage, Jacob destroying their livelihood.

  Jacob held out his hand, offering Henry his half-smile. If he had a piece of licorice he’d have offered that too.

  “I’m Jacob McCarthy,” he said.

  “Henry,” Henry said. “Henry Morgan.”

  “Good to meet you, Henry,” Jacob said.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as Henry walked inside and away.

  Jacob did a double take, looking through the window, after him. “That wasn’t the Henry Morgan, was it?”

  “You know about classical music now?”

  “I know enough to know about Henry Morgan,” he said.

  He gave me a smile, not commenting that I was dripping like a wet dog.

  “What have I missed?” he said.

  I pointed at the closed door. “Henry is my mother’s non-lover, and according to him, her soul mate,” I said. “And my brothers tried to kill each other over pot roast. And there was an incident with a fire hydrant.”

  Jacob took a breath, as if overwhelmed himself. “That’s it?”

  “There is a theory that I don’t love my fiancé. And I need money for a cab.”

  Jacob reached into his coat pocket, held out his wallet. “I can help with that part,” he said.

  He peeled off a fifty-dollar bill, handed it over.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Are you meeting Lee here?”

  He nodded as if remembering her. “Lee. Yes,” he said. “We keep meaning to go other places, but this is the only place open by the time we can eat. She’s at Foo Camp and running late.”

  “Foo Camp?”

  “Foo Camp.” He nodded. “That’s what they call this computer camp Lee is attending. This guy Tim O’Reilly runs it up here. He basically is at the forefront of everything technological. Lee idolizes him. It’s like hacker nerd dreamland.”

  “Lee likes chia and computers and Vera Wang. She’s interesting.”

  “To both of us.” He smiled, considering that. Then he pointed to the restaurant with his wallet. “You want to come in and have a drink?” he said.

  I looked down at my outfit—wet jeans, a white T-shirt. “I shouldn’t,” I said.

  Jacob reached out and held his hand over the back of my neck, like he was going to touch my skin, hold me there, warm me there. I felt a chill. I felt a chill where his hand almost was.

  “Come in,” he said. “That way there can be two of us looking stupid when Lee explains the algorithm that is going to change the way we log in to secure websites.”

  That sounded better than heading back to the house, but I shook my head. “Henry’s in there.”

  “The non-lover.”

  I nodded.

  He shrugged. “Another night, then.”

  I smiled, putting the money in my pocket. “I’m not paying you back, though.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You’re taking my family’s vineyard. I figure you can give me fifty bucks.”

  He nodded. “Fifty bucks seems fair.”

  I turned to go, walking in the direction of the main drag, the only place to catch a cab.

  But I looked back at Jacob. He was standing there, watching me go.

  He nodded, his way of offering encouragement for the rest of the night apart. Like he wished he was joining me for it. If I didn’t know better, a little like that.

  “What’s that look for?” he said.

  I shrugged, considering how to say it. “You just keep showing up. Exactly when I need you.”

  He smiled. “Some people would say that’s a good thing,” he said.

  Then Jacob walked inside.


  The Vintner Drinks Alone

  When I got back to the house, Ben was sleeping on the couch, trying to wait up so we could talk, the TV on, his shoes still on. But he was sound asleep. I put a blanket over him and headed upstairs. Maddie and the twins were in bed with my mother. Maddie fit right in, just one more, squeezed under my mother’s arm.

  The light was off in Bobby’s bedroom, the door was closed tight. And I imagined that Margaret was in there with him, that they were starting the process of working things out. But when I opened my bedroom door, Margaret was there, a box of tissues beside her, sleeping with her feet up by the pillows.

  I threw on a dry sweatshirt and closed the door behind myself, heading down the back stairs to the winemaker’s cottage, to the only free place to sleep.

  My father was up, drinking a glass of wine on the porch, looking over his incredible spreadsheet. His spreadsheet was the difference between him being a good winemaker and a great winemaker. It listed every grape, every clone, on the entire vineyard. It listed where they were fermenting in the cellar, how long he was going to let each ferment, the combinations that were going into the final product. The spreadsheet was his ultimate work in progress. He would make changes throughout the entire winter, based on the wine’s taste and its color. That was the part that made him a good winemaker, he would say. Not that he was willing to make the changes, but that, in the end, he was also willing to change it back.

  He kept his eyes on his spreadsheet, marking it. “Avoiding everyone?” he said.

  “Not you.”

  He looked up and smiled. “Aren’t I lucky, then?”

  He patted the bench beside him, and I sat down, tossing off my shoes, pulling my knees up. I took a first breath, lavender and chamomile and honey filling the vineyard air. It took me back, remembering how it used to calm me, a night just like this one. I’d stay up past bedtime, sitting beside my father while he worked on his spreadsheet, my father stopping occasionally to show me what he was doing.

  He put the spreadsheet down and poured me a glass of wine. “Finn doing okay?”

  I nodded, relaxing into the safety of this porch, the vineyard like a beautiful barricade, keeping everything wrong and unwanted away.

  “Thank you for dropping him off,” he said.

  It didn’t feel like a good time to tell him that I hadn’t.

  He handed over the wine. “That’s the 2005.”

  I took the unlabeled bottle, the glass shiny and blue. My father could have meant several wines from that vintage, but referring to it in that way, it was clear he meant the 2005 Block 14: the one wine on his spreadsheet that he never messed with. The first wine he’d ever made, an expression of a single site. Every year, those were the grapes he picked after the harvest party—everything else off the vine except for them. These were his most valuable grapes, juicy and rich from the extra time on the vine. He saved those grapes for last and fermented them as they were.

  Some years Block 14 turned out well, some years not well. Biodynamics at its most pure. And, 2005, it turned out gorgeous. The fruit was present in every sip of the wine, a rich, dark berry explosion. It won my father two national awards, his distributor insisting he charge ninety dollars a bottle. He liked to joke that 2005 was the wine that paid for all the wines. Tonight, it was like drinking comfort. Ripe and simple.

  “Not bad, huh?” he said.

  I breathed into the wine, thick with chocolate and jamminess, the way only the best Pinot Noir was. “Beautiful.”

  “Beautiful. I’ll take it.”

  I motioned toward his spreadsheet. “How’s it looking?”

  He smiled. “These last grapes came off lovely,” he said. “The whole southwest corner came off lovely. I’ll feel better when Block 14 is off the vines, but I’d like to give them a little longer to ripen fully.”

  “Forecast clear?”

  “Forecast clear, but they’ve been wrong before.”

  He pointed to the last page of his spreadsheet, the weather services lining the top. He updated each of them daily, all five of them showing sunny skies.

  “Jacob is getting into my head,” he said. “He thinks they should come down.”

  “Why would you listen to him?”

  He picked up his wine, considering the question. “He’s paying me plenty to.”

  “Well, not enough, in my opinion.”

  “Good thing it’s my opinion that matters.”

  Then he tipped the glass in my direction, looking at me, and smiling a little sadly.

  “Not that you asked, but it might help to separate out what’s going on with the vineyard and with our family from what’s going on for you and Ben. They are all separate things.”

  It all felt like the same thing: the loss of the vineyard, the coming apart of our family. Finn and Bobby and Margaret. My parents. Ben and Maddie. Michelle. It all felt tied up, like the same thread was running through them. Where there had been trust—to keep each other safe, to make each other feel loved—there was none. Maybe it was tied up. Synchronized to come apart the moment my father turned his back on the vineyard and we were all too busy to stop him.

  “Not that you asked, but it might help you to stop thinking of them as separate things. Everything is falling apart.”

  “Not everything is falling apart,” my father said.

  “Did you see your sons trying to kill each other tonight?”

  He nodded, considering that. Then dismissing it.

  “Finn and Bobby are fighting over the wrong thing. But at least they’re fighting.”

  “And how is that good?”

  “Because that’s the only way to get somewhere better.” He shrugged. “If you fight, you work it out. If you don’t fight, you move into your own corners, and nothing gets decided there.”

  I looked up toward the house. All the lights were off. Everyone sleeping where they shouldn’t: my mother in my parents’ bedroom without my father, my father apparently resigned to that. The man who had built a vineyard from nothing, who had kept my family together in spite of everything. He was just giving up. That was suddenly the scariest part.

  “It’s not like you,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Not to fight?”

  My father had fought hard for the vineyard his entire life—he fought for everyone in our family. “Yes.”

  He poured more wine, pointing at my empty ring finger.

  “You either,” he said.

  Pancakes at The Violet Café

  The last harvest that Finn and Bobby were still living at home, Finn and Bobby and I moved into the winemaker’s cottage. My father stayed in the house with my mother. My father allowed us to do this as long as we worked the entire harvest start to finish. It was my father’s last chance to show us fully what running the vineyard would be like. He wanted us each to have that knowledge. Of course, we took it as an opportunity to stay up late and smoke cigarettes and avoid homework. The three of us spending time together and talking, really talking. The way you often avoid doing with your siblings while growing up—­everyone too busy doing other things.

  It was only recently that I realized the knowledge my father wanted us to have. It wasn’t about the vineyard. It was about each other.

  Five days before my wedding, I woke up in the winemaker’s cottage, in the extra bedroom, in another world. Finn and his angry words snaked through my head most of the night. Was he right that if I truly loved Ben I’d have reacted differently? It felt simplistic to think so, but in my own way I was being simplistic too. As if Ben’s wrong freed me to stop behaving right.

  I slid out of the cottage, past the cold toast and jelly my father had left on the table. My father was already gone. No such thing as a day off during the final days of the harvest.

  I headed up toward the main house, toward the one person that could make me feel better about what Finn had
said, about what my father had said, toward the one person that I needed to try with most. Toward Maddie.

  She was already up, dressed in her heart leggings, watching Beauty and the Beast in my mother’s bed, lying with my mother, and the twins—in their fireman uniforms.

  It startled me for a second, seeing the three of them there, watching morning movies, like the three of us had done, growing up. The twins like Finn and Bobby. Maddie, a little like me.

  My mother looked sad lying there and I bent down, kissed her on the forehead.

  “What’s that for?” she said.

  “It’s a new day.”

  My mother studied me in my faded jeans and a tank top, my hair piled into a messy bun on top of my head. “Then don’t you think you could use a shower?” she said.

  I gave her a smile and turned toward Maddie. “You sleep well?”

  Maddie nodded, her eyes on the movie. “We watched Beauty and the Beast.”

  “Last night also?”

  Maddie smiled, eyes on the television. “Twice,” Maddie said.

  My mother shrugged. “Don’t judge,” she said. “I learned a long time ago to pick my battles, and it’s not like they aren’t learning something,” she said.

  “What’s that, Mom?”

  She pointed at their happy faces, intent on the princess. “Commitment,” she said.

  I looked at Maddie, trying to get her attention. “Maddie, what’s your favorite breakfast in the world?”

  “Pancakes,” she said.

  “With chocolate chips?”

  She looked at me like I had just solved a code. “How did you know that?”

  “Would you let me take you for some, if your dad says it’s okay? There’s a place near here that has the world’s gooiest chocolate chips.”

  “Just you and me?” She looked skeptical about that. I held her gaze, letting her know she could trust me about the chocolate chips. And everything else.

  She turned toward Josh. “Can I borrow your fireman hat?”

  He nodded, handing it over, too entranced by the movie to care.