Eight Hundred Grapes

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.