She paused, and my heart started racing, trying to reconcile what she was saying with what my father said.
My mother sighed, looking down. “I see your father and I love who I see.”
“But Henry sees you?”
She nodded, looking back up, meeting my eyes. “But Henry sees me.”
She stood up and started getting dressed. Without further explanation. And I understood what my father didn’t get about my mother. It wasn’t about her fear of losing him. It was about her fear that she had lost herself. It was about what she had given up for him. Henry didn’t just see my mother as she was. He saw the girl who was sitting in the yellow car, her cello the most important thing in the world to her. He saw who my mother would have been if she had told my father to get out of her car—the imagined life she would have led then.
Who could blame her for wanting a second chance at that? Suddenly, not me.
I stood up and walked up behind her, wrapping my arms around her.
“Mom, I just want you to be happy.”
She nodded. “I am happy.”
Though she was crying when she said it.
Falling Out of Sync
Desynchronization. Your fiancé lands his dream job on the other side of the world only to find out he has a daughter down the block, her mother still in love with him. Your mother is tired of doing too much work in her marriage at the exact moment someone returns to her life promising to do all the work instead.
Everything seemed to be lining up so the wrong people were together. So the right ones were apart.
In all my years growing up in Sonoma County, the drive over CA-116 had never felt so fast. In fifty minutes, I was in the Murray Grant waiting room, staring up at the pear. I’d planned on waiting for Jacob to walk out of his meeting, but Jacob wasn’t going to walk out of any meeting. There was a note taped to his office door. AT THE FACTORY.
I got back into the car and hit the gas, moving fast toward the large Murray Grant Wines facility, where they bottled and shipped all their wines.
There was a security guard outside too busy watching ESPN to notice or stop me.
I stormed past him, opening the wooden door and entering the factory. It was angry and cold. A large conveyor belt was bottling the wine bottles. Cranes were pulling crates of wine toward the shipping area. I thought of my father bottling his wines by hand, waxing each shut.
On the second floor was a hallway with several large glass offices. Through the glass, I could see Jacob standing in one of them. No cozy white couches there.
He stood before a group of four men in expensive suits sitting around a conference table. Were they having a meeting about how they were turning Sebastopol into the new Napa Valley? Selling factory wine. Making them a lot of money to buy more small vineyards, turn them into something other than what they had been. Someone’s home.
I ran up the stairs toward him and stormed into the office.
Jacob looked at me in the doorway, the men in the business suits staring.
I knew I was being crazy. I knew it even before Jacob’s look of confusion and outright irritation confirmed it.
“Hey, Georgia. Could you give me a minute?”
“No.”
He looked at me, then back at his meeting in progress.
“I need you to give me a minute, okay?” he said.
The security guard had made his way up the staircase. “Everything okay?”
Jacob tried to wave him off, trying to stay in control, to make it less of a scene. “We’re fine, Caleb,” he said.
Jacob turned toward the businessmen. “Would you guys excuse me?” he said. “I’ll be back in one second.”
Jacob quickly steered us out of the office, past Caleb, the security guard.