Eight Hundred Grapes

He wasn’t making an effort. She loved everything about being in Big Sur and on the ocean. She had joined a musical theater group and she was playing in the band. It was beyond the fact that all of that made him feel threatened. It was this, if he was truthful. He felt neglected. He wasn’t seeing her at all and he was being a child about it. He knew he was being a child about it. That was different from knowing how to stop.

“Is it because you’re not feeling well?”

She asked him this all the time now, since the heart attack.

“I’m good. I’m really good.”

“Then it just seems like you’ve forgotten how to do anything other than what you’re doing.” She shook her head. “And the thing is, that was why I fell in love with you. That vision, that passion. But you have to be able to do something else too. You don’t know how to do anything but be at the vineyard.”

“I know.”

“And you haven’t tried.”

He nodded. “I know that too.”

She was waiting to see what he’d say next.

“We can sell the vineyard,” he said. “If that’s what you want to do.”

“No one is talking about selling the vineyard, Dan. Why is that all that you hear?”

She looked at him. And he saw it: The way she had looked at him at the beginning, all that love in her eyes—this looked like the opposite.

“What are we talking about, then?”

“Something else,” she said.

She started walking away, but he held on to her arm. He didn’t say anything, but he held on, hoping she would see what he didn’t seem to know how to say. He was waiting for her to do it, the thing she would do when they were this angry with each other, the thing she was the one who knew how to do.

He was waiting for her to move back toward him.

The Details

Synchronization.

A fire hit a vineyard. And then, like a miracle, it started to pour. It was overdue to pour but it started then, pressing down at the fire.

Synchronization. Your heart pumped blood to the necessary vessels. The vessels pumped the blood back to the heart muscle. Everything flowed through the coronary artery to the heart muscle. To where everything was needed.

An unspoken agreement.

Ben went back to the house to relieve Michelle. Margaret went with him to be with her twins. They needed her, and it was easier to be with them. She didn’t expect Bobby to go with her. But he did. Bobby went to oversee the grape picking, to do the one thing for my father he felt he could do at that moment. Then Finn left to deal with the fire department, to see what was left of the winemaker’s cottage. By the time my mother came out, there was only me, surrounded by empty seats.

My mother walked back into the waiting room, carrying an enormous care package.

“You all alone? How did that happen?”

“A little bit of luck.”

She smiled. “Thanks for staying for me,” she said.

She put the care package down on the seat next to me and took the seat on its other side, exhausted.

“What a night,” she said.

“How is he?”

“He was irritated more than anything else, which seemed like a good sign.”