My father leaned in close. Then he smiled, pushed my hair back off of my face. “Can I tell you, you’re my favorite kid.”
“You say that to all of us.”
“Well. That doesn’t make it any less true,” he said.
The Wedding
There was supposed to be a wedding at our vineyard. And in the end, there was.
Five days after my wedding was to take place, my parents stood there together under a homemade altar. My father wore a sports coat and jeans. My mother wore a blue beret, the blue beret she’d been wearing the day she’d met my father, the day he’d gotten into her car and never gotten out.
It wasn’t an official ceremony. They were never officially divorced, but it felt official: Finn married them, and all their friends from town—from the life they’d built in Sebastopol—stood with them. All the local winemakers were there, Jacob included. Suzannah and Charles flew up to be there too.
I was by my mother’s side. Bobby, my father’s best man, stood by his. Margaret and the twins, eager flower boys, completed the circle.
“There is nothing for me to say that I haven’t said,” my father said, talking to everyone, his eyes held fast on my mother.
“Except bon voyage,” my mother said.
He smiled. “Except bon voyage,” he said.
With that, he kissed her. Everyone cheered. And we opened wine, more and more wine, as they spoke about leaving there, closing up the house. They told us they were going on a trip around the world, boating to the south of France and the Mediterranean, the gorgeous coast of South America. That part of the plan they kept: my father buying that wristband that he thought was going to stop the seasickness that he wasn’t even worried about coming. There was no worry. Just excitement. The two of them were heading off to be together on a new adventure. Though this time instead of following, my mother was leading the way. My mother was leading him.
Suzannah and I walked away from the crowd, up to the top of the hill, the very top of the hill that looked out over the entire vineyard. The fifty acres that had taken my father his adult lifetime to accumulate: the original ten, the house and gardens he and my mother had built on them, the forty that followed.
How long ago had my father been the one standing here, looking over this land? How had he known what to do with it? How had I not figured out, before it was too late, how much that mattered?
“It’s a good thing you listened to me and decided to stay here,” she said.
I laughed.
“So is this your new look?”
She pointed at my curls falling over my shoulders, no makeup, none of my Los Angeles armor.
I smiled. “Much less refined?”
She shook her head. “Much more . . . happy.”
She gave me a kind smile.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Apparently not return phone calls,” Jacob said.
We turned around to see him behind us, his hands in his pockets, a button-down shirt on, wine running down the front of it.
“Am I interrupting?”
Suzannah smiled at him. “Of course you are,” she said, irritated.
Suzannah walked away, turning back and making the so-so sign with her hands. I laughed, looking away from her, looking back at Jacob and his wine-covered shirt.
He shrugged apologetically, pulling on his shirt. “I’m a mess,” he said.
“What happened?”
“The twins. They were fighting each other for my licorice.”