Eight Hundred Grapes

I smiled. “Now you tell me.”

“You needed to get there yourself. Or it wouldn’t have been. You get that?”

“Well, if you say so.”

He smiled. “I think you’re going to be okay, kid. He wasn’t the person.” He shook his head. “Or maybe that’s just what I’m telling myself now so I don’t feel responsible.”

“Responsible for what?”

“Responsible for you. You don’t understand your worth. That was my job.”

I reached over and took his hand, my father, whom I loved more than anything in this world. My father. My mother.

“Daddy.”

“Oh no, you’re bringing out the big gun.”

“I’m moving home, not because I’m scared, but because I’m not anymore. I want to be here.”

He nodded because he could see that I meant it. Then he got sad, thinking about something else.

“It’s too late, baby.”

I nodded. “For our land, but I’ll find new land. And I’ll make Jacob give it back to me, the Last Straw name.”

“He won’t do it. He’s not going to be allowed by his board, even if he wants to.”

“Then I’ll fight him to give me B-Minor, unless you don’t want me using it.”

“Then what?”

“Then I’ll ask Mom.”

He shook his head. “You’re the most stubborn person that I’ve ever met. And if you think I mean that nicely, I don’t. It’s not a compliment, even if it sounds like one.”

“Will you help me?”

“If you tell me why you want to be here so badly?”

My mother’s words came to mind. Be careful what you give up. In a way, that was what I had done. I had focused on other things, on my relationship, on a life far from here. And I was glad I had. It had altered me in the ways that made it possible for me to want to be here. To know what that meant. I had given away a love that felt too dangerous, too risky, and being back here was the greatest reminder that it was real love. How I felt waking up here in the morning, and how I felt sitting on the winemaker’s cottage porch at night. How the smells and sounds and people seemed to grab hold of me every time I let them in. How the wine still did.

The wine. And the fearless piece of me that wanted to be a part of it, even if I couldn’t control it. The fearless part of me knowing that just maybe it was the way to build a life that I wasn’t only good at, but that I loved.

He smiled. “You remember when you were a little kid, and you came into the winemaker’s cottage and announced that you wanted to be a winemaker? I was relieved when you changed your mind.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a life you have no control over. You do everything in your power and ultimately you have no control.”

I moved in closer to him, trying to avoid sounding ironic when I said it, what I knew to be the truth. “Didn’t you just describe everything

worth doing?”

He smiled. “Not everything, wiseass.”

“Give me the exception.”

“Making clocks. That, you can control.”