If I Forget You(24)

Her mother sees her first. “Look who is here!” she exclaims, and comes to her. Her father is standing against the granite island, rows of tumbler glasses in front of him filled with ice, a bottle of gin in his hand. He looks up and smiles. They have company, of course.

“Honey,” her mother says, and hugs her. Her mother is all perfume and hair, and underneath Margot smells the slightly dank smell of the cigarette she recently sneaked in the composed but wild-crafted landscape between the dunes and the ocean.

Her father gives her a broad smile across the counter. “Come here,” he says, not stopping making the gin and tonics.

Margot goes to him and leans into him and her father puts his arm around her. He has on his summer uniform, shorts and a polo shirt.

“How’s Danny?” her father says.

“He’s great,” says Margot, lying. She has no idea how Danny is.

“Well, I hope he comes down this summer. Good kid.”

“We’ll see,” Margot says.

“Help me with these drinks. The Baldwins are here.”

Outside on the fieldstone patio, there is a fire in the large stone pit that is built in the middle of it, and on either side of it sit her parents’ friends, who rise and each give her a hug. Beyond them in the dark Margot can hear the incessant slap of the ocean.

“Sit down with us,” her mother says. “Have a drink.”

“Chad will be down on Monday,” Mrs. Baldwin says. “I know he’ll look forward to seeing you.” Chad is their son, who goes to Colby, in Maine. Margot kissed him once in high school. He is handsome in a toothy kind of way. Ever since they were little kids, there has been an effort to put the two of them together.

“I think I’m going to lie down,” Margot says. “Long drive.”

“Of course, honey,” her mother says.

“Good to see you all,” Margot says.

“Welcome home,” they say in return.

Upstairs, Margot lies on her bed fully clothed in the dark. With the window open, their empty conversations float up to her, just voices on the air, the gin-soaked laughter of a crude joke landing, and in the distance she can hear the surf.

Margot is pleased with the solitude. In a few days, her sister and her fiancé will join them on the island. The summer will kick into gear. There will be sun-drenched days on the beach. Clambakes. Afternoons punctuated by cocktail hours that arrive earlier and earlier.

But tonight she can be deliciously alone in her bed with Henry. She can replay that moment when they said good-bye. She can see his black eyes pleading with her not to go. She can feel his hands on her in the hotel bed from the night before. And this is the part of love no one tells you about: that you can be far apart and if you close your eyes and push your face into the pillow, you can reach across time and space and for a few moments before you fall asleep you can be together for as long as you like.





Henry, 1991

Henry is not afraid of hard work. At the winery, the day starts at dawn, and for the first time in his life he fires a gun. Henry rises with the sun and makes his way to the house, always with some trepidation, for Ted and Laura, the owners, have an Australian cattle dog, which never seems to learn that Henry belongs here. Henry has a fear of dogs that comes from growing up in his Providence neighborhood, where few people actually owned dogs and those who did owned ones meant to deter people from coming into their apartments.

Ted cooks breakfast for the three of them, and it is as if they are a family, Henry thinks, eating eggs at the table, with its view of the blue expanse of lake. Afterward, Henry and Ted go to the winery, where they sit on the rooftop with the acres of grapes below them. Ted teaches Henry how to use a shotgun and the day begins with firing over the grapes at the huge murder of crows that descends every morning to try to eat the grapes. The goal is not to actually kill the birds but, rather, to make them fly away. And Henry is happy about this strategy, for he doesn’t want to kill anything, though on his third day he levels the shotgun and takes one of the huge black birds right out of the sky. Watching it flutter down takes his breath away, and when they discover it a few minutes later, dead between the rows, Henry feels sick about it and Ted laughs at him.

“It’s okay to hit a few, Henry,” Ted says. “They’re terrible thieves.”

There are hot mornings when they spend hours on their knees amid the ten acres of grapes, pruning by hand each individual plant. Henry likes the labor and he has the focus of a poet, and Ted teaches him about the grapes, the different varieties—the pinot noir and the chardonnay, the sauvignon blanc and the Riesling, the black-as-night merlot and the cabernet. For lunch, Laura brings them sandwiches and they eat cross-legged in the fields and open a bottle of wine, and Henry loves this, the sun hot on his face, drinking wine from the bottle and feeling the sweat of the morning’s labor.

The afternoons and rainy days are spent inside the cool, dark winery, and Ted teaches him how they fill the bottles from the wooden casks, in the case of the red wine, and from the stainless-steel tanks, in the case of the white. They bottle by hand, they cork them by hand, and then they apply the labels one at a time. It is simple and beautiful work, and Henry thinks Ted and Laura might be the happiest people he has ever met. They have this spit of land on the lake and they have each other. They roll out of bed and into their jobs. At night, they cook beautiful meals and always there is wine. They welcome Henry into their home. His is the old-fashioned life of a farmhand and he loves it.