Screwmates(12)

He sighed. “Fine.”

I knew I shouldn’t pry, but nearly two glasses of wine in, and I was ready for a good chit-chat. “So, is it… like is it terminal, or just chronic?” I took another long sip. Still no mocha, but maybe a plum? I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a plum, so maybe not.

“Is what terminal?” He clicked off the TV as it started into the next episode of Daredevil.

“Your mom’s condition. I understand if you don’t want to talk about it.” I regretted bringing it up. He was looking more and more uncomfortable, and I’d spoken without thinking. What if his mom was dying? What if she only had a short time left? Oh, God.

Yep, I was definitely capable of more humiliation where Marc Kirby was concerned.

But then he said, “My mom doesn’t have a condition,” and grabbed another handful of Fruit Loops.

“I’m—” What was I? Confused, mostly. “I’m sorry. I mean, not sorry that she doesn’t have a condition. That’s not. Anyway. Ava told me you go take care of her every weekend. I just assumed she was sick.”

Marc looked slightly ashamed. He took a deep breath, and then a deep swallow of wine, and then another deep breath.

Lo and behold, we’d finished the bottle.

I poured us some chardonnay, which tinted pink when it hit the dregs of merlot.

“Do you have siblings?” Marc asked. Not where I thought he was going.

“I have a sister twelve years older. She’s more like a cousin or something, since we grew up so far apart. Why?”

“Because I have a brother. Paul. He’s eighteen months younger.” We clinked our glasses and sipped. “White grapes, this time.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed. “Maybe a touch of apricot.” I did not taste any apricot. But it sounded like a good thing to say. The kind of thing that would be printed on a bottle.

“Paul has always been my mom’s favorite. No matter what I did, she’d pat my head and then praise Paul. I got honor roll. He got C’s. Still, guess who got to pick the fancy dinner because he’d ‘tried so hard’?”

Ouch. That was never the case with my sister and I, because we’d both basically been only children. Also, both solid B students. High five.

“I just finished my PhD with a job offer in hand. Paul barely managed to get his GED. And yet my mom coos over him as though he’d gotten a Nobel. Check the bottle, I feel good about that apricot thing.”

I revealed the description on the bottle. “Pineapple and vanilla?”

“No,” Marc said.

“No,” I agreed.

“Anyway, then Paul got busted for small time dealing, and now my mother doesn’t have anyone to manage the business on the weekends. She could hire someone else, but I’d thought that if I spent more time working with her, we might finally have a chance to get closer.”

“And?”

“Hasn’t happened so far.” He took another swallow of his wine. “Pineapple? Really?”

“Really. Maybe it was mislabeled.”

“Could be. This one was homemade.”

“No way. Are you serious?”

“Sort of. My mother’s neighbor is an amateur vintner and has been bottling everything from reds to meads to dandelion wine for as long as I can remember. He’s even won a couple of awards, but he says if he ever does this for business, he’ll stop finding the pleasure. So we just enjoy everything he makes while it lasts. He’s getting older. Not too old to stop threatening me with a bare-butt-whipping every time I drive the moles off Mom’s lawn and into his, but…”

“Your mom lives next door to a home-winery? Is this in Kansas City, Missouri?”

“No, a little further out. My mother runs an organic farm outside Lawrence, in Kansas.”

“That’s kind of cool.”

“Don’t look so surprised.”

“You’re just, you know. All professorial and bookish. It’s hard to imagine you digging around in the dirt.” Though it did explain how extremely well built the man was. Also, I liked the thought of Marc and Dirty in the same sentence. Hulk-growl. “What exactly do you do for her?”

“I help with a variety of things. In the spring, I supervise the planting. In the summer, I help get everything to the farmer’s markets where we make most of our money for the year. In the fall, I help with the books and the budget.”

“And in the winter?”

He smiled like he was about to tell a secret. “That’s when we’re selling her organic body care products.”

“Wait. Wait. That cucumber-rose bodywash of yours is actually yours?” In the back of my head, I’d assumed it was left over from some date or another, and he’d just kept it as a guilty pleasure. Now there was truly no excuse why he hadn’t been sharing, and I was not going to feel guilty over stealing it. Not that I had been feeling guilty, but I wasn’t going to start.

“It’s my mother’s. But, I do help with the distribution. And the occasional flavor. Cucumber rose was my idea.” His face lit up. Of course it was. “Not for much longer, though. This year I’ve been training my replacement, and as soon as summer is over, I’m done.” He raised his glass in celebration.