Eight Hundred Grapes (71)

They both got quiet. Everyone got quiet, and the entire waiting room turned to look at my mother: the Ford family and Ben and Margaret and Jacob and an array of midnight strangers, crowding around. Everyone looked at my mother, who was done with all the nonsense, demanding that the rest of her family be done too.

“Now it’s time for you to keep your father safe. To keep each other safe. Like you all didn’t forget how.” She moved toward the doctor. “So what does this mean for Dan?”

The doctor looked back and forth between my brothers to see if they were going to interrupt.

“He’s resting now. We’ll know more tomorrow, but you should get some rest.”

Jacob looked down as if it was his fault.

“So he’s going to be okay?” Finn said.

My mother caught his eye, trying to calm him.

“What you’re saying means he’s going to be okay?” Bobby said.

“It means we watch him until tomorrow. Run a few more tests. But assuming he is fine, he can go home then. Though he’s going to have to take it easy. His body is not going to give him another warning call.”

Bobby laughed. “Sure. That won’t be an issue at all.”

My mother put her hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “Bobby . . .”

“What? Dad has never taken it easy. Ever.”

The doctor turned and looked at him. Serious. “Until today.”

My mother nodded and turned to us so we’d hear it, what she was saying in her silence, that it was time for everyone to think differently about our father. “Can we see him?”

“He said you had a long enough day and you should go home. I think that would be wise. Dan is groggy and could use his rest, and Jen, you need your rest too. He’s right. You can see him first thing in the morning.”

My mother nodded. “Sure. Okay,” she said. “That makes sense.”

She turned to me and squeezed my hand.

Then she walked right past the doctor, toward her husband.





Sebastopol, California. 2009




Jen was furious with him and she was right to be. They were spending a month in Big Sur, in a beautiful house, large windows looking out over the ocean. She had told him what she needed. She needed a change and she had said that she’d go on her own. But he had insisted that he go with her.

That part was fine, but he wasn’t really here. He knew that was what she was furious about. If he was going to barely be here with her, why had he come at all?

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.