Eight Hundred Grapes (74)

I hugged him. “Thank you.”

He looked confused. “For what?”

“I wasn’t sure what to do about Ben, and you just made it feel very clear. Thank you for that.”

“You should marry him. You’d be an idiot not to.”

And then there was that. I laughed, even though he wasn’t kidding. And leaned forward, squeezing into my brother.

“Hey, guys. What’s going on?”

We looked up, and Finn was there, holding a six-pack of beer. Finn stood there, Bobby stiffening at the sight of him. I made room anyway, for my good brother, who had behaved very badly.

Finn sat down on the other side of me, and maybe this was all that Bobby could do, but he did it. He didn’t get up. I tried to reward him for that, handing him the beer.

Finn cleared his throat. Maybe so we would look at him.

Which was when I noticed that he was holding a paper in his hand: an entire folder, a blue folder, UCLA Law School’s insignia on the front.

He handed it over.

“I stayed up looking for it. It wasn’t easy to find. But there it is.”

The contract. It was the contract we had signed saying we would never take this place over. I looked down at it. There were the signature lines I’d made. Bobby had signed the first one, Finn the third. But on the second line—saved for me—there was nothing.

“I never signed it?”

He shook his head. “You never signed it,” Finn said.

Bobby looked over, as if to confirm it. He nodded. “No signature.”

There was meaning to derive from that, probably that everyone is too busy in law school to do anything well. But maybe there was some other meaning too.

Finn put his arm over my shoulder. “You should frame that,” he said. “It was like the younger you telling the older you something.”

“But what?”

“But what? That is the question.”

It was Bobby who answered.

“Maybe that you’re a pretty crappy lawyer.”

Then he took the contract and ripped it into a thousand pieces.

We sat there quietly, the early morning coming up over the vineyard, the fog moving away. Slowly but surely. Leaving a glistening in its wake. Leaving sunshine. From the half-burned winemaker’s cottage, it couldn’t have been more beautiful.

“I still don’t want this place,” Finn said.

“Me neither, I have no interest,” Bobby said.

He didn’t look at Finn when he did it, when he agreed with him, but he agreed with him all the same.

I looked at Finn, tempted to explain what had just happened, Bobby moving toward him, though I kept my mouth shut, in favor of trusting what I had learned this weekend, in the face of everything falling apart, and maybe coming together in a greater way than I could have hoped for. You couldn’t always work so hard to fix it. Even if things didn’t always go the way they should, sometimes they went exactly where they needed to.

Bobby took a sip of beer. “I don’t want the responsibility,” he said. “But it’s more than that. I’m not really sure I would be good at it. I think you have to believe you’d be good at it.”

“That might change,” I said.

“Well, it only changed for you because it’s too late,” Bobby said.

Finn looked over.

“Maybe too late,” Finn said. “Maybe not.”

“Maybe not,” Bobby said.

Then Finn reached over and held out his hand to Bobby.

Bobby took it.

And the three Ford children got drunk and watched the sun come up.





The Other Line Ben was lying on my bed, awake. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”


I stayed in the doorway, not because I didn’t want to go to him, but because it felt bizarre, looking at him in my childhood bedroom. This room, more than any place since, felt like my home.

“What are you smiling about?” he said.

I shook my head. “Can’t answer that, at the moment.”

He smiled. “I’m just glad you’re smiling,” he said. “Is she okay?”

I tilted my head. “Don’t you mean he?”

“No, I mean she. Your mother. I knew your dad was going to be okay. He’s the toughest bird I’ve ever met.”

“They’re both fine. They’re going to be fine.”

“Good. Then come here, already.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed, and Ben put his arm on the small of my back.

“Maddie went to the hotel with Michelle,” he said. “But she asked when she could come back. She asked if she could have pancakes with us in the morning. Isn’t that cute?”

“That’s nice.”

“I told her we are working on keeping the vineyard, which she was thrilled about, but maybe because it’s close to the pancakes. Fine by me if that’s the reason. I feel good with her happy being in Sebastopol.”

I smiled. Then I looked at him, really looked at him, trying to figure out how to say it. “You can’t stay here, Ben.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You can’t stay here with me. Even temporarily. You need to go and start your life in London.”

He looked at me, taking in those words. “And you’re not coming?”