Eight Hundred Grapes (77)

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.”

“Why does that sound familiar?”

“I tried to convince you to become a clockmaker. I even took you into San Francisco one afternoon to go to the oldest clock store in the city, to watch the clockmaker do his work.”

“Seriously?”

He shrugged. “You had trouble telling time. I thought at the very least it would help.”

“Did it?”

“Not really.”

He closed his eyes. He was getting tired. I patted his hand, getting ready to leave him, to let him rest, to let my mother come inside and rest with him, the two of them quiet together, the way they belonged.

“So you’re staying? And I’m going. I’m going boating. I’ll hate every second of it, but I’m going.”

I laughed. “Why are you doing that to yourself?”

“It’s the only way to get where we want to be.”

He looked at me, making sure I heard him. They weren’t coming back to Sebastopol, or if they did, it wouldn’t be on the terms I was imagining. The vineyard saved, my father’s legacy, the way it had been, intact.

Then he smiled. “But you’ll be okay. You’re going to be a great winemaker for the same reason you’re a terrible driver.”

“Why is that?”

He shrugged, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “No one else has a clue what you’re doing, but at the end of the day, you get to where you want to go.”

I smiled, leaning in toward him, starting to cry.

“Okay, let’s not get dramatic. You really do have to work on the driving.”

He motioned toward the doorway, where my mother was walking down the hall toward us. “Are we not going to talk about the other guy?” he said. “Before your mother gets here?”

“What guy?”

He tilted his head. “Your mother will make a big deal about it.”

“Who?”

“Jacob. I’m talking about Jacob, of course.”

I pointed at him. “Don’t cause trouble.”

He smiled. “Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, just say that,” he said. “Just say, ‘Shut up, Dad.’ ”

“He’s not the reason.”

He shrugged. “In a way, he is. Actually, he’s the reason for all of it. A guy decides to buy a vineyard from a winemaker. Weddings get cancelled. The daughter goes crazy.”

“You’re talking crazy.”

“I’m not saying you’re going to marry him or anything,” he said. “Calm down.”

“That’s good.”

“We do have that tent, though,” he said.

I leaned in and hugged my father. I hugged him and felt it. The strength that came from him, that you couldn’t get from anywhere else.

My father leaned in close. Then he smiled, pushed my hair back off of my face. “Can I tell you, you’re my favorite kid.”

“You say that to all of us.”

“Well. That doesn’t make it any less true,” he said.





The Wedding There was supposed to be a wedding at our vineyard. And in the end, there was.


Five days after my wedding was to take place, my parents stood there together under a homemade altar. My father wore a sports coat and jeans. My mother wore a blue beret, the blue beret she’d been wearing the day she’d met my father, the day he’d gotten into her car and never gotten out.

It wasn’t an official ceremony. They were never officially divorced, but it felt official: Finn married them, and all their friends from town—from the life they’d built in Sebastopol—stood with them. All the local winemakers were there, Jacob included. Suzannah and Charles flew up to be there too.

I was by my mother’s side. Bobby, my father’s best man, stood by his. Margaret and the twins, eager flower boys, completed the circle.

“There is nothing for me to say that I haven’t said,” my father said, talking to everyone, his eyes held fast on my mother.

“Except bon voyage,” my mother said.

He smiled. “Except bon voyage,” he said.

With that, he kissed her. Everyone cheered. And we opened wine, more and more wine, as they spoke about leaving there, closing up the house. They told us they were going on a trip around the world, boating to the south of France and the Mediterranean, the gorgeous coast of South America. That part of the plan they kept: my father buying that wristband that he thought was going to stop the seasickness that he wasn’t even worried about coming. There was no worry. Just excitement. The two of them were heading off to be together on a new adventure. Though this time instead of following, my mother was leading the way. My mother was leading him.

Suzannah and I walked away from the crowd, up to the top of the hill, the very top of the hill that looked out over the entire vineyard. The fifty acres that had taken my father his adult lifetime to accumulate: the original ten, the house and gardens he and my mother had built on them, the forty that followed.