Eight Hundred Grapes (9)

I still hadn’t said hello, the files in my hands. I held them up higher. “Did you know about this?”

His smile disappeared. “About what, exactly?” Bobby said.

He ran his hands through his blond curls, which matched our mother’s—and which Bobby thought made him look angelic. What did make him look angelic were his ragged fingernails—Bobby biting them to stubs since we were little kids. It was my favorite part of him.

“Mom and Dad are selling the vineyard,” he said, trying to sound casual, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. As if we were talking about a car.

I sat back down and opened the files up, trying to ascertain where they were in the process. I was unhappy to see my father’s signature already on the final page, notarized.

Along with the signature of someone named Jacob McCarthy.

Jacob McCarthy. CEO of Murray Grant Wines.

Bobby shrugged. “I guess Dad didn’t want to bother you until after the wedding.”

Then he leaned down over me, a little too close for comfort. I thought about swatting him with something. My muffin came into view.

“What happened to the contracts?” he said, biting his nails nervously.

I moved away from him.

“And why are you freaking out?” he said. “This is a good thing. Dad won’t have to work again. Murray Grant made them the kind of offer that comes around once in a lifetime.”

“Do you even hear yourself?”

“Do you even hear yourself?”

If looks could kill, I might have killed him. Right then. That was the thing about Bobby. He had always been logical and robotic about everything. His feelings were like something he practiced—he should be emotional about a wedding, shedding one calculated tear—but never embraced. It was why he was so good at business. It was why he was so bad at showing that he cared about anything else.

“Since when is that what they want, Bobby?”

“That’s what everyone wants!”

Bobby drilled me with a look.

“You’re yelling at the wrong person,” he said.

“I’m not yelling.”

“You are YELLING,” he yelled.

“You are both yelling.”

We turned toward the doorway to see my father. He stood there in jeans and a T-shirt, looking younger than he was, with a thick mound of hair, skin brown from the sun. He was holding a thermos and a glass jar of grapes, his hair sweaty against his face.

He looked toward me as I dropped the files on the table, back in their pile of wet coffee.

He clocked it, my tenseness. He didn’t ask when I’d arrived home, and what I knew about what was happening here with my mother. My father knew what I knew. He was already thinking about how to make it better.

“Daddy,” I said, which I hadn’t called him since I was a little girl. “Please tell me it’s not true.”

He walked past Bobby, squeezing his shoulder hello, and sat down beside me, putting down his grapes.

He put his arms around me, kissed the top of my head.

Waiting for another minute, so I could possibly believe him.

“It’s not true,” he said.





The Secateurs




This is what your mother and I want to do,” my father said. “Honestly.”

We arrived on the northwest part of the property, the last twenty acres my father bought. These were the farthest vines from my parents’ house. He’d bought them from a developer for too much money—the beautiful, slightly lusher land that he thought could make a Pinot that was slightly more fruity and light than what he was producing with the western light.

We knelt down in Block 8, and started clipping ripe grape clusters off their vines, picking at a rapid pace. These were the grapes that produced B-Minor—the wine that I loved, the wine that Bobby loved. These clones also helped to produce a wine called Opus 129, which I found to be sharp, too rigid—though it was among my father’s most popular wines. How they were both made from the same grapes could be confusing, but it didn’t confuse my father. That, he believed, was often how it happened. The grapes liked to do different things depending on how you fermented them, how you trusted them to ferment themselves.

Normally we wouldn’t be picking midday. The grapes were at risk for fermenting in the sun, crushing in the bins. But my father had tested the Brix—the sugar in the grapes—and he didn’t want to wait until tonight to get them off the vines.

That was where he had been, testing the Brix, when I’d found out that he was giving away his life, as he had known it.

“Murray Grant Wines . . .” he said, “made a generous offer.”

“You hate them.”

He smiled at me, his warm smile. “I don’t hate anybody.”

Then he motioned for me to keep moving. His hands wove through the clusters effortlessly, clipping in quick succession, dropping the clusters in a bucket. I was going at half-speed, not a fast enough speed for him, not when he wanted these grapes off the vine and somewhere cooler.

“All hands on deck, or we can have this conversation later.”

“I want to have it now.”

“Then keep up,” he said.

I started moving faster, gently removing the grapes, careful of the heat coming off of them, careful not to add to it. Truthfully, my father didn’t need the help. He had five men out in the vineyard helping already. He needed to be doing something that made him seem busy, though. My father needed to be busy so there was a chance I wouldn’t notice how sad he was.