This Place of Wonder (85)

In memory, I hear the music they loved to play and the laughter of guests. I see myself and Rory, stealing desserts the size of graham crackers, and beers and appetizers, and running outside with them. I see Meadow bending down to kiss my dad, her hand on his shoulder.

How long since anyone was here? It seems so bloody sad that it all ended over something so stupid. Aloud, I ask, “Why did you wreck our family, Dad? Why, why, why? I will never understand.”

We’ve never had that conversation because I was too furious to talk to him. He seemed like a fool, chasing a woman no older than me, breaking Meadow’s heart into a million pieces, destroying the future we’d been trained to envision: all of us and all our children and grandchildren, a circle and an empire, a bastion of safety against the dangerous world.

After the big cataclysm, after Meadow moved up to Ojai and her farm, and they hired lawyers to split everything properly, Christy left. It was only six months in, not even time for them to get divorced. She said she’d never meant to cause so much trouble, that she was too young to really settle down like that, and she was sorry, but . . . off she went.

By then, the damage had been done. My dad lived alone here at Belle l’été. Meadow lived in Ojai, and built a farmhouse there that was both elegant and easy, not as large as this one, but also not right on the ocean.

I severed the relationship with my father when he told me he’d left Meadow. I didn’t revive it again, not in all the years since. He tried. He wrote me letters, and called me on the phone and even sometimes drove out to where I worked, and then to the winery to surprise me into talking to him. The last time was only six or eight months ago. He drove up to Shanti Wines and found me in the fields. He strode between the vines in the boots he always wore and jeans, and a heathered long-sleeved T-shirt that showed he was as fit as ever.

I shook my head when I saw him. “I don’t want to talk to you.”

“I’m worried about you,” he said plainly.

“Whatever.” I tossed the weeds I’d just pulled into a bag at my feet. “You don’t get to do that.”

“You’re drinking too much.”

“I’m a vintner. It goes with the job.”

He shook his head. “No. It’s gone beyond that.”

The words were like tiny arrows shooting through my conscience. I did know. I drank all the time, and I’d known for a long time that there was a big problem here. I looked at him. Pointed at him. “Pot.” Pointed at myself. “Kettle.”

He rested his hands on his hips, looked out toward the horizon, where blue mountains rose in showy beauty against a pale-blue sky. “I drink a lot,” he said. “But it’s not the same for me as it is for you. You’re like your mom, Maya.”

“Oh hey, thanks.” I turned my body away from him.

“It will kill you if you don’t stop. It killed her.” He pauses. “It killed my mother, too.”

I looked back at him, walls of anger safely holding him at bay. “And?”

“You need to go to rehab.”

I snorted. “Not happening.” I walked down the row, carrying the bag with me. “Bye, Augustus.”

“Maya!” he called. “I drove all the way here.”

I turned, still walking backward, which a person in need of rehab might have trouble doing, by the way, and shrugged. “Too bad, so sad.”

He didn’t move. For the tiniest moment, I almost relented. He was still my father, still the man who cooked my favorite pie and made me dolls out of flowers, and read me books until I fell asleep.

But I shook my head and kept walking.

Thinking of it now, I am so furious I can’t even think. He left me. Again. This time, it’s for good, and there’s nothing I can do to fix that. I’m furious with him, furious with myself, devastated that he will never meet his grandchild, that our perfect family life was destroyed by his selfish, selfish impulses.

Stomping to the garage, I take three delivery boxes from beside the recycling bin and stomp back into the house, into his office. I yank open drawers and start throwing stuff into the boxes—some for Meadow to look at, some for trash.

In the lower right-hand drawer is a photo album I’ve never seen, and I pull it out. Laying it flat on the desk, I open it.

And there is my mother. Not Meadow. Shanti. I have only one photo of her, and all this time Augustus had this whole album of their wedding. My knees go weak and I sink into his chair, which lets go of a poof of air that smells of him. Something in me breaks.

Memories of my mother are of her terribly thin and despondent. I never liked to be left alone with her, and my father took me with him a lot. She wasn’t abusive, but I might as well have been with a plant. She never ate, so she never fed me. She didn’t shower, so she didn’t bathe me. She was wan and thin and pale and never spoke, as if I were a ghost.

In these photos, she’s happy, carefree, young. So very young. Her eyes are bright and her skin healthy. My dad is young, too, and less self-aware, his body posture sometimes awkward.

I think about what Meadow said, that he rescued women. Shanti was a runaway with drug issues when he found her and took her in, and they fell in love. I actually don’t know how long they were together, how long her addictions held sway in their lives. I have no memory of her sober.

Why did I name the winery after an addict?