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Eight Hundred Grapes: a perfect summer escape to a sun-drenched vineyard
Laura Dave
There are secrets you share, and secrets you hide…On the eve of her wedding, Georgia Ford returns to her family’s vineyard, shaken by a devastating secret. She yearns for the rituals of harvest, the comfort of her mother’s lasagne, her brothers’ camaraderie - but the family home is rife with undercurrents. Her parents’ long marriage is revealed to be far from perfect , and her brothers, Bobby and Finn, are badly at odds.As the storm clouds gather over the vineyard’s last harvest, sibling rivalry, marriage vows and the promise of the future are strained to breaking point. Can Georgia and her family make their peace with the secrets they have hidden from each other? Georgia must also face the secret her fiance has kept from her and decide where her heart lies.







Copyright (#ue2612add-b506-5bd8-a4a8-0ca8f3e910e4)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Copyright © Laura Dave 2015
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Cover images © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Laura Dave asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008129378
Version: 2015-07-02

Dedication (#ue2612add-b506-5bd8-a4a8-0ca8f3e910e4)
J.
Without you, there probably wouldn’t be a novel …
There certainly wouldn’t be such great wine
You have to grow about eight hundred grapes to get just one bottle of wine. If that isn’t an argument to finish the bottle, I don’t know what is.
—Anonymous
Contents
Cover (#u8b63c8bb-445e-5c49-b9ab-f667b65b239b)
Title Page (#u430db8cc-0025-593d-a63c-3295159cfa30)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph (#u60653da6-8826-5279-8299-5c77cba5bf20)
Part 1: The Grapes
Sebastopol, California. Six months ago
The Last Straw
Regarding Henry
The Contract
The Secateurs
Sebastopol, California. 1979
Mr. McCarthy
A Guy Named Mark and a Guy Named Jesse
The Wedding Crashers
Sebastopol, California. 1984
The View from 8 A.M., the Last Sunday of the Harvest
The Wine Thief
The Ride Home
Grown, Produced, and Bottled
Part 2: The Crush
Ben and Maddie and Georgia and Jacob
Sebastopol, California. 1989
The Terroir Has a Story
The Last Family Dinner (Part 1)
Spontaneous Fermentation (and Other Ways to Lose the Love of Your Life)
Sebastopol, California. 1994
The Last Family Dinner (Part 2)
Exile on Main Street
The Vintner Drinks Alone
Pancakes at The Violet Café
Perfect Red
Sebastopol, California. 1999
Home
The History of Wine
Note by Note
Falling Out of Sync
No Secrets
Part 3: The Union
An Invitation
People Who Screw Up
High Yields
The Starkville City Jail
The Wine Cave
Sebastopol, California. 2004
Have-to-Have
The Harvest Party
A Few Good Men
The Defrosting
Synchronization
Part 4: The Last Harvest
The Waiting Room
Sebastopol, California. 2009
The Details
The First Contract
The Other Line
Everything Worth Doing
The Wedding
Part 5: An Unnamed Vineyard
Sebastopol, California. Present day
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Laura Dave
About the Publisher

Part 1 (#ue2612add-b506-5bd8-a4a8-0ca8f3e910e4)

Sebastopol, California. Six months ago (#ue2612add-b506-5bd8-a4a8-0ca8f3e910e4)
My father has this great story about the day he met my mother, a story he never gets sick of telling. It was a snowy December morning and he was hurrying into his co-worker’s yellow Volkswagen bug parked in front of Lincoln Center, holding two cups of coffee and a massive slew of newspapers. (His first wine, Block 14—the only wine in his very first vintage—had gotten a small mention in the Wall Street Journal.) And between the excitement of the article and the steaming coffee, Daniel Bradley Ford didn’t notice that there were two yellow bugs parked in front of Lincoln Center. That his East Coast distributor was not the one huddling for warmth in the yellow bug’s driver’s seat. But, instead, his future wife, Jenny.
He had gotten into the wrong car to find the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen, wearing blue mittens and a matching beret. Her long, blond curls seeping out from beneath. Her cello taking up the whole backseat.
The legend goes—and knowing my parents I almost believe it—that my mother didn’t scream. She didn’t ask who my father was or what he was doing in her car. She offered one of her magical smiles and said, “I was wondering what took you so long.”
Then she reached out her hand for the cup of coffee he was ready to give her.
Synchronization, my father would say. This was a very big word for him. Synchronization: The coordination of events to operate in union. A conductor managing to keep his orchestra in time. The impossible meeting of light reflection and time exposure that leads to a perfect photograph. Two yellow bugs parked in front of Lincoln Center at the same time, the love of your life in one of them.
Not fate, my father would add. Don’t confuse it with fate. Fate suggests no agency. Synchronization is all about agency. It involves all systems running in a state where different parts of the system are almost, if not precisely, ready.
For my father, it was the basis of how he approached his work: first as a scientist, then as a winemaker. He was one of the first biodynamic winemakers in America, certainly in his little corner of it. He considered not just the grapes themselves, but—as he liked to espouse—the ecological, social, and economic systems that needed to be synchronized in order to properly grow them. My father said that doing it any other way was lazy.
As for me, I had trouble seeing the role synchronization played in my own life. The role it was supposed to play. Until it went and destroyed my blessedly ignorant, willfully optimistic life, in a way I couldn’t ignore unless I ran from it.
So, on that fateful Friday, I did just that. I ran from it.
With only the clothes on my back and a hastily packed suitcase, I drove from sunny Southern California—the place that had been my home for the last fourteen years—to the small town in Northern California on the edge of the Russian River Valley. The place that’d been my home for my entire life until then.
Nine hours, five rest-spot stops, two terrible milkshakey coffee drinks (one vanilla, one strawberry), and a roll of Rolos later, I arrived in Sonoma County. I should have felt relief, but as I passed the familiar sign for Sebastopol—its wiry hills visible behind it—I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview. My hair was falling out of its bun, my eyes were deeply unsettled, and I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was about to walk into a new kind of hell.
So I turned around and started driving the nine hours back to Los Angeles.
But it was getting late, and I hadn’t eaten (save the Rolos), and the rain was coming down hard, and I was so tired I couldn’t think. So I pulled off Highway 12, getting off at the exit for downtown Santa Rosa, knowing where I was going before I admitted it to myself.
The Brothers’ Tavern was something of a Sonoma County institution. The original owners—and brothers—had opened the doors seventy-eight years ago with the idea that it would be the place in the county that was open late, and the place that served the best beer. The subsequent owners had stuck with the plan, taking the bar and grill to another level, brewing award-winning beer on site that drew people from all over the state.
Of course, the current owners of The Brothers’ Tavern were my brothers. Finn and Bobby Ford. And the jig would be up as soon as they saw me. They would see it on my face. What I had been through.
But when I walked into the bar, Finn was the only one standing there. No Bobby. Bobby was always there on the weekends, so this was the first confusing thing.
The fact that my father wasn’t sitting on the corner bar stool having a drink with them was the second.
My father came by every Friday—the only way to start his weekend, he liked to say, was to have a drink with his boys. My heart dropped in disappointment, realizing that this was really why I had shown up, despite the ramifications. So that my father would have a drink with his girl, jig up or not.
But it was only Finn standing behind the bar, looking at me like he didn’t recognize me. And, for a minute, I wondered if he didn’t. My hair was in a disheveled bun, my smile fake and forced. And it was late. Maybe I looked like another straggler, trying to get a drink before he closed down for the night.
To his credit, Finn didn’t call me out on any of this. He walked past the other customers, who stared at me as I took a seat at the end of the bar—the one close to the fireplace. My father’s seat.
I sat down, ignoring their pseudo-casual glances, Finn drilling them with looks so they’d stop staring. This was Finn, the perpetual big brother. He was ready to protect me even before he knew what he was protecting me from.
He offered a big smile. “What are you doing here?”
“Took a drive.”
“A nine-hour drive?” he said.
I shrugged. “Got carried away.”
“Clearly.” He paused. “No speeding ticket?”
“No, Finn,” I said, knowing Finn thought I was an awful driver. Like running-out-of-gas-while-getting-a-speeding-ticket awful. It’s hard to lose that reputation. Even if it only happened once.
“Glad to hear that, at least,” Finn said, sincerely.
Then he nodded, trying to decide how hard to push, keeping his eyes on me.
Finn was my good brother. They both were pretty good, but Finn was the truly good one in my book, even if he wasn’t the good one in anyone else’s. Bobby was more ostensibly impressive: The captain of the high school football team, a local legend, a successful venture capitalist with a full life in San Francisco. A beautiful town house, beautiful cars, beautiful family. He was five minutes younger than Finn, but in every other way he seemed to always come in first.
Bobby had bought the bar as a hobby and to give Finn something to do. Finn believed less in employment. He owned the bar so he could drink for free and so he could keep taking photographs. Finn was a great photographer, but he seemed to only work—weddings, family portraits—when the mood struck him. He was a little like my father in that way, adhering to a code of purity that only he understood.
“I missed Dad?”
“He didn’t come in tonight.” Finn shrugged, as if to say, Don’t ask me. “We can call him. He’ll come now, if he knows you’re here.”
I shook my head, keeping my eyes down, afraid to meet Finn’s eyes. Finn looked so much like my father. Both of them had these dark eyes, with matching piles of dark hair. They were handsome guys, all American. The only obvious difference was that Finn liked to keep that mane of hair under a backward baseball cap. Usually a Chargers cap.
It made it hard to tell him what was going on without feeling like I was about to disappoint my father too.
Finn cleared his throat. “So they don’t know you’re here? Mom and Dad?”
“No, and I’d appreciate if you don’t tell them, you know, the circumstances. It wasn’t planned, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
He paused, like he wanted to say something else, but thought better of it. “They’ll be happy to see you,” he said. “That you came. Whatever the reason. None of us thought you were coming home for the harvest, you know?”
The harvest of the grapes—the most important five weeks in my father’s year. I’d arrived home under duress the very weekend he always held most sacred—the last weekend of the harvest. Every year I came home for it. We all did. We returned to the family house: The brothers slept in their old rooms, I slept in mine. Our various spouses and partners and children filled up the rest of the house. And all of us joined my father to harvest the final vines, to drink the first sips of wine. We all stayed for the harvest party. But this year was supposed to be different. For a variety of reasons, I wasn’t supposed to be there.
Finn, realizing his error in raising this, shifted from foot to foot. “What do you want to drink?” he said.
I pointed at the entire bar behind him. The bourbon and scotch and whisky were like Christmas presents.
Finn smiled. He put a glass of bourbon in front of me, and a glass of red wine. “What you think you want,” he said, pointing to the first. “What you’ll actually take more than two sips of.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“My pleasure.”
I sipped at the bourbon. Then I turned, almost immediately, to the wine.
Finn put the bottle on the table so I could see what he had poured. It was a dark and grippy Pinot Noir. The Last Straw Vineyard. B-Minor 2003 Vintage. One of the wines from our father’s vineyard. My favorite wine from our father’s vineyard, mine and Bobby’s. One thing we had in common.
“This is a great bottle,” I said. “You should take it away and save some for Bobby.”
Finn nodded, tightly. Like there was something he didn’t want to say, not out loud.
Then, just as quickly, he softened.
“You hungry?” Finn said. “I could get the kitchen to fix you something.”
“They’re not closed?”
Finn leaned against the countertop. “Not for you,” he said.
It was the nicest thing he could have said, and I gave him a smile so he knew how much I appreciated it. Then he walked back toward the kitchen, taking a sip from the bourbon as he went.
I sat taller on the bar stool, more aware of the looks I was getting, now that Finn was moving away.
Finn turned back for just a second. “Hey, Georgia …” he said.
“Yeah?”
“You know that you’re still wearing your wedding dress, yes?” he said.
I looked down at the sprawling lace, dirty from the five-hundred-mile drive and the run across The Brothers’ Tavern parking lot. And what looked, sadly, like a lost Rolo.
I touched the soft skirt. “I do,” I said.
He nodded and turned back toward the kitchen. “All right, then,” he said. “One grilled cheese coming up.”

The Last Straw (#ulink_45a8d253-788f-55a8-8099-1ac5afcde70b)
Synchronization. Systems operating with all their parts in synchrony, said to be synchronous, or in sync. The interrelationship of things that might normally exist separately.
In physics: It’s called simultaneity. In music: rhythm.
In your life: epic failure.
I pulled up to the driveway to my parents’ house after midnight, woozy and exhausted. I immediately regretted that I hadn’t taken Finn up on his offer to crash at his place in Healdsburg and to return tomorrow to face my parents. When I was more appropriately dressed. Though, after the day I’d had, I wanted the twin bed I had grown up sleeping in, complete with its flannel sheets and heart-shaped pillows.
As I took the left turn into the driveway, I passed the small wooden sign for THE LAST STRAW, EST. 1979, carved by hand. The vineyard spread out on both sides of me, twenty acres of vines sweeping by on either side of the car. The vines were rich and meaty with grapes and wildflowers, cushioning my parents’ sweet yellow Craftsman straight ahead, up the hill.
It was a lovely house, comforting with its large shutters, flowers on the windowsills, a bright red door. Bay windows lined the back, running the whole length of the house, leading out to the original ten acres of vineyard. And to a small two-room cottage at the back of the property—the winemaker’s cottage—where my father did his work every day.
I shut the ignition and stared out the car window at my parents’ house. Every room was dark but their bedroom. It worried me that they were still awake, but more likely than not it was just my mother who was awake, reading in bed. She wouldn’t hear me come in. She wouldn’t be listening for it.
I stepped out of the car and headed for the front door, grabbing the spare key from the flowerpot. I let myself in. If I was going to wake them, if they were going to hear me, this was the moment. The red door squeaked when it opened. It was a lesson every child of the Ford family had learned the hard way the first time they attempted to sneak into the house after curfew.
I closed the door. And the house remained silent.
I smiled, standing there in the dark foyer, a small victory. It was the first still moment of the day, and I took it in, surrounded by the familiar smells: a mix of freesia and lemon—what my mother cleaned with—and the night jasmine from the windows my mother always left open, letting in a nice breeze. It was the kind of breeze that you couldn’t find anywhere in Los Angeles. Which made Los Angeles feel a million blessed miles away.
I walked into the kitchen, leaving all of the lights off, running my hand along the wooden countertop and along the farm table. The remnants of dinner—plates, two glasses, and a bottle of wine—were waiting by the sink.
I decided to make myself useful and started gathering up dishes when I saw it through the window. It was next to the hot tub—taking up the patio and the yard. A large tent. Sailcloth white. It was the tent I was getting married under in eight days. Since it was after midnight, did it count as seven days? Los Angeles came screaming back.
Literally. My cell phone rang, piercing the darkness.
I picked up, on reflex, not wanting the phone to wake my sleeping parents, not wanting to scare them.
“Don’t hang up,” he said.
It was Ben. His voice through the phone line shook me.
“Then stop calling.”
“I cannot.”
I loved how Ben spoke. It was an opening statement about who he was: calm, sincere. British. I was a sucker for an accent, which was why I always listed the other qualities first. It was a way to keep my credibility. We had spoken on the phone for over a month before we ever laid eyes on each other. Ben, an architect, had lived in New York at the time. I was a real estate lawyer, my firm working on one of his projects in Los Angeles, a modern office building downtown. That was how we fell in love, on the phone, talking about the least sexy things in the world. Permits. And billing. And then, everything that mattered.
“You need to let me walk you through this, Georgia,” he said. “I’m not saying there is a good explanation. I’m saying it’s not what you think.”
“No, thanks.”
“This is madness. I love you. You know I love you. I’m not involved with Michelle, not since before I knew you. But Maddie …”
I hung up the phone.
Hearing the name Maddie was too real. She had a name. Ten hours before this phone call, she hadn’t existed. Now she had a name.
Ten hours before this phone call, I’d been happy. I’d been late, but happy. I ran into Stella’s Bridal Shop in Silver Lake twenty minutes late for my final dress fitting. It was a fitting for my wedding dress, which Stella had made entirely in her five-hundred-square-foot shop: a trumpet dress made with silky white Chantilly lace, draped Spanish tulle, soft sleeves.
I loved the dress—the way it hugged my hips, mermaid-style, the way it softened my shoulders—and I found myself smiling when Stella (after forgiving me for being twenty minutes late) asked me to shimmy across the floor in my satin heels and find my way to the pedestal, so she could do the hem.
I went to the pedestal by the window, striking a bit of a pose. Stella smiled, and egged me on. Put your hands on your hips, she said, enjoying the happy stares we were getting from people walking down the street.
Then I saw my fiancé walking down the street.
Ben was walking down the street with a woman I didn’t know. And not just any woman. She was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, with long red hair, a stunning smile. A matching version of the woman—redheaded and tiny, four or five years old—was by the woman’s side. But the woman outside the bridal shop window was the one who caught my eye.
I recognized her from somewhere, but it would take me a minute to place the where. Stella would actually place her for me. My fiancé was the side note.
And that wasn’t the biggest problem.
The biggest problem was what happened when I knocked on the window, failing to get Ben’s attention.
I was excited for him to turn around. I was excited to see Ben’s face—his strong jaw and cheekbones, a dimple that made no sense. I figured there was a reasonable explanation for what he was doing there with the woman. We’d spent that morning in bed together, in our home together, eating peach French toast. Laughing, getting naked. We were getting married in eight days. We were madly in love.
But Ben didn’t hear me. He kept walking, toward Sunset Junction. The woman was happily walking by his side, her mini-me by hers.
The woman leaned into him, into my fiancé, putting her hand on the small of his back, like it belonged there. And it jerked me forward, and out onto the street, wearing my un-hemmed wedding dress.
I gripped the lace in my hands, making sure the un-hemmed part didn’t hit the dirty street. Stella ran out into the street after me.
“Ben!” I called his name.
Ben turned around. As did the woman. And her little girl.
And then I knew how I recognized the woman, holding her daughter’s hand, as Stella said her name. Michelle Carter. The famous British actress. On the cover of so many American magazines. Close up she was light and lean, like a leaf. Like a pickle.
Ben looked at me. The woman looked at me. The little girl looked at Ben.
“Daddy,” she said.
Let me stop there.
With what Maddie said.
To Ben.
Let me stop there before Stella bent down and bustled as much of the lace as she could—my eyes holding on the little girl, the beautiful little girl, her eyes holding on mine. People stopping on the street, staring at Michelle, pointing.
Ben was moving toward me, completely panicked. Three words coming out of his mouth, but maybe not the words you’d think. Not: I am sorry. Not: It isn’t true. Not: I can explain.
Just this. As though it was all he could see. And if it was, does that count for anything?
“You look beautiful,” he said.


Ten hours later, I took off my satin heels and headed up the stairs, holding my dress so I wouldn’t slip, moving quickly to the safety of my room.
My phone rang again, vibrating through the house.
“Don’t hang up,” Ben said.
“Didn’t we just do this?”
“You answered, didn’t you? A part of you wants to hear what I have to say.”
He wasn’t wrong. There was a way to turn off the phone. I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t been able to. Part of me wanted Ben to tell me a story that would make this all okay, that would make him familiar again.
I sat down on the staircase, my dress billowing out to the sides.
“You need to understand, I didn’t even know about Maddie until a couple of months ago …” he said.
“Your daughter?”
He paused. “Yes. My daughter.”
“How old is she, Ben?”
“Maddie is four and a half.”
He emphasized the half and I knew why. We had been together for five years. The half meant she was conceived before me, before us.
“I obviously wasn’t going to keep this a secret forever, but it’s complicated with Michelle,” he said. “And I wanted to smooth that part of this out before I dragged you into it.”
“Complicated how?”
He paused. “That’s complicated.”
I stood up again. I’d had enough—enough of Ben’s non-explanation, enough of my heart pounding in my throat.
“Look, I just don’t want you to do anything rash. We’re getting married in a week.”
“I’m not so sure about that, at the moment.”
He got quiet. “That’s what I mean by rash,” he said.
He sounded devastated. And the problem was that it reminded me of the first time I’d spoken to him. My law firm had just signed Ben as a client and I called to introduce myself shortly after his bike was stolen. I didn’t know this about him yet, but Ben had owned that bike for ten years. It was less his preferred mode of transportation and more … an appendage. And still, by the end of our conversation, he was joking, happy. His bike, and his sorrow, a thing of the past. Because of me, he said. And, even now, there was a huge part of me that wanted to make him feel that good again.
“Where are you?” he said. “Let me come talk to you in person.”
I was at the top of the stairs. Maybe because Ben asked where I was, I looked around. My bedroom was to the left—the door wide open. My parents’ bedroom was to the right.
And coming out of my parents’ bedroom was a large man. Two hundred and fifty pounds large. With hair and skin I didn’t recognize. In a towel.
My mother, in a matching towel, stood close to him.
This man, who was not my father.
I dropped the phone. “Oh my God!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
“Oh my God!” my mother screamed back.
The man moved away, backward, toward my parents’ bedroom, which he apparently knew all too well.
Then, as if thinking better of it, he reached out his hand. “Henry,” he said.
I was stuck in place, right at the top of the stairs. I reached, as though it made sense, for this man’s hand.
My mother covered her mouth in abject horror. I thought it was her disgrace at being caught. But then she reached for me, touching my cheek with the front of her hand, then with the back.
“What did you do to your wedding dress?” she asked.

Regarding Henry (#ulink_919aefec-85fb-5f5b-96ff-7e74a8f9437b)
If I were keeping count—and who was keeping count?—it wasn’t shaping up to be the best day of my life.
I sat in the dining room with my mother, the two of us dressed in sweatshirts and jeans, my dress hanging on the door, the silence between us aggressive.
Henry was gone. My mother had said good-bye to him on the front steps while I waited for him to walk away. It was like what my mother had done to me my senior year of high school, when I was dating tattooed and mean Lou Emmett. But in a gross reverse.
My mother poured herself a cup of coffee, avoiding my eyes. I wasn’t going to be the first to speak. Normally, I’d reach across the table, make this conversation easier for her, but I couldn’t do that this time. My mother was going to have to do that—she’d have to figure out herself how she was going to explain this.
Instead, I stared at the wall above her head, lined with photographs, all the photographs that made up my parents’ life together—beginning when they were young, at this vineyard, and even before that. One of my favorite photographs was of my mother, still a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, smiling at the camera, her cello resting against her long black dress. The woman sitting here now looking remarkably like the photograph of herself then. She had the same long curls, wide cheeks, a nose that didn’t quite fit. She was still not wearing a drop of makeup, still not needing any.
Next to that photograph of her was one of me playing softball. I’d been a complete tomboy growing up (care of trying to keep up with Bobby and Finn). I’d pretty much lived in a T-shirt and sneakers, my hair perpetually in a ponytail. But there was no denying how similar we used to look: my curls the darker version of her curls, my nose tilted like her nose, my eyes dark green like my father’s but shaped like hers.
My mother used to say that I was the spitting image of her, cloaked in my father’s coloring. That was until I moved to Los Angeles and transformed in the way Los Angeles seems to transform people: a little bit at a time until you don’t recognize yourself anymore. With all the gorgeous women strolling through yoga class and into parties, I found myself paying attention to all sorts of things that I hadn’t historically.
Maybe it would have been the same thing if I’d left Sebastopol for New York or Chicago, but for me, at eighteen, it was Los Angeles that I left for, so it was Los Angeles where I learned some fundamental lessons that growing up in a house full of men and farmers had forgotten to teach me about how to look and feel sexy.
You could see the transformation on the wall. My mother joked that I’d morphed from the darker version of her into the glam, movie star version—which, I assured her, a walk down Abbot Kinney among the real movie stars would prove untrue. Though, in truth, I did look different and I took a certain amount of pride in that.
The Southern California sun had lightened my hair, I’d slipped off ten pounds, and I’d started to dress as though I had some idea of how to. Under my friend Suzannah’s supervision (and insistence), I’d spent more money on a pair of shoes than on a month’s rent. I tried to return them the next day—in guilt and nausea—but the store had a strict no-return policy. So I’d kept them. And loved them. In fairness to myself, these had been magic shoes: slinky stiletto heels that made your legs look endless. In further fairness, the shoes had outlasted that apartment and all the ones that had come since.
Whenever I’d come home for a visit, my mother would always say how stylish I looked. But I knew she judged my evolution from ponytails to pencil skirts. My mother thought style should be effortless and easy. She took to touching my straightened hair, saying, “Shiny.” She commented on new items of clothing with a whistle and a shifty grin: “Look at that Los Angeles armor.”
And it was always first thing in the morning—when I was freshly awake and racing downstairs for her walnut and cherry waffles, the same way I’d done as a child—that she would touch my skin and say, “Gorgeous.”
The disjunct left me feeling somewhat alone in navigating my two homes. Sonoma County was blue jeans and fleece pullovers and practical field boots. Los Angeles was slingbacks and blue jeans distressed to the tune of $275. I wavered between the two worlds, neither feeling like it fit exactly right. I was self-conscious about my lifestyle in Los Angeles—a lifestyle on which I felt I had a tenuous hold at best. And when I came home, the put-together version of me who seemed to have it all together felt myself judging, in a way I never used to, how unrefined and rural local life was. I didn’t like being judgmental in that way, but I was having trouble stopping myself. I was still trying to find the balance.
I lowered my gaze from the photographs, looked down. My mother caught my eyes, held them. Then she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t stand there in judgment of me,” she said.
It didn’t seem wise to tell her I was sitting in judgment.
“There was a naked man coming out of your bedroom, Mom,” I said. “Who wasn’t Dad.”
“Well, who shows up at midnight unannounced?” She shook her head. “It’s our fault for not redecorating your room. You think nothing here is supposed to change.”
“I think you’re not supposed to be shtupping someone who isn’t Dad.”
“Well, I’m not shtupping him.”
I looked at her, confused. “What?”
She shrugged. “Henry is impotent, if you must know.”
I covered my ears. “I must not know. I must go back in time and know anything but that.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m just saying … I’m just trying to explain to you that things are more complicated than they seem.”
Complicated. That was Ben’s word too. The problem was that they were both using it passively. When the truth was that they had made things complicated. Actively. That was the important part they each were leaving out.
“Where’s Dad?”
“Dad and I are taking a little time apart,” she said. “He’s been staying in the winemaker’s cottage for the last couple of weeks. Not that he doesn’t do that every year during the harvest.”
There was an edge to how she said that, which I chose to ignore.
“Because of Henry?” I asked.
“Because we’re taking time apart,” she said.
I looked through the bay windows to the lantern-lit vineyard, the lantern-lit path that led to the winemaker’s cottage. My father was asleep in one of the two bedrooms inside. When I was a little girl, I’d beg to sleep in the other room and go out with him first thing in the morning to help pick the first grapes before school. I told him that when I was older my brothers and I were going to take over the land for him—to keep his legacy running. I meant it. Running the vineyard was what I had wanted more than anything when I was a little girl. Now I had left him there alone. Each in our own way, we all had.
“How could you not have told me what was going on?” I asked.
My mother reached for her coffee. “We were waiting until after your wedding. We didn’t want to ruin it for you.”
I met her eyes. Apparently Ben and I had done that all ourselves.
“I’ve tried not to burden Finn and Bobby with this either. They both have their hands full with other things.”
I thought back to the bar—Finn acting weird when Bobby came up. Bobby nowhere to be seen. “With what things?” I said.
She shook her head. “I can’t get into all of that right now. They should be allowed to be here to offer their side.”
How had we gotten to the place where everyone in the family was on different sides? I had been home for the last harvest, I had been home another time since—everyone had seemed fine. Now though? I felt like I was going to cry. And Ben—usually my first call when I felt this way, the one person who could help me find perspective on this—was the reason I had none.
My mother cleared her throat, seeing an opportunity to change the subject. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” she said.
I shook my head.
“Did he do something unforgivable?”
“What kind of question is that?”
She leaned in. “A bad one, probably. What’s a good one? Tell me and I’ll ask.”
Ever since I’d left the bridal shop, I’d envisioned sitting at this table with my mother and my father, talking it out. The way we had when I’d needed to figure out what college to go to, how to pay for law school, how to get over a thousand broken hearts. Now my concern was that the three of us were never going to be sitting here again.
“Georgia …”
I looked up.
“Did you do something unforgivable?”
“Stop using that word. No.”
“Well, is there someone else?”
Normally, my mother was the first to think adultery went into the unforgivable category.
“Yes, there is. And she’s four-and-a-half years old.”
My mother looked confused.
“He has a daughter. That he’s kept from me.”
She went silent, the calm before her impending storm. My mother couldn’t stand dishonesty. She was wisecracking and irritable and stubborn. But, beyond all that, she was remarkably genuine. And she demanded the same of the people she loved.
She reached for her coffee. “I’m sure Ben has an explanation for this,” she said.
“You can’t be serious,” I said. “I just told you that Ben has a child with someone, and he didn’t choose to share that information. I found out at my dress fitting when I saw him walking down the street with the mother of his child.”
“I understand. It’s awful. Particularly that he didn’t tell you.” She paused. “I’m just putting it out there that he may have an explanation for keeping this to himself.”
This was what she had to offer me? Pre-Henry, my mother would have demanded blood from Ben. She would have stormed around the dining room talking about values, the way she’d done when my best friend in high school had used her parents’ restaurant to throw herself an open-bar birthday party. Even when I explained how that had happened, she had said there was no explanation. You either were truthful or you weren’t, and that defined you.
Where was that mother now, screaming about Ben’s lie of omission? Why couldn’t she take on that role so I could find my way to the other one—the one where I got to find sympathy for Ben in her outsized protection of me. That was the mother I knew.
I stood up. “I can’t deal with this right now. I’m going to bed.”
“Then go.”
I headed for the door, completely exhausted and ready for the night to be done.
“Henry is an old friend,” my mother called out after me. “We knew each other back in New York. And he recently was named the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony.”
I turned around, but stayed in the doorway.
She shrugged. “He’s only been out here a few months, but it’s been nice. Just … to be a part of that world again.”
Part of that world. She looked defeated saying the words and remembering it—who she used to be, how she used to be. It made me want to convince her that she was still a part of it: She had been the music teacher in town for decades. But that wasn’t the same thing. And what was the point in trying to convince her it was, anyway? As if anyone could convince you of the one thing you didn’t want to see.
“What does that have to do with you and Dad?” I said instead.
She looked up at me.
“I’m not talking about Dad. I’m talking about you and me. You have always tried to take care of everyone in this family, just like I have. As opposed to figuring out what you want. Not what you’re supposed to want, but what you truly want.”
I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.
“You can’t seriously think you’re in a good position to offer me advice on my romantic life at the moment.”
She met my eyes. “I think I’m in a great position, actually,” she said. “No one sees what an incomparable person you are more than I do. Except, perhaps, Ben.”
She paused. And then she said it simply. “Be careful what you give up.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, trying—in spite of myself—to hear what she wasn’t saying. “Because you can’t get it back?”
She stood up, walking past me in the doorway.
“No.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Because, eventually, you get it back any way you can.”
I waited for her to disappear up the stairs before heading that way myself. But before my mother was gone, she called out a final good night. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re home.”
That made one of us.

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