“Well, you probably have one up on me, then . . .”
He pointed to his degrees on the wall, mounted in fancy frames. Proof that he was a jerk, those degrees in such fancy frames. Cornell University College of Agriculture, Cornell Law School.
“I went to law school, but I never practiced,” he said.
“How about viticulture? Did you practice that?”
He smiled. “I can assure you, your father is getting a great deal.”
“That’s beside the point.”
“What is the point?”
I was honest, as hard as it was to say it out loud to a stranger. “My father’s going to regret it.”
He looked at me. “You think so?” he said.
And, suddenly, it looked like he cared. His eyes went soft, and the smirk disappeared.
I nodded, meeting his eyes and trying to impart my true feelings about how much my father was going to regret this. “I do.”
He nodded, like he’d heard that.
“Hmm. I don’t,” he said.
Then he started rummaging through papers on his desk, my hope of him being a reasonable and kind person deflating.
I pointed at him. “Escrow hasn’t closed yet. You don’t take possession until after the new year.”
“I believe that was so someone could get married on the property,” he said. “Isn’t that next weekend?”
“Don’t insult me.”
“I’m not insulting you. I’m just letting you know that all the contingencies have been met. Your dad requested that we not transfer ownership until after your wedding. Until they’re able to close up the house.”
“I intend to contest this sale, Mr. McCarthy.”
He shot me a look.
“No one’s called me Mr. McCarthy. Like ever.” He paused. “I don’t like it.”
Which was when my phone buzzed. Suzannah appeared on the screen with a text message.
Ben called me and told me what was going on!!
Where are you? Call me already, so I can tell you what to do. After I yell at you for sticking me with this case. (Still at work and furious btw.) Jacob was staring at the phone. “Who is Ben? The jilted groom?”
I put my phone away. “I’m just here to talk about the sale,” I said.
He laughed. “Then there’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “That isn’t your business.”
“My father’s well-being is my business.”
He nodded. “So you should know that the contract has been signed and notarized. His business is now . . . my business.”
Then he smiled—a smug, assured-of-itself smile, his going-out-on-a-limb-for-no-one smile. Which was when I decided it. How much I couldn’t stand him.
“Good of you to come by. Though I think we should probably end this conversation,” he said.
“I couldn’t agree more,” I said as I headed out the door.
A Guy Named Mark and a Guy Named Jesse When I got back to the house, the sun was setting over the vineyard. The magic hour, as my father would call it. So much of what my father did at the vineyard, he did after the sun was down. The magic hour, the time before he went to work, involved respecting where the vineyard had gotten to in the daylight. After dark, when the grapes were on the vines, he’d help pick. If they were off, he’d help care for the soil, or care for the wine.
My father also thought it was the magic hour for another reason. The sky turned an odd shade of yellow, which he swore it never had before he started working the land. He said it was reflected that way because of the land—how lush and vibrant the land had become.
I was too exhausted to get into it with anyone. But Finn was sitting at the kitchen counter, wearing his backward baseball cap and running shorts, looking like the little-boy version of himself, back from pitching practice. He was eating an enormous piece of my mother’s famous lasagna, straight from the baking pan.
This was the big joke of the lasagna. We all loved it. Never once did it actually make it to the kitchen table for dinner. No matter how pissed we were at each other—all of us would sit at the counter and eat it as soon as my mother took it from the oven to cool. Burning our tongues on it.
She made the lasagna with olives and tomatoes from the vineyard, spinach, five cheeses, and something else she wouldn’t ever confess to. Finn swore he’d walked in once and seen her adding chocolate chips to the bottom layer of noodles. We had spent years, cumulatively, searching for a sign of them.
Finn looked up as I walked into the kitchen. “I was bribed,” he said.
“I can see that.”
He took a large bite as I climbed on the stool across from him and put the contract down on my lap. It was a reminder—as if I needed one—that if I didn’t figure out what to do, this could be the last time I’d be sitting in this house with Finn, eating our mother’s lasagna, staring out at a vineyard that we would soon have to say our family used to own.
Finn puffed his cheeks out and tried to cool the lasagna already in his mouth. Then he shoveled more inside. “Mom didn’t want to be alone with you,” he said. “She called in reinforcements.”
“So she told you about her and Dad?”
He nodded. “She told me.”
Finn handed over a fork. I dug into the middle of the large pan. Finn’s look of sympathy turned to annoyance, always annoyance when I took lasagna from the middle of the pan, even though he liked the edges.
I stopped caring as soon as I took a bite. The gooey, cheesy mess, sweet and salty with the first taste. The tomatoes as sweet as strawberries, the whole-wheat noodles buttery tender. It reminded me how hungry I was. It reminded me that I had failed to eat anything all day. Licorice included.
“I already knew, really.”
I stopped chewing and looked at him. “How?”
He shrugged. “Mom has no poker face. And when I showed up unexpectedly for dinner last week, she panicked. She said Dad was at the Science Buzz Café. But it wasn’t Thursday. Then she made me chocolate cake.”
“Great. I get a naked man, and you get cake.”
“It was pretty good too,” Finn said.
Then he motioned toward the vineyard, where our parents were walking together. They were walking the way they normally did, except there was distance between them. My father’s hands were behind his back; my mother’s hands by her side.
It hurt to watch them. I went in for another bite, but he knocked my fork out of the way.
“Slow down on the lasagna,” he said. “Don’t you have a wedding dress to fit into?”
I knew he didn’t mean it. My mother’s lasagna made him do crazy things. To make amends, he cut a small square, moved it toward my side of the pan.
“Make it last,” he said.
“What are we going to do about Mom and Dad?”
“What can we do? I mean, it’s their life.”
“And ours.”
We each took a bite, quietly. Then I moved the contract over, so he could see it for himself.
“It’s been a great day for you, huh?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He shrugged. “It was Dad’s information to share.”
My head was spinning thinking about all the things people in this family knew. And the things that people were leaving out.