“I was thirsty,” he said.
I tried to focus on taking deep breaths. I couldn’t calm down, though. Apparently when your parents split up, it didn’t matter if you were a grown-up, it turned you into a five-year-old again: wanting them to promise you that everything was going to be okay. And wanting to make everything okay for them, the way you could when you were five, just by saying you loved them.
Jacob tossed the cup into a trash can. “You seem like you need to get out of here.”
“I do, but I don’t have a car.”
“You want a ride?”
I laughed, shaking my head.
“The proper response is thank you. Or, thank you anyway. Only two options.”
He wasn’t wrong, even if I couldn’t stand him.
I turned back toward The Tasting Room. My mother was walking outside to make sure I was okay. She caught my eye and started walking toward me.
Which was when I saw Henry. He was standing in the parking lot across the street, waiting for my mother, for wherever he was planning on taking her.
Had my mother told him to stay out of sight so my father wouldn’t see him? Was she going to run to their meeting spot now that my father was distracted? Was I going to have to see them kiss hello?
Jacob tilted his head, following my eyes across the street. “Who’s that guy?” he asked.
“Let’s just go,” I said.
Jacob looked surprised. “Okay.” Then Jacob paused, remembering something, looking like he didn’t know how to say what he’d remembered. “Thing is, my car’s back at my place. In Graton. We could walk to it. And then I could drive you home.”
“It’s five miles!”
“More like seven,” he said. “Remember your choices. Thank you or thank you anyway.”
My mother was getting closer.
I glanced at Henry. He hadn’t yet noticed my mother. He looked like he’d spotted me, though, like he just might decide to come over to introduce himself again. Fully clothed.
This was when I started walking.
Grown, Produced, and Bottled My father’s favorite varietal of his wine, Concerto, was an ode to my mother’s musical roots—and an ode to the word itself. Concerto. My parents loved what it meant. It originated from the conjunction of two Latin words: conserere, which means to tie, to join, to weave, and certamen, which means competition, fight. The idea was that the two parts in a concerto, the soloist and the orchestra, alternate episodes of opposition and cooperation in the creation of the musical flow. In the creation of synchronization.
Which was, precisely, what was required of wine.
Which was precisely what I had lost. Any cooperation. Leaving only opposition.
Jacob wanted to avoid downtown, so we wound up Sullivan Road into the hills—into the deep remoteness of the old apple orchards, stunning farmhouses, renovated barns. This route exemplified the very quiet I had run from as a teenager. It suddenly felt comforting to be back in it. It felt comforting and completely unchanged. Which maybe, at the moment, was the same thing.
I’d taken this walk with Ben one of the first times I had brought him to Sebastopol. Ben had immediately fallen in love with it—the hills, the crisp quality of the trees and the faltering terrain, farmhouses harboring stories.
Jacob and I walked quietly, neither of us anxious to talk, at least not to each other. Then, Jacob broke the silence.
“This is going to be a long walk if we don’t call a temporary truce,” he said.
I motioned toward the hills, the naked landscape around us. “It’s going to be a long walk anyway.”
Jacob nodded in agreement, which was about as close to a truce as we were getting. “It must have been weird growing up here,” he said.
I turned toward him, startled to hear out loud the opposite of what Ben had said.
“Most people assume that it was idyllic.”
“Because it’s so pretty?”
“Something like that.”
Jacob put his hands in his back pockets. “Growing up is never idyllic, is it? Or it’d be called something else.”
I turned away, not wanting him to see how that made me smile. “My mother would say you had to use your imagination raising kids here because there wasn’t much going on. It would force us to make our own fun. Turning the old apple orchards into mazes. Doing a weekly relay race that would end at the ice cream shop and with two scoops of their homemade ice cream. At ten in the morning.”
“I grew up in New York City. Our relay races would involve a nanny. And end on the 4 or 5 subway heading downtown for a hot dog at Gray’s Papaya.”
“Sounds idyllic.”
He smiled. “It wasn’t bad.”
Jacob bent down, picked up a handful of rocks. He started throwing them, one at a time.
“I remember coming to visit my grandparents when I was a kid. Of course, they lived in Napa, but they had this barn and I’d lie there staring at the stars,” he said. “It’s weird to live somewhere where you can’t see the stars. I told myself when I was old enough, I’d get my own barn.”
“Your own stars?”
He nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “Kind of how you want your own skyscraper. You’ll have plenty of those in London.”
“Or if I stay in L.A.”
It was the first time I had said it out loud. What I might do if Ben and I couldn’t get past it, in a world that went on for me Ben-less.
Still, I felt my breath catch in my throat, thinking of London. My new office was in a small building near the Chelsea Arts Club, a short walk from our house, a short walk from Ben’s architecture firm. Ben had done the walk when he had been in London the month before—in the morning and the evening—noting the places we’d most want to stop together. A coffee shop in a converted garden, a rooftop art gallery, every theater on the West End.
“Why would you stay in L.A.? I mean, if you didn’t go to London. Would it be for your job? I only ask because I hated being a lawyer. I really hated it.” He paused. “The five minutes I was one.”
“I thought you said you didn’t practice,” I said.
“No, I practiced. After I left Cornell, I moved to New York and joined a law firm in the corporate restructuring division. But it was literally five minutes. I quit before lunch.”