It made me want to ask him a question. Not if he understood what my parents’ love was like—what it had been like to grow up in the glow of it—because how could he? And he didn’t care as much about that as he cared about being with my mother.
But that wasn’t my question. I was wet and freezing and exhausted. I wanted to ask him if he could lend me twenty dollars so I could get home.
Then the restaurant door opened. And he was standing there.
In his sweater vest glory.
Jacob. I started putting pieces together. Jacob grew up in New York. I only knew Jacob’s mother, not his father. Was Henry his father? I didn’t know Henry’s last name, but he had moved here from New York. I knew that. I knew Jacob was a winemaker. Maybe this was the story. These two men, father and son: Henry destroying my parents’ marriage, Jacob destroying their livelihood.
Jacob held out his hand, offering Henry his half-smile. If he had a piece of licorice he’d have offered that too.
“I’m Jacob McCarthy,” he said.
“Henry,” Henry said. “Henry Morgan.”
“Good to meet you, Henry,” Jacob said.
I breathed a sigh of relief as Henry walked inside and away.
Jacob did a double take, looking through the window, after him. “That wasn’t the Henry Morgan, was it?”
“You know about classical music now?”
“I know enough to know about Henry Morgan,” he said.
He gave me a smile, not commenting that I was dripping like a wet dog.
“What have I missed?” he said.
I pointed at the closed door. “Henry is my mother’s non-lover, and according to him, her soul mate,” I said. “And my brothers tried to kill each other over pot roast. And there was an incident with a fire hydrant.”
Jacob took a breath, as if overwhelmed himself. “That’s it?”
“There is a theory that I don’t love my fiancé. And I need money for a cab.”
Jacob reached into his coat pocket, held out his wallet. “I can help with that part,” he said.
He peeled off a fifty-dollar bill, handed it over.
“Thanks,” I said. “Are you meeting Lee here?”
He nodded as if remembering her. “Lee. Yes,” he said. “We keep meaning to go other places, but this is the only place open by the time we can eat. She’s at Foo Camp and running late.”
“Foo Camp?”
“Foo Camp.” He nodded. “That’s what they call this computer camp Lee is attending. This guy Tim O’Reilly runs it up here. He basically is at the forefront of everything technological. Lee idolizes him. It’s like hacker nerd dreamland.”
“Lee likes chia and computers and Vera Wang. She’s interesting.”
“To both of us.” He smiled, considering that. Then he pointed to the restaurant with his wallet. “You want to come in and have a drink?” he said.
I looked down at my outfit—wet jeans, a white T-shirt. “I shouldn’t,” I said.
Jacob reached out and held his hand over the back of my neck, like he was going to touch my skin, hold me there, warm me there. I felt a chill. I felt a chill where his hand almost was.
“Come in,” he said. “That way there can be two of us looking stupid when Lee explains the algorithm that is going to change the way we log in to secure websites.”
That sounded better than heading back to the house, but I shook my head. “Henry’s in there.”
“The non-lover.”
I nodded.
He shrugged. “Another night, then.”
I smiled, putting the money in my pocket. “I’m not paying you back, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“You’re taking my family’s vineyard. I figure you can give me fifty bucks.”
He nodded. “Fifty bucks seems fair.”
I turned to go, walking in the direction of the main drag, the only place to catch a cab.
But I looked back at Jacob. He was standing there, watching me go.
He nodded, his way of offering encouragement for the rest of the night apart. Like he wished he was joining me for it. If I didn’t know better, a little like that.
“What’s that look for?” he said.
I shrugged, considering how to say it. “You just keep showing up. Exactly when I need you.”
He smiled. “Some people would say that’s a good thing,” he said.
Then Jacob walked inside.
The Vintner Drinks Alone When I got back to the house, Ben was sleeping on the couch, trying to wait up so we could talk, the TV on, his shoes still on. But he was sound asleep. I put a blanket over him and headed upstairs. Maddie and the twins were in bed with my mother. Maddie fit right in, just one more, squeezed under my mother’s arm.
The light was off in Bobby’s bedroom, the door was closed tight. And I imagined that Margaret was in there with him, that they were starting the process of working things out. But when I opened my bedroom door, Margaret was there, a box of tissues beside her, sleeping with her feet up by the pillows.
I threw on a dry sweatshirt and closed the door behind myself, heading down the back stairs to the winemaker’s cottage, to the only free place to sleep.
My father was up, drinking a glass of wine on the porch, looking over his incredible spreadsheet. His spreadsheet was the difference between him being a good winemaker and a great winemaker. It listed every grape, every clone, on the entire vineyard. It listed where they were fermenting in the cellar, how long he was going to let each ferment, the combinations that were going into the final product. The spreadsheet was his ultimate work in progress. He would make changes throughout the entire winter, based on the wine’s taste and its color. That was the part that made him a good winemaker, he would say. Not that he was willing to make the changes, but that, in the end, he was also willing to change it back.
He kept his eyes on his spreadsheet, marking it. “Avoiding everyone?” he said.
“Not you.”
He looked up and smiled. “Aren’t I lucky, then?”
He patted the bench beside him, and I sat down, tossing off my shoes, pulling my knees up. I took a first breath, lavender and chamomile and honey filling the vineyard air. It took me back, remembering how it used to calm me, a night just like this one. I’d stay up past bedtime, sitting beside my father while he worked on his spreadsheet, my father stopping occasionally to show me what he was doing.
He put the spreadsheet down and poured me a glass of wine. “Finn doing okay?”
I nodded, relaxing into the safety of this porch, the vineyard like a beautiful barricade, keeping everything wrong and unwanted away.
“Thank you for dropping him off,” he said.
It didn’t feel like a good time to tell him that I hadn’t.
He handed over the wine. “That’s the 2005.”