Ben went back to the house to relieve Michelle. Margaret went with him to be with her twins. They needed her, and it was easier to be with them. She didn’t expect Bobby to go with her. But he did. Bobby went to oversee the grape picking, to do the one thing for my father he felt he could do at that moment. Then Finn left to deal with the fire department, to see what was left of the winemaker’s cottage. By the time my mother came out, there was only me, surrounded by empty seats.
My mother walked back into the waiting room, carrying an enormous care package.
“You all alone? How did that happen?”
“A little bit of luck.”
She smiled. “Thanks for staying for me,” she said.
She put the care package down on the seat next to me and took the seat on its other side, exhausted.
“What a night,” she said.
“How is he?”
“He was irritated more than anything else, which seemed like a good sign.”
“About what?”
She shrugged. “He wants to get to the grapes.”
I started to tell her that it was taken care of, that Bobby was handling it, but that wouldn’t have mattered to my father. He would need to be there himself to believe it.
“He tried to tell me yesterday about the heart attack. I only half-heard him.”
“He probably only half-told you.”
I looked down, still feeling guilty that I hadn’t known intrinsically what was going on here. And also that I hadn’t been here while it was happening.
“Don’t do that.”
I looked at her. “What?”
“Don’t say this happened again because he’s selling the vineyard,” my mother said. “It’s not. He wanted you to understand that. This is because he didn’t sell it sooner.”
I nodded. It seemed like she was right. My father had given everything he could to this land. He needed to give himself to something else now. I was done fighting him on that. I was done fighting him on anything, except what he said he wanted for himself.
My mother smiled. “He said it was a fitting ending.”
“For the last harvest?”
“For the last harvest,” my mother said.
She leaned toward me. “And that was before the fire inspector called. It seems someone left something on the stove in the winemaker’s cottage.”
She shook her head, laughing. What else was there to do? In the realm of disasters that night, the fire was lower on the list. Higher on the list was this: She looked happy. She looked happier than she should in a hospital waiting room. She looked happier than she had since I’d walked in the door in my wedding dress, her in her towel. Two different lifetimes.
And I saw it creep over her face, the rest of it, what she had to do. What was required of her. She needed to leave Henry, if she was going to reimagine her life with my father.
She looked down. “Henry is a good man,” she said. “When I told you how Henry made me feel, how he made me feel seen, I left that part out.” She shook her head. “One of these days, I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“How does it end, Mom?”
She paused. “With your father. It ends with your father.”
I took a deep breath in. “The details don’t matter, then.”
She shook her head. “The details matter,” she said. “It’s the big picture that confuses us.”
What were the details of today? What was the big picture? The big picture was that my mother made sacrifices. We all did, didn’t we? Hers caught up. But now she was trying to let them go for what she had gotten in return.
My mother leaned forward. “Ben works hard to understand you,” she said. “It doesn’t mean he’s good at it. But it’s important that he tries. Sometimes all you need is a man to remind you he’s doing the best he can.”
My initial thought was that Ben did more than the best he could. He succeeded in knowing what I needed, often before I did. Except then I thought about the enormity of what he had kept from me, his daughter, her mother’s feelings for him, his feelings for her. An entire other life he was living. If he really understood me, wouldn’t he know that what I needed most—what I wanted in my new family—was what I had in my first family? What we still had? It was a mess and we fought and battled and lost it and made bad decisions for one another. But we put it on the table. We put one another first. Ben had done the opposite.
My mother pointed toward the care package. “Jacob dropped this. He left it outside your father’s door. I don’t know how he got back there. It doesn’t matter. Jacob left this.”
“He did?”
She opened the wrapping. “He wanted to make sure your father was okay. And, like a man, he brought everything we didn’t exactly need.” She held up a box of licorice as an example. “Doing the best he can.”
She was quiet.
My mother put her arm around me. “Can we go home and go to sleep? I feel like I could sleep for five days straight. And I probably should. I should probably rest up so I can be back here in five hours.”
I nodded. That I could do for my father. I could take his wife home and get her some rest.
“FYI. The last time I felt this shitty, I was pregnant with you.”
I smiled. “Are you going to tell me what Dad said to you? When he whispered in your ear.”
“Do you think that’s what turned everything around? You think it’s as simple as that?”
“I’m just nosy.”
She pushed her hair behind her ears, considering what he said, whether she was going to share it. Then she smiled.
“Your father said the same thing he said when he got into my yellow buggy.”
“What was that?”
She shrugged. “So, where are you taking me?”
She shook her head, taking a stick of licorice, taking a large bite. Then she stood up to go, care package in hand, my arm over her shoulder as we headed out the hospital door.
“It’s not all a happy ending. We’re going to have to get you a new tent,” she said.
I looked at her, confused, at which point she rolled her eyes, like she couldn’t believe she had to explain this.
“A new tent for your wedding. Rain damaged it. Rain and wind and everything else that a tent like that is supposed to stand up to, but doesn’t.”
She leaned in, as if listening to my heart, as if listening to how that made my heart feel.
“Not tonight, though.” She shook her head. “Nothing is open tonight.”
The First Contract When I got back to the vineyard, I went down to the winemaker’s cottage, the back of it burned off, Bobby sitting on the porch. He was sitting alone, drinking a beer. At 5:55 in the morning.
He didn’t look at me, keeping his eyes on our vineyard, the sun not yet lighting it. The fog still dusting the vines, laminating them in frost and half-light.
Bobby stared straight ahead, glassy-eyed and confused, the stare of someone who had been up all night. “You may as well sit down,” he said. “There’s half a beer left, and I don’t think anything is going to collapse.”
He moved over and handed up the bottle of beer. I had a sip, taking a seat.
“Long night,” he said. “We got half of the grapes. We can use half of them.”