“It could have been worse, then,” I said.
“It also could have been better,” he said. He paused. “Mom back?”
“Yeah. She went upstairs to go to sleep.”
“Good. She must be exhausted.”
Then he took his beer back, even though I was mid-sip, which was when I noticed he had Band-Aids on his fingers, over the nails.
Bobby shrugged, looking down at them. “You’ve got to start somewhere, right?”
Then he took a sip, turning back to the vineyard. The morning glaze holding in the sky, intoxicating him. It was comforting, the way this place got more beautiful every day. Wasn’t that the gift of a home? You looked at it the same way, but then when you needed it to, it showed you all over again the many ways you’d been during the time that you had been living there. The many ways it had brought you back to yourself. The many ways it still brought you back to yourself.
“Margaret went back to San Francisco with the twins just a few minutes ago. They were asleep but I helped her load them in the car. They didn’t make a move. We’re good at that. The two of us. You’d be surprised how much skill that takes.”
I reached for the beer, took a small sip, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to say, and I didn’t want to upset him more than he had already been upset these past few days.
He took the beer back. “We talked before she went. We decided I would stay here for a minute with Mom and Dad. We decided to take a minute apart to see if that would help us remember how much we used to love being together. That’s the plan at least.”
He was holding the beer or I’d have handed it back to him, just so he could have something to do besides sitting there, telling me his family was falling apart before him.
“I made a mess of things,” he said.
“I don’t think you should be blaming yourself.”
He laughed, a little angry. “What should I be doing?”
I shrugged. “Drinking?”
He smiled, took another sip. “She’s not wrong. I stopped paying attention to her. I stopped doing the things that someone does for the person he loves. Because I was tired. Because other things always seemed to matter a little bit more.”
He paused.
“That doesn’t happen overnight, you know. It happens slowly. You should be careful of that. You should be careful not to take the person you love for granted. Not only because they’ll notice. But you’ll notice too. You’ll think it means something it doesn’t.”
“Like what?”
“Like that’s how much you care.”
He looked like he had lost everything. If Margaret saw that, would it be enough? Bobby loved his wife in a way she couldn’t feel, but he loved her all the same. Shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t the effort, no matter how misinformed, be enough to keep people together—especially at the moment they might otherwise decide it was easier to be apart?
He took a swig. “I’m mad at her. It doesn’t help, but I am mad at her and him.”
“Me too.”
“That really doesn’t help.”
I moved closer to him. “What are you going to do?”
“Make it up to her if I can. Forgive her if I can. Help her forgive me.” He shook his head. “Something like that.”
“That sounds like a plan.”
“What choice do I have?”
He put down the beer, rubbed his hands together.
“You don’t give up on a family. Not without trying to put it back together.”
That stopped me. My brother, who always said the wrong thing, had said the most important thing of all.
His words vibrated in the place that had gone vacant the minute I’d seen Ben on the street in my wedding dress. With Maddie. With Michelle.
I hugged him. “Thank you.”
He looked confused. “For what?”
“I wasn’t sure what to do about Ben, and you just made it feel very clear. Thank you for that.”
“You should marry him. You’d be an idiot not to.”
And then there was that. I laughed, even though he wasn’t kidding. And leaned forward, squeezing into my brother.
“Hey, guys. What’s going on?”
We looked up, and Finn was there, holding a six-pack of beer. Finn stood there, Bobby stiffening at the sight of him. I made room anyway, for my good brother, who had behaved very badly.
Finn sat down on the other side of me, and maybe this was all that Bobby could do, but he did it. He didn’t get up. I tried to reward him for that, handing him the beer.
Finn cleared his throat. Maybe so we would look at him.
Which was when I noticed that he was holding a paper in his hand: an entire folder, a blue folder, UCLA Law School’s insignia on the front.
He handed it over.
“I stayed up looking for it. It wasn’t easy to find. But there it is.”
The contract. It was the contract we had signed saying we would never take this place over. I looked down at it. There were the signature lines I’d made. Bobby had signed the first one, Finn the third. But on the second line—saved for me—there was nothing.
“I never signed it?”
He shook his head. “You never signed it,” Finn said.
Bobby looked over, as if to confirm it. He nodded. “No signature.”
There was meaning to derive from that, probably that everyone is too busy in law school to do anything well. But maybe there was some other meaning too.
Finn put his arm over my shoulder. “You should frame that,” he said. “It was like the younger you telling the older you something.”
“But what?”
“But what? That is the question.”
It was Bobby who answered.
“Maybe that you’re a pretty crappy lawyer.”
Then he took the contract and ripped it into a thousand pieces.
We sat there quietly, the early morning coming up over the vineyard, the fog moving away. Slowly but surely. Leaving a glistening in its wake. Leaving sunshine. From the half-burned winemaker’s cottage, it couldn’t have been more beautiful.
“I still don’t want this place,” Finn said.
“Me neither, I have no interest,” Bobby said.
He didn’t look at Finn when he did it, when he agreed with him, but he agreed with him all the same.
I looked at Finn, tempted to explain what had just happened, Bobby moving toward him, though I kept my mouth shut, in favor of trusting what I had learned this weekend, in the face of everything falling apart, and maybe coming together in a greater way than I could have hoped for. You couldn’t always work so hard to fix it. Even if things didn’t always go the way they should, sometimes they went exactly where they needed to.
Bobby took a sip of beer. “I don’t want the responsibility,” he said. “But it’s more than that. I’m not really sure I would be good at it. I think you have to believe you’d be good at it.”
“That might change,” I said.
“Well, it only changed for you because it’s too late,” Bobby said.
Finn looked over.
“Maybe too late,” Finn said. “Maybe not.”
“Maybe not,” Bobby said.
Then Finn reached over and held out his hand to Bobby.
Bobby took it.
And the three Ford children got drunk and watched the sun come up.
The Other Line Ben was lying on my bed, awake. “Hey,” he said. “You okay?”