“I didn’t just ‘leave,’?” I spit out angrily. “I found you two in bed and spent months making a rational plan to get out of here. It was an eye-opener, that’s all.”
“That’s not all. That’s not all that happened,” he says. A precarious silence follows, and I turn my face away. He sighs. “I meant before, anyway. Before Zelda was even part of it. You just disappeared,” he says, and he still sounds hurt and angry, after all this time.
“I…had to go. I’d just finished this degree that committed me to staying here in Hector and running Silenus. Then Nadine was diagnosed. I was twenty-two years old, and I was freaking out a little. I…panicked.”
“So you just took off? Where did you go, Ava?”
I bite my lip and hide my face in my glass.
“Where were you that winter?” he asks again.
When I again don’t answer, he turns away. “You ran off with that guy from Cornell. Jordan. I knew it, that whole time, I effing knew it.”
“Jordan was gay, Wyatt,” I snap. All of my senior year at Cornell, Wyatt had been touchy and aggressive with Jordan, a friend of mine from my soil ecology class. He was a fine, upstanding guy from Oregon, into biking and hiking and surfing and other athletic, outdoorsy activities. He wanted to go home and start a vineyard near his family’s house, not far from Willamette. I’d liked him for his frank good-naturedness. And the fact that he knew no one in my family, never once compared me to Zelda or Nadine. He was bouncy and fun and uncomplicated, and his presence had driven Wyatt nuts. Even Zelda had started hinting that we were more than just study buddies.
“You left with him, though. He picked you up, in February, and you drove off with him,” Wyatt says, pouting. While I had graduated on time in May, Jordan had had several more credits to complete, and he’d stayed through the winter semester before getting his degree. I’d puttered around Silenus listlessly all that autumn, wondering what I had gotten myself into, realizing that I had merely acquiesced to my mother’s plans for me. I knew I was stuck, and I was flailing. Zelda had dropped out of the community college by this stage, and Nadine had been getting more and more unpredictable. When we finally took Mom to a specialist in January, we had all begun to suspect that it wasn’t just menopause that was making her moods erratic and her mind leaky. She was forgetting things nearly all the time and had had one or two episodes of hallucinations. At least, that we knew of. Her gait had became strange and off-kilter. You could have a conversation with her that she would be completely unable to remember five minutes later. Most staggering was her new tendency toward confabulation, a rather clinical description for making shit up. Not lying—she genuinely believed the stories she was telling.
Jordan stayed through winter break because I begged him not to leave me, promising hot toddies and long gossip sessions. He stayed until the end of January. But then he announced that he had gotten a winemaking internship in Willamette and he was leaving in ten days. I fretted, and paced, and stared out at the cold water of the lake, the frozen gray slopes, my future; the day before he left, I asked him if I could hitch a ride with him to the West Coast.
“He drove me to Oregon, and I stayed with his family for a couple weeks. They were nice, and I was having a minor identity crisis. Jordan was…very kind.” He had been; he had barely batted an eye when I’d told him I didn’t know what I was going to do next, and he had put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room and told me to settle in. I sip at my glass of Pinot Noir, so similar to the glass of wine Jordan handed me in the guest room of his parents’ home while telling me to figure my shit out and take my time. I feel choked up at the memory. “I stayed with them for as long as I felt like I could, and then I realized what I was doing on the West Coast. I took the bus down to California to see my dad.”
“Oh,” Wyatt says. “You weren’t…”
“Fucking my gay friend from college all that time? Nope. I was…” I take a deep breath, feeling achingly sad. “I was na?vely begging my father to give me a way out. I—fuck, I’m humiliated even now.” I worry that I’m going to start crying. The wine is clearly getting to me. I’m not usually a weepy drunk.
“You wanted a job,” Wyatt guesses.
“I asked him to let me work on his vineyard for a bit. An internship maybe, or just some entry-level gig. I told him I didn’t want to get in his way or affect his new life; I just needed some space from Zelda and Mom. I was qualified. Overqualified. He let me stay for a while, and I didn’t work up the courage to come out and ask him for the job until I’d been there a few weeks.”
“But he said no.”
“Obviously. He seemed embarrassed by the whole thing, remorseful. Like he really wanted to help me out but he just…couldn’t. I got the impression that his new wife had told him she didn’t want me around, and it was her money, her vineyard.”
—
We had awkwardly faced each other across a table at a café in town. I clutched the diner mug filled with coffee I couldn’t bring myself to drink and tried to explain.
“It’s not like it would be charity, Dad. I’m qualified to do this.”
“I know that, Little A! I know you’d be a competitive candidate even if we were doing an open hiring. It’s just that we’re not really looking for anyone right now—”
“I’m happy to start as an apprentice winemaker. Even a pourer in the tasting room.”
“Oh, kiddo, that would be throwing your talents away. You’re too good for that!” His phone had rung, and he glanced down at it anxiously. I assumed it was Bianca, who was very precocious with the cellphone. Or his newest wife. “Listen, can we maybe talk about this some other time? If you want to stay out here, I know this great place where you can crash. I’ll get you a deal on the rent….”
—
“You told him about Nadine?” Wyatt asks.
“Of course. I was pathetic. I told him she was sick, that Zelda was crazy, that Hector was claustrophobic and I didn’t know if I could live there. I was desperate not to go home, so I humbled myself. I wanted him to take me in, rescue me, but he…he rented me an apartment fifteen miles away.” I finally crack, a fat tear spilling down my face. “He didn’t even want me in the house. It was like I contaminated his picture-perfect family. The New Antipovas. His current wife wasn’t a drunk, his new daughters were normal….It’s like I was a reminder of his guilt, of the balance he didn’t settle here, in Hector.” I sniff, crying. I realize I’m monologuing, performing like I do when I’m drunk. But I’m not drunk; I’m fine.
“Oh, Ava. You reached out. And he rejected you,” Wyatt says softly, stroking my arm. “You kept yourself so self-contained, for years, and that was the first time…” I nod miserably, more tears tumbling from my eyelids. It feels good. “Zelda didn’t know?”
“I didn’t tell her. I just…disappeared. And left her. With Mom.”