There was a moment before we were in the waiting room at Sonoma County Hospital, full of Fords, the mishmash of people they loved. All of them currently afraid of losing the person they loved the most: Margaret held on to Bobby, Finn stood with my mother, I was sitting with Ben on a bench. And Jacob. Jacob was standing off to the side.
Bobby started pacing. “We have been sitting here for hours, someone has to do something.”
Finn shook his head. “What do you want us to do, Bobby?”
“Something.”
I leaned in to Ben, Finn holding my mother. It was something when you lose your center. My father, in a way that we weren’t willing to acknowledge, was that. And in the moment I saw him lying in the vineyard, I realized it wasn’t the vineyard I feared losing. It was him. As long as he was working the land, I got to imagine it. That the day without him would never come.
My mother stood up. “That’s him.”
I turned, expecting to see my father, standing there with a hospital band on his wrist, telling us he was fine. But it was the doctor coming out to see us. The doctor giving my mother a hug, like they were old friends.
“Jen. He had another heart attack,” he said.
“Another?” Bobby said.
“What does he mean another, Mom?” Finn said.
Which was when I realized what my father hadn’t told me about the car accident, what must have happened. My father had had a heart attack while he was driving, causing that accident.
The vein popped in Bobby’s neck. “What the hell is going on?” Bobby said.
My mother jumped in front of him, in front of all of us, her back to us, facing the doctor.
“What does that mean, exactly?” she asked him. “Is he okay?”
“It was a mild heart attack, though not as mild as last time. He’s responding to a clot-dissolving agent, but he isn’t out of the woods. I’m not pleased to see him back here. He has to take it easy, Jen. We have talked about this.”
Bobby looked like he was going to explode. “When did you talk about this? Mom, how did you not tell us that Dad had a heart attack?”
“We didn’t want to worry you,” she said.
Finn stood behind his brother. “Why?” Finn said.
“Yeah, why?” Bobby said.
Bobby was yelling now, full-on yelling.
They both were.
My mother turned toward them, her voice the loudest of all. “We thought you’d overreact! Imagine that. We thought you’d make it about your own fear as opposed to, you know, what your father would need to actually get past it.”
They both got quiet. Everyone got quiet, and the entire waiting room turned to look at my mother: the Ford family and Ben and Margaret and Jacob and an array of midnight strangers, crowding around. Everyone looked at my mother, who was done with all the nonsense, demanding that the rest of her family be done too.
“Now it’s time for you to keep your father safe. To keep each other safe. Like you all didn’t forget how.” She moved toward the doctor. “So what does this mean for Dan?”
The doctor looked back and forth between my brothers to see if they were going to interrupt.
“He’s resting now. We’ll know more tomorrow, but you should get some rest.”
Jacob looked down as if it was his fault.
“So he’s going to be okay?” Finn said.
My mother caught his eye, trying to calm him.
“What you’re saying means he’s going to be okay?” Bobby said.
“It means we watch him until tomorrow. Run a few more tests. But assuming he is fine, he can go home then. Though he’s going to have to take it easy. His body is not going to give him another warning call.”
Bobby laughed. “Sure. That won’t be an issue at all.”
My mother put her hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “Bobby . . .”
“What? Dad has never taken it easy. Ever.”
The doctor turned and looked at him. Serious. “Until today.”
My mother nodded and turned to us so we’d hear it, what she was saying in her silence, that it was time for everyone to think differently about our father. “Can we see him?”
“He said you had a long enough day and you should go home. I think that would be wise. Dan is groggy and could use his rest, and Jen, you need your rest too. He’s right. You can see him first thing in the morning.”
My mother nodded. “Sure. Okay,” she said. “That makes sense.”
She turned to me and squeezed my hand.
Then she walked right past the doctor, toward her husband.
Sebastopol, California. 2009
Jen was furious with him and she was right to be. They were spending a month in Big Sur, in a beautiful house, large windows looking out over the ocean. She had told him what she needed. She needed a change and she had said that she’d go on her own. But he had insisted that he go with her.
That part was fine, but he wasn’t really here. He knew that was what she was furious about. If he was going to barely be here with her, why had he come at all?
He wasn’t making an effort. She loved everything about being in Big Sur and on the ocean. She had joined a musical theater group and she was playing in the band. It was beyond the fact that all of that made him feel threatened. It was this, if he was truthful. He felt neglected. He wasn’t seeing her at all and he was being a child about it. He knew he was being a child about it. That was different from knowing how to stop.
“Is it because you’re not feeling well?”
She asked him this all the time now, since the heart attack.
“I’m good. I’m really good.”
“Then it just seems like you’ve forgotten how to do anything other than what you’re doing.” She shook her head. “And the thing is, that was why I fell in love with you. That vision, that passion. But you have to be able to do something else too. You don’t know how to do anything but be at the vineyard.”
“I know.”
“And you haven’t tried.”
He nodded. “I know that too.”
She was waiting to see what he’d say next.
“We can sell the vineyard,” he said. “If that’s what you want to do.”
“No one is talking about selling the vineyard, Dan. Why is that all that you hear?”
She looked at him. And he saw it: The way she had looked at him at the beginning, all that love in her eyes—this looked like the opposite.
“What are we talking about, then?”
“Something else,” she said.
She started walking away, but he held on to her arm. He didn’t say anything, but he held on, hoping she would see what he didn’t seem to know how to say. He was waiting for her to do it, the thing she would do when they were this angry with each other, the thing she was the one who knew how to do.
He was waiting for her to move back toward him.
The Details
Synchronization.
A fire hit a vineyard. And then, like a miracle, it started to pour. It was overdue to pour but it started then, pressing down at the fire.
Synchronization. Your heart pumped blood to the necessary vessels. The vessels pumped the blood back to the heart muscle. Everything flowed through the coronary artery to the heart muscle. To where everything was needed.
An unspoken agreement.