“You can’t seriously think you’re in a good position to offer me advice on my romantic life at the moment.”
She met my eyes. “I think I’m in a great position, actually,” she said. “No one sees what an incomparable person you are more than I do. Except, perhaps, Ben.”
She paused. And then she said it simply. “Be careful what you give up.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, trying—in spite of myself—to hear what she wasn’t saying. “Because you can’t get it back?”
She stood up, walking past me in the doorway.
“No.” She squeezed my shoulder. “Because, eventually, you get it back any way you can.”
I waited for her to disappear up the stairs before heading that way myself. But before my mother was gone, she called out a final good night. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re home.”
That made one of us.
The Contract
I woke up to the sound of a Bach cello sonata, the sun heaping through the windows, joining the music in an intense wake-up call. It was how I woke up most every morning as a kid—my father wanting us to get up with the sun, my mother reserving the first half hour of each day to practice, to keep her hand in.
I used to love the sound of her cello, the warm tones greeting me. Post-midnight run-in, though, her cello had another connotation, images of a naked Henry running through my head, dancing along with the music.
I rummaged through my suitcase, searching for a decent pair of jeans and a sweater, lamenting how little clothing I’d brought from Los Angeles. Nothing to battle the early morning fog, nothing to battle the late afternoon heat. The only shoes I had with me were a pair of ballet flats. My favorite boots left behind, my favorite everything left behind.
In my rush to get out of the house before my mother finished playing, I almost missed the note she had left on the countertop: “Coffee on. Banana muffins in fridge. Made yesterday, but delicious.”
I took a cup of coffee and a muffin, and headed down the hill to the winemaker’s cottage to find my father.
It was just after 9 A.M.—a gorgeous time in the vineyard. The sky was intensely blue, the early morning fog starting to burn off, letting in the sun, the morning heat. I passed through the gardens that served as cover crop, their wildflowers snaking between the vines, the land all purples and greens.
I stopped to study the vines, touching the shoots, feeling it come over me. It was a feeling that I only knew when I was back in the vineyard. A potent mix of happiness and excitement and something I couldn’t name except to say that being back in Sebastopol, back at my parents’ house, was like seeing a lost love again.
Until I was fourteen, I couldn’t get enough of the vineyard. I’d followed my father around to do the most mundane tasks: to trellis the vines, study the grapes, make teas to feed the soil. My father would dig into the compost, and I would join in, just to be a part of it. Before school, after school, we discussed vines and vintages. My father would even take me down to the wine cave and give me a taste of the racked wine, a taste of the wine still waiting to be racked. He never said it, but he was thrilled I wanted to be a part of it.
Then came the day I wanted nothing to do with any part of it.
The same vineyard, the same fifty acres that had brought me so much joy, became suffocating as opposed to freeing.
It coincided with two awful harvests in a row. The first harvest had gone awry due to weather, the rain forcing the grapes off the vines long before they were ready. The second had been the result of rolling forest fires, the smoke drying out the Sebastopol air, searing the vineyard. After years of everything going fairly smoothly, the two bad vintages—the only two my parents ever had in succession since early on, since before I remembered—had threatened to put us out of business.
It was still hard to think about how awful those winters were. My parents had tried to shield us from how scared they were about losing everything they had built together. But late at night, after we were supposed to be asleep, I’d hear them talking quietly in the kitchen, a pot of coffee between them. It would have been better if they had screamed it out loud as opposed to what it felt like, sitting on the other side of the door, thinking about all the ways I couldn’t fix it for them, thinking about all the ways our family’s life was about to fall apart.
I started going into San Francisco every chance I had. One night I convinced my father to take me to see an art exhibit of light installations. The truck broke down on the way and we took a cab the rest of the way into the city. Afterward, we walked the streets downtown, past the Ferry Building and the pier, up into the ritzy hills of Pacific Heights. We passed a small jazz club, a ninety-year-old woman singing Gershwin. If that sounds ridiculously romantic, it was. And I was completely hooked. I loved the noises of the city, people fighting and laughing in the streets. The old woman singing Gershwin. It’d be easy to say that it was the energy of the city that pulled me in, but it wasn’t. It was the noises. Suddenly, it felt like everything I had known before then had been too quiet. My parents’ sadness, the vineyard, Sonoma County itself.
I spent the next summer staying with my cousin who ran a law office downtown. She was beautiful and elegant and she took me under her wing, introducing me to city living: coffee shops and skyscrapers, streets and bookstores, fancy shoes and cigarettes at parties. She even gave me an internship at her law firm.
She warned me that it would be boring, but it was a relief. Law was specific. It was concrete. The soil and fruit and wind and sun and sky didn’t have to cooperate for work to go well. After years of watching my father struggle at the mercy of the weather patterns, that type of control felt empowering.
When the vineyard worked, it was beautiful. But two years of fallow crops were decimating. And they were especially decimating when I realized they weren’t the first. After I left for college, I learned that my parents had narrowly escaped previous disasters, previous moments when it had seemed the only option was throwing in the towel.
My chosen path was far less unpredictable, which felt like a good thing, a different thing.
Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.
When I arrived at the winemaker’s cottage, the front door was open, but no one was inside.
“Dad?” I said.
There was no answer.