I didn’t want to try to find him out in the vineyard, or by the receiving table, watching the grapes come in off the vines, sorting through them, picking which ones would last. I didn’t want to interrupt. Maybe I wasn’t anxious for a confrontation.
The point is that I didn’t plan on snooping. I planned on sitting, all the windows open, the late morning sun streaming in, an entire banana muffin and cooling coffee waiting to be enjoyed.
But I put everything down on the coffee table too quickly—and I spilled the coffee. All over the table. All over a heavy pile of files.
Files labeled: MURRAY GRANT WINES SALES FOLIO.
There were no napkins, so I picked up the wet files, wiping them against my T-shirt. I was trying to dry them off, though I doubted it mattered. My father hated Murray Grant Wines. He wasn’t alone. Most of the small winemakers in Sonoma County did. They hated them not only because of the quality of their mediocre production, but because they treated winemaking like a business. It was a business, of course. It was just also supposed to be something else.
So I assumed the papers were a dumb mailer, my father keeping up on what Murray Grant Wines was doing. He had to keep up with them. They were one of the biggest wine producers in Napa Valley, shipping five million cases of wine annually.
Direct competition, of course, to my father’s five thousand.
But then, as I rubbed the second file clean, I came across a series of contracts. They were lengthy and specific contracts that couldn’t say what they seemed to say. Except that I was a real estate lawyer and worked on far more complicated deals. And I knew they were saying exactly what they seemed to say.
The Last Straw Vineyard. Ownership Transfer. To Murray Grant Wines.
My pulse started to throb in my ears, drowning out my ability to slow down, figure out what I was reading.
“No way!”
I looked up to see my brother Bobby in the doorway. He was standing there, wearing a dark blue suit, his tie slung back over his shoulder. The smile on his face, which on another day I would describe as charming, was more like a smirk.
I wondered if this was one of the reasons we had trouble getting along. Bobby had a penchant for showing up at the exact time that there was no one there to blame but him.
“What are you doing home? Aren’t you getting married in, like, ten minutes?” he said. “I have two incredibly excited and very cute ring bearers who can’t wait for the wedding.”
I still hadn’t said hello, the files in my hands. I held them up higher. “Did you know about this?”
His smile disappeared. “About what, exactly?” Bobby said.
He ran his hands through his blond curls, which matched our mother’s—and which Bobby thought made him look angelic. What did make him look angelic were his ragged fingernails—Bobby biting them to stubs since we were little kids. It was my favorite part of him.
“Mom and Dad are selling the vineyard,” he said, trying to sound casual, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. As if we were talking about a car.
I sat back down and opened the files up, trying to ascertain where they were in the process. I was unhappy to see my father’s signature already on the final page, notarized.
Along with the signature of someone named Jacob McCarthy.
Jacob McCarthy. CEO of Murray Grant Wines.
Bobby shrugged. “I guess Dad didn’t want to bother you until after the wedding.”
Then he leaned down over me, a little too close for comfort. I thought about swatting him with something. My muffin came into view.
“What happened to the contracts?” he said, biting his nails nervously.
I moved away from him.
“And why are you freaking out?” he said. “This is a good thing. Dad won’t have to work again. Murray Grant made them the kind of offer that comes around once in a lifetime.”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
If looks could kill, I might have killed him. Right then. That was the thing about Bobby. He had always been logical and robotic about everything. His feelings were like something he practiced—he should be emotional about a wedding, shedding one calculated tear—but never embraced. It was why he was so good at business. It was why he was so bad at showing that he cared about anything else.
“Since when is that what they want, Bobby?”
“That’s what everyone wants!”
Bobby drilled me with a look.
“You’re yelling at the wrong person,” he said.
“I’m not yelling.”