“Are you looking for your mother?”
“I’m actually looking for you.”
This surprised him. He stepped back, looking uncomfortable. “Why’s that?”
I tried to think of how to answer him. What was a good answer? Why had this little confrontation seemed like a good idea? Maybe because there was no one else that I was able to talk to. Not Ben, or my brothers, or my parents. I had no idea what I wanted to say to any of them, but I knew what I wanted to say to Henry. I wanted to tell him to stay away.
“I thought we should talk.”
“Okay . . .” he said.
I wasn’t sure where to start. I looked at Henry, as if that would provide a clue as to why my mother loved him. He was so different from my father: city intellectual to my father’s outdoorsman, large to my father’s lean and lanky. Of course, that wasn’t the right question. The right question was why my mother was giving so much up for him—her family, her home, the farm around it that she had nurtured with her own hands.
“Your mother just texted me that she may not be coming.”
He reached in his pocket, showed me his phone like proof.
“I’m meeting my son instead, actually. He’s never been to La Gare.”
“You have a son?”
“I do, yes.”
“You’re divorced?”
“No, I’m not technically.”
I looked at him, confused. Henry was married? He had a wife somewhere, wondering where he was, two homes breaking up so he and my mother could run off?
“I have a son, but I was never married to his mother. We were close friends. We still are.” He pointed at the menu. “Would you like to join us for a bite to eat? My son is a winemaker. He’s relatively new to the area. I think you’ll enjoy each other.”
“No, Henry, I think that may be the last thing I’d like to do. No offense.”
“None taken.” He paused. “It’s nice to see you again,” he said.
He looked like he wanted to see me as much as I wanted to see him. Which did the strangest thing. It warmed me to him.
Then he leaned forward, looking me in the eyes, and a weird thing happened—suddenly, I was the one standing at attention.
“It’s easy to think you understand what’s going on between your mother and me,” he said. “It’s always easy from the outside looking in.”
I gave him a look, warning him to avoid suggesting I was on the outside of anything involving my mother.
“What I’m saying is that I do love your mother very much,” he said.
“And you think that makes it okay to break up a family?”
He shook his head. And I saw it, his edge. The kind that meant he wasn’t going to play nice. “That’s her choice, not mine.”
He paused, softening, but pressing on.
“Your mother has taught me a little about winemaking. It’s fascinating to me. Perhaps because it isn’t unlike music. Timing is everything.”
I was unsure what he wanted me to take from that.
“When your mother walked into rehearsal for the first time, she had on this green jumpsuit which she thought looked sophisticated but she looked ridiculous. She was the most ridiculous and beautiful woman I’d ever seen.”
He shook his head fondly.
“I’d just had my son, though. And by the time I left his mother, she had already met your father.” He paused. “So if you want to understand why your mother’s with me, you have to ask someone else. But for me, I’ve been waiting thirty-five years for the two of us to fall into rhythm.”
I was floored, hearing him talk about my mother that way, and seeing what happened in his eyes. There was an intensity there. It was intoxicating to witness that kind of intensity—that kind of passion, really—-honest and raw and irresistible at the same time. Irresistible in how sure of itself it was. And my mother was on the receiving end of that intensity. How could she turn away from it?
“What makes you think I want to hear any of this?”
He smiled. “Because you came to find me tonight,” he said.
“To tell you to go away.”
He shook his head. “That’s not going to happen.”
Again, that edge—and worse, a certainty. He was certain that my mother and he were a done deal. He was certain that they belonged together—the way my father was certain of the same thing.
It made me want to ask him a question. Not if he understood what my parents’ love was like—what it had been like to grow up in the glow of it—because how could he? And he didn’t care as much about that as he cared about being with my mother.