“I’m just trying to understand.”
“Which part?”
“What are you going to do when you leave here?”
He paused, deciding whether he wanted to say it, whether he was going to tell me the truth about what he was doing or push it off. “You remember the harvest I spent in Burgundy?”
I nodded, the difficult time moving to the front of my mind: the harvest of my father’s absence, the two awful harvests that forced my father’s absence. My mother was so sad that winter without him, distracted and lonely. I was so desperate to make her happy that I initiated dance parties on Friday afternoon—the two of us jumping around the kitchen to Madonna. Though her heart wasn’t in it. She was almost dancing well, which gave her away.
My father nodded. “I’m heading back there to visit a friend.”
I was shocked to hear him say that. I wanted to ask him what friend he was talking about, but—remembering my mother’s sadness—I didn’t really want the answer.
“I’m going to travel the world. I’m starting there. I’m renting a yacht from someone who my friend knows.”
“You hate boats.”
“Who doesn’t?”
Mom. That was the answer. She loved boats. And she loved the ocean. But she wasn’t going with him. So why would he go without her? He was planning the dream trip, her dream trip. Like the sky and the rain and the soil, was this something else he thought was going to line up—that it would be enough to make her want to come back to him? If not, would he just take this other person instead?
Synchronization. You get into the wrong yellow buggy and build a life with someone. You do everything in your power to build a new one when that life falls apart.
My father climbed the opposite ladder, moving toward the top of the second fermenter, from the opposite end.
Then he motioned toward the compost piles, Bobby and Finn standing by them, ignoring each other, working on the feed. He was happy, looking at his sons. “They’ve been working all day, not saying a word.”
“Why are you smiling, then?”
“People get more work done when they don’t talk.”
He bent over the grapes, kneading them softly. Which was when I saw it, sneaking out from beneath his white shirt. A scar, white and winding, in the center of his chest.
I moved closer to him. “Dad, what is that?”
“Nothing.” He pulled up his T-shirt, blocking my view. “It’s nothing . . .” he repeated.
He kept studying the grapes, not taking his eyes off his task.
“What happened? Did you hurt yourself working?”
He was getting more and more irritated. “Georgia, can you drop this?”
“You want me to drop everything these days.”
“Not everything. Just this.”
“And Henry,” I said.
He drilled me with a look, angry that I had the nerve to bring up Henry when he so clearly didn’t want to discuss it. Except that I was angry too. I was angry at all the secrets around here, at all the things that we weren’t talking about: my mother’s relationship, the fact that the most beautiful woman on the planet was in love with my fiancé.
“Henry isn’t even about Henry. It’s about a car going off the road.”
“What are you talking about, Dad?”
He looked up at me. “Do you remember when your mother and I were driving into town a few years ago and the pickup went off the road? Do you remember? Neither of us was badly hurt, but we had to go to the hospital.”
“Of course. Mom called me hysterical.”
He motioned toward the scar on his chest. “When this happened, when we got in that car accident, it changed things. When I lost control of the car that night, it changed things around here . . . and really it changed things for your mother.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. “It scared her when I got hurt like that. And I think your mother had to consider that one day she was going to be without me, and what was her life going to look like then.”
“Her answer was Henry.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“So you’re letting her do that. Even if it costs you the vineyard?”
“Even if it costs me the vineyard,” he said.
My father stepped down the ladder, moving back toward the destemming machine. Then he looked out at the vineyard, at everything he was giving up. Which was when I understood: My father didn’t want to be here without my mother. If he was going to be anywhere without her, it was going to be somewhere far from here. It was going to be far from everything he was proud that they had built.