Everything seemed to be lining up so the wrong people were together. So the right ones were apart.
In all my years growing up in Sonoma County, the drive over CA-116 had never felt so fast. In fifty minutes, I was in the Murray Grant waiting room, staring up at the pear. I’d planned on waiting for Jacob to walk out of his meeting, but Jacob wasn’t going to walk out of any meeting. There was a note taped to his office door. AT THE FACTORY.
I got back into the car and hit the gas, moving fast toward the large Murray Grant Wines facility, where they bottled and shipped all their wines.
There was a security guard outside too busy watching ESPN to notice or stop me.
I stormed past him, opening the wooden door and entering the factory. It was angry and cold. A large conveyor belt was bottling the wine bottles. Cranes were pulling crates of wine toward the shipping area. I thought of my father bottling his wines by hand, waxing each shut.
On the second floor was a hallway with several large glass offices. Through the glass, I could see Jacob standing in one of them. No cozy white couches there.
He stood before a group of four men in expensive suits sitting around a conference table. Were they having a meeting about how they were turning Sebastopol into the new Napa Valley? Selling factory wine. Making them a lot of money to buy more small vineyards, turn them into something other than what they had been. Someone’s home.
I ran up the stairs toward him and stormed into the office.
Jacob looked at me in the doorway, the men in the business suits staring.
I knew I was being crazy. I knew it even before Jacob’s look of confusion and outright irritation confirmed it.
“Hey, Georgia. Could you give me a minute?”
“No.”
He looked at me, then back at his meeting in progress.
“I need you to give me a minute, okay?” he said.
The security guard had made his way up the staircase. “Everything okay?”
Jacob tried to wave him off, trying to stay in control, to make it less of a scene. “We’re fine, Caleb,” he said.
Jacob turned toward the businessmen. “Would you guys excuse me?” he said. “I’ll be back in one second.”
Jacob quickly steered us out of the office, past Caleb, the security guard.
“You want me to escort your friend outside?” Caleb said.
“I’m doing that myself, Caleb,” Jacob said, moving us down the stairs, keeping his voice low, now trying to control his temper, in addition to everything else.
Jacob slammed through the front door of the factory, leading us back out to the parking lot, toward his Honda.
“I can’t believe you,” he said.
He was moving so fast I was basically running to keep up with him.
“What makes you think you can just walk in here like that?” he said. “That was my board up there. Do you have any idea how embarrassing it was to have that meeting interrupted?”
“You need to sell me the vineyard, Jacob.”
He stopped walking. “What?”
“I want to run it.”
Jacob stared at me, dumbfounded. But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I felt the weight of their truth. It was what I had been feeling from the minute I returned to Sebastopol. This was my family’s home, and I didn’t want to give it up. I didn’t want to give up how I felt being back at the vineyard, despite everything that was going on with my parents and my brothers and Ben. I felt like myself here.
He shook his head, and started moving again, faster than before.
“You have no idea how to run a vineyard.”
“My father will stay on and teach me. That’s not your problem.”
“Except you keep making it my problem when you show up demanding I do something I’m not going to do. My grandfather ran this company for fifty years. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get the board to take his grandson seriously? Even without crazy women interrupting my meetings?”
We got to his car and Jacob opened the trunk. It held several boxes of files. Jacob began searching through, reaching for a file.
“Look, I understand you’re having an emotional reaction to the vineyard’s sale, but . . .”
“Is that what I’m having? An emotional reaction?”
“What would you call it?”
Jacob grabbed the file out of the trunk. Then he grabbed another file. But Jacob seemed to still be searching—and it seemed like maybe he wasn’t actually looking for anything, busying himself as an excuse, so he could get himself together.
“Thing you don’t get is that you can’t save your family like this. I know you think you can. It doesn’t work that way.”