“I know.”
“And you haven’t tried.”
He nodded. “I know that too.”
She was waiting to see what he’d say next.
“We can sell the vineyard,” he said. “If that’s what you want to do.”
“No one is talking about selling the vineyard, Dan. Why is that all that you hear?”
She looked at him. And he saw it: The way she had looked at him at the beginning, all that love in her eyes—this looked like the opposite.
“What are we talking about, then?”
“Something else,” she said.
She started walking away, but he held on to her arm. He didn’t say anything, but he held on, hoping she would see what he didn’t seem to know how to say. He was waiting for her to do it, the thing she would do when they were this angry with each other, the thing she was the one who knew how to do.
He was waiting for her to move back toward him.
The Details
Synchronization.
A fire hit a vineyard. And then, like a miracle, it started to pour. It was overdue to pour but it started then, pressing down at the fire.
Synchronization. Your heart pumped blood to the necessary vessels. The vessels pumped the blood back to the heart muscle. Everything flowed through the coronary artery to the heart muscle. To where everything was needed.
An unspoken agreement.
Ben went back to the house to relieve Michelle. Margaret went with him to be with her twins. They needed her, and it was easier to be with them. She didn’t expect Bobby to go with her. But he did. Bobby went to oversee the grape picking, to do the one thing for my father he felt he could do at that moment. Then Finn left to deal with the fire department, to see what was left of the winemaker’s cottage. By the time my mother came out, there was only me, surrounded by empty seats.
My mother walked back into the waiting room, carrying an enormous care package.
“You all alone? How did that happen?”
“A little bit of luck.”
She smiled. “Thanks for staying for me,” she said.
She put the care package down on the seat next to me and took the seat on its other side, exhausted.
“What a night,” she said.
“How is he?”
“He was irritated more than anything else, which seemed like a good sign.”
“About what?”
She shrugged. “He wants to get to the grapes.”
I started to tell her that it was taken care of, that Bobby was handling it, but that wouldn’t have mattered to my father. He would need to be there himself to believe it.
“He tried to tell me yesterday about the heart attack. I only half-heard him.”
“He probably only half-told you.”
I looked down, still feeling guilty that I hadn’t known intrinsically what was going on here. And also that I hadn’t been here while it was happening.
“Don’t do that.”
I looked at her. “What?”
“Don’t say this happened again because he’s selling the vineyard,” my mother said. “It’s not. He wanted you to understand that. This is because he didn’t sell it sooner.”
I nodded. It seemed like she was right. My father had given everything he could to this land. He needed to give himself to something else now. I was done fighting him on that. I was done fighting him on anything, except what he said he wanted for himself.
My mother smiled. “He said it was a fitting ending.”
“For the last harvest?”
“For the last harvest,” my mother said.
She leaned toward me. “And that was before the fire inspector called. It seems someone left something on the stove in the winemaker’s cottage.”
She shook her head, laughing. What else was there to do? In the realm of disasters that night, the fire was lower on the list. Higher on the list was this: She looked happy. She looked happier than she should in a hospital waiting room. She looked happier than she had since I’d walked in the door in my wedding dress, her in her towel. Two different lifetimes.
And I saw it creep over her face, the rest of it, what she had to do. What was required of her. She needed to leave Henry, if she was going to reimagine her life with my father.
She looked down. “Henry is a good man,” she said. “When I told you how Henry made me feel, how he made me feel seen, I left that part out.” She shook her head. “One of these days, I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“How does it end, Mom?”
She paused. “With your father. It ends with your father.”