I was by my mother’s side. Bobby, my father’s best man, stood by his. Margaret and the twins, eager flower boys, completed the circle.
“There is nothing for me to say that I haven’t said,” my father said, talking to everyone, his eyes held fast on my mother.
“Except bon voyage,” my mother said.
He smiled. “Except bon voyage,” he said.
With that, he kissed her. Everyone cheered. And we opened wine, more and more wine, as they spoke about leaving there, closing up the house. They told us they were going on a trip around the world, boating to the south of France and the Mediterranean, the gorgeous coast of South America. That part of the plan they kept: my father buying that wristband that he thought was going to stop the seasickness that he wasn’t even worried about coming. There was no worry. Just excitement. The two of them were heading off to be together on a new adventure. Though this time instead of following, my mother was leading the way. My mother was leading him.
Suzannah and I walked away from the crowd, up to the top of the hill, the very top of the hill that looked out over the entire vineyard. The fifty acres that had taken my father his adult lifetime to accumulate: the original ten, the house and gardens he and my mother had built on them, the forty that followed.
How long ago had my father been the one standing here, looking over this land? How had he known what to do with it? How had I not figured out, before it was too late, how much that mattered?
“It’s a good thing you listened to me and decided to stay here,” she said.
I laughed.
“So is this your new look?”
She pointed at my curls falling over my shoulders, no makeup, none of my Los Angeles armor.
I smiled. “Much less refined?”
She shook her head. “Much more . . . happy.”
She gave me a kind smile.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Apparently not return phone calls,” Jacob said.
We turned around to see him behind us, his hands in his pockets, a button-down shirt on, wine running down the front of it.
“Am I interrupting?”
Suzannah smiled at him. “Of course you are,” she said, irritated.
Suzannah walked away, turning back and making the so-so sign with her hands. I laughed, looking away from her, looking back at Jacob and his wine-covered shirt.
He shrugged apologetically, pulling on his shirt. “I’m a mess,” he said.
“What happened?”
“The twins. They were fighting each other for my licorice.”
I smiled. “Who won?”
“Not me,” he said. “I had to take off my vest.”
He moved closer so he was looking where I was looking, over the late-day vineyard. His vineyard now, The Last Straw, a subsidiary of Murray Grant Wines. And it was starting to feel like that was okay. I had lost that fight, which was hard to accept. But my parents were happy again, my brothers were on the mend. In the ways that mattered, I had won so much.
“They’re leaving on their boat trip tomorrow?” he said.
I nodded. He knew the answer, but he was trying to ask me something else, maybe why I hadn’t called him back. Maybe if it meant that I was staying here.
“You’re okay with that?”
“As long as they’re going together,” I said.
“I told your father that the boat is a good idea,” he said. “It will take them to the place they want to go next.”
“How do you know?”
He shrugged. “I know some things.”
I smiled, wanting that to be correct, that my parents would dock somewhere, call it Big Sur. Somewhere surrounded by water and trees. Somewhere they would make their home.
Jacob crossed his arms over his chest. “Lee’s gone,” he said.
“I heard something about that.”
“I’m doing okay. Thanks for asking.”
I laughed.
“She left the day after the harvest party,” he said. “She moved to Seattle to take a job with Tim O’Reilly. And to get away from me. It was the right thing. She’s happier there.”
Jacob kicked the ground beneath him, soil rising up. Soft and damp. November soil, ready for a quiet winter, its well-earned rest.
“What about you?” he said. “What’s next?”
He looked at me, held my eyes. It was too much, though, to meet his gaze. So I looked away, to the vineyard.
“I’m going to get a plot of land. I won’t be able to afford much. But I’m going to start with a small plot of land. Five acres. See what I can do.”