Stomping to the garage, I take three delivery boxes from beside the recycling bin and stomp back into the house, into his office. I yank open drawers and start throwing stuff into the boxes—some for Meadow to look at, some for trash.
In the lower right-hand drawer is a photo album I’ve never seen, and I pull it out. Laying it flat on the desk, I open it.
And there is my mother. Not Meadow. Shanti. I have only one photo of her, and all this time Augustus had this whole album of their wedding. My knees go weak and I sink into his chair, which lets go of a poof of air that smells of him. Something in me breaks.
Memories of my mother are of her terribly thin and despondent. I never liked to be left alone with her, and my father took me with him a lot. She wasn’t abusive, but I might as well have been with a plant. She never ate, so she never fed me. She didn’t shower, so she didn’t bathe me. She was wan and thin and pale and never spoke, as if I were a ghost.
In these photos, she’s happy, carefree, young. So very young. Her eyes are bright and her skin healthy. My dad is young, too, and less self-aware, his body posture sometimes awkward.
I think about what Meadow said, that he rescued women. Shanti was a runaway with drug issues when he found her and took her in, and they fell in love. I actually don’t know how long they were together, how long her addictions held sway in their lives. I have no memory of her sober.
Why did I name the winery after an addict?
The question slides into my mind sideways, and once it’s there I have trouble dislodging it. What twisted thing was in my mind when I came up with that? What weird curse did I bring down on my own head?
I look at her young, pretty face. Why did she get so lost? Why didn’t anyone help her? Why didn’t my father help her? The thought brings up another surge of powerful emotions, and it’s so much I just want it to stop. I want to stop feeling. Stop the pain of it.
Stinging, I put the album back in the drawer and open the other side. I halt.
All the drawer holds is a bottle of bourbon. I pull it out, planning to carry it to the kitchen and pour it down the sink, but instead, I place it on the desk and turn away, get up, leave the room.
Start my pacing once more.
I walk to the french doors. Clouds are blowing in from the west, and the wind cools things down. A buzzing restlessness burns up and down my spine, a sense of loss and longing and hope and—“Argh!” I say aloud, and walk back into the office.
The bourbon sits in the middle of the desk and I grab it, carry it to the kitchen. Open the lid. Lift it, ready to pour it down the sink, but the smell suddenly snares me. I bring it to my nose and inhale, closing my eyes as memories flood through my brain. My dad’s chest, rumbling with his laughter as I rested against him, the sharp voice of his reprimands, the way he got down on the floor to play Barbies with Rory and me. How proud I was of him when he was on television, how great he looked when he made jokes on-screen.
Without even thinking, I lift the bottle to my lips and drink. It tastes so good, and the heat slides down my throat like a magic elixir.
Tears are rolling down my face, and I don’t know if they’re for my dad or for myself, for all the time I’ve wasted, all the things I’ve lost. I stand in his kitchen, tasting the booze in my throat, and feel the relief of giving in, finally. I was never going to get sober, not really. I was just stopping for a while to get everybody off my case. I take another long swallow and let the tears come, wild and hot.
“I can’t do it!” I cry aloud. “I just don’t know how. I don’t know how to be this new person.”
And as if I conjured him, there’s my dad. Not at all ghostly, not strange, just himself. “You do know,” he says. “Pour it out.”
Instead, I lift it to my lips, drink. Close my eyes as it burns down my throat, welcoming the edge of peace that seeps in. I bang it down. “Why did you leave me? Why did you leave my mother? And Meadow? Why couldn’t you just stay? Why did you rescue all of them and not me?”
He puts his hand over mine and together we pour the bottle down the sink. I watch it go, feeling lightheaded and lost. “I did,” he says.
And I suddenly remember. Sitting on the concrete stoop of the winery, soaked with wine and shivering, I waited for Meadow.
But when a car arrived, it was my father who stepped out of it. He gathered me up and carried me back to his truck and covered me with a blanket. “I’m so sorry, Maya,” he said in the dark.
Now, in the kitchen of the home he’s left me, I watch the bourbon glug down the sink. “I miss you,” I cry. “I’m so sorry.”