The Vineyard (15 page)

He picked off a low leaf that grew just above a cluster of nascent grapes, studied the resulting configuration of fruit and light, then plucked off another. Satisfied, he moved to the next bunch.

“What are you doing?” came the voice of a child.

He looked up. Olivia Jones's daughter stood halfway down the row, staring at him through glasses that made her eyes look too large in comparison to the rest of her, which seemed small, enveloped by a neon green rain slicker. She had the hood up, but frizzy wisps of brown hair stuck out at odd spots.

Simon hadn't realized it was misting until he saw her push the back of her hand over her glasses.

“That makes it worse,” he told her, wondering how she could see with her glasses all smudged. He gestured her away from the vines. “You're standing too close. The grapes need to breathe.”

She took one step away, but no more. “You're just as close as I was.”

“I'm working,” he said and returned to his task, hoping she would take the hint and leave.

“If I was too close, then so's your cat.”

“He's a cat. He's shorter than you, and he's not wearing a big raincoat.”

“He's ugly.”

Simon shot her a look. “Thank you. That was very nice.” He studied his vine.

“What are you doing?”

He snapped off a leaf. “Pruning.”

“What does that do?”

He snapped off another leaf. “It thins the leaf canopy.”

“Why do you need to thin it?”

“If there are too many leaves around these grapes, they can't get the sun.” He sat back on his haunches to study the cluster he'd cleared.

“It doesn't look very sunny to me. And those don't look like grapes.” Her tone of voice made her sound like a spoiled little girl.

Turning around, he decided that she looked like one, too. Her eyes were hard. Her chin jutted out. “Trust me,” he said. “They're grapes.”

“Can I eat them?”

“Don't you dare.”

“Why not?”

“Because they're sour and they're hard. If you eat them now, you'll have a bellyache and I'll have no harvest.”

“I wasn't going to eat
all
of them,” she said.

“Don't … eat … any,” he told her, enunciating each word separately while he gave her a long, hard look. Incredibly, she returned it. He was thinking that she had some kind of gall—not entirely unlike her mother, he noted—when she turned and marched off in the other direction.

She didn't like him. Fine. He didn't like her either. He hadn't asked to have a child around. He certainly didn't want one wandering through his vineyards. He couldn't afford to be distracted—the quality of the year's vintage was precarious enough without that.

When his stomach growled, he glanced at his watch. It was nearly noon. Right about now, Madalena would be putting out a spread of sandwiches in the Great House kitchen. Anyone could stop by. It was a casual custom, one of the perks of life at Asquonset. He'd been grabbing lunch at the Great House all his life.

Today, he was in the mood for something different. He didn't care what. A grinder from the crossroads would be fine. Even a Big Mac from Huffington would do. Huffington was the next town over. He could handle the drive.

First, though, he needed therapy. Ignoring the mist, which was looking more like rain by the minute, he went back to leafing and
trellising until he felt the knot inside him loosen. The vineyard did that to him, never failed. The rest of his world could be falling apart, but the vines were always there. Whether dormant or growing, shorter or taller, heavy with grapes or with promise alone, they responded to his touch.

When Donna dropped by after spending the morning with the Chardonnays, he sent her up to lunch without him. Likewise, he passed when Natalie called him on the Nextel that was hooked to the back of his belt. His hair grew wet. His shirt grew wet, sticking to his skin, but he worked until the sound of the vines and the smell of the earth had restored his equilibrium.

Then he returned to the shed, hopped in the pickup, and left Asquonset behind.

Nine
 

O
NE WEEK LATER
, Olivia was again up at dawn, perched on the window seat in her bedroom, her arms hugging her knees. One week later, she reminded herself. Hard to believe. Each day had been fuller than the last—and Natalie's book was slow in coming.

Was Natalie concerned? No.

“How can you write my story without knowing Asquonset?” she asked and proceeded to make one suggestion after another for things that kept Olivia away from the loft and work on the book. Olivia might have begun to fear that Simon was right—that Natalie hadn't brought her to Asquonset to write a book at all—if Simon had been around. But he was nowhere in sight during a walking tour of the vineyard or an introductory lunch at the yacht club. They didn't so much as pass his pickup during a driving tour of the town. And when it came to an afternoon at the movies with Natalie and Carl, he either wasn't invited or opted out.

The movie outing was on Saturday. Natalie and Carl were as into it, and as into fast food at an old-fashioned drive-in afterward, as were Olivia and Tess. How could Olivia not dream then? Of course, Natalie had ulterior motives for bringing her to Asquonset,
but they involved returning long-lost kin to the vineyard—or so the dream went. Lord knew, there didn't seem to be any other young blood around. To Olivia's knowledge, neither of Natalie's grandchildren had called. Nor had any cousins or nieces and nephews. Carl had no family but Simon. And Simon's wife and daughter were dead.

The dream got a whittling down on Sunday, when Olivia and Tess were invited to services in the sweet, white-steepled church near the center of town. It seemed that several carloads of people from the vineyard went together each week. Olivia and Tess were invited along as part of the Asquonset family, in the broadest sense of the word.

Tess was mildly appalled. “We don't go to church,” she whispered in dismay as Olivia ushered her off to their rooms to get dressed when breakfast was done.

“We do,” Olivia replied. “Just not often. We haven't found a church that we like.”

“But what am I supposed to
do
there?”

“Listen. Sing. Pray.”

“What do I wear?”

“Your new sundress.”

Tess sent her a pleading look. “Every other time I wear something new, it's wrong. I mean, there I am at the yacht club meeting the kids who'll be in my sailing class, and they're not wearing white shorts and sandals. They're wearing cutoffs and sneakers. I felt like a
geek
.”

“Fine. So now you're wearing cutoffs.” With Asquonset shirts. Tess always chose one of those, Olivia noticed. “But this is church. You heard what Natalie said. People dress for church.”

Olivia put on her own new sundress. She took care with her makeup and worked extra hard on her hair. Her appearance was a reflection on Natalie, and she wanted to look the part of the worthy assistant. Or cousin. Or niece.

Simon wasn't with the Asquonset group, or anywhere else in the church either, but this time Olivia's clothes were just right. She said an extra little prayer of thanks for that, plus an extra little prayer for sun and an extra little prayer for Tess.

Looking back over their first days at Asquonset, Olivia wondered if the last had indeed worked. Tess was nervous about sailing and she was dreading tutoring. There were some positive things, though. For starters, she had found four best friends in the cats that
lived in the house. Like children at the playground, they were waiting when she came down in the morning, or came in from outside, or popped up to the attic office in search of Olivia. They followed her from room to room and jockeyed for her attention, Henri with greater stealth than the more in-your-face Maxwell and Bernard, and Achmed from his imperial perch in the loft. In turn she spent hours doting on each, rubbing heads, brushing backs, sketching their faces on her pad.

Cats weren't other kids, but as playmates they were better than nothing.

Another positive thing was tennis. Carl turned out to be the instructor, and Olivia couldn't have asked for a better one for Tess. He was patient and gentle. Since he was a known quantity to the child by now, he wasn't threatening, as a new teacher would be. He was also good at tennis.

“I had to be, living here all these years,” he teased when Olivia remarked on it. “Alexander loved the game. He used to pull me out of the vineyards to play when he didn't have a partner. Then Simon wanted to learn, having the court right here and all.”

“Was he better than me?” Tess asked, tipping her head back and looking up through her glasses from under the bill of an Asquonset hat. She'd had a total of two lessons at that point and had easily missed more than half of the balls he had tossed at her racket.

Carl appeared to give it some thought. “No,” he finally said. “You're better. Simon wanted to be all power and speed even before he learned to connect with the ball. He was all boy, swinging this way and swinging that, missing most everything in sight.”

“I was missing stuff.”

“Less at the end than the start. You're catching on. You're watching the ball, like I told you to do. You're coming to judge the distance between your hand and the center of the racket.”

“And Simon didn't?”

“Well, it took him awhile.” Carl leaned closed to Tess. “Only don't you tell him I said that.”

So, on the plus side of the ledger for Tess were the cats, the Asquonset gear, and Carl. On the negative side was tutoring.

Tess didn't want it. She didn't want any reminder of weakness. She would have been quite content to spend the summer without opening a book, but Olivia refused to have that. The whole point in coming here was to be able to afford daily tutoring. Olivia knew
there would be fights before each session, but she vowed not to be swayed.

That resolve was strengthened by the tutor herself. Sandy Adelson was the head of the special needs program at Braemont, the same day school in Providence that Olivia was eyeing for Tess. That was a major plus, as far as Olivia was concerned—an immediate
in,
should Olivia land a job nearby for the fall—but it was only the first of the pluses.

Sandy was the daughter of one of Natalie's oldest friends. She lived ten minutes from Asquonset. Something of a free spirit, she wore her gray hair straight, center-parted, and long; her halter tops were hand-crocheted and her jeans wildly embroidered. She was the least likely looking expert on learning disabilities that Olivia had ever met, but she was an expert nevertheless. She was also dedicated, if the hours she spent poring through Tess's files prior to their first meeting were any indication.

They held that first meeting on the patio, at a table under the awning. Olivia had vowed to be there, even before Sandy requested her presence. That was the first difference from past tutors; the second came barely five minutes into the session.

“I think,” Sandy said, speaking straight to Tess, “that I'd like to try a new approach. I've had success using it with other students with visual discrimination problems like yours.”

“I'm dyslexic,” Tess corrected.

“Yes, but there are different kinds of dyslexia. Some kinds involve auditory processing. Yours involves a visual problem. You don't see letters and words the way you should. But unless you see them correctly, you can't spell them or write them or understand them.”

“I just had my glasses checked. I can see fine.”

Come on, Tess,
Olivia scolded silently.
You know what she means.

Sandy was unperturbed. “Physically, yes. Your eyes see what's on the paper, but they don't interpret it in a way that your brain understands. We can correct that.”

“How?”

“By giving you tools to help you see the correct way.”

“Tools, like nuts and bolts? Or special glasses?” Tess asked, sounding bored.

Olivia had to bite her tongue to resist reprimanding her daughter.

Again, Sandy seemed unfazed. “Tools, like new ways to look at words. New ways to read books. New ways to study for tests. New ways to
take
tests.”

“You can't do all that in one summer.”

“I can come close.” Turning to Olivia, she said, “There are learning strategies for children like Tess. Has she been taught SQ3R?”

Olivia blinked and shook her head.

“How about visual mapping?”

“No,” Olivia said. “Her tutors have focused on reviewing what's been done in class.”

“Without much success,” Tess put in.

Sandy returned to her with a smile. “Well, maybe that's why. We have to be proactive, not reactive. We have to prepare you to succeed, not play catch-up after you've failed.”

Tess didn't have a comeback for that.

“So one of the things we'll do is to preread the books that you'll be reading in the fall.”