The Vineyard (8 page)

“What if I don't get in?” Tess asked.

“If you don't get in,” Olivia rationalized for the umpteenth time, “it'll only be because there wasn't an open spot in the fifth grade. Right now, the class is filled. They're expecting a dropout or two over the summer.”

“Why would someone drop out?”

“They move. Their parents take jobs in other parts of the country.”

“What if they don't?”

“If they don't, we'll apply for next year.”

“Then what'll I do
this
year?”

If they moved to a different city, there would be another public school, with the possibility of a better teacher and a better program for someone like Tess. If not, Olivia just didn't know. Her conference with Nancy Wright hadn't gone well.
It's the demographics,
the woman had claimed with more than a little arrogance.
Our student body is ahead of most. We can't hold all of these children back while we cater to a few who lag.
Olivia had had to go to the principal of the school and lobby hard before they finally did assign Tess to a fifth-grade class, but it was clear that they did so reluctantly and that they would hold Olivia responsible for the move. If something went wrong, they said in so many words, the school wouldn't be to blame.

And that, in a nutshell, was the problem with the school Tess was attending. The mentality was adversarial—them against us. There was no sense of partnership, no sense of working together for
the good of the child. The process had left Olivia more convinced than ever that Tess needed something different.

O
LIVIA WAS FOCUSED
on that thought when they turned off the highway and, following Natalie's directions, headed down the local road. She was wondering what would happen if she screwed up and couldn't do this job. Writing letters was nothing compared to writing a book. Her computer would check spelling and grammar, but it wouldn't express ideas and connect one with the next.

The truth? This job was a reach for her. If she lost it in a week, there would be no summer by the sea—no iced tea on the veranda, no picnics, no sailing. There would be no hours of being lost in the past. There would be no glowing reference from Natalie, no California connections from Carl, no good word put in to a powerful friend who might know someone on the board of directors of a museum that had an in-house restoration department. If Olivia screwed up, there would be no stipend, and without that stipend she could kiss good-bye the dream of sending Tess to Cambridge Heath.

So maybe it was irresponsible of her as a mother to have raised the child's hopes. But how not to? Tess had had to be interviewed and tested. Olivia couldn't have submitted an admissions application for her without her knowledge.

They passed a plaque marking the Asquonset town line. The inside of the car grew still. Olivia was as terrified as she was excited; she imagined that Tess felt the same.

The road was flanked by low-growing shrubs and the occasional large maple or oak, but the few houses strewn about looked run down. There was a rusted piece of farm equipment at the start of a dirt path, and a broken-down truck in a field just beyond. If Olivia didn't know better, she would have thought she was in a dying town.

But she did know better. There were neatly mowed fields in the distance beyond the truck, and grazing in its midst, a pair of elegant horses. Besides, according to the Asquonset Web site, the vineyard was thriving. Last year it had produced sixty thousand cases of wine, up from fifty-five thousand the year before, and the estimate for this year was even higher. Asquonset wines were hot up and down the East Coast. Estate labels were being served in the best restaurants, more moderately priced labels were being snapped up for home use,
and all of that stood to increase if Natalie's upcoming marriage merged two big wine names. No, there was nothing dying about this operation. A little chipped paint on the outskirts of town wasn't getting her down.

More to the point, she wasn't about to judge a book by its cover. She had wasted far too much energy in her life doing that. She had fallen for Jared's brains and Ted's intensity, for Damien's singing voice and Peter's baklava. Not a one of the four had offered much else in terms of a relationship.

Now Olivia had new clothes, a new job, and a new town. This was a new day. She was turning over a new leaf.

A
SQUONSET CENTER
materialized just when Natalie's directions said that it would. It was little more than a crossroads, with a sandwich shop on one corner, Pindman's General Store on another, a Cape cottage that appeared to house a lawyer, a psychiatrist, and a vet on the third corner, and a private home on the last. All four buildings were variations on the wood-frame theme, with the sandwich shop low and long, the general store narrow and tall, and the cottage and private home somewhere in between. All four were yellow and painted none too recently—although the faded look struck Olivia as being deliberate. A couple emerging from the professional office looked well dressed and content, as did a pair of little boys sitting on the general store steps. American flags flew proudly. Mailboxes were neatly numbered. A FedEx delivery truck approached from Olivia's right. The driver honked and waved at a group of twenty-somethings sitting on picnic benches outside the sandwich shop.

Deliberate, indeed, Olivia thought. The center of town had age and a cultivated charm. She suspected that there were wonderful stories to be told about the origin of Pindman's or the various incarnations of the professional building; and the sandwich shop had eternal-gathering-spot written all over it. She would be back with her camera to photograph this corner, and more than once, she guessed.

The road began to climb, taking them past a small brick building with a
Town Hall
sign and an oversized garage with a
Fire Department
sign. They crested a gentle rise that held a pretty white church. Its steeple was luminous in a pale blue sky, but what caught Olivia's breath was the view of the ocean beyond.

“Look!” she cried.

Tess said, “I'm hungry. Aren't there any restaurants here?”

“There's the
ocean
.” But the view was already gone, obstructed by a stretch of thicket, and then the road dipped again, heading inland. Olivia was ebullient. “This is going to be so good.” She rolled down the window and felt a wash of warm, salty air.

“I have to use the bathroom,” Tess announced.

“Hold it. We can't be two miles from the vineyard.”

“But there's
nothing
here,” Tess remarked, and she was right. At that minute, Olivia saw only scrub forests and barren fields.

Then the vineyard came into view—not the vineyard, actually, just the sign, but the effect was the same. It was bold and bright, startlingly vivid in a world where all else seemed muted. No single minimalist line here. This bunch of grapes spilling from a wineglass was painted in glorious color, and instead of having the expected burgundy letters, the vineyard name was embossed in gold.

Heart pounding, Olivia turned left onto a narrow road covered with pebbles that crunched under her tires. The road undulated inland, alternately climbing and leveling, brightening with fields of young cornstalks, darkening under forests of cedar and birch.

“Where's the house?” Tess asked after a minute.

Olivia was waiting, watching, wondering the very same thing. They crested another rise, and the fields changed. There were low stone walls running along the side of the road now, and though the greenery here grew in rows as neat as the corn, it was low to the ground.

Olivia had done her homework. “Those are potatoes,” she told Tess. “The Seebrings grow both—corn and potatoes.”

“I thought they grew grapes.”

“They do now, but they didn't always. Potatoes came first. They were the cover during Prohibition.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“During Prohibition, people weren't allowed to sell wine. For all official purposes, Asquonset supported itself growing potatoes and corn.”

“But they did grow grapes and they did sell wine?”

“Much less than they do now, but yes.”

“Then they were criminals.”

Olivia didn't want Tess
thinking
illegal, much less asking Natalie about it. “Well, Prohibition was very unpopular. More people
were against it than for it. That's why it didn't last very long. It was a bad idea from the start. Put down your window, Tess.” She inhaled as Tess complied. “Smell that?”

Tess sniffed. “I smell dirt.”

“It's earth. It's earth that's fertile and moist.”

“If there's poison ivy here, I'm in trouble.”

“You won't get poison ivy. I brought your medicine. You never get it when I bring the medicine.”

Tess didn't respond to that. She was sitting as far forward as her seat belt would allow, scanning the road again. “So, where's the
vineyard?”

Five
 

O
LIVIA GUIDED THE CAR
around a turn to a patch of farmland that at first glance looked simply scrubby and low. Then she noticed posts, wires, and a pattern of plantings. Exhilarated, she declared, “Right
there.”

As the car cruised slowly closer, a world of neatly trellised vines became delineated, tidy rows of gnarled canes and branches with pale green canopies, sides trimmed and guided for maximum exposure to the sun.

Some rows had signs.
Chardonnay,
read one. Farther on, another read,
Pinot Noir
.

Olivia got goose bumps. It didn't matter that the hard little BBs growing on the vines in June only remotely resembled grapes. After ogling Asquonset on paper for months, she felt as if she were in the company of celebrities.

No. That was not the right analogy, she realized. Celebrity was shallow. The feeling here was almost religious. Driving more slowly up that pebbled road, flanked by descendants of the vinifera that had been producing precious European wines for hundreds of years, she felt a hush. And the awe seemed mutual. She imagined that the vineyard
had parted to let them through and would close up again once they passed.

“What do the signs say, Mom?”

“They're the names of grapes. Must be by section. That was Pinot Noir on your right. You know which side that is.”

Tess often confused them. This time, she didn't. She pointed right, then switched sides. “What's that one?”

“Riesling,” Olivia read and gasped. “Oh my.”

A man had risen between two rows of vines.

“Who's
he?”
Tess asked.

“One of the workers, I guess.”

“Where'd he come from?”

“He must've been crouched down in there.” Standing now, he was taller than the highest trellis by more than a foot. She saw auburn hair, sunburned skin, broad shoulders, a maroon T-shirt with the arms ripped off and a tear under the neck band. He wore dark glasses, but he was clearly looking their way.

“Why was he crouched down?”

“He was working.”

“Why is he staring at us?”

“Not staring. Just looking. We're strangers. He's curious.”

“Mom,”
Tess murmured out of the corner of her mouth, “why are you slowing
down?
He does not look nice.”

No, in fact he didn't—but Olivia hadn't realized that she was staring, or that she had slowed. Facing forward, she accelerated gently.

“I hope they're not all like him,” Tess said once they were safely past. “He doesn't want us here.”

“Why do you say that?”

“His face said it.”

Olivia thought his face was pretty compelling. Somber and intent. But compelling.

“So, where's the house?” Tess asked.

“It's coming.”

“We'll be at the river soon,” the child warned. Bless her, she had studied the maps and remembered Olivia's narration. She knew that if the ocean was behind them, the river was ahead. Yes, Olivia thought, she is smart. What she lacked was a sense of distance, which had more to do with inexperience than dyslexia. She didn't realize
that driving slowly, climbing and twisting, they had crossed barely a quarter of the peninsula that the Seebring family owned.

Then the Great House appeared. It rose with surprising suddenness, and actually had been there all along, but was so neatly framed by trees at the very top of the hill that it had been hidden for a bit. Then again, Olivia may have been so taken by the sight of the vineyard that she had missed it. The Great House looked different from the photographs she had restored. It appeared nowhere near as large or as bright in person. The first floor was clad in large slabs of stone held together by mortar, deeply shadowed where a sloped roof covered the porch. The second floor wore wood, weathered gray by the sea air. The two blended into one hard, craggy face.

It hadn't been like that in pictures. Bottom and top had seemed gentle and distinct. For a second, Olivia had the horrible thought that she had created something in the darkroom that hadn't existed at all—worse, had created something in her
mind
that hadn't existed at all.