Valley Fever (29 page)

“They're too big not to sell to, George.” It was Uncle Felix's line.

“I don't need them. We're not in debt.”

I put the lids on the kettles. “We can leave these alone,” I said.

George said, then, “Why is it that I'm the only one in my family invited to these things? You never invite my mother or brothers. You never invited Dad, even, when he was alive.”

“I think we did.”

“No, Inky. And your dad liked my dad. Didn't he?”

“Everyone loved your dad, George.” George's father was simple and honest. He liked guns and falcons. He took care of his land, which is the most important thing neighboring farmers can ask.

“My dad liked your dad, I know,” he said.

“Our dads are alike. A lot alike.”

“Why, then?”

“It's because my mother is a bitch.”

He laughed. “I knew that.”

“She's the reason we broke up, George.”

“I think I was the reason we broke up.”

“You were,” I said. “But she was insidious.”

“Yes. She was.” That's when he pulled out his first cigarette.

“No worse than Ellie's mother, though, right?”

He laughed just a little bit. “I love you because you have not changed at all, not one moment, not one molecule has changed.” He put his lovely rough hand on my waist.

“Don't use the word
love
with me, really.” I moved away.

“I do, though. It's the right word. I know you. I thought we were going to be friends.”

“We are friends. While I'm back here, we're friends.”

“While you're back here,” he said, “is not very friendly.”

I adjusted one of the turkeys and poked the coals a bit. “Let's just start here.”

He kicked at the dried-up grass. “I'm not going anywhere else.”

“How do you know that?”

“Bees,” he said. “And trees. I have things to take care of. This is home, I'm happy here.”

George had always worn his shoes until they looked like they needed to be taped back together. He brushed his foot left and right over the dirt.

I conceded. “We can be friends everywhere.”

He nodded. “I can't believe I talked you into that,” he said. “I wonder what else I can talk you into.”

Debby wandered over to the barbecues, quite far from the rest of the guests and the lively action of the party. “This smells exciting,” she said. Debby had worn terroir-appropriate ballet flats, pale blue to match the moths on her dress. I wondered if she did this on her own or if Felix had given her instructions. So many of the wives who'd come to these parties for years still wore pointy heels that sunk into the grass or slipped precariously over the dirt.

“George, this is Uncle Felix's friend Debby.”

“This is where all the chic people are, I see,” Debby said.

“All the antisocial people,” George said.

Debby said, “The smokers are always the most interesting people.” Everyone was always flirting with George.

“I didn't know Uncle Felix had a friend,” George said.

Debby stood between us. “Ingrid, Felix tells me you lived in Paris.”

“Briefly,” I said.

“You'll have to give me a list of your favorite places for when Felix and I go.”

“Paris?” I said. As far as I knew, Felix had visited Italy once in his twenties and had never been back to Europe.

“After the crush, he says.”

“After the crush,” I said. “How did you convince him on Paris?” Mother was going to love this. Love it in a hate sort of way.

Aunt Jane had never been to Paris.

“He convinced me!” she said, her hand fluttering to her chest. She had begun to get those little wrinkles above her cleavage that women get in middle age.

“You tell Felix to take you to the south, to Bordeaux,” George said. “He'll be treated like royalty there.”

“It's true,” I told her. Even Mom and Dad were treated like celebrities in the wine regions of France. French growers and wine makers can't fathom the idea that someone farms twenty thousand acres.

“But he's treated like royalty here,” Debby said. “We want to see the Mona Lisa.”

“Let's go to Paris,” George said to me then. “We never went to Paris.”

“We never went anywhere,” I said. “Except New York, and you see what happened.”

“We should have gone to Paris, then,” he said.

“Paris is all pink and romantic, right?” said Debby, smiling those huge socially aspirational teeth.

“I don't know,” I said. “I was poor in Paris.” Paris was on my list of places that belonged to someone else.

*   *   *

Dad gave a toast, “To friends,” he said, “and my girls.” In harvest dinners past, Dad had made long toasts with jokes and addressed each guest with personal thank-yous. Tonight he had the strength for five words, which were enough. Anne carved my turkeys. Anne is very capable like that.

There were platters of tomatoes and cucumbers with piles of herbs on top and a large cast-iron pot full of pilaf, the same as always. Bottles of wine outnumbered the guests at the table. The pitchers of sidecars had been emptied. Chris seized a seat next to Anne and poured vodka into his glass from a bottle at his feet. He'd presented the bottle to Mother when he arrived and then had retrieved it from the kitchen counter before dinner started. Anne sat with her legs crossed toward Wilson, on her other side. She gave me long Anne winks across the table.

People laughed. Dinner outside, with the trucks and harvesters going for miles on farms all around, you can only hear the conversations happening right there next to you on one side at a time. You can't hear what's being said two seats down; you can't hear diagonally across the table. But you can hear the laughing from one end to the other.

There was no conversation worth listening to. I knew, by now, real conversations happened over lunch.

For dessert there were Thompsons with Manchego and a big wheel of Stilton you could dig out with a spoon. There were tiny thimbles of port from Ficklin, the winery in Madera, just up the road.

Mother was right: the dinner was good for Dad.

By the end of the evening, there was an unidentified Mercedes left in the driveway. We couldn't determine whom it belonged to until the next morning when Chris, still in his khaki pants and rope belt, ambled into the kitchen for breakfast, contrite, embarrassed, all his anger turned to humiliation.

“I don't know how I ended up down there,” he said. He had a red mark across his face where the criss-cross straps of the lounger had been.

“They're very comfortable lounge chairs,” Mother assured him. “Ask Ingrid.”

“Your pants are torn,” I said.

“I must have stumbled. Yes.” Terrible Chris looked as if he might cry. “You have been really kind to me. Thank you for having me last night. I didn't realize it was a sit-down affair.”

“But nothing,” Mother said. “Just some turkeys.” She spoke to him softly, tenderly, in a motherlike voice she never used with her own daughters. “We hope you had a nice time before you went to sleep.”

Then, shockingly, he did start to cry. “I'm sorry. You've been so kind. I don't know what's wrong.”

“It's a hangover,” I said.

“This town has been very difficult,” he said. “You know? It's just nearly impossible to live here.”

“It's been a particularly hot summer,” Mother said.

“It's not the weather,” he said. “It's been the people. I can't seem to find a way into this place. Not you, of course. But others.”

“People have their old friends,” Mother said. “It's like that.”

He nodded. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

“No one likes an outsider,” he said. “Even I don't like an outsider.”

“It must be lonesome,” Mother said. “A new place where everyone else knows each other.”

“I didn't mean to say that,” he said. “I don't know what I'm saying. I mean to say thank you, that's all. And I'm sorry I got so lit up last night.”

“We like for our guests to get drunk,” I said. It was true: we all loved a good drunk party, and last night had been one of the drunkest.

Mother gave him burnt toast and a small glass of pickle juice, her hangover cure.

When I saw him again at the club that fall, Terrible Chris never mentioned sleeping by the pool or his hangover in our kitchen. He never again asked about Anne. He had very pointy incisors, and he was always flashing them at me.

 

23.

By the end of September, growers were burning old vines. We needed sweaters outside at night. The smell of raisins drying had vanished; the valley smelled more each day like fertilizer and tar, the blank smell of the dormant season.

Dad's bedside table became his office, although the illness had compromised his ability to focus for more than a couple hours a day. He rarely left the bed. For valley fever, there was no more treatment than bed rest and fluids. The antifungal drugs the doctors tried at the beginning had no effect on Dad but to nauseate him even further.

He learned to wear slippers. We brought his work to him. From bed, he kept the books.

“It's nice when he raises his voice,” Mother said, listening to him make demands on the phone from his room.

“Who could he be talking to?”

“You would know better than I would,” she said. “They're all the same people to me. The chemical guys? The truck repair people? What's the difference. It's good to hear him fight for something.”

“Dad fights for everything,” I said.

*   *   *

What I didn't learn about the harvest season from George, I learned at the Vineyard. Sometimes I didn't even eat there, just went in to see who was there and to talk. Always there was someone to talk to.

Billy Moradian turned out to be a big gossip and full of good advice on harvest. It was Billy Moradian who warned me to keep on Felix about the grapes. “He's never going to pick those colombards, I don't care what he's telling you.” Green grapes that went for eight hundred dollars a ton last year were bringing in about two hundred dollars by the end of the season. In addition to the financial challenge of the grape glut, Felix was letting my grapes shrink on the vine.

I had started to think of them as my grapes.

Billy would give Felix a hard time, too. “Why are you putting this poor girl through this? Pick the grapes.” There were always artichokes, regardless of the season. There was always the bottle of lunch white on the table.

“I like my grapes sweet,” Felix would say.

“You can add the sugar,” I said.

“Sugar costs money. Let the sun make the sugar. We have plenty of that.”

Most all white grapes were off the vine. Their weight had been compromised by the delayed harvest, but it wasn't so much the weight that did us in that year as the drop in prices, no matter what your contract said. Napa and Sonoma and all the northern counties had gluts, too. It would have been impossible to sell the green grapes for more anywhere else. Felix had given us fair prices for the syrah and the merlot and the barbera, all the black grapes harvested so far, sticking to the number in the contract although he could have easily cut the price in half.

“Poor girl,” said Billy.

“She's no poor girl,” Felix said.

“You pick when you like,” I told him. “That's what the contract says.”

“That's what all my contracts say,” said Felix. He ate the breading off an artichoke.

“You're like Jack Sprat,” I said, eating the artichoke he'd left bare.

“I'll pick them this week,” he said. He took the crust off another and this time he ate the artichoke first. “I have been doing this a long time, Inky.”

Billy said, “Why do you let him speak to you like you're a little girl?”

“Inky's her name,” Felix said. “It's always been her name.”

“You should have picked last week,” I said. “At least last week and probably earlier. Dad says so, too.” The waitresses and most of the other guys in the bar had learned, by now, to avoid the table when Uncle Felix and I sat together. Billy Moradian, I think, enjoyed the tension.

“Where's your dad?” Felix said. “He hasn't joined us in a while.”

“Ingrid doesn't get either benefit,” Billy said. “She doesn't get the benefit of being your goddaughter, and she doesn't get the benefit of being an arm's-length grower.” He poured the last of the viognier into his glass. My grandparents used to tell me that whoever poured the last bit of wine in his glass had to buy the next bottle. No one at the Vineyard abided by that tradition. At the Vineyard, every meal got split individually, and each bottle of wine was charged to whoever had ordered it. Most everyone had an account settled at the end of each month.

Uncle Felix raised his index finger to the waitress for another.

“Wilson's the only one who gets the benefit of being family. Right, Uncle Felix?”

“Because he is,” Felix said. “He's what I've got to work with. You won't let me work with you.”

“I have to go,” I said, and kissed Uncle Felix on his round, dry forehead.

“Stay for one more glass,” Billy said.

I shook Billy's hand. I scooted the red club chair back up to the table. “Thank you,” I said. “I have a meeting in Berenda. Someone has to work in this family.”

*   *   *

Anne had returned to Los Angeles, to her half-empty home, to wait for word on what might happen in New York. Her agent, predictably, was not enthusiastic about Anne's theatrical ambitions. He'd been trying to distract her with a heavier than usual onslaught of auditions, keeping her from escaping.

“I'd rather be in this house alone than stay in Fresno any longer, anyway,” she said. “I think I begin to actually smell like Fresno.”