Counties. His daughter Erica now ran the business, but Austin still got involved when listings were in the multimillions of dollars.
Eli had just upped the stakes, setting up that meeting, and we both knew it. He’d also caught me off- guard.
It was neither the time nor the place to discuss anything so I just said, “Yes, I think we should talk later.”
After that, I stayed by the buffet table helping Dominique and her staff in an assembly-line preparation of dinner plates. Across from us, Joe Dawson and Greg Knight carved mounds of roast pork under the direction of one of the chefs from the Goose Creek Inn.
Mia, who was ferrying the heaping platters of meat to the buffet table, set one of them down in front of me and said quietly, “Greg and I stopped by the house on our way here. What happened to the clock? Is it being fixed or something?”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“Then where is it?”
“It’s a long story.”
She stared hard at me. “Lucie, you didn’t sell it, did you?” Her tone was somewhere between accusation and disbelief.
“I had no choice. We needed the money to fix the motor on the destemmer. Plus we’ve got to pay the workers for harvest.”
“How could you? That clock has been in our family for over a hundred years!” Her voice rose sharply and a few dinner guests looked our way. She stormed on. “I would have begged or borrowed the money instead. I never would have sold it!”
It was completely out of character for Mia, the dreamy, artistic unmaterial girl, to get worked up over the loss of a piece of furniture, sentimental value notwithstanding. Mostly she fretted over more abstract matters like the hole in the ozone or space debris.
I said, stunned, “If you’re so broken up about it, how come you’re willing to sell the house and the vineyard? I didn’t like it any more than you do.”
“
Mia glared at me, then walked over to Greg, flipping her hair off her neck like the twitching tail of an angry cat. She’d been this edgy and irritable at Leland’s wake, but since then things had been okay. Now it was back to fireworks between us. Not because of the clock, either.
I watched her touch Greg’s elbow, then pull his head down so she could whisper in his ear. He listened briefly before turning away. I caught a glimpse of the expression on his face. He looked irritated.
I saw her face, too. She looked hurt.
Though I avoided making eye contact with him, I knew he watched my every move for the rest of the evening like I was an exotic bird in a cage. As the evening wore on, it was obvious I wasn’t the only one who noticed. Mia, increasingly morose and unhappy, slammed a tray down in front of me, sending a spray of Pinot Noir sloshing from a glass and cascading in a graceful arc across my yellow sundress. I looked like I’d been shot.
“Oops.” She smiled. “Sorry.” She wasn’t.
“It was an accident. Forget it.” I poured sparkling water on a napkin and dabbed at my skirt.
Someone was at my elbow. Quinn handed me a salt shaker. “What was that all about?” He, too, had changed his clothes. Yet another Hawaiian shirt. This one was brown and green with dancing martini glasses, parrots, and tropical foliage.
“An accident,” I repeated taking the salt and sprinkling it on the largest stain, which turned dull purple. “Thanks for the salt. The tray slipped out of her hands. Anyway, it’s an old dress. It doesn’t matter.”
“If you say so.” There was a nearly simultaneous scraping noise of many chairs being pushed back. “I’d better get going. Some of these old folks might need help navigating that path over to the Ruins. Don’t want anybody losing their footing and suing. You coming?”
“I’ll help clean up here first.”
I began stacking plates when someone said behind me, “You look like you could use this.” Joe Dawson held two glasses of Chardonnay. He smiled and handed one of them to me.
“I probably shouldn’t until we finish cleaning up.”
“Aw, go ahead.” He clinked his glass against mine. An ex-baseball player in his days at the University of Virginia, he’d been good enough to be scouted by professionals until a broken hand during a beach week surfing accident ended his career. He was tall and rangy, dark-haired with flecks of gray, and good-looking in the kind of wholesome, ruddy-cheeked way that went over big with the group of jailbait girls he taught. From what Dominique said, they revered him like a minor god. He smiled and flashed boyish dimples. “It’s good to have you home, sweetheart.”
“It’s good to be home.”
He drank some wine, gesturing to the empty tables with their hurricane lanterns still gently flickering and the fairy lights in the trees above. “Place is beautiful, you know? I just can’t imagine it without your family running things. I heard you’re giving the listing to Austin and Erica. They’ll do right by you.”
“We’re not giving the listing to anyone. The vineyard’s not for sale.”
His eyebrows went up. “Not according to your brother.”
“He doesn’t have the final word.”
“So who’s going to run the place? Not you, surely.”
“Why not?”
He said, in a schoolteacher’s patient voice, “Look, darlin’, you of all people know what punishing physical work it is. Only people who don’t have a clue what’s involved think we live in a Dionysian paradise where we toddle around with a glass of champagne all day and life’s a big party. And frankly, I’m not sure how to put this, but for someone who is…who doesn’t…” He stopped talking and looked embarrassed.
“Use a cane?” I waved mine. “You mean, like Franklin Roosevelt shouldn’t have been president because he was in a wheelchair?”
“Oh, come on, Lucie. You know I didn’t mean that.”
“You know, one thing I’ve learned about being handicapped is that people tend to marginalize you right off the bat. We’re treated as a subclass of humanity because we’re broken, somehow, or deformed. Do you know what it feels like not to be given the same chance as everyone else? For people to assume automatically that you’re inferior?” It slipped out with more passion than I intended.
Even in the darkness, I saw him flush. He set down his glass and mine and pulled me to him, brushing my hair off my face and tucking a strand behind my ear. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I really am. You know I’ll help out around here like I always do. As long as I’m still in town.”
I pulled away. “Are you going somewhere?”
“Didn’t you know? I took a sabbatical from the academy. I’m off to Charlottesville in a couple of weeks. Finally gonna finish my dissertation. It only took me ten years.”
“I hadn’t heard. The sound of hundreds of teenage hearts breaking must have been deafening when you made that decision.”
He grinned, but it was rueful. “Yeah, well, maybe. Unfortunately the one heart it didn’t break belongs to your cousin. I think she’s pretty exasperated with me. Maybe some time apart, you know? The other night she asked me in her own special way if I was ever going to put my head to the grindstone and get my doctorate. I figured it was about time.”
“Good for you,” I said. “And don’t worry about Dominique. She’ll come around. She’s just overworked right now.”
“I know. Fitz’s death was a huge blow, too.” He picked up his glass and finished his wine. “Plus she’s nervous as all get out ever since she decided to apply for her U.S. citizenship. She’s been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in her sleep the past couple of nights.” He sounded gloomy. “I hope she doesn’t say ‘I pledge ingredients to the flag’ when she’s in front of the judge.”
A dark-haired waitress with her hair in a long braid came up to us. She held out a laundry bag and waved it at Joe. “We’re clearing the dishes. Dominique wants you two to take care of the tablecloths.”
