“I did not.”
“I’ve got to go.”
“Wait.” Her voice was soft. “Let’s not leave it like this between us. Please, Luce. I wanted to come by after work today and ask you something. I was hoping…well, counting on, that you’d be my maid of honor.”
I saw the smear of lipstick on her front teeth from where she’d bitten her lip as she waited for my reply. We stared at each other across a chasm that had opened up in the few feet between us that seemed as wide and deep as the Grand Canyon. Here was the one favor that symbolized what we’d meant to each other for so many years.
I struggled to control my voice. “Maybe this isn’t the best time—”
“Of course,” she said. “I understand.”
I turned and walked blindly out of her office, no longer caring that tears were flowing down my cheeks. Kit’s office door clicked shut, and a moment later I heard a muffled sound like a sob. I kept on walking, this time without even a nod to the receptionist, who said nothing as I passed her desk.
I stepped outside and closed the front door. From here, there was no turning back.
Chapter 14
Quinn’s salt-and-pepper head was bent over the record book in the lab when I showed up in the barrel room forty-five minutes later. I’d checked the rearview mirror in the Mini before getting out of the car. My eyes were no longer red-rimmed from crying. He’d never know.
I paused in the doorway as he closed the lab book and slid it over to a corner of the workbench. His eyes zeroed in on my face.
“You look like hell. I heard you paid Kit a visit. Guess it didn’t go too well, huh?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
He pushed his bar stool back a few feet and studied me some more. “What do you want to talk about?”
I picked up a graduated beaker and examined it.
“How about the Riesling? Have you decided when you want to pick?”
He stuck his pencil behind an ear and folded his arms across his chest. Today he wore a gray athletic T-shirt and jeans with a hole in one knee. The usual chains around his neck and the leather and steel bracelet around one wrist.
“No later than Thursday,” he said. “Before Edouard gets here.”
“Who?” I set the beaker down.
“The newest hurricane. We’re whipping right through the alphabet. This one may not hit us, either, but we’re going to get slammed with rain.” He wrinkled his forehead. “You haven’t been following it, have you?”
“Of course I have.”
“So where is it now, weather girl?”
“The Atlantic,” I said. Hurricanes always started there.
He rolled his eyes. “I knew you didn’t know. Look, I got a reefer truck coming in since we’re going to have to move fast to get those grapes picked.”
A reefer truck was short for refrigerated truck. We could keep the fruit chilled until we were ready to start processing it—putting it through the destemmer, pressing it, and moving it to the tanks to begin fermentation. It bought us time.
“Okay.”
“I told Chance we’ll need extra pickers that day.”
“Okay.”
Quinn stood and shoved me gently into the barrel room. “You aren’t listening to a word I say.” He walked me over to the long pine table and pulled out a chair. “Have a seat.”
I sat.
“If you insist on talking about the Riesling,” he said, leaning against the table, “I’ve been on the phone with Harry and John. They both think making a dessert wine is a terrific idea. I want to pick twice. Now and after the first hard freeze.”
Harry Dye and John Chappell owned vineyards not far from ours. We helped one another all the time, sharing problems and successes with the types of grapes we could grow since our soil and climate were practically identical.
“Harry and John don’t grow Riesling.”
“That’s why it would be unique to us.”
I shook my head. “Too risky that late in the year because of the weather. And you know we’re screwed if we don’t get it picked in one night and the next day it warms up.”
“I think we can do it.”
We could probably put this argument on a loop and hit replay, we’d had it so often. As a winemaker, he wanted to experiment and push the boundaries of what he could do. As the one who paid the bills, I wanted to be able to pay the bills. Pick everything now and I’d sleep at night knowing we would have the cash to do it. Our Riesling was so good we generally sold out before we released our next harvest.
“Quinn”
“Back me on this, Lucie. You’re too distracted with everything else that’s going on. Let me do it the way I want.”
“I want to think about it,” I said. “Give me one more day.”
I expected him to balk when I said that, but instead he said, “All right. As long as you do something for me.”
“What?”
“Take the rest of the day off. Go clear your head.”
How many times had he said that to me lately?
“If I go home, I’ll just—”
“Who said anything about going home? I gave Tyler some time off. He wants to take you to Ball’s Bluff battlefield. It’s a nice day. You’ll learn some history.”
I cocked my head. “Why did you give Tyler time off?”
“Someone left a bunghole cover open. We might have lost the entire barrel.” He paused. “It was Pinot.”
An entire barrel of wine. Five thousand dollars.
“Dammit. Are you saying Tyler did that?”
“Someone did it. My guess is he did. He was with Chance stirring the barrels yesterday.”
“Did you talk to him?”
“You bet I did. I gave him hell but he claims he didn’t do it. He can’t be doing chores with his nose in a goddamn Latin book. I don’t care how boring the work is and too damn bad if he thinks he’s too smart to be doing manual labor. We lose enough with the angels’ share as it is.”
The angels’ share was the name vintners give to the natural process of evaporation in the barrels. The story was that it went to the angels who liked drinking wine up in heaven. Depending on the humidity and temperature, the angels got as much as half a bottle a month per barrel. Not a bad share.
I wondered what kind of “hell” Quinn had given Tyler.
“That barrel is definitely spoiled?”
“I racked it over and I’m working on it,” he said. “I’ll let you know. After you come back from your field trip.”
“How come I feel like I’ve been set up? You talked to Frankie about this, didn’t you?”
His poker face was perfect. “Would I do something like that?”
I called Tyler, who agreed to meet me in the parking lot a few minutes later. He’d been primed, too, but he’d apparently gotten mixed signals from either Frankie or Quinn because he acted like the idea for the tour was a surprise to him.
