Season of Change

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“And Faith looks before she leaps.” Takata gestured to Faith, who was skipping by the Jimtown table, as if contemplating buying another sweet.

“You don’t know that,” Slade said gruffly.

The Jimtown clerk pointed at a plate of frosted cookies. Faith stopped and nodded enthusiastically, digging in her pocket for money.

Takata hammered his cane into the grass again. “As a funeral-home director and mortician, I’ve looked at a lot of faces and listened to a lot of stories. I think I know what someone’s about when I look at them.” He glared at Slade. “Your soul is wounded and trapped. Looks like it should be set free.”

“Are you telling fortunes now?” Slade stood, tugging at his tie, feeling it tighten like a noose. The last thing he wanted was to rehash the past with the old man.

Takata caught his sleeve above the cuff. “I’m telling truths. You need to forgive, if not your father, then yourself.”

Slade couldn’t move. Not from the sudden unbridling of grief and guilt, or from the spot where his feet seemed to have taken root.

“Now,” Takata stood unsteadily, “I’m ready to go home. If you let me lean on you, it’ll go much quicker.” When Slade didn’t move, he raised his voice. “Are you deaf? Lend me your arm.”

The twins ran by, heading for home with their purchases. He could almost feel the air move as they passed, feel grief and guilt recede. They were his hope.

Slade stepped closer to the old man and held out his arm.

“’Bout time.”

CHAPTER FOUR

CHRISTINE HAD THE vineyards to walk and the morning sun was already hot, the air dry, her T-shirt damp with sweat.

Slade and his partners had bought forty acres, which wasn’t even half a square mile. It was Christine’s job to familiarize herself with the soil, vines, and fruit. The property wasn’t large enough to justify hiring a full-time vineyard manager, full-time cellar manager, or full-time winemaker. She’d have to wear many hats and hire staff who could do the same.

Christine used a notebook and a stubby pencil to record the slope of each row, how it drained toward the river, the angle of the sun and where it was blocked by trees in the early morning or late afternoon. She recorded which blocks and rows of vines were lusher, which seemed almost scrabbling to survive. She sifted dirt through her fingers and checked that the vines had the proper support.

Grape clusters were developing nicely. She tried a bit of each fruit at different places in the vineyard. Most were tannic and promising in their complexity. The arid soil and growing conditions in Harmony Valley were influencing the taste of the grapes and would also influence the taste of the wine. Substance in the glass. Something Christine would be proud of. Something to finally prove without a doubt to her father and the world that she knew what she was doing.

She snapped pictures of a few grape clusters with her cell phone. The grapes on the Cabernet Sauvignon vines were still green, but soon the heat would begin veraison, when the sugars increased during ripening, reducing the acidity in the fruit and turning them a deep purple.

The vines were terribly overgrown. There was too much fruit, which meant as it ripened it wouldn’t be as flavorful. And the fruit was becoming heavy, dragging tendrils down to the ground, which made the grapes available for any passing snail to take a nibble. Tomorrow she’d need to get out here with hand clippers and twist ties and sunscreen. It’d be nice to have helpers. Maybe she could put together a crew like the one she’d seen in the sheriff’s office.

Christine paused, staring out over the vineyard. Why not exactly like the one she’d seen in the sheriff’s office?

She returned to the tasting room, where she’d left her laptop bag.

The partners had installed a communications tower on Parish Hill, a granite-faced mountain to the east. The tower provided Harmony Valley with free Wi-Fi and cell-phone service. Otherwise, they’d be too far out, in too deep a valley to receive any signal.

She called a few friends, putting feelers out for someone with diverse skill sets willing to relocate. She called some equipment suppliers on her cell phone and emailed a few more for bids. Slade had only collected ballpark estimates for equipment. They’d need companies to come out and measure their space, and provide a more detailed and precise bid, as well as timelines for installation. At this point, twelve or fewer weeks until harvest, she’d only approve purchases if they could guarantee delivery and setup.

She also got in touch with someone she knew who built wine caves to ask some initial questions. She was willing to make compromises to find wine-storage solutions locally, but long-term, she wanted a state-of-the-art facility in Harmony Valley.

She texted Slade: Who did you arrange to harvest the grapes?

If this heat wave lasted through July and into August, as it was projected to, they’d need to harvest earlier, rather than later.

His reply: Make arrangements with whoever you want.

“Are you kidding me?” Wineries arranged for harvesters up to a year in advance.

Christine made another round of calls and sent off more emails looking for a company available to harvest in their remote location. Initial response wasn’t good. No one wanted to talk to her after learning where they were based.

For the second time that morning, Christine wondered if she’d strayed too far from traditional wine country.

She texted Slade again: Will need a work crew tomorrow at the vineyard.

His reply was predictably prompt: Hire however many bodies you need.

She laughed the kind of evil laugh that Slade would have known, had he been here, meant trouble for him: I choose you and Flynn and Nate and Grace and Faith and Truman and whoever else you can find. Bring pruning shears, hats, and sunblock. 6 a.m.

He didn’t answer right away. And when he did, it was an anticlimactic Okay.

* * *

THE NEXT MORNING Slade and his crew reported for work, as Christine requested.

Slade knew the heat would make him miserable, but he still wore black slacks, a blue long-sleeved shirt, and tie.

Slade sought out his girls. At least the twins were dressed appropriately for the temperature in cutoffs and matching royal-blue tank tops. Each had her hair in a ponytail that swung through the hole in the back of a royal-blue baseball hat.

Christine was prepared for them with thermoses of coffee and hot chocolate, as well as a cooler full of water bottles, and her grandmother’s banana-nut bread. She also had a box of old work gloves and pruning shears. She, too, was dressed for the heat in canvas shorts and a canary-yellow T-shirt featuring another rock band. Her hair was braided tightly so that only pigtails peeked out from either side of her floppy white hat.

Standing next to her, Slade felt more overdressed than he had in years. His tie felt too tight and heavy. Before he’d been able to talk to Will, he and his fiancée, Emma, had left for San Francisco a few days ago for a series of art-gallery openings featuring Emma’s paintings. Slade was starting to think it’d be better to iron out the budget with Christine first. At least then he wouldn’t be talking in generalities. He’d have hard figures to present. Will and Flynn were sentimental about Harmony Valley. They let it cloud their judgment.

“I know I asked you to, but you didn’t have to bring the kids,” Christine said to Slade as he poured himself a cup of coffee.

“I don’t expect them to work much.” Slade didn’t expect them to do more than run around and have a good time. “It’d be nice if they felt useful before the real work starts.”

Christine reached over and squeezed his shoulder, as if they were old chums. “That’s so doable.”

“I’m feeling guilty that we did nothing to the vines since we bought them.” Flynn wandered over, tugging on a pair of gloves. “To Christine, it must be like ignoring your children.”

Slade set down his coffee. It was too hot for what already promised to be a hot day. “It’s not like that at all. We bought the property and didn’t get rezoning approval for months. It wasn’t as if we knew we’d be harvesting grapes this year.”

“Are you going to be okay in this heat?” Christine pulled lightly on his sleeve. “Please go home and change.”

“He won’t be caught dead without the tie. I lived with the guy for five years. Trust me,” Flynn said. “It’s a fetish.”

If there was a possibility Slade could ditch the shirt and tie, he would have. Instead, he unwisely took inventory of the rest of the crew. The guys wore shorts and T-shirts. Only Abby and Slade were overdressed. And Abby, being a dog, had no choice but to wear a fur coat. Soon, Slade would be panting just as loudly as she was.

Slade rolled up his shirtsleeves. “Don’t worry about me.”

“We’ve learned not to.” Flynn grinned.

“Let’s start before it gets unbearably hot.” Christine stood next to a row of grapevines and shook a baggy full of what looked like short wires. “We’re going to use twist ties—yes, just like from a loaf of bread. I know, highly technical stuff here. We’ll use twist ties to fasten the load-bearing shoots to one of two support wires on the trellis system.” She showed them how two wires were strung at two different heights from a post at one end of the row to the other end. “Too many clusters on the vine dilutes the flavor of all the grapes, so we’ll want to thin the secondary clusters. That way, the primary clusters will be bursting with flavor.”

Slade bent over for a closer look. There were a lot of clusters on the vine. “By thin you mean...”

“Cut back and toss in the bin.” She gestured to two large containers with wheels. “You’ll also be cutting back the tendrils that you can’t tie, the ones that get in the way of the corridor between rows.” At the group’s blank looks, she added, “Imagine driving between the rows. If anything would brush your car’s fender, cut it back.”

“Shouldn’t we hire experts to do this?” Slade would pay good money to be sitting in front of an air conditioner about now.

“Normally, I’d hire a crew.” Christine gazed out over the vineyards. “But this should have been done months ago and I’m finding that no crews want to come out this far to work. Besides, it’s not rocket science. These are plants. If you make a mistake, they’ll grow back.”

“But what if the cluster I cut off is the best cluster?” Slade’s muscles knotted with stress. Anything he did, he wanted to exceed expectations. “What if we mess this up?”

Christine put a hand on his shoulder and smiled up at him. It was a sparkly smile, one that said, Have no fear. “At this point, there is no best based on taste. The ripening process hasn’t shifted into full swing. We’re doing damage control, which means damage will be done, but more good than harm.” She stepped closer, bringing the coconut smell of sunscreen and the light scent of vanilla. “Just think, this is only five thousand cases worth of grapes. You want to bottle eighty.” And then, grinning, she pushed him forward and they got down to business.

She paired them up—Flynn and Nate, Slade and Christine—and they started down two parallel rows. One person cut. The other person tied off vines. She assigned the children to clean up. Faith and Truman with Flynn. Grace with Slade.

The children pushed the bins, darting in to grab cut vines and grape clusters and shoot them into the bins like writhing basketballs. Abby darted back and forth beneath the trellises to see how everyone was doing.

“Did I fail a test?” Slade grumbled, his shirt clinging to his back, sweat trickling down his spine.

Christine knelt a few feet ahead of him, cutting clusters. She glanced back, her furrowed brow barely visible beneath that floppy hat he was starting to envy.

“I got paired with teacher,” he clarified.

That made her laugh. “You seemed stressed out about the work. I thought you needed reassurance. Go with the flow. Trust in nature.”