Ellen Crosby - The Sauvignon Secret

Mick reached over and took my hand. “I heard that Quinn might not be coming back here, that he might stay in California for good. You going to hire a new winemaker to take his place?”

So that was the current rumor going around. Quinn left poor Lucie in the lurch.

“He’ll be back for harvest.” I withdrew my hand, hoping I didn’t sound defensive. “I guess I’ll have to stop by the General Store and straighten out Thelma and the Romeos.”

In every small town in America there is someone who keeps tabs on everyone else, minds their business for them, and then genially shares it with everyone else on the planet. Our someone was Thelma Johnson, who owned the General Store, where she presided like a chatty, benevolent queen over her subjects, the good citizens of Atoka. Telling Thelma something was like the kids’ old-fashioned game of telephone: little whispers passed around a circle, only to find out that what was said originally had been burnished and revamped into a tabloid-worthy headline with the over-the-top drama and throaty angst of one of her beloved soap operas.

The Romeos, her henchmen, were just as guilty. Their name stood for Retired Old Men Eating Out, but it could as easily have been Retired Old Men Eavesdropping Obsessively. I knew all of them practically like uncles because Leland had been a Romeo. Their whereabouts on any given day were as predictable as animal migration patterns: mornings gathered around the coffeepot at Thelma’s, laying siege to her fresh-made doughnuts and muffins, then whiling away long, lazy afternoons that stretched into “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” and the dinner hour with drinks and a meal at some restaurant or bar in Middleburg or Leesburg. Social networking on the Internet had nothing on the pack of them as a faster-than-a-speeding-bullet means of disseminating information.

“When’s the last time you talked to Quinn?” Mick asked. He kept his voice casual, but he was fishing.

“I can’t remember. Not that long ago.”

His eyes narrowed. “You can’t remember, huh? Why don’t you see him when you’re in California, Lucie? Straighten things out. You do know where he’s staying, don’t you?”

“There’s nothing to straighten out.” I folded my napkin and pushed back my chair. “Except the gossip about him not returning. Thanks for tea, Mick. I’ll call you after I get back from Napa.”

He caught my hand and pulled me up. “Come on, I’ll walk you to your car. You do know you’re a lousy liar, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He slipped an arm around my waist, suddenly serious. “Sure you do. Look, love, I’ve been doing some thinking. About us.”

“Mick—”

“Hear me out before you say anything.” He put two fingers over my lips. “How’d you feel about giving us another chance? We know each other so much better now. We’d be good together, the pair of us—wouldn’t make the same mistakes.”

I shook my head and removed his hand. “I don’t think so.”

“I’m not taking an answer from you right now. Please at least promise me you’ll think about it.” We reached my car and he turned me so I faced him. “But first, darling, you’ve got to sort out your feelings about Quinn. I’m not talking about business, either, and you know it. See him in California, get it sorted once and for all. When you come back, let me know if you want to try us again.”

He bent and kissed me like a brother. I think I mumbled something about him being completely and totally wrong before I got in my car and drove home.

But I knew, just as Mick did, that I couldn’t go on flying solo. If there was going to be any future for Quinn and me—that meant the winery’s future as well as our own—then Mick was right. I needed to seek out Quinn when I was in California and get some answers.

Whether I liked them or not.

Since childhood, I’ve always had a secret hideaway—a refuge where I can lick wounds, grieve a broken heart … cry. Growing up, it was the Ruins, the crumbling-but-elegant shell of a tenant house that had been torched by Union soldiers searching for the Confederacy’s most famous renegade: Colonel John Singleton Mosby, the Gray Ghost, and his Partisan Rangers. After we converted what was left of the old building to a stage for concerts, plays, and lectures, I retreated farther, to the family cemetery. Generations of Montgomerys were buried there, beginning with Hamish Montgomery, who chose the site in the late 1700s after receiving the land for service during the French and Indian War, and ending, at least so far, with my parents.

Hamish had picked the flattened crest of a hill for its view of his beloved Blue Ridge Mountains, which now watched over him forever. Over the years, more of my ancestors were laid to rest on that open-air place, until the mid-1800s when Thomas Montgomery—who later died as one of Mosby’s Rangers—built a low redbrick wall to surround and perhaps fortify the little cemetery, with a wrought-iron gate at its entrance.

I drove straight there from Mick’s, parking at the bottom of the hill next to a grove of oaks and tulip poplars. Years ago, my mother had discovered a pair of mulberry trees struggling to live in the dense underbrush on one of the many occasions she’d brought Eli and me along to pull weeds and tidy up the grave sites. She called it our duty to our ancestors. Eli called it a waste of time; the weeds always grew back and it wasn’t like the ancestors noticed anyway. For some reason I didn’t mind the work, and that annoyed the hell out of Eli.

Finding the mulberry trees changed everything. It became a ritual during the summer months to stop and look for berries, picking handfuls and cramming them into our mouths until our lips and fingers were stained with sticky dark red juice. Eli thought it was hysterically funny to pretend he was dripping in blood and began popping up from behind a headstone where I was weeding, saying in a fake Transylvanian accent, “Bwah-hah-hah, I’ve come to bite you and suck your blood.” The first few times he scared me until I dumped a vase of dirty rainwater on him and that was the end of the vampire act.

Out of habit, I checked the trees for fruit. Not quite ripe, but I ate some berries anyway and thought about Eli waving his red fingers like wriggling worms on a hot bright July day like this one, the three of us trudging up the hill with our trowels and rakes and a thermos of my mother’s fresh-made lemonade or sweet tea. Now she was always here, and I was the one who cared for the graves, fulfilling the family duty to our ancestors.

I picked some wildflowers blooming nearby—joe-pye weed, black-eyed Susans, wild chicory, and Queen Anne’s lace—and made a small bouquet. The gate creaked as I pushed it open, another chore for Eli’s to-do list. I’d been here ten days ago on the Fourth of July to leave small flags at the headstones of all those who fought in wars as far back as the Revolution, so the cemetery still looked neat and tidy.

I dumped the wilted roses from the vase at my mother’s grave and replaced them with the wildflowers. Then I sat, my back against her sun-warmed headstone, and called Quinn.

He answered on the third ring, breathing hard like I’d caught him in the middle of doing something involving intense physical labor.

“Lucie? Hey, what’s going on? Haven’t heard from you in a while. Everything okay?”

I leaned farther into the stone until I could feel the chiseled grooves of the words of my mother’s epitaph: I will go before you and light the way so that you may follow .

Quinn’s familiar baritone was so matter-of-fact, so normal, that for a moment it seemed like he’d never left, and I was just calling to find out where he was. At that moment, I missed him—and all the times we’d spent together in our up-and-down relationship—unbearably.