Ellen Crosby: The Sauvignon Secret

I sat there, lost in my thoughts and worrying about him, until a security guard finally chased me away. Afterward, I drove slowly home in the rain, taking the long way on the back roads.

By October when we saw each other again, we’d be okay. Pépé’d bounce back to his old self and I would have finished the last harvest with Quinn.

Ready to move on, write the next chapter.

The next day I told Frankie I planned to advertise for a new winemaker. She looked at me the way a mother looks at a child who is about to do something she’ll regret forever.

“Quinn will be back for harvest in a few weeks,” she said. “Why can’t you wait and talk to him about this? Maybe he’ll change his mind and stay for good.”

“We’ve done all the talking we need to do,” I said. “Look, I need to clear my head. I’m going over to the cemetery to tidy up the graves. That wind and rain yesterday probably brought down some leaves and branches.”

“Give yourself a break. You don’t have to take care of that today.” She paused and studied my face. “Never mind. I shouldn’t be sticking my nose in your business, but I can’t bear to see you looking so sad.”

“I’ll be okay,” I said. “The Montgomery women are tough. I’ll get through this.”

She nodded. “I know.”

When I was done cleaning what little debris there was among the headstones, I sat with my back against my mother’s marker until the sun became a fireball and began to slip behind the mountains. A vehicle—the engine sounded like the old Superman blue truck that Antonio used—came down Sycamore Lane while the flame-colored sky was at its fiercest and most intense. It stopped at the bottom of the hill near the mulberry trees and a door slammed. Frankie obviously told Antonio where to find me.

He came through the gate, backlit by slanting gold light so he was completely in silhouette, but I knew right away it wasn’t Antonio.

“How come you haven’t returned a single one of my calls?” Quinn asked. He sprinted across the cemetery, threading his way between the graves before I could answer, and pulled me to my feet. “I called you every day for a week until I finally wised up and got my news from Frankie.”

“There wasn’t anything else to say,” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“Especially after you spent the night with Brooke right after we stayed together on the houseboat.”

“What the hell—you think I did what ?” He looked up and rolled his eyes. “ That’s what this has been about? You think Brooke and I—”

“What was I supposed to think when I called and you were right there while she was getting dressed?”

He put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said. “Brooke is like a daughter to me. That’s it. There is nothing—and I mean that—going on between us. I slept on her couch so I wouldn’t have to drive back to Sausalito.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because you’re so damn stubborn, that’s why. We could have sorted this out sooner and a whole lot cheaper,” he said, “than a oneway plane ticket.”

My heart skipped a few beats. “One-way?”

“I heard you’re looking for a winemaker and I’d like to know why, when you’ve already got one.”

“Do I?”

He nodded. “Unless you’re firing me.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Good. Glad that’s settled. Though I would like to make a few changes about the way we do things.”

“Oh God, you want a raise. I should have figured.”

“A raise would be good,” he said, “but I was thinking more along the lines of a change of accommodations. Maybe we could try living together. You know, I could leave a few things at your place, see if it works. That is, if you’d be willing?”

I felt suspended, breathless. “I suppose you could do that. Eli and Hope are living with me now, too.”

“I know,” he said. “You’d be okay with me being part of your family?”

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Because you’re part of mine.”

I took a deep breath. “Then if we’re family, you need to move in completely. No half measures, Quinn. It has to be all the way.”

He grinned and kissed me. “All right,” he said. “That’s how we’ll do it. All the way.”

“The wine is bottled poetry,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters , describing the Napa Valley wines the Scottish author and poet drank on his two-month honeymoon in an abandoned shack on Mount St. Helena in 1880. Today Robert Louis Stevenson State Park encompasses the region where Stevenson, his new wife, Fanny, and her son Lloyd Osbourne stayed in a three-story bunkhouse located in Silverado, a defunct mining town in the Mayacamas Mountains a few miles north of Calistoga. In August 2010, the California State Senate named a stretch of Route 29, the main north-south route through the Napa Valley, in honor of Stevenson, who wrote such well-known classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses , and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde .

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and, as a child, developed a series of medical problems from the damp Scottish weather that would plague him for the rest of his life. By the time he was an adult, he began traveling to warmer climates— particularly the south of France—for health reasons. On an 1876 canoe trip through Belgium and France, he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married American woman more than ten years his senior. Though there were apparently no sparks between them at this first meeting, the following year they became lovers in Paris where Fanny had moved with her children to study art and escape a philandering husband who resided in San Francisco.

In 1878, Fanny left Europe and returned to California to settle matters with her husband; the following year Stevenson journeyed to America to join her. He took a second-class passage on a steamship that arrived in New York, and from there traveled by train to California, writing about his experience in The Amateur Emigrant . Penniless by the time he arrived in Monterey where Fanny was now staying with the children, the trip all but destroyed his fragile health. Later he moved to San Francisco where Fanny had gone to finalize her divorce, but poor health and great poverty continued to plague him.

In April 1880, Stevenson got word from Scotland that his family, which had been set against his proposed marriage to an American divorcée, had relented and now planned to send him an annual allowance. In May, Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne were finally married in San Francisco.

Determined to get her new husband away from the damp and fog of that city, Fanny decided the family should travel to Napa to stay at the home of an old friend. When the plans fell through, they moved instead to a cottage on the grounds of the Hot Springs Hotel in Calistoga. Unable to afford the ten-dollars-a-week rent, a local storekeeper directed them to the abandoned, run-down house in Silverado. After cleaning and fixing up the somewhat open-air place, they spent an unconventional honeymoon two thousand feet above Calistoga, which commanded breathtaking views of the valley. There, in the fresh air and warm sunshine, a contented Stevenson recuperated and regained his health.

During his stay in Silverado, he kept a meticulous diary, describing his adventures, mishaps, and encounters with the colorful local inhabitants; the memoir later became The Silverado Squatters , written in 1883 after he returned to England. Stevenson also used his notes about the beautiful and somewhat primitive scenery as the model for Spyglass Hill in Treasure Island .