Ellen Crosby: The Viognier Vendetta

“Ms. Natale asked me to give you this when you arrived, Ms. Montgomery,” he said. “Welcome to the Willard.”

I slid my finger under the heavy vellum flap and pulled out a sheet of paper embossed with the hotel’s logo.

In a meeting with Tommy and Mandy all morning. Will be finished by 1. Meet me at the bottom of the steps to the Lincoln Memorial.

I slipped some money to the bellhop who whisked away my overnight case and garment bag and gave a few more dollars to the valet who put me in a taxi a moment later. The cab zipped down Fourteenth Street to Constitution Avenue, where tour buses lined up near the Washington Monument and the south lawn of the White House. Across the scrubby expanse of the Mall, a ring of American flags surrounding the monument snapped in the wind.

At home in Atoka, Virginia, some fifty miles west, the landscape was still painted in winter colors of straw and washed-out yellow green. The Blue Ridge Mountains, which for most of the year lived up to their name, were drab and dun colored. Here, though, the promise of spring already hung in the air. On my drive into town, white dogwood bloomed along the roadside, and the banks of Rock Creek Parkway were massed with daffodils and clumps of crocus. Pale pink buds covered the cherry trees near the Washington Monument like a lace curtain.

The cab dropped me on the Ohio Drive side of the Lincoln Memorial at the far end of the Mall where more blooming trees graced the embankment by the Potomac River. I waited for the light on Independence and wondered why Rebecca had decided we should meet here rather than the hotel.

I understood as soon as I saw her standing on the marble steps of the memorial regarding me like a Greek goddess at the entrance to her temple, a bouquet of yellow roses in her arms. I’d nearly forgotten how her sloe-eyed dusky beauty, inherited from a Vietnamese mother and Italian father, turned men’s—and women’s—heads. Even now she earned appreciative stares from passersby.

She descended the stairs with the fluid grace I remembered from our days as running partners at school, but everything else about her had changed. Movie-star sunglasses held back her shoulder-length dark hair to reveal large teardrop diamond-and-sapphire earrings. A matching pendant hung around her neck. Somehow I knew the stones were real. She wore a well-cut persimmon wool blazer, cream silk blouse, and slim jeans that looked tailored. The fringe of an off-white silk shawl flung around her shoulders fluttered in the breeze. It didn’t look like she was buying her clothes in secondhand shops anymore.

Rebecca knew about my accident, but she’d never seen me with the cane I now use. When her eyes fell on it, I caught the brief flicker of consternation and something else—I think it was shock. She recovered at once, though her laugh was too hearty, too forced, and her hug a little too fierce.

“Oh, my God! I can’t believe it! Look at you, Lucie, you look fabulous.”

I patted her on the back with one hand, leaning on my cane with the other. This was going to be harder than I expected.

Seven years ago the hospital nurses had been sure the extravagant bouquet of peonies, calla lilies, and hydrangea had been sent by my boyfriend who’d been driving the car that smashed into a stone wall with me in the passenger seat. But I’d recognized Rebecca’s distinctive bold scrawl the moment I saw the card.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree, and soundest casuists doubt, like you and me? Don’t listen to the docs and don’t doubt yourself. Chin up—you’ll pull through. R.

So she’d also heard that my doctors didn’t think I’d walk again. Later I looked up the quote. Alexander Pope—I should have guessed. Rebecca had a fine mathematical mind, but she possessed a poet’s soul. She especially loved the Restoration poets for their interest in reason and logic and their desire to bring order to the natural world. As for the casuists, she shared their practical view of life: Deciding right or wrong on moral issues depended on the circumstances. No absolutes, a kind of shifting value system. Deceiving someone or lying was wrong—unless the consequences were worse if you didn’t.

I wondered if she’d changed.

“You’re mad at me, aren’t you?” The exotic tilt to her eyes always made her look as though she’d just woken up to something that pleased her. Now a new shrewdness glittered in them.

At least we were going to get right to it. Good. No more games.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why’d you come?”

“Curiosity. Why’d you ask me?”

The question seemed to surprise her. “It’s been too long. I wanted to see you.”

Sure she did. “What do you want, Rebecca?”

“Wow, you didn’t use to be so blunt.” She brushed back a strand of wind-whipped hair from her eyes and laughed uneasily. “I mean it. I wanted to see you. You stuck by me through tough times, Little. I haven’t forgotten.”

In my freshman year of college, the bewitching and brainy Rebecca Natale had been assigned to be my “big sister” when I’d joined the cross-country team. Back then I called her “Big” since she was also a senior; she reciprocated with “Little.”

Running was the only thing the two of us had in common. Rebecca grew up in the hardscrabble Dorchester section of Boston, the daughter of immigrants. She worked a couple of jobs to pay for what loans and a scholarship didn’t cover and lived on vending machine food because it was cheap. I grew up in the affluent heart of Virginia horse-and-hunt country, a picturesque region of rolling hills, charming villages, and fence-lined country lanes. My tuition was paid from a trust fund set up by my grandparents.

Two things cemented our friendship—both tragedies in their own way. Rebecca’s affair that autumn with a married professor whose wife also taught at the university and the death of my mother in the spring. The sordid gossip that went around school about Rebecca and the handsome, straight-as-an-arrow chairman of the English department, their motel trysts and rough sex on his office desk, shocked everyone. I never asked her about it and she never discussed it—not one single time during the hours and hours we trained together. And when I returned to school, numb with grief after my mother’s funeral, it was Rebecca who came to my dorm room and wouldn’t leave until I laced up my running shoes and went out with her, day in and day out. Wouldn’t let me quit the team. Made sure I showed up for meets.

I stared at her now and knew she was remembering those days, just as I was.

“Are you in trouble?” I asked. “Is that what this is all about?”

“Of course I’m not.” I might have believed her too-quick protest if she looked me in the eye, but she didn’t. “I’ve been doing some thinking, and I know I didn’t do right by our friendship after I left school. I wanted to see you …” She hesitated. “To ask if you’ll forgive me.”

I hadn’t seen that one coming. And she’d phrased it like a yes-or-no question when it was so much more complicated.

“Rebecca—”

She cut me off. “I know what you’re going to say. Look, I didn’t plan to lay this on you thirty seconds after we see each other for the first time in, well … a long time.” She gestured to the top of the stairs where Lincoln sat in his splendid chamber. “I’ve got to buy a couple of postcards. You mind waiting while I dash up to the gift shop? Then maybe we could rewind, start over again.”

Or maybe we could slow this oncoming freight train down a little.

“I can climb stairs, Big.”

“That’s not what I meant—”

“Then stop acting like I’m not up to this, not strong enough mentally or physically.”

She could figure out for herself whether I was talking about stair climbing or seeing each other again.