Ellen Crosby - The Riesling Retribution

He paused to consider.

“It’s Saturday,” I said. “I bet you’ve been here since we picked on Thursday.”

“You could be right. All right, let’s eat at my place.”

“Why don’t you go home and take a shower and clean up? I’ll order the Chinese. We’ll eat at my house.”

“One, are you implying that I smell bad? And two, what’s wrong with eating at my house?”

“Forgive me, but one, I’d like to use bug spray on you right now, and two, I don’t want to eat out of the boxes with my fingers. Do you even own any dishes or silverware? More than one of anything, that is?”

“When I moved here from my cave in California, I did bring a few hollowed out gourds and some bones and spears.”

“See you at my place in, say, forty-five minutes. Any preferences or do you trust me to order?”

“Something that’ll set my mouth on fire. Why don’t we have dinner at the summerhouse? We could watch the Perseids.”

Quinn’s interest in astronomy—and the massive amount of information he knew about stars, comets, the galaxy, and everything celestial—still seemed out of character with the rest of his macho rough-and-tumble personality, at least to me. Shortly before Leland died, he’d given Quinn permission to use our summerhouse behind a large rose garden in my backyard as a place to set up his telescope and carry out his stargazing. Perched on a bluff overlooking a valley, the summerhouse had a breathtaking view of the Virginia Piedmont and the Blue Ridge. A few months ago Quinn bought what he told me was the Rolls-Royce of telescopes—a Starmaster. On a clear night when I looked through the lens I felt as though I had a front-row seat on the edge of the galaxy.

I’d learned a few things from him, including what the Perseids were—the galactic residue of a comet that produced a spectacular meteor shower visible every August, primarily in our hemisphere.

“Since you’ve been holed up here for the past two days,” I said, “you probably forgot that Edouard is still hanging around. Today was nice, but a few hours ago the clouds rolled back in. We won’t be able to see a thing.”

He ran his hands through his unruly hair and rubbed his face like he was trying to wake up.

“Too bad. All right, I’ll clean up since you’re paying for dinner. It won’t take me forty-five minutes. More like half an hour.”

“How come I’m paying when you invited me?”

“It’s cheaper than paying me for working two days straight. The way I figure it, you get off easy with an order of kung pao chicken and moo shu pork.”

He showed up half an hour later in a clean pair of jeans and yet another of his endless collection of Hawaiian shirts, this one red, cream, and yellow with exotic-looking anthurium and birds-of-paradise on it. His hair was still wet but neatly combed. I’d changed, too, into a long cotton dress.

“I like that dress,” he said. “Suits you.”

He’d brought wine and flowers. A bottle of Gevrey-Chambertin and flowers from a garden—not a florist—wrapped in pages of the Washington Tribune.

The garden around his cottage was mostly low-maintenance shrubs. Nothing blooming that I could remember unless he’d done some recent planting. I unwrapped the newspaper and found sprays of lilies, gladiolus, tea roses, and bougainvillea.

“Thank you; they’re beautiful,” I said.

He heard the unspoken question and looked sheepish.

“I’m better at growing grapes than I am at flowers. Now that no one’s living over at Hector and Sera’s cottage, the garden has gone wild. I go by every so often to do some weeding. It’s a shame to see the place closed up like that. They’re Sera’s flowers. You probably guessed.”

Hector came to work at the vineyard when my parents planted our first grapes, serving as our farm manager until his death a year ago. He and Sera had lived in a cottage at one end of a small cul-de-sac near the winery. Quinn lived at the other end.

Chance had taken Hector’s job, but not his place. No one could take care of the vineyard as he’d done, and both Quinn and I hadn’t gotten over losing him.

Quinn followed me into the kitchen and uncorked the wine while I found one of my mother’s Sèvres vases and began arranging the flowers.

“I miss Sera,” I said. “And Hector and Bonita.”

He laid the cork on the counter. “I never should have gotten involved with Bonita. It went downhill when she moved in with me.”

I arranged a pink gladiolus stem between some peach-colored lilies. “I never should have gotten involved with Mick Dunne. But we did what we did.”

“It’s really over with Mick?”

“Yup. Annabel Chastain said he came back from Europe with a new girlfriend.”

“You mind?”

“Nope.”

I nearly asked him about Savannah, but before I could bring it up, he said, “Ever thought about letting Eli live in Hector and Sera’s cottage until he gets back on his feet? Shame to have the place empty.”

I tucked a spray of pink bougainvillea in the vase. “I don’t mind having Eli live here. This house is certainly big enough and it’s nice not to be by myself all the time. Besides, now that we have to hire a new farm manager, I figured we’d offer the house to whoever takes the job. Like Hector did.”

“It was kind of weird that Chance didn’t jump at the offer of a free place to live,” Quinn said.

“He said he’d all ready signed a one-year lease and couldn’t get out of it, remember?”

The doorbell rang and Quinn looked hopeful.

“Is that the delivery guy? I’ll get it. I could eat a horse.”

“My wallet’s in my purse in the foyer.”

“My treat,” he said, and winked at me.

We ate on the veranda. The sky was still heavily clouded and the air had the closed-in feel of being inside a bell jar. Quinn lit all the candles and the torches while I prepared the table.

He poured the wine and sat across from me at the glass-topped dining table. We touched glasses and our eyes met.

“Cheers,” he said.

“Cheers.”

“How did the reenactment stuff go today?”

“It went all right. We’re invited to stop by tonight.”

He paused in the middle of scooping a helping of kung pao chicken out of the box.

“That square dance?”

“It’s not a square dance.” I took the chicken and handed him the rice.

“You really want to go?” he asked. “Sorry, but I still don’t get all that playacting stuff. Just seems weird to me, pretending you live in another century and refighting a war that your side lost.”

“Then maybe you should come and see what it’s all about.”

“The extent of my dancing doesn’t go beyond the hokeypokey.”

I laughed. “We’d have to be in period clothing to dance…whoa! Hold on. I’m not asking you to wear a Confederate uniform and bad shoes.”

“You’d better not. Besides, I’d be Union. We’d be on different sides.”

“You wouldn’t have to do much pretending after all, would you?”

He grinned. “We won.”

I took a pancake for my moo shu pork off a Styrofoam plate. “Around here, you’re on the wrong side.”

“Art imitating life?”

“You’ll never guess who I ran into at the reenactment site,” I said. “Annabel and Sumner Chastain. Dropped by on their way back from Mick’s. They might buy one of his horses.”

“Tyler mentioned they were still around. Guess that explains why. Want some plum sauce?”

“Sure. Annabel happened to see Eli. She almost passed out.”

“That’s the effect your brother has on older women?”

“Real funny. Eli looks just like Leland. Annabel was still in love with my father, Quinn. Leland broke it off with her. Not the other way around.”