Pamela Browning - Heard It Through The Grapevine

Gina wondered if it was too late to clap a hand over her niece’s mouth. Probably it was, and anyhow, she’d done her own share of talking.

“Who are you?” Josh asked.

“Mia Suzanne Sorise. My favorite color is purple, I love lasagna, and I live next door. Who are you?” she asked, abandoning the hidey hole under the counter where she had staked out the cat’s old bed as a good place to read the latest Harry Potter book.

“I’m Josh Corbett,” he said, smiling as Gina rolled her eyes in disbelief. She’d watched as he’d charmed twenty contestants vying for his affection on Mr. Moneybags, and now he was charming her own nine-year-old niece.

Mia’s eyes grew even rounder. “Ooh, you’re the guy who dumped my aunt Gina,” she said.

“I wish you wouldn’t put it that way,” Josh said, a pained expression flitting across his features.

Mia leaned her elbows on the counter and studied Josh. “Why didn’t you pick her?” she asked. “My aunt Gina is really a very nice person.”

“No argument there,” Josh said with a faint smile.

“Ha!” Gina replied, reflecting that it was sometimes possible to be too nice. She pretended to stack papers and clip them together. She needed something to do if Josh insisted on eyeing her in that coolly appraising way of his. She wished she’d run a comb through her hair after picking up Mia from soccer practice. She wished she had worn something other than her old peasant blouse and a skirt that fell short of her knees.

Josh had the good grace to look uncomfortable. “Actually, there was a lot more to the situation than that.”

“And less. Mia, you’d better finish that chapter you’re reading. We need to go soon,” Gina said. She sounded more confident than she felt.

“I already read it. I’m playing ticktacktoe now, but it’s not much fun to play against yourself.”

“I’m a great ticktacktoe player,” Josh said.

“Good! You can play with me.” Mia laboriously spread a grubby piece of notebook paper on the counter and handed Josh a pencil.

“How about a chance to explain,” Josh asked Gina.

“When you play, do you like Xs or Os?” Mia asked.

“Xs will be fine,” he said, but he was watching Gina expectantly. “Well?”

Despite the impending game, Gina decided against her better judgment to continue the conversation. “How about telling me why you were so insistent on showing me the heather back at Dunsmoor Castle? How about explaining what that—that procedure behind the pantry door meant?” She slapped the papers into a drawer beneath the cash register and slammed it, summoning up her recollection of the heather, which had been rippling gently in the breeze, and of Josh’s eyes, which had been blue and sincere. They were still blue; it was his sincerity that was in doubt here.

“The heather was a planned date. The producers of the show set it up. I had a great time, though, didn’t you? And the procedure behind the pantry door—it was a way to proceed, if you know what I mean.” He nonchalantly entered an X in one of the ticktacktoe squares.

The procedure had been a kiss; only, Gina didn’t want to say it in front of her niece, who could be counted upon to ask too many questions. In fact, on that night before his final choice of the twenty contestants, Josh had sought her, Gina, out and kissed her so tenderly and then so thoroughly that she’d known for sure that she would be the winner the next day. Wrong-o. He’d chosen the other semifinalist, a schemer named Tahoma. Gina found no consolation in the fact that according to one poll, seventy-eight percent of the viewing audience believed that Mr. Moneybags had made the wrong choice.

“The procedure was something you threw in to confuse people, including me,” Gina said.

“Not exactly,” Josh said seriously. “The only person I confused was myself. If you’d let me—”

“I’m not letting you do anything,” Gina said pointedly.

“I won! I won!” Mia crowed. She grinned up at Josh. “Hey, you know what? I really like you.”

“In that case, isn’t there a consolation prize? Like dinner with your aunt?”

“No,” said Mia. “But you could come to crush if you like.”

“Crush?”

“You know, it’s what we do after harvest. There’s this really funny I Love Lucy show where Lucy and Ethel are in a big barrel stomping on grapes. It’s like that.”

Gina glanced at Josh to see how he was taking this.

“That’s one of my favorite I Love Lucy episodes, but I thought they had machinery for squeezing the juice out of the grapes these days,” he said to Mia.

“The stomping is just matrimonial,” Mia replied.

Gina hastened to correct her. “Ceremonial, Mia. Wrong word.”

“Ceremonial, then. Ooh, that’s a good one to tell Frankie.” Mia prided herself in collecting words to impress her eleven-year-old cousin. “Anyway, at our family’s winery we have a grape-stomping contest. They don’t use any of the stomped juice to make wine, though, because we stomp barefoot and that wouldn’t be sanitary. They have crushers to get the juice out of the grapes for the wine that we make, and after that there’s a whole lot of things they do to the grapes to make them into wine. My dad’s the winemaker, so that’s how I know all this. It’s cool. Would you like to come to crush with us?” She gazed disingenuously up at Josh.

“I—” Josh began, but Gina had heard enough.

“He would not like,” she said pointedly. “He has other things to do, I’m sure.” To Josh, she added, “Did Tahoma come with you?”

“Tahoma?” he replied, wrinkling his forehead. “Why would she?”

“I thought you were in love with her. Why else would you toss me aside like yesterday’s old salami?” Gina walked to the far end of the counter.

“Maybe because I really cared about you,” Josh said with a determined air.

Gina indulged in a ladylike snort. “How could I not have known? Who would have thought?”

“Listen, Gina, I’d like a chance to talk it over.”

Gina treated this statement with the stony silence it deserved.

Josh turned to Mia. “Crush sounds like so much fun that I’d like to go.”

“Oh, it is.” Mia’s eyes sparkled up at him. She ducked under the counter and bobbed back up with the Harry Potter book, careful to mark her place with the ticktacktoe paper. “You can explain everything to Aunt Gina when we’re at crush. You can’t miss it. It’s bad luck if someone doesn’t go.”

Gina set her straight. “That only applies to family members, Mia. It doesn’t apply to people you’ve invited for no reason at all.”

“But, Aunt Gina, I invited Josh because he likes I Love Lucy,” Mia said, frowning. “My mom says that we can invite anyone to crush. She says it’s hospital.”

“I think you mean hospitable, Mia. It means making people welcome. And we don’t have to show that kind of courtesy to Mr. Corbett.”

“But, Gina, we’re old friends,” said Josh. “Doesn’t that count for something?” He beamed the full wattage of his smile on Gina, who immediately steeled herself against his charm.

“We were friends,” Gina corrected him. Turning her back on Josh, she said, “Mia, I have to run upstairs and get my jacket.” The October day was cool, and the night might become chilly.

“Please hurry,” Mia said. “We don’t want to be late.”

With one last scalding look over her shoulder at Josh, Gina ran up the stairs of the rustic stone cottage that served as both shop and living quarters. When she returned, Mia was pulling on her own sweater, a cable knit in bright purple.

“Now we can leave,” Gina said.

“When you have a customer?” Josh asked plaintively.