Pamela Browning - Heard It Through The Grapevine

“Now, Josh,” Rocco told him. “You don’t have to be Italian to learn this game. Right, Collin?”

The other man, standing with a bunch of mostly male onlookers, just grinned. This, Josh decided, was not encouraging.

“Collin married into the family, but that doesn’t make him any less an Angelini,” Rocco confided. “Even though his last name is Beauchamp.”

“Of the Virginia Beauchamps,” Collin said. “Spelled the French way, pronounced Beecham.”

Josh had known some Beauchamps at his posh northeastern prep school, but mentioning that exclusive institution didn’t seem like a good idea, considering the good-natured guffaws that greeted Collin’s statement.

“The game can be played indoors or outdoors, and there can be two to four players on a team. Four balls are assigned to each team. You’ll play on my team,” Rocco said.

Tim and Tom were also on Rocco’s team. The other team consisted of the two men named Tony, someone called Angelo and an older white-haired guy named Fredo, who was treated deferentially by everyone involved.

“First, the pallino,” Fredo said, holding up a ball that was smaller than the others. There was a coin toss, and Fredo’s team won the right to throw the pallino. Fredo rolled it onto the court, where it inched to a stop a little more than halfway to the end. At that point, Josh craned his head to search for Gina and discovered that she was surrounded by a bevy of women close to her age, all of them talking and laughing. Gina was holding a baby, patting it on the back and crooning to it, and paying no attention to what was going on over here.

While Josh was looking elsewhere, Fredo rolled one of his team’s balls, to the accompaniment of shouts of encouragement from his own team and groans from Josh’s team when the second ball rolled close to the pallino.

“Kiss it, kiss it!” cried one of the Tonys, which Josh figured meant that he wanted the two balls to touch. He shot another surreptitious glance toward Gina, remembering with a pang of regret the sweet softness of her lips. He must have been crazy to turn his back on her in Scotland.

“All right,” Rocco said, interrupting his reverie by slapping a ball in Josh’s hand. “Now you.”

Josh, whose mind for the past few moments had been engaged in wistful remembrances of a heather-strewn moor, stared at him blankly.

“Go ahead. We have to bowl until one of our balls is closer to the pallino than the ball that Fredo rolled.”

Josh hefted the ball in his hand and summoned enough bravado to convince himself that this game was a piece of cake. Unfortunately, he slipped as he rolled the ball, and it landed about as far away from the others as it could without jumping the sides of the court.

“You’ll do better next time,” Rocco said before rolling another ball, which edged somewhat closer to the pallino than Josh’s.

Rocco’s team bowled until all balls had been thrown, but not without a lot of good-natured jesting. After that, it was Fredo’s turn again.

“When both sides have bowled all their balls, the side with the ball closest to the pallino gets a point. A point is also awarded for any other ball from that side that is closer to the pallino than any ball rolled by the opponents. Thus, only one team can score in a frame, and that side can get up to four points. The first team to score sixteen points wins,” Rocco told him.

Josh didn’t need long to figure out that bocce was a game of strategy. The pallino could be moved by a shot, so a player often scored by knocking the pallino closer to balls previously rolled by his team. On the other hand, a player whose team already had balls in scoring position sometimes chose to place a ball in front of the pallino to keep it from being moved.

Whenever it was Josh’s turn, he managed to goof up. If he tried to land his ball close to the pallino, it inevitably pushed the pallino the wrong way. If he wanted to keep it from hitting the pallino, it always did. He found that he couldn’t estimate how much a ball would roll from where he stood to throw it, and he tended to throw short. If he didn’t throw short, he overcorrected.

Rocco, on the other hand, was a virtuoso. “Bocce is as simple or complicated as you want to make it,” he told Josh, and then he’d proceed to blow everyone away with a cunning move.

When the game was finally over, Josh realized that he was the one who had virtually lost for Rocco’s team. Even though the others tried to gloss over his many errors, he felt bad about letting the team down.

“Don’t worry, we’re playing two out of three to win,” Rocco said by way of reassurance, which was not at all reassuring to Josh. He looked around, wishing an excuse to bail out would come to mind. But Gina had disappeared, and Mia was hanging over a bench, waiting to cheer him on.

Well, maybe this time he’d give Mia something to cheer about. He forced a halfhearted grin and girded himself for the second game.

Unfortunately, he didn’t play any better in the second game than he had in the first. The only good thing was that now he knew the rules. The third game was a disaster, though his teammates were generous in not blaming their loss on him. Still, by the time everyone dispersed, Josh felt extremely apologetic, not to mention dejected for letting the team down.

“That’s okay,” Rocco told him. “A lot of guys wouldn’t have even tried to play.”

Josh resisted the temptation to invite Rocco and company to play lacrosse. Or hockey. Or water polo, in which he excelled.

Mia jumped down from the bench and ran over. “Don’t worry, Josh,” Mia consoled him. “You’ll get better at bocce.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said, wiping the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. He was still bummed out from his disappointing performance. He kept scanning the crowd for Gina, but he didn’t see her near the barbecue, the big doors that led to the wine cave or near the group of women she’d been standing with before.

Fredo stumped over, his white hair an aureole standing out around his head. “Come along, my boy,” he said to Josh. “I’ll show you where to clean up.” Josh followed him on a circuitous route along a well-worn grass path past the barbecue, the picnic tables and three or four kids playing with skateboards in front of the winery office.

“You know,” Fredo said as they washed up in the men’s room inside the small tasting facility, which held a bar and a few tiny tables, “it’s not the game that’s important, Joshua. It is the family, and that we play together as well as work together.”

Josh splashed water on his face. “That’s, um, good,” he said. He was surprised that Fredo was treating him as an equal, considering how everyone else deferred to him.

“My father, the first Gino Angelini, always held family to be more important than anything. This is the philosophy that we have let govern our family winery since we started it.”

“When we were in Scotland, Gina talked about her family a lot,” Josh told him. “The other women playing the game never mentioned their parents, brothers, sisters.” He hadn’t, either.

“Yes, that’s our Gina. She is named after my father and her father, too. Gino Junior was my elder brother. He died when Gina was twenty-two.” Fredo dried his hands on a paper towel and then handed one to Josh before clapping him on the shoulder. “Come, Josh. We must join the others. It is almost time for the stomping of the grapes.”

As they were making their way past the winery office, Fredo was distracted by questions from some of the children playing nearby, and Josh stepped to one side to wait for him. After a few moments, someone walked up behind him and gently put a hand on his arm. “Josh Corbett? I’m Maren, Gina’s mother.”