Page 88 of How to Say I Do
What a weekthathad been. My muscles and bones and cells were crying out for mercy. Each year, harvest left me worn down and ground up. But this year…
This year had been dizzying—a mad swirl of past and present colliding and merging and spinning me upside down and inside out. My father behind me, Noël in front of me, Liam at my side.
Frank, Liam, and I plucked the tempranillo from block 3, and Frank asked if Noël was coming. “In three days,” I’d said.
“Your father would have liked ’im.”
I had always been silently envious of Frank. He’d had more years with my dad, and he’d known him as a friend. Frank and my father had fished twice a month for twenty years. They’d hunted and gone out on the Gulf to drink beer and get tan and catch red snapper while their wives shopped through Houston and Corpus Christi.
I craved the memories Frank carried: easy laughter and casting flies while thigh-deep in a cool river, or bare-chested and drinking beer while waiting for a nibble at the end of their lines, their conversation meandering from ball games to beliefs to inside jokes and then back to lighthearted bullshit. I missed the sides of my father I never got to know so fiercely and so deeply that the empty places where those memories should have been often cut sharper than the memories I did have, like the solid sensory echo of my father’s hands over mine the first time he’d helped steady my bicycle handlebars while I learned to pedal, or how he'd carry me to bed when I’d fallen asleep.
Would my father have liked Noël? I hoped so. It mattered to me that Frank thought so.
I’d finished the last of block 1 a little after three a.m. last night. Liam and Connie and Dean had crushed the cabernet and the Sangiovese, which left the tempranillo and the petite sirah for me. When dawn rolled up, and Liam stumbled down the porch and found me still crushing grapes, he’d steered me back home and shoved me into bed.
“But, Liam, Noël is arriving later—”
“I’ll handle it,” he’d told me.
I’d been too loopy to think through what that meant, and my mind pulled up happier times and happier memories. Liam and Noël laughing across a dinner table in Mexico, and the two of them patiently helping Jason build a sandcastle while I played with the waistband of Noël’s board shorts and drew secret designs on the small of his back. But, wait— I remembered as I was falling asleep. Liam was still furious with Noël. Liam might put Noël on a plane back to New York.
I tried to get up, to— What? Warn Noël? Go get him myself? I couldn’t even roll over, and I was asleep seconds later.
Now I was awake, and according to the time, Noël should have landed by now. He and Liam were on their way, if they hadn’t killed each other.
I could hear the noise from downstairs all the way in my bedroom. My house sounded as full and alive as Thursday nights on Main Street. Voices called out in the yard, footsteps clattered across the hardwood floors. Big laughs, and the rise and fall of happy hellos, glass dishes sliding across granite counters. Everyone was coming out because of what today was and what my father had meant to everybody. I buried my face in my pillow one last time and breathed Noël in.
Splash of water on my stubbled cheeks, fresh shirt buttoned up, boots pulled on. There was nothing I could do about the juice staining my fingers. The skins and stems of my acres of grapes were ground into the loops and whorls of my now-purple fingerprints and my violet cuticles. I’d have wine-colored hands for weeks.Purple tickle time, I’d told Jason one year. Most of the town made a game out of my stained fingers and hands. As long as they were still purple, I didn’t pay for a thing. Not a sandwich or a gallon of milk or a lug nut or a nail. When they all started up with that business, I’d spend hours scrubbing at my kitchen sink, trying to get that purple out.
The chaos downstairs struck me like I’d opened the door on a tornado. The smells hit me hard. Potato bakes, lasagnas, enchiladas, banana bread, and all the other famous foods from town. Savannah and Connie were buzzing around the kitchen, heating up casserole dishes and peeling back aluminum foil, stirring bubbling pots on burners, and slicing loaves of bread and big blocks of cheese. Sunlight and voices flew through the house.
Outside, Savannah’s parents were setting up plates and silverware on the picnic tables. The town’s old men, the ranchers and farmers, were surveying my yard, inspecting my new shade sails and my whitewashed barn and my horses while nodding appreciatively and looking impressed. Jason and Trish were in the paddock, where Jason was playing a game of chase with Peanut. Or, well, Peanut was playing with Jason, more like.
Connie spotted me first. “Wyatt!”
Everyone converged, and I was herded out to the back porch and given a cup of strong coffee. A dozen voices chattered at me all at once as all the old ranchers came to shake my hand and slap my back and gruffly tell me I’d done a damn fine job with everything. My thoughts skipped over the top of the conversation. I kept searching the yard and the drive for Liam’s truck.
Frank caught my wandering attention. His sleeves were rolled up, and, like me, he was drinking coffee. He’d been with me all week, working block by block, row by row, and he looked like he was ready to fall into bed for a year-long nap. “They’re on their way,” he said. “Liam left a few hours ago. Should be here soon.”
Voices kept swooping in and out, conversations from Thursday nights and weeks past smoothly picked up once more as we settled in to wait. I rocked on my boot heels. Peanut tossed her mane and snorted. Jason giggled and threw hay over his head. Someone started up a conversation about the beef markets. Someone else joked that all the old guys should convert their ranches to vineyards, too, since mine looked like it was doing mighty fine. Elbows bumped into my shoulder. Beer bottles and coffee mugs rose in a toast.
Noël, my mind whispered.Noël.
It was Jason’s shout that alerted us. He’d been on an eagle-eyed watch for his dad to return, and at the first hint of disturbed dust down my gravel drive, he sounded the call. They were here.
There were two men in Liam’s truck, both drawn in sunlight falling through the windshield. Liam, and—
White t-shirt, angular features, blond hair. He was unfastening his seat belt and straightening a chocolate felt cowboy hat, checking his reflection left and right in the visor mirror before he grabbed the door handle. Liam waited, out of the truck with his elbows up on the hood.
Noël slid out and took everything in with one sweep: Jason climbing the paddock fence and waving wildly, a dozen of the town’s ranchers clustered beneath an oak and nodding hello, Frank tipping his hat, Savannah and Connie in the open doorway, me at the foot of the porch steps—
His sweep stopped, and his gaze locked on mine.
I stepped forward. So did he. Another step, another, and then we were jogging, closing the short distance between us. My arms opened, and he leaped the final half-foot, throwing his leg around my thigh as his arms wrapped around my shoulders. Both our hats tipped off our heads and tumbled toward the rose bushes.
I heard soft laughter. I smelled sweet hay and wildflowers. I felt Noël, the solidity of him, the heat of his body, the thunder of his heartbeat,here. He was here. I spun him in a slow circle. Everyone who loved me was watching us. “You came.”
Noël cradled my face in his palms. His hands were cool from the air conditioning in Liam’s truck. “Of course.” He smiled, the same smile that had hooked my heart down in Mexico.
