Page 90 of How to Say I Do
“Well, it was a lot like it is now. I keep everything the same. What you and I have done this week? That’s exactly what Dad and I did ten years ago.”
I told him all the stories I’d hoarded through the years. Dad and me at midnight, pulling those first bunches of grapes off our vines by hand. Me being so careful not to crush the fruit, laying each down as delicately as if I were picking flowers, until Dad said,You know after this we’re going to stomp on them, right?The two of us jumping inside buckets inside bigger buckets to mash up the grapes and the juice and the skins until we were practically surfing. How, nearly delirious with exhaustion, we’d had a food fight and had hurled mashed grapes at each other until we couldn’t breathe. I spoke until I couldn’t, and when I was done, Liam was staring at his hands.
“You and Dad always had something special.”
“I felt the same way about you and Mom.” Liam and Mom had been as inseparable as Dad and I, especially after Liam and Savannah started dating. The three of them had gone to lunches and dinners together, gone into town, gone to the movies and to the mall. Dad and me in the fields, Mom and Liam and Savannah up in San Angelo. That was the way the world had worked that last year. “You know, Savannah reminds me a lot of Mom.”
Liam nodded. His smile was small, and his voice was soft. “You remind me a lot of Dad.”
There was one final bend in the creek bed, one final rocky turn, and then we were there. I rolled to a stop at the flat, gravel-strewn pack outside the rolling steel doors of the wine cellar. The air here was chilly and tinged with sweetness, and the closed-in oaks and crisscrossing branches gave the place an otherworldly, out-of-time feel. The cellar hadn’t existed when Dad was alive. Back then, we kept our first barrels in the barn, wrapped in cooling blankets while we figured out what to do. We had a year to make something happen, we’d thought. We’d found the creek bed and thought it might work, but Dad worried that the logistics would be difficult.
Building this storehouse was the first decision I’d made on my own.
Liam waited. “Ready?”
Ten years. My father was inside, waiting for us.
Noël, too, was waiting for me at home.
“Ready.”
I rode in the truck bed on the way back, watching over Dad’s last barrel of petite sirah. I kept my hand on the worn wood, my fingers looping over and over on his scrawled name.A. McKinley.
Everyone was waiting when we returned. Jason and Noël played at the edge of the vineyard, Jason crouching down and peering at the dirt, Noël hovering over him and pointing out rocks or roots. Savannah and Trish were sitting on the porch steps, and Frank and Connie and the rest of the town clustered in the yard. The rustling trees and the bobbing flowers had gone still, and even the bees and the crickets were quiet. The whole place seemed to have taken a deep breath in, holding on to the moment as Liam and I parked near the picnic tables and worked my father’s barrel out of the truck bed.
When the barrel was settled, Liam tugged me into a bear hug, and he hid his face in my neck. Savannah called to Jason, and then she and Jason and Noël bracketed me and Liam as everyone gathered in close.
Noël took my hand. I laid my other on top of my dad’s wine barrel.I miss you so much, Dad.
“I, uh,” I started. “I should have worked out something to say, but… Well, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I don’t know how—” I bit my lip hard, dug my boot heel into the dirt. “Truth is, I’ve got no clue how to tell y’all how grateful I am for everything you’ve done for our family.”
Hard, slow swallow, like trying to push down a blade. Everyone was watching me. “I don’t know how we would have survived without y’all. I truly don’t. Y’all saved us, time and time again, and I don’t know how I can ever show my thanks.”
My voice cracked. It felt like there was no oxygen, like I was underwater and drowning, like I couldn’t escape and couldn’t move and was going to die. Noël’s hand slid up my arm and over my back, grounding me, drawing me back to this moment, and, suddenly, I could breathe again.
“Today, ten years ago, Dad and I finished our first—and only—harvest. This is the last wine left on Earth that my father made with his own hands.” The last grapes he touched, the last summer he lived.
Dad had been so happy when we were done barreling up that first harvest. He’d hooked his arm around my neck as we shuffled out of the barn, purple fingers and ruined jeans and stained boots and all.Your mom is going to make us strip on the porch and run inside in our underwear, he’d said, and he’d been right. Mom told Dad to take our clothes straight to the trash, because that filth was never coming out. Savannah was over that morning, and she and Liam were eating muffins at the kitchen table with Mom.
Eight months after that morning, my parents were killed.
We lost everything in the fire, except for the vines and the barn. Our cattle and our horses, thank God, had been spared, but it took days for Peanut and Pickle and the rest to come home. They’d gone out to the edges of our range, too spooked by the catastrophe to stay.
When I was picking through the soot-blackened barn, I found the ten barrels of wine my father and I had stored in the stables. Those ten barrels turned into everything, into the rebuilt ranch and Liam’s college education and Jason’s daycare and the first bottles of wine I was able to sell at Frank and Connie’s.
My words were wobbling and filled with rivers of tears, and I was clinging to Noël so badly I thought I’d break his hand, but I was still going.Noël, I need you here.“Dad told me, when we sealed this barrel, that he wanted to crack it open in ten years’ time and share it together as a family. Mom and Dadaren’t with us today, but y’all are, and y’all are family. You all are the best family that two boys needed. So, here’s to family.”
Noël turned his face into my shoulder. Behind me, I heard sniffles where Liam and Savannah were, and then Jason’s little voice asking, “Daddy? What’s wrong?” and Liam saying, “It’s okay, baby boy.”
Baby Boy. My second wine.
I picked up the wine thief someone had laid out on the picnic table and held it up. “Let’s slip into this barrel and see what we’ve got.”
My father and I had sealed up that barrel good and tight. I brushed my thumb across the wax drippings over the cork and remembered the two of us struggling to get that right, both of us loopy after being awake for so many hours. Now, it took some time, but I managed to saw through the old wax and slowly pry out the cork.
The smell of ten-year-aged petite sirah curled around me. Buttery leather, wood smoke, crushed blackberries, and sweet roses. Currants and spice, chocolate and sage and cedar, sunny summer days and star-soaked nights.
My father’s voice rushed back, all the thousand different things he’d said on a thousand different days, all his quips and aphorisms and cautions and words of wisdom, all the names of stars and grapes and flowers he’d taught me, and all his words of love. One memory rose over all the others. The day he and I sat on the tailgate of his pickup and I confessed to him that I was afraid I might be different, that I was afraid I was gay.
