Page 43 of Before We Say Goodbye
“It’s not fifty acres—it’s forty-nine—but it’s close. And it’s on a hillside.”
Otis scratched his head. Never mind that it was exactly what they’d dreamed of. “We’re buying this with what?”
“I don’t know that part yet.” Bec had returned to her other self and showed a kind of enthusiasm that Otis couldn’t quite muster.
“I’m not sure that’s a currency.”
“Let’s go see it.”
“Why, Bec? So we can be reminded of what we don’t have?”
“No, so we can realize what we want.”
“You don’t even want this dream anymore. You think I’m working hard now. Wait till we have our own place.” He resisted the urge to say that she’d been discouraging lately, to say the least.
“Otis. We want the same thing, but you don’t have to work so hard to get it. Don’t you see we made this happen in Germany? We created this.”
Oh, he saw it. Talk about adding fuel to her fire. She’d never stop her mysticism now.
“Well, we might have talked about it, but we’re a long way from owning it.”
“I already see it, Otis. We live on this farm. You’re making the wines of your dreams.”
Otis rolled his eyes. “Oh, here we go again. I’m going to make you stop hanging out with Sparrow.”
She didn’t like that comment. “So I should just roll up my sleeves and work myself to the bone too? Your way is so much better, isn’t it?”
He sighed. Why was she always right? “How much is it?”
“Two hundred thousand.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars?”
“No, two hundred thousand guineas. Yes, dollars. It’s chump change. Let’s call the Realtor.”
As if he’d ever win this one. “Fine, let’s go see what we can’t have.”
“This was the worst idea in history,” Otis said, standing in the middle of what might have been the prettiest piece of land he’d ever seen. “Now I really want it.”
The real estate agent currently wandering around inside the house had no idea that his clients were late on two bills and had dined on hot dogs topped with canned chili for the third night this week.
Bec looked at him like he was an idiot. “Of course you want it. It’s going to be ours. It’s already ours. That’s how it works.”
She’d said the same thing about having another boy, and that still hadn’t happened. He knew when to keep his mouth shut, though.
“I know, I know. Mind creates matter. Seth said so, so it’s true.”
“It’s science, Otis. Don’t belittle my beliefs.”
“You can’t know that this is ours,” Otis said, looking out over a piece of land that he’d give both kidneys for. Other than the birdsong and the swoosh of the breeze pushing the trees, there was absolute peaceful stillness.
The farm was called a ghost winery, as it had been left abandoned during Prohibition. The land lay at the end of a winding gravel artery that threaded back into the rolling knolls of Glen Ellen, near to both Jack London’s Beauty Ranch and Carmine’s vine oasis. Weeds and wild bushes had taken over. The vineyards hadn’t been pruned in ages, the canes swirling like barbwire. Birds had made this land their paradise. Frogs croaked from lily pads in the overgrown pond.
The charming stone house had been built by an Italian family in the 1870s. A line of Douglas firs protected it from the setting sun. This was not a place for potato chips and chili dogs. This was a domain where chefs prepare their meals for the gods, a place for someone with actual money to create a paradise ripe for hosting friends and family, where kids ran with reckless abandon, where a poet of a winemaker could carve his place into history.
Almost all the property, including the stone wall that wrapped around it, was crumbling, but it had potential, like a dust-covered masterpiece found in the vaults of the Louvre. The vineyard was enough on its own, scraggly vines of mysterious varieties that begged for a caretaker to bring them back to life. Beyond the vines, a forested hill hosted countless species of trees. Below the house lay a meadow of wildflowers.
Otis scratched his head and said to Bec, “The things you do to me. For the rest of my life, this place will be the one that got away. I can only imagine this is how Jack London felt when he set eyes on his property. Yet he had the money to pay for it.”
