Page 23 of Before We Say Goodbye
Rebecca gave Otis a peck on the cheek. She was fighting her own demons but somehow kept finding a way to prop Otis up when he needed it. “Dad, there’s a whole lot to worry about out there, but you don’t need to worry about us. Those who underestimate this man will end up eating their words. I promise you that.”
Otis took her words two ways. One, her cheering him on and standing up for him was love like he’d never known. Two, failure was not an option.
In the morning, Otis and Rebecca drove in her mother’s car to check out a place that Paul had told him was for rent in the hills around Kenwood. The property manager met them at the door and showed them around, telling them a businessman bought it as an escape from the city but that he’d been too busy to use it lately.
The sparsely furnished one-room cabin stood on an acre of land tucked down a gravel drive off Bennett Valley Road. A walk in almost any direction led to vines. Otis sat in one of the two chairs on the tiny front porch and soaked it all in, the gnarly old trees rising from the grassy hills, the trickle of a nearby creek, the happy song of birds who didn’t have to go far in the winter.
“What do you think?” Bec asked, lying on the wooden planks of the porch, stretching her arms out. The property manager had crossed the street and was speaking with the only neighbor in the near vicinity.
“I think you should move in with me.”
“You know I’d love to.”
“Then why not?”
“Because my family is a disaster. You saw them. I do everything now.”
“That’s because they push it on you. They’re taking advantage of you, Bec. You’re cooking all the meals, now bringing home most of the money. Dragging Jed around.”
“We only have one car.”
“Yeah, but . . .”
“Otis, I’ve always looked out for Jed. He’s different, you know. It’s not what happened that made him this way. He’s always been ... I don’t know ... troubled. Sad.”
Otis gave a nod that extinguished the tension. How could she not see the truth, that she was trying to make up for running away by becoming the caretaker of the entire family?
“Can I say one thing, though, and you won’t get mad at me?”
Rebecca sat up. “I guess.”
“If your dad touches you again, even if he raises his voice at you, then you’re moving out, okay?”
“He’s not going to do anything again. He learned his lesson, trust me. He wasn’t always like this, not until he lost his job a couple of years ago.”
“But he’s like that now.”
“Trust me, I won’t tolerate it. He gets one pass, that’s it.”
They held eye contact for a while. He hoped she was right.
Otis coughed up three months’ rent, a deep dent in his savings that reminded him that this was the beginning of a race against countless odds.
While Rebecca worked at the café and attempted to reassemble her family, Otis spent his days on Murphy Vineyards, pruning vines with two Mexican men who called himgringo. When Otis finished each afternoon, he hung around the winery to soak up as much information as he could. In the lab, he’d peek over Paul’s shoulder as he tested sugar, acid, and pH levels of the new lots, and he’d pepper him with countless chemistry questions, half of which Paul couldn’t even answer. He appreciated Paul’s artistry, how he didn’t get bogged down by the science. In the cellar, Otis would watch the workers, known as cellar rats, as they followed Paul’s various work orders: racking wines that needed air, pumping finished lots from tank to barrel, thumbing out samples with a barrel thief, and cleaning incessantly.
A good ten years older than Otis, Paul had come upon the vines for the first time when he was hitchhiking from his home state of Oregonto San Francisco. He recounted the tale as he cut strips of tape and labeled various containers of wine. “I made it as far as Santa Rosa when I overheard a man talking about being short on workers for harvest. I was in the fields a day later plucking cab off old vines with a grin I’d never known. I eventually worked my way to cellar rat for the Charles Krug Winery. Peter Mondavi was the one who taught me the good stuff: micro-filtering, cold fermentation, inoculated secondary. The guy’s a legend.”
Otis craved such knowledge. “How’d you come upon Lloyd?”
“His dad was a longtime friend of the Mondavis’. Lloyd was up visiting one time, and we shared a glass of wine after work. He was building a portfolio of small wineries that he could finance. His trust fund had kicked in. Mr. Mondavi had said good things about me, and Lloyd asked if I’d be interested in starting something up with him. Sparrow and I scraped some money together, secured some ownership interest, and signed on the dotted line.”
Paul was a long-haired hippie who was barefooted more often than not and would never turn down a couple of tokes from an afternoon joint, but he took his wine seriously, and Otis grew to respect the man greatly as he studied under him.
At night, after visiting Rebecca, Otis would pore over the many books he’d borrowed from Paul, topics covering wine chemistry, viticulture, geography, and philosophy.
Glimpses of the wine life began to reveal themselves, and Otis found them even more intoxicating than he’d imagined. Once the vines were retrained and pruned, they focused on irrigation. Otis’s Spanish-speaking skills grew by the day. When the leaves appeared in April, they thinned the canopy to open a window to the sunlight. Witnessing the birth of the vintage was nothing short of a marvel, and everyone at the winery would close out the days in camaraderie, sharing a glass and a few stories.
On the weekends, Paul and the employees and other friends and family would sit at long tables, enjoying delicious spreads of family-stylefood and bottles of wine, and ramble on well into the night about wine and music, religion and politics. That was where Otis and Rebecca began to learn how to taste, and it was where the wine bug had finally gotten to Rebecca too. It wasn’t only about what was in the bottle; it was the way of life that pulled her in.
