Page 92 of Before We Say Goodbye
Otis stood. “Okay, we’re leaving. Bec, let’s go, please.”
Bec slashed a hand through the air. “No, hold on. What have I done to you, Jed? What have we done that makes you feel like you can speak to us this way? Was it the rehabs we’ve paid for? The money we share? Or was it all the love and patience I’ve shown you?”
Jed’s jaw fell onto his lap. “Love? Where is the love? You’re not here for me now, and you weren’t there for me then.”
Bec raised her voice, damn the neighbors. “I wasn’t there for you? I left the city for you. I came back and got a job so that I could helpsupport you and our parents and help take care of you. What part of me hasn’t sacrificed for this family?”
Otis looked over at Mike, who still had his Game Boy in his hand but was fully captured by Jed’s outburst. Was that a smirk? “Go inside, Mike.”
He didn’t move.
“Right now!” Otis surprised himself with the authority in his voice.
Rebecca didn’t wait until Michael was inside to continue. Otis had never seen her so angry in his life. “What do you want me to say, Jed? That you lost? That you let your injury beat you? That being around you sucks my soul up? I’ve tried everything, given you so much of myself, ever since we were kids—even at the risk of not giving as much to Otis and the boys. Need I remind you that I suggested you go into computers fifteen years ago; imagine if you had. I gave you a thousand solutions, but you wouldn’t listen. I was here for you from thebeginning.”
He pulled on his beard. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Here for me? You ran out on us. You want the truth? Okay. Let’s finally get this out.” He took a sip of liquid courage.
Otis tugged on Bec’s arm, but she shook him off.
Jed slapped his empty cup on the table, then wound up and threw words at her like they were baseballs. “You’re fucking right I wouldn’t have gone to Nam had you not run off on us. You were the only hope for this family, and you abandoned us like we were nothing more than shit on your shoes.”
A tear dropped from Bec’s eye.
“That’s enough, Jed,” Otis said.
“What are you going to do about it? Knock me down like you did Lloyd? Or are you afraid to hit a man in a wheelchair? I’ll wipe the patio with you, you pompous British shit.”
Olivia sat motionless, staring at the sliced pickles and iceberg lettuce. Even Marshall had nothing to say and kept needlessly flipping the burgers. Maybe they thought this would be cathartic for Jed, finallysaying what he’d been harboring all along. Perhaps what all three of them had been harboring.
Otis touched Bec. “Let’s go, please.”
She found Otis’s eyes and nodded in defeat. He took her hand and helped her up. Not another word was said.
To no one’s surprise, Lloyd didn’t take the July picking well. Throughout the fall and winter of 1991, he sent threatening letters through his lawyer claiming sabotage and accusing Otis of being mentally ill. Otis and Rebecca’s lawyer pushed back but warned them they were skating on thin ice.
“That’s my life, thin ice,” Otis said. “We’re not selling, and he needs to stop forcing it, or I will sabotage in ways that he can’t imagine. I will drag the name Lost Souls through the mud, if that’s what it takes. I don’t care if we lose every dime. I’m not letting him win.”
Strangely enough, the market begged for this wine he’d made, and even the critics took note. Bedwetter wrote a long article called “The Sonoma Feud,” and he broke down with impressive investigatory skills the collapse of Lloyd and Otis’s relationship. He even mentioned Lloyd’s possible infatuation with Rebecca. He talked about the Tills’ choice to abandon building the facility and stop making bulk juice. He even wrote something rather kind:Hats off to Otis Till. He’s proving to be more of a terroir man than I’ve ever given him credit for. His gall is noted.
Otis read the last sentence a hundred times.His gall is noted.
Pushing the early-pick wines out in February of ’92, they sold out in an instant. Parker slaughtered the wines, giving the Lost Souls Zinfandel a 53. No one in the world had ever received anything lower than a seventy. Still, instead of being laughed at, Otis was called the “Grape Messiah,” a true artist, a god of wine, an iconoclast. Maybe Bedwetter was right. Otis could urinate into a bottle, and it would sell out.
The problem was that his defiance had an adverse effect. Whereas he thought he’d run Lost Souls into the ground with his bold decisions, what he did was make the company even more valuable, while also creating a demand that was simply impossible to satiate. Who didn’t want to get their hands on what theSan Francisco Chroniclecalled a “puckering sessionable slosher that throws a middle finger up at what is generally acceptable”?
Was it pride that Otis felt reading these comments and hearing these calls from distributors? All of a sudden, writers who’d never given him the time of day wanted a word with him. When Otis spoke with them, he spoke his mind. No matter what he said, folks enjoyed it. He was now the terroir soldier of California.
Nineteen ninety-two brought with it a sense of unknowing. Lloyd remained somewhat quiet, though the lawyers were certainly talking. Otis paid the lawyer fees with the same ask: “Buy me some time. Let’s see if he wears down.”
He and Bec knew they were delaying the inevitable. Lloyd was not the type of man to wear down, especially now that Bedwetter had called him out inThe New York Times. He couldn’t imagine a scenario where he let go of the vines. Otis could feel the dipshit stewing in his penthouse downtown.
Meanwhile, Rebecca and Otis would go a long time without talking about their feud with Lloyd. Otis’s mother visited for two weeks, and they barely mentioned it. Rebecca was still dealing with her family, coming to grips with her crushed relationship with her brother. She still hadn’t spoken to any of them, though they were still happily cashing her checks.
“You need to go see Carmine,” Bec suggested while chatting about the future. “When’s the last time you talked to him?” The television played the latest news on the LA riots.
“It’s been a while.”
“Go check in on him. Tell him what you’re going through.”
