Page 51 of Christmas Chaos
10
Sonoma, CA
December 23, 11:58 pm PST
Prohibition Winery
BAX
Iwatch my wife pull her coat around her as a December wind kicks up. Her ebony hair is so long now it whips around her head like a swarm of bees. Her long hair is the only outward sign of her pain or that anything is wrong. No one notices. That’s who she is to almost everyone, except me. Carefree, wild, brash and brave. But I know her better than anyone and I feel it all with and for her. If I could take this frustration, fear and pain from her I would. I’d bear the burden for both of us. But apparently there’s only so much we can do. And that might be the hardest part for Tabi.
She’s an action girl believing there’s always a solution, a way forward. She gets results instantly or figures out a way to fix everything. She barrels through life righting the wrongs and injustices of the world or for her friends. Hell, she’s inserted herself into five virtual strangers’ lives in the past year. Random people she met at an airport, and they all think they’re better off for her meddling. She sees things clearly and knows how to fix them, always has.
The irony is fertility isn’t like that. It’s not linear, it doesn’t make sense and often no one can point to a cause, so she feels the effects of what she thinks is failure, deeply. The miscarriages were bad, but losing the foster boys was worse. We knew them and loved them.
We’ve stopped the shots and are coming to terms with her hormones as they cascade down to normal from fucking crazy when she was shooting up.
I suspect her dad feels the depth of it with her, they’re too similar for him to miss it. Both annoyingly obstinate, so dialed into each other it borders on psychic. But she can’t fix this no matter how hard she tries. She has to stop throwing herself into the shots, vitamins, acupuncture, yoga, worldwide adoption papers, the foster parenting, and accept we are unable to find a solution.
So, it’s just us. And thank God for each other. If I get to walk the world for another hundred years with only one person, it damn well better be the bright-ass insane shooting star, my Bee.
We’re going away early on Christmas morning because we can’t bear a massive 5 Families holiday with tons of kids running around. There are five winery families here in Sonoma that make up most of our world. Our immediate families are two of them, but we were raised in the “village” that is ever-expanding.
Our parents were angry, but I convinced them this was an adventure we wanted to take, not that we couldn’t handle being around our pregnant friends and our parents’ sad looks. We simply said we wanted to go somewhere warm and have a different kind of Christmas this year. We’re packed and ready to get out of here for three weeks to Brazil. Somewhere we’ve never been and never thought we’d go, but anywhere but here sounded fucking perfect.
Sam Langerford, David Gelbert and Josh Whittier are our best friends and business partners. We’ve all known each other since about birth when our parents decided to become best friends and take us along for the ride. David and Josh’s kids, respectively, are already forming the third generation’s bond. Something that pulls at both of us and we’re trying to overcome.
We love being Aunt Tabi and Uncle Bax to blood relatives and our extended “family” but right now we need to be away from it. My sister and her wife’s egg was fertilized the first time they did IUI. We’ve been very unsuccessful with that little procedure. And a complete failure with way too many fucking cycles of IVF and with two miscarriages, we’re fucking done. If our kid is out there in the universe somewhere, I wish they’d show up or let us stop hoping.
Tabi usually keeps her hair short, just below her ears in a bob so it doesn’t annoy her when she’s out with the vines. But she stopped caring about it when our foster boys went back to their mother in the fall. The hard part was having to convince them to leave us. That their crackhead mom cared about them instead of the larger welfare check. Fucking stung like a jellyfish lashed at my insides.
I flip the bright twinkle lights off and tug on the tasting room door of Prohibition Winery to make sure it’s locked. Our winery had a big sales day. Well, it’s ours and our three best friends. I’m only here part time, but it’s Tabi’s whole life.
She’s walking the driveway towards our house which sits on the edge our winery. The house she loves, and I fucking detest. She insisted we renovate this dilapidated piece-of-shit farmhouse that was on the winery property when we all bought it. We own the land on the boundary of the vineyard, so the structure looks like it’s on the property, but it’s ours. The five of us own the vineyard in equal parts. But this fucking house, Jesus, I hate it. Every time we get a piece of it done, another falls apart. It’s cursed even though she says it’s lucky. I loathe our home but love her.
Only Tabi Aganos could think that because the house falls apart it safeguards us from evil things. She may not carry on a lot of her mother’s Greek orthodox traditions but irrational belief in evil spirits and luck is one of them. She and her mother actually had a cleansing ceremony for her womb. Her aunts and cousins flew in from Greece to bring special shit to burn. The house smelled like charred octopus and burnt pencil erasers for a week. The results were inconclusive, according to Tab.
She stops halfway up to our house, passing the dormant Zinfandel vines that are brown and twisted like a mass of rubber bands in a drawer. She glances over at the large, renovated barn that houses our new, shiny admin offices with a full basketball court out front. There’s an equipment barn back on the property. And this one attaches to another large barn structure that houses our steel tanks, enology lab, and the empty barrels before they get filled. Our crush pad is in there as well. It’s where you find Sam, Tabi and David most days. The three of them do the bulk of Prohibition’s work while Josh manages his family vineyard with his dad, and I run the city of Sonoma most days.
Eventually the back barn will be a couple of sleeping quarters for extra help we bring on for harvest. It’s simply a couple of giant empty rooms waiting to be filled next fall.
This year will be our first full harvest of our own grapes. We’ll buy a little juice from all our families’ wineries. We each have one that our parents still run. But that juice is mostly for nostalgia from how this place began. We do a limited run of “Pro/Ho Saved My Ass” blend each year for our original wine club members, to continue to say thank you. My mind drifts to that story for a second and I smile at how far Prohibition has come. I hear her throaty, loud voice over the distance and wind.
“Bax, why are there lights on in my barn?”
I yell back as I approach her, “First off, it’s not your barn. It’s all of ours. And second, I think David and Josh are buffing the floor or something.”
She fires back as I get closer to her, “Are we sure they’re not buffing each other?”
I roll my eyes while she laughs at her own juvenile joke and pull her towards me. It’s been a shitty year, and I couldn’t love her more. I’ve loved her since we were five, and it’s scary that with each day, I seriously love this brash, outrageous, ridiculous woman even more. She throws her arms around me, and I push her hair from her face. Her coffee eyes taking in my expression.
She says, “Wasn’t Sam supposed to do that? The buffing. He’s the one putting a fucking gym in the back of the front barn.”
Ever since our friend, Sam, was ghosted by the love of his life, he found a new religion in becoming, for lack of a better word, buff. He’s a meathead manwhore now, and we’re all adjusting to his new norm. We all miss his ex-girlfriend, Sammy, but he thinks that if he can lift enough weight or fuck enough strangers, he can forget her. So far, he’s just become a bit of an asshole and is no closer to closure. I miss our chubby, positive teddy bear of a reliable friend. The one we all opened up to simply when he’d hug us. But we’ve all been through stages of assholery and life experimentation, now it’s his turn, so we endure it. But we can’t wait until he gets back to being himself again or at least onto his next enlightened plane of existence.
I tell her, “Sam’s at dinner with his parents, then has a date or two later.”
“I thought I crushed some ass in my lifetime. And David was a hall of famer, but it’s like Sam’s possessed to out-fuck us all.” I grin as she says, “Are the women folk in there with them buffing?”
