When I woke, there were eleven messages in voicemail, all from my mother. Suspecting she might call, I had muted my cell phone so that I could get some sleep.
As Jack snored, I showered, climbed into fresh clothes, and stepped into the corridor. I found my mother parked outside her door. She raised her one good arm toward the ceiling and demanded in a rising tone, “Where were you? I was so worried.” She started crying.
I squatted down in front of her. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
“I thought you’d gotten arrested.”
“I was out with an old girlfriend.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Mom! Jesus.”
“You could have called. We say goodnight before I go to bed. You scared me.”
“I’m sorry. I accidentally had my ringer off. It won’t happen again. Didn’t Joy take you down for breakfast?”
“No, I was so sick with worry I couldn’t eat.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous,” I said, rising to stand upright.
Joy, hearing our voices, opened the door. The piquant smell of marijuana preceded her. She rubbed her eyes with her small hands fashioned into fists, looking sleepy-faced.
“Good morning, Joy,” I said. “You don’t look like you slept much.”
She combed the hair out of her face with her hand. “Your mom’s tooth was hurting.”
I looked down at my mother in quiet alarm. “What’s wrong with your tooth?”
“It’s fine,” she said curtly.
“Joy just said it was bothering you last night.”
“It’s fine this morning.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m hungry,” she said.
I faced Joy. “You didn’t take her down for breakfast?”
“She wasn’t hungry earlier. She was upset about you.”
“Well, let me find Jack. Why don’t you two go down to the restaurant and we’ll join you in a minute?”
“Hurry up,” my mother barked. “I’m starving.”
I went into my room and found Jack lounging on the bed in a courtesy bathrobe, sipping a glass of Pinot. He toasted me silently, a salacious grin on his face.
“Let’s go down and get some breakfast before my mom flips out. Then we’ll do a little wine tasting on our way out, you fucking degenerate.”
“Now you’re talking my language,” Jack said, rolling off the bed.
Jack—prospect of a late-morning wine tasting and a night of hot sex elating him—pulled himself together in record time and we took the elevator down to the windowless, bottom-floor, catacomb-like restaurant. We found my mother and Joy seated at a table for four. I would have elected to go elsewhere, but with my mother’s infirmity, this was easier.
A waitress appeared with two laminated menus and handed them to Jack and me. I glanced at my mother, who was massaging her lower right jaw.
“Is that where your tooth hurts, Mom?”
She dropped her hand immediately. “I’m fine,” she said. “It’s just a little sore.”
I looked at her skeptically. “Have you had trouble with it before?”
“Oh, it comes and goes,” she said in a blithe voice.
“Maybe we should take you to a dentist?”
“No,” my mother said sharply. “They’ll hospitalize me.”
“For an infected tooth?” I asked in disbelief.
“Yes. Everything has to be done in the hospital. And I’m sick of hospitals.”
“Okay. Okay. Relax. Jesus. If it blows up on you, we’ll just tie a string around it and do it Afghani style.”
Everyone laughed, including my mother. An RN before her marriage, she had a bit of the macabre in her.
Her and Joy’s breakfasts came as Jack and I ordered. My mother must have been famished. She demolished a four-egg omelet in minutes, while diminutive Joy picked at a semi-circle of fruit festooning a bowl of cereal she left untouched. She was a wisp of a girl and I could see why.
Jack’s and my meals came—dreadful scrambled eggs and overcooked bacon. We scarfed the grub down. We were on the same page, eager to get on the road and to a few select wineries before we headed out of town.
When we had finished, we packed up the van, watered, fed, and peed Snapper, climbed in and sailed off on leg two of our voyage. It was a beautiful blue-sky morning. We drove six miles north on the 101 to the Highway 154 turnoff in the direction of Foxen Canyon Road. A meandering two-lane country road, the Foxen Canyon Wine Trail—as it’s known—evoked pleasant memories of sojourns I had made here years before, often alone, in search of respite and escape from the depredations of my then-life. Anxiety had me in its perpetual grip as I rode in search of wine and the emollience it brought about in me. It was different now. I appeared to have firm footing on the ground beneath me: career, money, women if I wanted them. And unlike my old Honda Accord with its worn shocks and rusted muffler, the Rampvan glided along the road like the automotive equivalent of a hydrofoil. Almost overnight, everything had changed.
I wrested myself from my reverie and found Jack with the Shameless wine map unfolded in front of him on the steering wheel. I’m sure he, too, was trying to do what I had done years before: escape. But from the frown on his face I could tell he was besieged by all his worries—dwindling job opportunities, absentee fatherhood, burgeoning waistline—and, in silent communion with his unspoken woes, I felt sorry for him. He’d brought it on himself, of course, with his wanton, unbridled ways, and I’m sure he wished he could rewind the last five years and plot things differently. But Jack was a guy who always lived his life forward, not retrospectively and in remorse like me.
Suddenly, he stared laughing. “This is wild, Miles. A map to all the places we used to go. Bizarre.”
I glanced into the back of the Rampvan. Joy’s head was resting on her shoulder and she was staring trancelike out the window at the bucolic countryside with its iridescently green undulating grassy hills, contented cattle, interspersed by the symmetrical grids of vineyards, all basking under the genial canopy of a limpid, baby-blue sky. Next to her, my mother cradled a panting Snapper in her lap. Now and then she rolled her tongue around her lower right jaw and winced.
I turned to Jack and said in a lowered tone, “We’re going to have to do something about my mother’s tooth.”
Jack threw a backward glance at my mother. “Yeah, it’s going to baseball on her one of these days. I tried to blow off an impacted molar once a long time ago when I was dead broke. I woke one morning and looked like Brando in The Godfather. Fucker hurt, too.”
“What’d you do?”
“Took a pair of pliers and yanked it out. Stuffed some cotton in and went hillbilly until I could borrow some money to get a bridge.”
I laughed uproariously.
“True story,” Jack said.
About fifteen miles up the Foxen Canyon Wine Trail I instructed Jack to pull off onto the dirt shoulder and brake to a halt in front of a dilapidated, barnlike structure: Foxen Winery’s utterly and deliberately unprepossessing tasting room. It had looked like an abandoned building when Jack and I first visited, years before. Until the film was released, we would have been the only patrons at this early hour. But times had radically changed and now there were already five other cars parked haphazardly and at oblique angles around the charmingly (now!) decrepit shed. With their lineup of exquisite wines, the ramshackle tasting room was an oenophile’s dream, rising up out of nowhere like a Saharan oasis.
Jack and I extended the ramp and Joy wheeled my mother out.
As Joy was getting her things together, my mother looked all around and said, “Where are we?”
“There’s a dentist here, Mom. Okay, his license has been revoked and his instruments are a little rusty, but his rates are reasonable. He’s going to get this tooth out. No hospitalization.”
For a brief moment, she looked thunderstruck, believing me. Then the delayed synapses of her compromised brain started firing and she snapped, “Stop joking me.”
“You’ll like this, Mom. You wouldn’t believe it, but they’ve got some great wines in here.”
“Oh, that’s such good news,” she cooed as our dysfunctional little contingent crossed the short distance over the dirt and into the tasting room.
There were about a dozen wine aficionados sampling Foxen’s product when we bulldozed a path up to the bar. The young tasting room manager smiled at me.
“Miles! How are you? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Hi, Susan,” I said. “Beautiful day.”
“It is,” she said. “It always is. Wow. What a surprise!”
I opened my hand and gestured to my mother. “This is my mom. She’s going home to Wisconsin.”
“Hi, Mrs. Raymond,” Susan said.
My mother nodded, at a loss for words.
“She needs a taste of Chardonnay,” I said. Turning to my mother, I said, “Don’t you, Mom?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m on vacation!”
Susan laughed and poured a half glass of their ’08 Tinaquaic Vineyard Chardonnay—an austere wine—and handed it to me. I nosed it, then passed it to my mother.
“Chardonnay, Mom. But very different from what you’re used to. Meaning, more than seven dollars.”
“Oh, stop it,” she said.
“What would you like, Miles?” Susan said. “Pinot?”
“No, Susan. We’re still in the brunch mode. How about a little of that Chenin Blanc?” I turned to Jack. “A little white Loire, big guy?”
Jack flashed a 1,000-watt smile at the very cute, brown-haired, green-eyed Susan and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, and embarrassing me in the process: “I’ll have whatever the Shameless guy is having.”
As Susan poured us generous dollops, mutterings arose from the others in the tasting room. A guy in his thirties, clutching a copy of my novel, was staring at me. He flipped it over to look at the thumbnail shot of the author. It was five years out of date, but I’m sure the bloodshot eyes and slightly bloated countenance didn’t completely efface the fact that I was the same guy. He weaved his way through the patrons.
“Are you Miles Raymond?” he asked.
“No, I’m his twin brother. I’m just trying to get some free wine and some starstruck pussy.”
He reared back and laughed. “You’re him! You’ve got to be him!”
“Guilty,” I said, silently praying he wouldn’t grope me.
He extended his hand and I shook it affably. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” he said, in the stentorian voice of someone who has been drinking too much. He turned to his cohorts. “Hey, everyone, this is Miles Raymond. The dude who wrote Shameless.” Everyone’s attention was suddenly riveted on me. The hoi polloi closed ranks and converged. The drunk who had recognized me thrust book and pen into my hands.
“Have you read it?” I asked, pen poised over the title page, trying to conjure a funny inscription.
“Three times,” he said. “I loved that scene where they go out with the boar hunter. Why wasn’t that in the movie?”
“I don’t know. I think the director’s afraid of guns or something.”
Two attractive women, whom I pegged to be not just lesbians, but lovers, were next. I scribbled my John Hancock across their Shameless winery tour maps. Others had me sign bottles of Foxen wines they purchased. I got machine-gunned with a lot of the familiar questions. In the midst of the blizzard of queries I noticed my mother holding up her glass and beseeching Susan for more, going unnoticed in the stampede over her to get to me, sunk as she was in the crowd in her wheelchair. I plucked her glass from her hand and reached it across to Susan, who poured her their ’08 Bien Nacido Chard.
I handed that to my mother, then said to Joy, “How about you take her outside in the sun? I’ll be with you in a bit.” Joy nodded assent. “But watch how much she drinks. She can be really sneaky.” Joy nodded knowingly, already onto my mother’s guile whenever wine was present.
When I turned back to the crowd Jack was regaling by far the most beautiful woman in the room with stories about himself and his exploits as inspiration for Jake. Her eyes grew moony as she gazed adoringly up into Jack’s florid face.
I whispered into Jack’s ear: “We have to be in Paso tonight.”
Jack whispered back to me: “Just getting a phone number for a return visit, short horn. Relax.”
“I don’t want you doing her in the Rampvan.”
Jack looked at me and grimaced. “That’s high school, dude. I’m disappointed you would think that of me.”
I set my glass on the bar in front of Susan and spoke sub rosa: “Jack and I would love to try a couple of those single-vineyard Pinots you’ve secreted from the marauding masses.” Susan giggled. “How can we finesse this?” I said, flirting shamelessly. “A dozen books? A quiet, romantic picnic?”
She leaned over the bar and said in an undertone, “Just don’t say anything, okay?”
“Okay, Susan. Work your magic. Legerdemain is the operant word.”
Susan disappeared into the back. I squeezed Jack’s shoulder and he swiveled his head toward me. “We’re getting the good stuff. Pretend it’s the entry level, okay?”
“You’re the one who’s going to pontificate and blow our cover.”
“And it’s your job to stop me,” I said, already a little high from the Chenin Blanc, and mockingly brandishing a finger at him.
Jack winked at me. We were getting tipsy and having a good time. It was only a hundred miles to Paso Robles, our next stop on the itinerary, and we had plenty of time to squander. I had planned it that way.
Jack put his arm around the woman he was making eyes at and drew her into our vinous cabal. “Laura, this is the famous Miles Raymond.”
I made a face and shook my head. “Not really,” I said.
“Yes, but you wrote Shameless,” she said, unable to disguise her excitement. She was no more than 5’5”, a brunette with shoulder-length hair that shaggily framed an olive complexioned face. Her smoldering black eyes and Salma Hayak eyebrows matched her dark brown tresses and I caught myself glancing down at her cleavage, more than visible in her summery tank top.
“Laura,” I said. “You have such a lovely, exotic accent. What’s your nationality?”
“Spanish,” she replied.
Jack nudged my shoulder, as if I needed any coaxing.
“Spain,” I said. “How come the women there are the most beautiful in the world?” I was instantly enamored.
She blushed red. Jack smiled. If Laura was mine, he was certain, in his inimitable way, to flush out her friend. Women never go wine tasting alone. Uh-uh.
“Miles?” Susan hollered. I turned and stepped toward the bar. She slid two half-full glasses of red my direction. “Sea Smoke,” she said conspiratorially. “Sold out.”
“Thank you, Susan,” I said. “You’re a sweetheart. I’ll put you in my next novel.”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, I will, I promise.”
“Well, just make sure I keep my clothes on. I don’t want you describing something you haven’t seen.”
I must’ve already been a little looped on the Chenin Blanc because I raised my glass and said, “That could change between now and then.”
Susan laughed a throaty laugh and turned back to the buzzing crowd. She raised the volume on her voice. “Anyone need anything else here?”
Half of them raised their glasses and shouted, “Yeah!” It wasn’t even noon and the party was in full swing.
I edged past an elderly couple I guessed to be the owners of the grotesque RV parked out front. The man said, “Loved the movie.”
“Thank you,” I said.
His wife, a loose-limbed chubby already half in the crapper, piped up: “Where do you come up with these ideas?”
I tapped a forefinger to my temple and raised my glass of single-vineyard Foxen Pinot. “Between here and here lies the Rubicon of the imagination,” I replied grandiloquently, as I was wont to do when I got a little wine in me. They regarded me strangely and clearly didn’t know what to say.
I wormed my way back to where Jack was. More people had filtered into the tasting room. Those who were there when we arrived hadn’t left, my presence conferring on Foxen’s modest little facility the aura of something grander than the other tasting rooms in the vicinity.
I handed Jack his glass of Pinot. As he raised it to his mouth, I put my lips close to his ear and said, “Sea Smoke. Single vineyard. Sold out. 148 cases.”
Jack worked it around in his mouth and weighed in. “Awesome.”
“An orgy of flavors,” I said. When I turned to look at the lovely Laura, the anticipated friend was standing next to her, a smile emblazoned on her face. She had long honey-hued hair that straddled a face freckled with light brownish spots. Big-boned and gangling, close to six foot; the divisions of the spoils, if Jack and I had elected to journey there, and if the women were willing, became patently obvious.
“Hi, I’m Carmen,” she said, thrusting out her long, elegantly fingered hand.
I took it in my mine and held it for a meaningful moment. “Hi Carmen. I’m Miles.”
“I know,” she said excitedly. She turned to her friend and they giggled.
I swiveled my head and whispered into Jack’s ear: “Laura.”
“I figured,” he said. “Now that you have the upper hand you get the dark meat, is that the deal?”
I laughed. “You need that Amazon to find your dick under that gut. Laura would have to be a contortionist to get that silly little thing of yours inside her.”
“You’re having fun with this, aren’t you, Homes?”
I slapped him on the back. “You can dish it out, but you can’t take it.”
Jack smirked. “So, what’s the plan, Stan?” he said. “A little shuttle dick-plomacy?”
“No,” I said. “Let me take care of it.”
Jack laughed because it was such a glaring anomaly that I would be taking care of anything that had to do with the arranging of who, where and when.
A finger tapped me on the shoulder and I turned. Joy held up an empty glass. “Your mom would like some more.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Fine.”
“She getting slurry?”
“She’s okay, I think.”
I held up my mother’s wineglass so Susan could see it. I held my thumb and forefinger an inch apart to indicate how much, then jerked my thumb to the open door where my mother was parked outside. She smiled and nodded. I passed the wineglass back to Joy and she took it over to Susan for the refill.
“So, Miles, what’s your next book about?” Laura asked, batting her eyes.
I took a sip of the Pinot, which was really luxuriant, silky and herbaceous, and considered her question. “Well, I always write in the first person. So, I’m thinking about writing a book about a guy like Martin who meets this beautiful girl from Spain in a tasting room and throws it all away to go off with her.”
A wry smile creased her pretty face. “Yeah, right,” she said.
“Or maybe not,” I tacked, afraid suddenly of alienating her with my lame flirtatious banter. “I don’t know, Laura. Honestly? I’m kind of blocked.” I shrugged. “So, what brings you to the Santa Ynez Valley?”
Carmen held up the Shameless map. “We are doing the tour of your movie. Which we both loved.”
“Oh, yeah? All the way from Spain, huh?”
“Yes.”
“You know, my friend Jack here is the inspiration for the Jake character,” I said, clapping Jack on the shoulder. Quid pro quo, as it were, for hooking me up with Maya years ago.
“Yes, he was telling us all about it.” Carmen turned to Jack. “Did you really cheat on your fiancée just before you got married?”
“Pure fiction. Right, Miles?”
“Well . . . yeah, it’s fiction. The real Jake would never cheat, Carmen. He’s a one-woman guy.”
Carmen and Laura looked at each other, their glance acknowledging that I was surely being facetious.
Laura said, “Well, we have to fly back home tomorrow. Do you want to go wine tasting with us?”
Jack widened his bloodshot eyes at me. “Well,” I started, “unfortunately, we’re taking my mom, who’s in a wheelchair, up to Portland, then on to Wisconsin to be with her sister, so . . .” Jack’s shoulders visibly sagged. “But, hey, we’re heading up to Paso Robles this afternoon. I’ve got an event there tomorrow at Justin Winery,” I added casually.
Jack looked fixedly at me like I was about to blow it, utter something alienating, grow all nasty and snobbishly erudite about wine and prompt them to hightail it.
“Where’s Paso Robles?” Laura asked, flashing her dark eyes at me and making my knees weak.
“Eighty miles north of here. Gorgeous place. Beautiful winery.”
Jack chimed in: “We’re heading to the International Pinot Noir Celebration in Oregon.” He placed a hand on my shoulder, pressed his ruddy cheek next to mine and added for maximum effect, “Miles is the master of ceremonies.”
“Wow,” exclaimed Laura. She was looking more beautiful with every sip of the startlingly delicious Pinot, helping me—God bless her!—to bury the harsh, if justly deserved, rejection by Maya. “What does a master of ceremonies do?”
“I think he gives an opening speech,” I said, “then they strip off all his clothes and send him loose through the vineyards and the participants chase after him brandishing Dijon clone cuttings and he becomes like Cornell Wilde in The Naked Prey.”
Laura erupted into knowing laughter.
“You’ve seen that film, Laura?”
“I’m getting my degree in cinema at the University of Barcelona.”
“Really, no shit?” Now the needle on her attractiveness was climbing past ten! “Criticism? Writing? Production?”
“Directing.”
“Reeeeeaaaallly?” I said, the wine hyperbolizing my speech. “And you thought Shameless was pretty good, huh?”
“I think, sorry for my English, it’s a minor masterpiece.”
“Well, thank you, Laura.” I turned to Jack. “Jesus, this day’s getting off to an auspicious start.”
Jack looked anxious as to where I was going with this. I think the arcane film reference had him a tad concerned. Laughter warred with worry.
“Well, sounds like quite a trip,” Laura said, referring to something I had evidently said and already forgotten.
“Would you two beautiful señoritas like something a little more exciting in your glasses?”
They both thrust their wineglasses at me and chorused, “¡Sí, sí!” Loved it! Fuck, man. Maya, you are so yesterday!
I ferried their glasses over to Susan and set them on the table. “Could I get a little more of the Sea Smoke, sweetheart?” Ever since the film had been released their tasting room business had gone through the roof. You couldn’t get into their wine club, even if you begged.
“No prob, Miles,” Susan said. She set the glasses under the bar, discreetly filled them halfway up, and set them in front of me.
“Thanks.”
“And don’t write in your next book that I did this.”
I laughed. “Maybe I’ll play god and have everyone take their clothes off and start having sex.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “It’s already too crazy in here. I used to have a stress-free life.”
“All right,” I said jauntily. “Back in a bit for another hit.”
I carried the Pinot back to the girls and passed the glasses into their waiting hands. Jack went out to check on Joy and my mother. I leaned my head in to the two Spanish girls. “Single vineyard. Very sought after by Pinot vignerons. Highly allocated,” I murmured in a tone to let them know they had entered my inviolable world and were drinking something spectral. “Just don’t let it out.”
We sipped Foxen’s Sea Smoke studiously.
“Oh, wow,” said Laura, raising her eyebrows. “It’s very different from what we’ve been drinking.”
“This is nice,” Carmen chimed in, a little too loudly.
I tapped a forefinger to my lips. “Stick with me,” I said, winking conspiratorially.
A few moments later, Jack reappeared at my side.
“How’s my mom doing?” I asked.
“Gal loves her wine.”
“I know. Speaking of which. We need to be freshened up.”
“Indeed we do,” Jack said. He slung his arm over my shoulder and rubbed his beard against my cheek and slobbered, “You are awesome, dude. Awesome!”
I handed him my glass. “Tell Susan we want to try the Sanford & Benedict.”
“Sanford & Benedict,” he echoed. “Aye, aye, captain.” Jack blustered his way through the crowd and bushwhacked his way to the bar.
“We’re going up and up,” I said to the two Spanish girls, adding, “Until we touch the edge of the vinous empyrean.”
They laughed at the silly trope, though who knows whether it translated? I made a quick mental note to go light on the polysyllabics, wine having the unfortunate effect on making me go supercilious.
A stocky man in his thirties, red-faced, wobbling in place, picked up one of the spit buckets from the bar. Susan shouted at him, “Hey, hey, HEY!”
But the guy, with Neanderthal forehead and manifesting all the physiognomic characteristics of fetal alcohol syndrome, was on a mission. He staggered over to me, hoisted the dump bucket high over his head and shouted: “Shameless!” Then he threw back his head like a spooked horse and upended the contents of the bucket over his florid face. He wiped the spilled wine from his face with both hands like windshield wipers run amok and grinned the grin of a farm-boy idiot. There was a brief, almost hushed, silence before the packed tasting room started hooting like a crowd of soccer hooligans.
Susan, accustomed to puerile imitations of that scene in the movie, had already, via cell, summoned help. Minutes later, in the ruckus that followed, a burly young man hurried in; his heavy work boots thundered on the planked floor. It wasn’t hard to discern who the tasting room miscreant was—the guy’s yellow shirt now looked like some hippie tie-dyed rag—and the vintner aide went right up to him, wrestled him into a half nelson and spun him around. “All right, pal, you’ve had a little too much.”
When the Spit Bucket Upender tried to break free of the hold, a scuffle ensued. Some of the other wine appreciators in the tight quarters were jostled and spilled their wine on their companions’ attire.
Jack handed me the two glasses that Susan had refreshed and said, “Sanford & Benedict as ordered,” then hustled over to help the somewhat outmanned vintner aide. They arm-wrestled the Upender outside into the blazing sun and forced him to the hot dirt-and-gravel shoulder. The vintner aide gave him a stern upbraiding, and Jack, for good measure, booted him in the ass a few times. Upender’s equally inebriated girlfriend got upset and started flailing her tiny fists at Jack. Jack grabbed her by both wrists and practically lifted her up off the ground in his attempt to calm her down.
“Rape! Rape!” the Upender’s girlfriend screamed. “Rape!”
“You should get so lucky!” Jack shouted into her hysterical face.
“Jack’s a man of action,” I explained to Laura and Carmen. “He doesn’t like violence.”
Two more workers from the winery appeared to help roughhouse the obstreperous couple into their car. One of them reached into the Upender’s pocket and stripped him of his car keys. “I’ll call you a cab!”
Jack lumbered back into the tasting room.
Behind the bar, Susan resumed her duties. She wagged a finger at me. I shrugged, but she smiled to show she was kidding.
I turned back to Laura and Carmen, shaking my head. “Jesus. What’s wrong with these people? Can’t they hold their mugs?”
“This happen a lot?” Laura asked.
I lifted my glass of Sanford & Benedict and said, “The power of words.”
They laughed until their cheeks were rosy as uncooked saffron and their eyes watered.
Jack extended his hand and I returned his glass. He looked at his forearm with an expression of disgust. “Fucking chick scratched me.”
I examined his injuries. The arm was raked pretty good and fresh blood marked the wounds. “Not as bad as when Terra went after you.”
“Let’s not go there, Homes,” Jack said, glancing over at Carmen to see if she was eavesdropping, the minor language barrier affording us some latitude.
“Excuse me, girls,” I said. I zigzagged over to the bar and whispered to Susan, “Can I have that bottle of the S&B? I’ll pay for it. I think I need to get out of here. For your sake and mine.”
She produced the bottle, with alacrity, from below the counter. “On the house.”
“Thanks, Susan. Sorry if I caused a stir here. Jack was the one who blew my cover.”
“We’re always glad to see you, Miles.”
I picked up the bottle, turned and caught Jack’s eye and motioned with my head to the outside deck.
Jack said something I couldn’t catch to Laura and Carmen, and the two of them smilingly trailed him out to where I had indicated.
I placated the circle of people who had surrounded us by signing a few last autographs, then canoed my way through the treacherous straits of the burgeoning mob and outside, to join Jack and the Spanish girls. The wind had freshened, the sun was blazing in the cloudless sky, and hawks and turkey vultures were now swooping in baleful circles homing in on otiose rodents. I set the bottle on the wooden balustrade and Jack instantly grabbed it by the neck and refilled the girls’ wineglasses. I stood behind Laura and, without thinking, splayed my fingers and combed them through her silky dark hair. She gave me a backward smiling glance, which I took as reassurance it was okay I had touched her.
My hand resting on her bare shoulder, I asked Jack, “Hey, where’s my mom?”
Jack gestured with his wineglass to a knoll overlooking one of Foxen’s splendiferous vineyards. I panned with his arm. Just over his extended wineglass, I could make out my mother sitting in her wheelchair, signature Gilligan’s Island hat on her head, a glass of Chard glinting in her hand, appearing positively at peace with the world. Scampering around her was Snapper whom, I could hear, she frequently admonished.
“Where’s Joy?”
“I don’t know,” Jack said.
“Excuse me a sec.” I set my S&B on the picnic table and traipsed up the hill to where my mother had been wheeled. About twenty feet short of her I paused. She was staring out over the vineyard, nodding her head up and down, unaware of my presence, swimming in her stroke-addled, hypnagogic netherworld. There was something sad about her sitting there all alone. Then, too, she was out of that mausoleum, Las Villas de Muerte, she had before her a gorgeous view, not to mention a cold glass of artisanal Chardonnay, while reposing under the soothing sun. All her peevishness had been replaced by a profound serenity, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since that moment she had gone out like a light on a dimmer switch and almost died . . . She was going home.
Not wanting to startle her, I made a gingerly approach. “How’re you doing, Mom?” I squatted to her eye level.
She turned her arthritic neck as far as she could manage, and a sad smile creased her face. “Marvelous,” she said. She raised her wineglass as if saluting the abode of God, which was no doubt soon to reclaim her. Her face grew merry. “I’m flying with the angels. Whoo!”
I laughed. “It’s a beautiful view you’ve got here.”
“I know.”
“What’re you thinking about?”
She sipped her wine. “About how lucky I am to have you for a son.”
I hooked an arm around her shoulders and said, “Well, I didn’t like seeing you so unhappy in that place.”
“I was going to die there.”
“I didn’t know what else to do, Mom.”
“I know.”
“I know you had a stroke and things are different, but I’m taking you home.”
“That’s such good news.”
“Do you miss Dad?”
She lifted an arm at a forty-five degree angle and pointed a finger at the pristine blue sky. “Oh, yes. He’s up there somewhere.” She nodded to herself. “We had a pretty good marriage.”
“Where’s Joy?” I asked, eager to get off the subject.
“Oh,” she said in a trilling voice. “Off smoking her Mary Jane somewhere.” A look of sudden alarm clouded her face and she hunched forward, shouting, “Snapper! Snapper! Get back here.”
Snapper had ventured down the hill in pursuit of a blue jay who was toying with him, dive-bombing and nipping at him, then elevating out of his reach. Several times he leapt up in the air, yipping excitedly, the cackling bird barely eluding his jaws. Hearing my mother’s admonitions, he jerked his small box-shaped head in her direction and mindfully sprinted back to her.
“Okay, Mom, I’m going to go back down to the tasting room. You all right? You want to go?”
“No, I’m fine.”
“If you need a little more wine, just ask Joy, okay?”
“Okay.”
“We’re on vacation,” I said magnanimously.
“Oh, yes,” she exclaimed.
I straightened up and started off. Halfway down the narrow road, I heard my mother cry out, “Joy! Joy!” I looked back and saw Joy materialize out of nowhere and minister to my mother. She took my mother’s empty glass and headed in my direction. I waited until she caught up with me.
“Your mom wants more wine.”
I laughed. “Oh, yeah. One glass and the trapdoor springs.”
“She said you said it was okay.”
“You have to monitor it, Joy,” I said. “Okay?” But what I was really thinking was how I could keep my mother occupied while I figured out what to do with the Spanish girls.
We started down the hill together. I walked deliberately slowly because her stride was only half that of mine. “Give her whatever she wants. Within reason. She’s had a hard life.”
“Okay.”
“You don’t drink wine, huh?”
She shrugged.
“You like pot, huh?”
She smiled. “I drink wine some time.”
“I can’t smoke pot. Makes me too self-conscious.”
“I have a medical marijuana card,” she confided.
“Oh, yeah, for what? Just to get pot?”
“No,” she said in a chastising tone. “I had a bad accident. A car ran over my foot. I was in the hospital for three months. At first they wanted to amputate it.”
“Really? That’s awful.”
“I had like ten surgeries,” she amplified. “I couldn’t walk for six months. I stayed with my sister.”
“So, are you still in pain?”
“Not when I smoke,” she giggled.
I didn’t know whether this was a positive or negative admission, but I was a little looped, so I squeezed her shoulder. “Well, you’re doing a great job, Joy. We’re going to hang out here another hour, then hit the road.” I bent my head down so that I was looking into her eyes, but she averted her gaze. “Everything going okay?”
She grew a quizzical look and just nodded. When we reached the tasting room, I said to Joy, “Tell Susan you’re with me and you’d like a glass of the Viognier. Make sure you get an ample pour.”
“Okay.”
“My mom will sleep it off on the way to Paso Robles.” I patted her on the shoulder and sent her on her mission.
I returned to the deck where Jack and the two Spanish girls were seated around the picnic table. The wine had gone to my head and I was in an uncharacteristically touchy-feely mood. I eased down next to Laura and bumped my shoulder affectionately against hers. “Hey, Laura.”
“Hey, Miles.”
Her womanly nearness made me feel warm and fuzzy all over. I lifted my glass and saluted Jack. A beaming Jack toasted me back. Carmen, it seemed, had wriggled closer to him on the opposite side of the picnic table. I sensed that a colloquy between her and the lovely Laura had been conducted, in the event we should prove to be amenable to additional festivities. By their laughter I concluded we pretty much could do as we pleased. But I needed more time, and more wine, to suss this one out. Marcie would have a hematoma if I canceled on the Paso event, but I’d bailed before—often last minute with a crucifying hangover and a pack of lame excuses—“Brother just went in for emergency triple bypass surgery” her current favorite.
I sipped my wine. The noise from the tasting room was resounding. Cackling laughter would occasionally shear away from the thrum of inebriated voices. Twice I was interrupted by people demanding autographs. I was surprised by how many people had brought my book with them, reading passages as they traipsed from tasting room to tasting room. They wanted to know if I was going to be at the Hitching Post later so we could continue the party. The more I drank the more Laura’s face seemed to glow. This was my time, I thought, feeling my shoulder warming against Laura’s. Jack was right. Why hold back? I glanced up at the knoll where my mother was basking in the sun just as Joy reached her and handed her a glass of golden Viognier. My mother wouldn’t know it was Viognier, but she would know it tasted outrageously good. I suddenly found myself saying, “So, you girls came all the way over from Spain just to do the Shameless tour?”
“We did,” Laura said.
It flashed on me that I was repeating myself. I set my wineglass down and slid it a foot away. “And where are you staying?” I asked.
They answered in unison, “The Windmill Inn.”
“Oh, Christ,” I said. “You really are doing the tour, aren’t you?” I tried to sound jokingly sarcastic, but Jack wasn’t convinced. He frowned at me, gave me the stink eye, fearing I was about to alienate them with my irrepressible sardonic wit. To allay his fears I added, “It warms me to the cockles of my heart that my words could have such a salubrious effect on such lovely women from so far away.”
Jack evidently had no idea what to make of salubrious, and my tone of voice may have come off a tad disingenuous, or a little too mocking, so he went on the mend. “What Miles means to say is that he couldn’t be more happier at this point in his life. Right, Miles?”
“Exactly,” I said in a rising tone. “Could not be a scintilla more happier.” But Jack had nothing to worry about. The Spanish Laura was exactly my type. “So, Carmen, what do you do back in . . . ?”
“Barcelona,” Carmen said in her Catalan pronunciation so that it came out sounding like “Bur-celona.” “I work for an architecture firm doing their, how do you say, their gardens and plants . . .”
“Landscaping?”
“Yes,” she said. “But it’s environmental. Good for the land.”
I poured some more wine—where had it gone so quickly? “God, a woman who works the earth with her mind! Is there anything sexier, Jack?”
Jack smiled. “Nope.”
“You know, it’s too bad we have to be up in Paso Robles and you girls have to fly out tomorrow.”
Now Jack frowned. “They don’t fly out of LAX until late tomorrow, right, ladies?”
“It’s a red-eye,” Carmen said.
“Well, then maybe the two of you would like to come up to Paso with us.” Relief washed visible over Jack like a thunderstorm bursting over a desiccated floodplain. “We’re staying at this great little bed & breakfast. There’re only four suites, and they’re amazing, and I’m confident I can get you into one.”
Jack was nodding nirvanically like a bearded Buddhist. The girls were making intense eye contact, locked in a dialogue whose language was composed of darting eyes and subtle birdlike expressions.
“Okay,” Laura said. “That sounds fun.”
“Great,” Jack said.
I straightened from the bench. “Laura? You want to take a stroll with me and check out the Pinot grapes?”
She leapt to her feet. I held out my hand and she took it in hers. “Grab your glass.” I raised my eyes to Jack. “Hold down the fort, Jackson.”
“Will do, Capitán.” He tented his forehead with one hand and mock saluted me.
I seized the near-empty bottle of the Foxen Pinot and escorted Laura away, toward my lair of drunken erotic fantasies. Over my shoulder I said to Jack, “Susan’ll give you another bottle. Try their dry-farmed Cab Franc.”
“We’ll see you in a bit, Miles,” Jack said, waving and smiling.
I ushered Laura down into one of Foxen’s vineyards. Out in the open, away from the shelter of the main winery and the tasting room, the cooling wind off the ocean rustled the flora and cooled the perspiration that had our clothes sticking to our skin. It was late July and the gnarly, trellised and netted rootstocks, abundantly leafed out in canopies of shimmering green, rose above us as we descended between rows. Clusters of fruit the size of a girl’s fist hung nestled in the leafage, promising an autumn profusion. In the next two months they would swell to twice their size and ripen to a dark blackish-purple, ready for harvest.
I didn’t know what I was going to do with this girl. She was barely thirty, more than a decade my junior. She had journeyed 6,000 miles to visit the locations in the movie, spurred by a vivid imagination that the film inspired, wanting to see where it all happened in reality. I sensed that she was looking for romance and that, in her mind, it was her felicitous fortune that she had stumbled upon the author of the book that had inspired her vacation. For a moment I felt what it must feel like to be a rock star after an electrifying set.
“Do you have a boyfriend back in Barcelona, Laura?”
“It’s LAU-ra,” she corrected.
“LAU-ra. I love that pronunciation.”
“No.”
“No. How come? You’re so beautiful.” She was.
She shrugged. “I’m too busy.”
“You’re not gay, are you?”
“No. I tried it once, but I didn’t like, forgive me my English . . .”
“Lobster nibbling?” I attempted to joke, but it didn’t translate.
She looked at me strangely and I tried to maintain.
“So, you want to make movies?” I inquired, quickly shifting the subject.
“Maybe. Be the female Almodóvar?”
“Do you like his films?”
“He is a genius.”
“I agree,” I said. “What about Buñuel?”
“More than genius. A god.”
Christ! “Hey, if I came to España, would you show me around?”
“Claro! You should come. It’s a beautiful country. You speak castellana?”
“Muy poco.”
She smiled shyly.”
“All right. I’m coming. That’s not a threat. It’s a promise.” I pointed my wineglass at her for emphasis.
We had reached the end of the vineyard grid. A patch of wild fescue beckoned and I plopped down on my butt and elbows, the sky a vertiginous swirl of blue and drifting wisps of indolent clouds. Laura coiled down next to me. I poured us both more wine. She sipped it with evident pleasure. I inquired whether she drank a lot of wine and she said she did, she loved wine. But since Pinot Noir wasn’t indigenous to Spain and because Bourgognes rouges were too expensive she rarely drank any. “But this tastes a lot like our Riojas,” she remarked, studying the wine in her glass.
“You know,” I said, “some wine historians contend that when phylloxera decimated France in the mid-1800s and destroyed most of their vines, they took the Pinot rootstock they salvaged to Spain, where it flourished and was renamed Tempranillo.”
“Oh, yeah?” she said.
At a momentary loss for words, I said, “So you like Almodóvar, huh?”
“Yes. He is a true auteur.”
“Talk to Her was a brilliant film.”
“I think I like his earlier films better. More . . .” She fumbled for words.
“Risk-taking?”
“Yes. Risk-taking.”
Our eyes locked. Totally high on the Foxen grape, I said, “I’d like to write you a film, Laura.”
“Really?”
“When I come to Spain. Maybe we’ll write it together.”
“I think you’re drunk, Miles.”
I sipped more wine. “Drunk on you, Laura.” I leaned in and kissed her. Her lips were soft and pliant. We set our wineglasses down. Then we kissed again, this time more ardently. “I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever been within five feet of.”
“Now, I know you’re drunk.”
“No, seriously. And I’ve met Penelope Cruz.”
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. I mean, she’s pretty, but your beauty is . . . unique, muy especial. Okay, so I am a little tipsy.”
She laughed and we kissed again. Then we stared meaningfully into each other’s eyes. She really was extraordinarily beautiful. I wanted to make love to her so badly, maybe because I was still smarting from Maya’s rejection, but I feared if my move was too aggressive it could blow the whole Paso plan. And that I would never hear the end of it from Jack.
I tore away from our lovestruck gaze and cast my eyes over the trellised vineyard. I could make out my mother, still parked atop the knoll with her glass of wine and frisky dog. She seemed content so I returned my attention to LAU-ra. “I can’t believe we met,” I whispered into her ear before kissing it lightly. “Do you think it’s fate?” I nuzzled her ear again and spoke mellifluously into it. “Maybe I wrote my book so that a woman like you would come to me from somewhere faraway and make me deliriously happy.” I actually meant it when I said it, even if all the wine had disinterred a romantic fantasy I pathologically kept hidden from women.
“Maybe,” she said. She picked up her glass and took a sip. I sipped mine. The sun beat down on us. A native raptor cawed overhead. We locked eyes again. I wanted to say, “I really want to lick your pussy,” but, instead, I quoted a line of poetry from memory: “‘I seek in my flesh, the tracks of your lips.’”
“That’s Lorca,” she cried.
“Yes. One of my favorite writers.”
We kissed again, this time more passionately. She set her wineglass aside and lay down on the wiry grass. I eased myself on top of her. Her chest swelled and I wondered if she wanted me to take her then and there. Slowly, with my eyes fastened on hers—rejection be damned!—I unfastened the top button of her jeans. She made no move to protest. Wordlessly, very slowly, teasingly, I undid the other four until her panties were revealed, shockingly white against her light brunette skin. She fell silent. Her face was frozen into a kind of compliant smile. She may have been floored by my romantic patter, or she may have, well, just wanted to get laid in a vineyard. Then she looked up at me. In her unblinking eyes there was yearning, an attempt to read me, and perhaps a scintilla of danger stirred with lust. I stared into the dark passageways of her eyes as I concomitantly slid my hand into her panties, forded her silky-haired pussy, found the wet crease in her thatch of wiry hair and carefully everted it. Again, without receiving any remonstration.
“You’re so wet,” I said in a susurrus voice.
She smiled, threw her head back, then collapsed her arms and lowered herself to the grass and surrendered to my desires.
I massaged her clitoris with my forefinger until it swelled like the flesh of a raw mussel. She shut her eyes against the advent of pleasure. A gust of wind clattered the leaves of the Pinot rootstock and freshened our bodies. I kissed her. “You taste like tapas, Laura.”
Her body rocked with laughter. “Oh, yeah?”
I kissed her lightly again, my left hand still gently massaging her clitoris. “Scampi. Pickled olives. Smoked paprika. Saffron. Seafood. Paella.” In between kisses: “I make an amazing paella.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. It took me about fifty botched attempts to perfect it.”
“You cook?”
“I love to cook.”
We kissed again, this time more passionately, our lips deliquescing. I could feel her chest swelling, surrendering to me. She was a beautiful woman. Perhaps the most beautiful woman I had ever kissed. It made me want to kiss her that much more. I gently pushed my finger inside her and she moaned. I obliterated her moans with more kisses. My cock grew hard and struggled to escape my tight pants. I deftly unbuckled my belt and unbuttoned my jeans and swiftly brought her hand to my fleshy rudder. She squeezed it artfully. Her whole body leapt up into mine as if her soul were a succubus inhabiting me in my dreams and tyrannizing my unconscious. I awkwardly rode her tank top up to her neck and redirected my mouth to one of her exposed breasts. She had been blessed with dark, sexy nipples, the color of squid ink, and I could feel them distending against the flicking of my impious tongue. Her chest heaved against mine. Unrepentant, I licked a trail to her belly button. Her hand lost purchase on my cock and it staggered in the air like a sword stabbed in stone. I wriggled her jeans off to just below her knees and bifurcated her legs. I dissolved into her pussy. Her small hands reached for my head and clutched it forcefully as if fearing I would decamp for more conventional expressions of licentiousness.
“Pour some wine on me just like your character did in your book,” she said, startling me.
I looked up at her. “Really? That’s so cliché, Laura.”
“I don’t care. I want you to lick wine off me. Por favor.”
Her por favor made me laugh. I reached for the bottle, scrabbled to my knees, my cock still leaping around like a boom cut loose from the rigging, and straddled her pussy. Like a cellarmaster decanting the finest aged Burgundy, I tilted the bottle until just a trickle streamed into the Tastevin of her bellybutton. She giggled, as if undergoing some kind of pleasurable torture. I traced a trail of wine from her navel along the gloriously faint line of dark hair to the nearshore of her abundant pubic hair, then to the headwaters of her wetness.
She laughed all the way during the teasing liquid journey. When the bottle was emptied, I fell on her again with an unquenchable thirst for both the sexual thrill that the wine inspired and the vertiginous thrill of her midday alfresco nakedness. All, it appeared, because one day I dared to write a book that I thought for certain would capsize my “career.”
“Oh, God, Miles. That feels so good!” Her voice rose and her spine arched and her thighs tensed and quivered. “Don’t stop! Please.”
I had no intention of stopping. Sex in the out-of-doors, especially with someone you just met, whether it be on a deserted beach accompanied by thunderous surf or in a ripening vineyard emitting its floral piquancy, is about as torrid as it gets. It was, that is, until I heard a faint, but familiar, cry.
“Snapper,” the distant voice sounded. “Snapper,” my mother wailed from atop the knoll. “Snapper! Come back here!”
Sensing something amiss, I hoisted myself up off Laura and clambered to my feet. I tented my forehead, shielding it from the sun, my cock hard as a hammer. I could make out my mother hunched over in her wheelchair, her arm extended toward the vineyard at the bottom of the grassy hill, calling frantically for her dog.
“What is it?” Laura asked, whiplashing from the cunnilingus interruptus.
“My mother,” I said.
I didn’t see Joy anywhere in sight and my mother continued to yell at Snapper, who was running around in crazy circles, chasing another taunting blue jay. Suddenly, in a moment of utter foolishness engendered by her stroke, she released the brakes on her wheelchair, clutched the handrim with her one good hand and dislodged herself from the precipice and started down the hill! In her demented determination to reclaim her pet, she picked up speed and charged down the slope, looking surreally like some handicapped Soap Box Derby contestant on a collision course with a trellised row of grapevines instead of a finish line.
“Holy shit!” I cried.
Laura scrambled to her feet. “What?”
“My fucking mother!” Bent at the waist, she was now halfway down the hill, trailed by a funnel of dust. I pulled up my pants and took off running, buttoning them as best I could manage in a full headlong sprint toward God knows what calamity. I ran tangle-footed along the perimeter of the vineyard until I came approximately to where my mother had launched her kamikaze pursuit of her uncontrollable dog. Careering into the vineyard, I ran up between the Pinot rootstock, the foliage slapping at my arms. “Mom? Mom? Where are you?” I called out.
I emerged on the other side but didn’t see her. When I looked around, I saw Joy diagonally navigating the knoll in a frantic descent, slipping and falling on her ass a few times. I walked along the vineyard rows calling out my mother’s name. About a dozen rows down from where I’d emerged, I heard whimpering.
“Oh, Snapper, you make me worry so much,” my mother was cooing to her incorrigible pet.
I found her about ten feet into the vineyard and closed in on her hurriedly. “Mom, Mom, are you all right?”
Strangely, as if in a dream, she lifted her wineglass, which she had tucked between her thighs, and took a sip. The wine had sloshed out on her death-defying plunge down the hill and she was more dismayed to think that it was empty than that she could easily have been maimed in the brakeless ride. “Can I have some more, please?” she said, squinting her eyes against the sun, utterly oblivious of what had just happened.
“Are you all right?” I said.
“I’m fine.”
“What’d you do that for?” I implored.
“Snapper was running away.”
“Jesus, Mom, you could have killed yourself!”
“Then you would have gotten your trust fund.”
“There’s no trust fund left, Mom. Doug spent it all!”
“I don’t care if I die,” she said petulantly. Or, possibly, truthfully.
“Well, I do. Not on my watch.” I patted her Gilligan’s Island hat. “I was worried. You freaked me out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you want me to cut your wine allotment?”
“Oh, no.”
I stared angrily at the panting Snapper and brandished a reproving finger at him. “It’s your fault, you little devil. Do it again and I’m going to have you euthanized.”
“Don’t say that,” my mother screamed. “He’s all I’ve got.”
I looked at her, incredulous. “Mom, I’m all you’ve got.”
“You’re not always there for me.”
“What’re you talking about? Okay, so maybe we weren’t very close when I was growing up, but that doesn’t mean I’m some heartless bastard. I’m fucking taking you back to Wisconsin.”
“Because you want to get rid of me! And watch your language.”
“Want to get rid of you? If I wanted to get rid of you I wouldn’t have called 911 when you had your congestive heart failure. You had died, Mom, and gone to heaven. I made that call and they brought you back. I’m the reason you were sitting on that beautiful knoll with an expensive glass of wine in your hand a moment ago.” I shook my head. “You think I wanted to go on this journey? Take you and Joy and Snapper all the way to Wisconsin? If you thought about it for one second—if I thought about it for one second—you would have to conclude I had one foot in the loony bin!” I lowered my voice to a more conciliatory register. “And all I ask is that you not do crazy shit! Otherwise I’m going to have to lock you in your hotel room with Joy and that”—I pointed at Snapper—“stupid animal.”
“He is not stupid,” she said, breaking into tears.
I exhaled a sigh and knelt in the dirt beside her chair. “Look, Mom, I know only half your brain is working. But that pretty much sums up half of the people in this country. Especially those nincompoops in Washington. So, to me, you’re almost normal. I mean, what possessed you to release the brakes on your chair? You could have gotten a WUI?”
She looked at me quizzically. “Huh?”
“Wheelchairing under the influence.”
She chuckled. “Oh, no.”
“Look, Mom, we have a long way to go. I want to have fun on this trip, just like you. I’m doing my best. Okay?”
“I know,” she said, suddenly contrite.
“So, no more reckless wheelchairing or I’m going to turn this thing around and deposit you back in Las Villas de Muerte.”
“I’ll be good.”
“Okay.”
Joy found us in the vineyard. Seeing my mother none the worse for wear, she searched me for an explanation.
“She’s okay,” I told her.
“I’m sorry. It’s my fault,” she said matter-of-factly.
“It’s not your fault, Joy,” I said.
My mother crooked her forefinger at me and said, “What’s that on your face?”
Remembering suddenly the wine-infused cunnilingus, I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm a couple of times to tidy up.
“And how come your buttons are undone?” my mother asked, jabbing her finger at my crotch.
I glanced down and noticed that I had managed only half the fly on my jeans. I quickly remedied the oversight, but not before a bedraggled Laura materialized in the vineyard, running her fingers through her straggly hair.
Snapper, sniffing something that made him—and hetero men everywhere in the world!—go crazy, ran up to her and started leaping up and trying to get a closer whiff of her forbidden, and now redolently ripe, fruit.
“Snapper. Stop that,” my mother scolded.
Snapper darted back to my mother, lifted his leg and urinated on her wheelchair, then leapt up into her lap with the agility of a bullfrog.
“Mom, this is Laura. I met her in the tasting room.”
“Did you drink from the wine bucket?” my mother screeched.
“No, Mom. I didn’t drink from the spit bucket. I spilled a little wine when I saw you flying down the hill. I still can’t believe you did that.” I burst out laughing at the recollection of my mother hurtling down the knoll in her wheelchair in her death-defying pursuit of her dog. “Jesus—fucking—Christ. If you want to commit suicide, let’s go to a gun shop and put you down properly!”
Laura and Joy exchanged raised eyebrows, unaware that my mother and I were comfortable with this sort of macabre badinage.
“Watch your language,” my mother reproached. “He’s watching.” She pointed to the hot blue sky.
I looked up where she was looking and said histrionically, “Sorry, God.” Then I looked back down at her. “All right, let’s get you back.” I clutched the handlebars on the wheelchair and spun her around. It took the strength of all three of us to push her back up the hill. Now and then it felt like a Sisyphean effort and, yes, admittedly, a part of me secretly wished she had gone in peace, wineglass in hand, soaring heavenward with her imaginary angels. But the woman had the proverbial nine lives of a cat. She had survived two marriages, three rambunctious sons, a pulmonary embolism, a massive cerebral infarct, and arrhythmic heart attack, and congestive heart failure. She was one tough old bird.
Gasping for breath, we finally reached the crest of the hill. I let a still-shaken Joy take the reins. Laura and I hung back. When they were out of view Laura wrapped both arms around me and hugged me tightly. Sometimes interrupted sex can make a woman cleave to your body in anticipation of deferred gratification.
“Will you come to Paso Robles?” I asked in an undertone. “I didn’t mean to be so forward. You just really turn me on.”
She looked up at me with ardent eyes. “We said we would.”
Relief suffused me. “Great. Because I really want to get to know you better.” I kissed her to demonstrate that I meant what I said. And I did. “Plus, we have some . . . unfinished business.”
Laura laughed, and we kissed again. “Okay, Miles, we come to Paso.”