St. Helena, Napa County, California
September 1999
ROWS OF GRAPES STRETCHED INTO the distance, vines full and clustered under a bronze sunrise that inched toward the western foothills. There was a bite in the air that hadn’t been around a week ago, a chill imperceptible to someone without our bone-deep knowledge of the environment. It was harvest season, the chance to correct last year’s mistakes and have a fresh start, a do-over.
I crouched down in my rubber boots and held a plump green grape between my thumb and forefinger. Its skin was dusty and warm, its texture soft but firm. Most of the family-owned wineries around us—and they appeared so often lately, people with big dreams who craved a different lifestyle—used machines for the harvest, machines that shook the fruit from the vines and cut out the human element of the work. They prioritized quantity, but not us, never us. Last year, David suggested bringing in a machine—We can get the grapes chilling so much faster—but I refused.
The physical part of the process was what I enjoyed most. The touch, the precision that a machine would never be able to achieve. We clipped the grapes by hand and let plump bunches fall into buckets. A machine would take everything—even the inferior grapes, blistered and sunburned and rotted—shearing bits of leaves and branches in the process. Every morning during the harvest I was outside with the pickers, choosing only the best fruit. There was no substitution for human care, and our wines reflected the attention we put into them.
David had disagreed but hadn’t pushed; lately, his mind wasn’t fully on the harvest. He had been distracted, a vacant quality behind his dark blue eyes. When I’d asked him what was wrong, he’d responded without looking at me: Nothing. Just trying to get everything done before the wedding.
The wedding that night wasn’t ours. Our wedding was nearly twenty years ago, a ceremony and reception at this very vineyard. The location had been an obvious choice. We’d been in the process of taking over the Golden Grape from David’s parents, and what better way to start the next chapter of our life together? I remembered David’s hand, reassuring on my back, the heat of it radiating through my dress. I’d thought about how lucky I was. Our friends at UC Davis had all said from the start that we’d end up married; David had told me after he proposed that he knew from the night we met that he’d ask me to marry him one day.
Tonight, we were attending the wedding of a friend’s daughter who was from another family of vintners down the St. Helena Highway, a corridor punctuated by wineries. There would be talk about this year’s harvest, about how all of us have been obsessively following the weather reports, checking sugars and pH and acid levels. Every day in September mattered: the pick date chosen is a winemaker’s most crucial decision. Wine, like people, is notoriously unforgiving.
To an inexperienced eye, the grape in my hand looked ready to eat. It was green and bulbous, straining with flavor. But I knew it would be too bitter. That it wasn’t yet time. Of all people, I understood that appearances could be deceiving.
David drove us to the wedding. In the back seat of our Escalade, our son Josh and his girlfriend, Michelle, were having a hard time not touching each other. I watched in the rearview mirror as his hand darted in and out of the lap of her short pink dress, a smile twitching at her lips as she crossed her legs and swatted him away. David and I had been like that, so many years ago: we’d driven from our off-campus housing at UC Davis to Napa in his beat-up Oldsmobile, our meager possessions bundled into the trunk, his fingers lazily drumming on my thigh.
As an only child, he was the heir to the Golden Grape, and our move here was inevitable. The winery had been in his family for over a century, passed down from generation to generation. He had learned the day-to-day operations as a teenager, never needing to find a part-time job of his own. His parents had been looking to retire, and David and I had freshly graduated, David from the viticulture and enology program and I with a degree in art history that I was never quite sure what to do with. It was time. David had been forthcoming from the start that the winery was his future—a future he wanted me in too.
“Forty-five acres,” he’d said when he first told me about the Golden Grape, casting his hands in the air. “With a house on the edge of the property. So it’s a bit dated, but we can renovate. A huge vineyard, right in our own backyard. Imagine all the space for our kids to run around, and for us to just—be a family. What more could you possibly want?” His palm had migrated to my back, his grin as infectious as his perpetual optimism. He’d looked so hopeful and sure of himself, like he was when we first met. We’d been dating for less than two weeks when he confessed he was already falling in love with me. He had pulled me out of the most uncertain time of my life and had given me the one thing I was starved for: a feeling of safety.
I loved the way he talked about parts of our life that hadn’t yet happened: his certainty, the way his eyes fixated on me and only me. His enthusiasm was contagious.
“Only if you’re sure, though,” David kept saying. “I know you wanted to work in a gallery—this is a different lifestyle.”
“I can handle it,” I assured him, brushing his floppy hair off his forehead, relishing how soft it felt in my hand. The handsome face underneath it, blue eyes and long lashes and strong cheekbones. We’d make beautiful babies, I found myself thinking out of nowhere.
“We’ll still travel all the time,” he promised me. We’d recently returned from Europe, where we’d stayed at hostels in Italy and Spain, and I itched to see even more of the world, to press colorful pushpins into the world map we’d tacked on the wall of our apartment.
I loved the Golden Grape the same way I would later love our children: without trying to, without even truly meaning to, memorizing and marveling over every inch of rolling skin. I pictured myself in the screened-in sunroom of the old house, working in a sketchbook as sun seared the vines. I didn’t know much about wine at first, but David was a good teacher, and in those early days, our teeth stained with cabernet sauvignon, we couldn’t get enough of our new land—all of it, ours—and each other—all of him, mine.
“Let’s start trying,” he whispered in my ear one night after a dinner he’d cooked for me. His warm breath tickled my ear; his hand migrated between my legs. We’d been the first of our friend group to do everything: engaged at twenty-one, married at twenty-two. We were twenty-five, and children were the logical next step.
He waited for my response, his eyes trained on my face, the way only David had ever looked at me. Like I was deserving of worship. My hesitation melted under that gaze. A thought fizzled in my head, like a snuffed-out fire: I’m not sure I’m ready. It was just nerves; of course I wanted a family with David. It was something we’d talked about and planned for.
That night, we started trying, and for the weeks that followed, I walked around with a newfound fragility, imagining the cells multiplying inside me. But the ensuing pregnancy test was negative, bringing with it a mixture of disappointment and relief.
“We’ll try again,” David said, his lips finding my neck. We did, and when my next period was late, I peed on a stick and held my breath as two lines instantly formed.
I surprised David by wrapping up the stick inside a tiny onesie I’d seen at a baby boutique in town. His expression had been one of awe. His mouth had dropped open and his eyes had crinkled at the corners. “Really?” He’d pulled me into the tenderest hug. I’d dipped my chin into the crook of his shoulder. I have everything, I’d thought as tears filled my eyes.
And I did have everything. Until a few months ago, when it all started to come undone.
When we arrived at the Oakery Estate for the wedding, Josh and Michelle left to join a group of teenagers, other students from St. Helena High. I waited for David to lead me through the crowd. He was an extrovert but had found ways to accommodate me when he sensed I felt shy or awkward. Tonight, his hands remained firmly in his pockets.
“You look good,” I told him. It was true: at forty-two, David was still sandy-haired and square-jawed, with no hint of the paunch that inflated the waistbands of other men cresting into middle age. If anything, he was only becoming more handsome with each passing year.
“You too,” he said quickly, without looking at me. My dress was pale green silk, the hem tailored perfectly around my high-heeled sandals. David had barely glanced at me since I’d put it on, even though I’d chosen it with him in mind. He’d always loved when I wore green, commenting on how it brought out my eyes.
“I’ll be right back,” he whispered in my ear before retreating into a well-dressed throng of men in black tie and women in elegant long dresses. I made small talk with some of the other guests, my fingers wrapped tightly around the stem of a champagne flute. When I saw Michelle’s father, Rodney, and his wife, Jen, I waved. Jen made her way over and draped me in a hug.
“You look beautiful,” she said, patting at her tight updo.
“So do you,” I replied. Jen was Rodney’s second wife, and younger than me—in her midthirties, if that. David and I had known Rodney casually before Michelle and Josh started dating. He’d been a winemaker for even longer than we had owned the Golden Grape, and when Michelle and Josh became a couple, David and I made an effort to get to know the family better. We went on a few double dates and learned that Michelle split her time between Rodney and Jen’s home and her mother’s—Sylvie’s—house. Sylvie had never responded to my voice mails asking to meet for coffee: the few times I’d met her in person while dropping off Michelle, she had been aloof. Jen had drunkenly called her a snob once, and I wondered if she was right.
“I feel like this hairstyle was a mistake—it looks like a goddamn helmet,” Jen said with a tipsy giggle. “Where’s David?”
“Around somewhere,” I said, a nervous laugh catching in my throat.
Over the last three weeks, I’d looked at David differently, studying his face for a truth he wasn’t telling me. Ever since I’d found a receipt in his jacket pocket while getting our dry cleaning ready, for a small, expensive restaurant in Sonoma we’d been to several times, but not recently.
“We should go back to Sonoma,” I’d said absentmindedly, the receipt curled in my hand. We hadn’t been for a proper date night since Kieran was born nine months ago, and we’d both been strained over the summer, feeling more like coworkers than husband and wife. “Maybe a weekend away. We can get a sitter for Kieran. It would be good for us, don’t you think?”
David had been in the shower. The sound of the water pelting down exaggerated his pause before he responded. “Yeah. Sounds good. I haven’t been there in years.”
My fingers had closed around the receipt. Until that moment, I had assumed it was for a business dinner. Later, I would open it and analyze the dishes ordered—two appetizers, two meals, a shared bottle of chardonnay—and picture David, seated across from another woman, his foot bumping hers under the table. I almost confronted him, but I could already hear his excuse: Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Memory must be going with my old age.
Now, the receipt was in the beaded purse that hung at my side. I was afraid that if I couldn’t find it, it would be as if I had imagined its very existence.
It was ridiculous, the idea of David cheating on me, and something I’d never once considered in our two decades of marriage. It was ridiculous, until I remembered what the last few months had taught me. That I didn’t know everything about my husband.
David sat beside me as the bridesmaids made their slow walk down the flower-strewn aisle, as the organ swelled in preparation for the bridal chorus. He rested his hand on my knee as everyone watched the bride approach her groom, her tawny hair covered by a long veil. The groom was who I focused on: how his expression changed as she neared, tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. His hands clasped in a knot in front of him. The rapid rise and fall of his chest. It was all there, so much bald emotion, almost too intimate for a crowd.
I cast a sidelong glance at David. He met my eyes, but his smile—so familiar I could have memorized it, down to the striations around his denim-blue eyes—came a beat too late.
We left the reception when the dancing began, the scent of sunbaked grapes filling the air. Napa’s climate made the wine. The heat of day swelled the grapes with sugary ripeness, while the night balanced them with acidity. It was early in the season; the grapes for the sparkling wines would be picked first, followed by the whites a few weeks later. The reds needed longer to mature, and our cabernet sauvignon took the longest.
Josh stayed behind with Michelle. He said he would get a ride home with a friend. I worried about him constantly, but what I never admitted was that I worried more about what he might do than what someone might do to him. Josh had a tendency to become sullen when things didn’t go his way, his mood snapping like an elastic band. And he’d been quieter than usual, ever since the last week of junior year. After the seismic shift in our family.
David didn’t speak to me on the drive home. It wasn’t like him to have nothing to say, but it felt like we’d been in a stalemate for several weeks. Tension bubbled in my chest, tightening the space between my ribs. I wanted to ask him about the receipt, about all the other business dinners I was suddenly questioning. I wanted to ask him so many things, but once those questions were out in the open, everything would change.
“Here we are,” he finally said when we pulled into the long driveway leading up to our home, a converted farmhouse on the southeast corner of the Golden Grape. He got out of the car and headed toward our front porch, leaving me to follow. Once upon a time, he’d insisted on opening car doors for me, but it had been a long time since he had made those gestures.
I trailed behind him, taking in the familiar white wooden clapboard and wraparound porch. This was the house David was raised in. He’d originally given me his enthusiastic blessing to renovate and make it our own. But whenever I tried, he became incredibly nostalgic, and I’d be left feeling guilty for wanting to change anything.
As soon as the babysitter left, David came up beside me in the kitchen, his hand migrating to my lower back. His mouth dropped to my ear, his fingers tracing a trail up my spine. It was the kind of gesture that used to make me melt into his arms, but I stood stiffly. David didn’t seem to understand that my affection couldn’t be turned on and off, like a piece of machinery.
“We need to talk,” I said.
He didn’t want to talk, so he did what he always did to avoid it. He snaked up the hem of my dress and reached for my underwear, which he tugged down as he braced my body against the wall, his lips dropping kisses down my bare shoulder. His fingers rubbed against me, creating an unpleasant friction that he somehow took as an invitation to slip inside.
It would have been easier to go along with it, so that David went to bed satisfied and our stilted sense of equilibrium hummed along. But the less aroused I felt, the more enraged I became. The same nagging suspicion that had been collecting in my gut over the past few weeks felt impossible to ignore.
Finally, I pulled away. “You said you hadn’t been in Sonoma in years.”
“What are you talking about?” he said, genuine confusion in his voice.
I turned to face him, pulling my dress down. “Sonoma. Your last business dinner there. It was last month, but you said you hadn’t been there in years.”
He wasn’t expecting the confrontation. I saw the surprise on his face, the slight panic in his eyes. “Bev, I don’t remember every single time I travel for work. I must have forgotten. What’s the big deal?”
“I know you better than anyone, David. I know when you’re lying.”
“I’m not lying.” He rubbed circles into his temples. “Why are you so wound up?”
My voice trembled. “Are you cheating on me?”
He turned toward the granite counter, hunching forward on his elbows. “Am I cheating on you? Bev, are you serious?”
“Don’t lie,” I said. “Look me in the face and tell me the truth.”
For a long moment, he didn’t turn around. But when he did, he wasn’t rattled or upset. His expression was calm, completely unreadable. “We haven’t had sex since—well, in months. You’ve pulled away from me, and you barely talk to me anymore. It’s like you’re punishing me.”
“Don’t bring… that into it,” I said, practically choking on my words. “This is about you and me. No—this is about you, lying to me. And you, pretending certain things never happened.”
“Why do we need to dwell on it? It’s over, and I’m the one trying to move on. Bev, you’ve become totally unavailable to me. It’s like I’m living with a stranger.”
“So you’re cheating on me,” I said, the force of it making the air leave my chest.
David pinched the bridge of his nose. “Is it any worse than what you’ve done to me? I have needs too, and they haven’t been taken care of in a very long time. I’m not even talking about sex. You’ve shut me out of your life.”
I mentally traversed the last few years of our relationship, David’s heartfelt pleas for another baby, my arguments against having one. It felt like starting over from scratch, setting the clock back another eighteen years. Giving up on the plans we’d put in place: leaving the vineyard more often, spending more time overseas. We were only forty-two, and it was about to be just us again. Some people thought we’d given up our freedom by being young parents, but there was an upside: we would also be young empty nesters.
Then we’d had Kieran. I had seen things from David’s perspective: it was our last chance to have another baby before we were too old, and didn’t I owe him that? I’d psyched myself up, convinced it was a good idea. My sister, Camille, and her then-husband Paul were trying too, and even though she lived in Santa Barbara, knowing we could be pregnant at the same time helped bolster my excitement. Camille and I talked daily about it, but then I conceived after only a month of trying, and Paul changed his mind about children.
Now Kieran was almost nine months old, and things had been good, minus the fact that motherhood at forty-two felt entirely different than it had at twenty-five, leaving me constantly exhausted and forgetful and overwhelmed. My body had refused to snap back. And while David helped with Kieran when he could, sometimes it felt like he didn’t understand how much I had to juggle to even function. My work at the winery, plus the invisible labor at home. The multiplying laundry. Visits to the pediatrician. Wakeups at night, sometimes hourly. Parenting babies and teenagers required different parts of me. Parenting both at the same time required too much.
You can take some time off from the winery, you know, David had said, and he probably genuinely thought he was being helpful. But I didn’t want to give that up. I wanted to feel productive; it wasn’t enough to simply be needed.
When he’d suggested we hire a nanny to help with Kieran, I balked at that too. Camille and I had been left with babysitters and family friends so often that our mother’s retreating back, the bony knobs of her spine, was something I still pictured. I didn’t want my own son to feel that too.
But despite a few bumps, David and I still would have made it through Kieran’s first year virtually unscathed. We would have looked back and missed the same chaotic days from which we longed to escape. Time would have erased the stress and fatigue. We would have made it, had Josh not come to us that day in mid-June, his lower lip wobbling. Something happened. Tear-blurred eyes, protestations of innocence. The heated arguments that followed, and David’s obsession with preserving appearances. Giving him the cold boulder of my back instead of snuggling into him at night.
“Are you fucking someone else, David?” I said now, enunciating every painful word.
He reached for my wrists, the anger leaving his face. “Let’s sit down and talk rationally. We have a lot of things to discuss.”
“No.” I yanked my arms away before he could touch me. “We’re not talking about anything until you answer my question. Are you having sex with another woman?”
In his silence, the slow ticking of the wall clock seemed too loud.
“I slept with someone else,” David finally said, his blue eyes trained on mine. “I admit it. But only one time. It was a weak moment. You must understand why. The way you’ve withheld from me.”
“Oh, it’s my fault?” I shouted. “I’m the one who made you do this?”
David rubbed his eyes. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying—we’ve both screwed up. Before now, I’ve been a good husband, Bev. I’ve given you everything you needed—”
“And now you’ve taken it all away!”
My scream took us both by surprise. David looked like he was afraid of me, and maybe I was afraid of myself. As the full weight of the betrayal settled in, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to physically hurt David, or sink into a sobbing heap on the floor and never get up. My family. David knew how much it meant to me. He knew what I had gone through as a kid. He knew I had done everything I could to stop history from repeating itself.
“We can fix this,” David said, putting out a tentative hand. “We can work on us—”
I turned away from him, opened the fridge, and pulled out a bottle of chardonnay, momentarily, crazily, imagining the meaty thwack it would make against David’s skull. “Who is she? Do you love her? Does she love you?”
When he spoke, it was practically a whisper. “Do you?”
I dropped my gaze to the floor, which had been tiled neatly with marble—my only real mark on the home we’d shared for so many years. I’d insisted on replacing the worn hardwood, which David had said I could do, only to later grumble that the house felt like it lacked its natural character.
“I can’t look at you right now,” I said, a ribbon of steel in my voice. “I think you should go. I need time to think, and I can’t do that with you around.”
His hand hovered above my lower back, but he pulled it away before it touched me. “You want me to leave? I’ll spend the night at a hotel—”
“No.” I wrapped my arms around my chest. “I can’t be near you right now.”
“But the harvest—I need to be here. And the kids. What will you tell them?”
The kids. Their questioning blue eyes. Then: the incident. The hurt in those eyes. David’s own gaze, hard and stormy. My anger surged.
“The harvest, David? That’s what you’re thinking about right now?”
“It’s our life’s work,” he said quietly.
I couldn’t find a way to put the crushing disappointment I felt into words, so I took another shot at David. “Maybe you should have thought about your life’s work before fucking another woman. Who was she, David?”
“Nobody you know,” he said carefully. “I didn’t know her either. I was there for work, but I stopped at a restaurant—I was hungry, and then I had too much to drink.”
The chardonnay cold in my hand. The bottle of chardonnay on the receipt. Had she chosen the wine, or had he? When we’d first started dating, I loved watching David taste wine: the way he closed his eyes, bobbing his head ever so slightly like he was listening to music only he could hear.
I knew, rationally, that David wasn’t more concerned about the harvest than he was about our marriage. But I had also recently learned exactly how far David would go to protect his family, and the reputation of our vineyard.
My voice was steady, even though I felt anything but. “You need to leave right now.”
“I’ll go,” he said, fear deepening his voice. “But, Bev—you haven’t been the same since what happened in June… You know we made the right decision, but I feel like you’ve been blaming yourself for it, and you’ve closed yourself off.”
“It has nothing to do with that,” I spat out. “This is about you.”
“It’s about us,” he said. “We’ve both made mistakes.”
“I never would have cheated on you.”
“There are worse things,” he said.
I watched him walk out the door. He paused briefly on the porch, like he wanted me to stop him.
I waited for the tears to come, but they never did. Instead of sadness was deep regret. I’d trusted David to keep me secure, but I had never felt less safe.