Henry is not afraid of hard work. At the winery, the day starts at dawn, and for the first time in his life he fires a gun. Henry rises with the sun and makes his way to the house, always with some trepidation, for Ted and Laura, the owners, have an Australian cattle dog, which never seems to learn that Henry belongs here. Henry has a fear of dogs that comes from growing up in his Providence neighborhood, where few people actually owned dogs and those who did owned ones meant to deter people from coming into their apartments.
Ted cooks breakfast for the three of them, and it is as if they are a family, Henry thinks, eating eggs at the table, with its view of the blue expanse of lake. Afterward, Henry and Ted go to the winery, where they sit on the rooftop with the acres of grapes below them. Ted teaches Henry how to use a shotgun and the day begins with firing over the grapes at the huge murder of crows that descends every morning to try to eat the grapes. The goal is not to actually kill the birds but, rather, to make them fly away. And Henry is happy about this strategy, for he doesn’t want to kill anything, though on his third day he levels the shotgun and takes one of the huge black birds right out of the sky. Watching it flutter down takes his breath away, and when they discover it a few minutes later, dead between the rows, Henry feels sick about it and Ted laughs at him.
“It’s okay to hit a few, Henry,” Ted says. “They’re terrible thieves.”
There are hot mornings when they spend hours on their knees amid the ten acres of grapes, pruning by hand each individual plant. Henry likes the labor and he has the focus of a poet, and Ted teaches him about the grapes, the different varieties—the pinot noir and the chardonnay, the sauvignon blanc and the Riesling, the black-as-night merlot and the cabernet. For lunch, Laura brings them sandwiches and they eat cross-legged in the fields and open a bottle of wine, and Henry loves this, the sun hot on his face, drinking wine from the bottle and feeling the sweat of the morning’s labor.
The afternoons and rainy days are spent inside the cool, dark winery, and Ted teaches him how they fill the bottles from the wooden casks, in the case of the red wine, and from the stainless-steel tanks, in the case of the white. They bottle by hand, they cork them by hand, and then they apply the labels one at a time. It is simple and beautiful work, and Henry thinks Ted and Laura might be the happiest people he has ever met. They have this spit of land on the lake and they have each other. They roll out of bed and into their jobs. At night, they cook beautiful meals and always there is wine. They welcome Henry into their home. His is the old-fashioned life of a farmhand and he loves it.
At night in his small cabin, Henry reads by the light from the oil lamp, and often he is bone-tired and the morning is unforgiving, but in the dimly lit quiet he forces himself to work, writing at the desk with a bottle of wine. It is a discipline, he reminds himself, like learning to play shortstop, and he practices with the same attention to his poetry as he once did with his glove, when he would take grounder after grounder until it was second nature, until he could read the hop before the ball even came off the grass.
And amid it all in that first week is Margot. It is as if Henry has built a new cabin in his mind where she lives, a finished poem, a place he can summon whenever he chooses and sometimes when he does not. When he is working in the fields, images of her come to him: those eyes, her laugh, her strong legs, how she tilts her head and closes her eyes softly when he reads to her.
There is something else, too: a nagging sense of self-doubt. All new loves are like a dream, but sometimes he wonders if Margot is a mirage, and Henry reassures himself by remembering the small particulars of their parting, how she clearly didn’t want to go, the magic of that last night, when they held each other until the sun rose above the lake.
But she also didn’t invite him to the island, and while she left him the phone number for her house, she knows he doesn’t have a phone other than at Ted and Laura’s, and it is in their kitchen and they are always there, it seems, and in the first days at the winery he is not yet comfortable enough to ask them if he can use it.
After dinner on his third night there, Henry walks down to the water from his cabin. The night is humid and on his arms is a shine from the heat. At the water’s edge he looks out, and far across he can see the tops of some of the buildings of Bannister, the rise of the clock tower on Bishop Hall interrupting the sky above the trees.
Henry strips off his clothes and leaves them in a pile at the lake’s edge. Then he wades into the cool water until it’s above his knees and then he dives, going under and then coming back up, doing the crawl until he is far out and can float on his back. From out here he can look both ways, to two different worlds, close but far apart: the college and the winery. One contains Margot. The other does not.
That night at his writing desk, Henry counts the days till school starts again. There are fifty-three from today. He takes a clean piece of paper and on the top of it he writes in blocky numbers and letters 53 things I miss about you.
Number 53, he writes. That you want to watch me write as if that is something that can be watched.
And so Henry makes his list. It is a test of sorts, for it seems like it should be hard to come up with that many, but they roll off his pen with ease. He talks about her laughter, what a beautiful peal it is, echoing in his head; he talks about how she loves to talk after sex, how it makes her manic; he says he loves that her eyes are the color of a foreign sea; he describes the place where her hip meets her leg, the subtle rise and curve of her. He says he loves hearing her say his name, how she says it differently depending on the circumstances, like how Eskimos have so many words for snow, each iteration of Henry meaning something slightly different. He loves her love of ice cream and her unabashed appetite in general, that she will dive into a burger with a relish he is used to associating with baseball teammates. He says he saw tears in her eyes only once, when they were parting, but that he longs to see her cry, even though he doesn’t want to feel what she cries for.
Number 1, he writes. You, just you, all of you, my Margot.
In the end, Henry fills three pages of paper. He thinks about rereading them but then reminds himself one of the lessons he learned in creative writing: Don’t self-edit too quickly. This is not a poem, he tells himself. You do not need to sculpt it.
He folds the paper up and puts it into an envelope and addresses it to Margot, using the address she gave him for the house on the Vineyard. And in the morning, he mails it from Ted and Laura’s house.