Thirty-three

“Come in,” Mateo said from inside the closed door of his office.

The barn was hot and humid, and Sadie pulled a rubber band from her wrist to lift her heavy curls from the back of her neck. After the sting of the previous night’s debacle, she had planned to keep her distance from Mateo for a few days. Why push it? She probably already seemed like a psycho. But now time was running out.

With her father coming this weekend and her mother ready to pack her bags, there was absolutely no justification for staying any longer herself. It was true: she needed to either get her thesis going or find a summer job, or both. She had to get back to real life. The book club excuse was pretty flimsy. But in the moment, she would have agreed to anything just to stall.

What did she expect to happen with Mateo? Nothing, probably. All she knew was that she wanted to spend time with him. She felt pulled to him, an itch she had to scratch. Leaving the vineyard was probably the only way to get rid of it. But as long as she was still there, she would indulge herself.

“You lost again?” he said, but with a smile. Hot and a sense of humor. Who could blame her for acting a little crazy?

“No,” she said, pushing her sunglasses on top of her head. “And I left my phone back at the house.”

“With your track record, that’s probably smart.”

“Funny.” She pulled a chair up to the front of his desk. “Am I bothering you, or can you take a break?”

“Do I have a choice?” But again, the warmth in his tone, the light in his eyes, belied the edge to his words.

She looked at the photographs hanging on the wall.

“I meant to ask you about these,” she said. “What are they from?” She had no doubt the framed pictures were Mateo’s and not a relic from the days when old Joe Gable occupied the space.

Mateo leaned back in his seat and looked at the frame closest to him, the one of the man with gray hair, dressed in a blue vest and blue pants, drawing vertical lines in a long row along the side of an orange building. He glanced at Sadie, as if considering what he was going to say—or if he was going to say anything.

“What do you know about Guatemala?” he said.

“Not that much,” she admitted. “I know about the Mayan ruins. I know about the civil war. But if you want to make me feel uneducated and uninformed, I can guarantee it will be very easy.”

He shook his head. “I’m not trying to make you feel uneducated, though most people are when it comes to my parents’ country. Like you said, they either know it for its tourist attractions or for its violent history. But there is so much more to it. Like beautiful art.”

She nodded. “So this is a Guatemalan artist?”

“This photo is by Francisco Morales Santos from a piece of 2008 performance art by Isabel Ruiz. The performance is called Matematica sustractiva—Subtractive Math. Ruiz drew forty-five thousand lines to represent the number of people who ‘disappeared’ during the three-and-a-half-decade civil war. He dedicated the performance to the disappeared Guatemalan writer Luis de Lión.”

Sadie knew so much about literature but very little about visual art, especially from other cultures. She tried to think of something to add to the conversation, something indicative of her intellect, but came up short. Then she was saved by the proverbial bell when his office phone rang.

“Hey, man,” Mateo said into the receiver. “How’s that Chenin Blanc looking?”

Sadie watched his long, tapered fingers drum his desktop. He swiveled his chair to look out the window, and it was all she could do not to leap over the desk and touch the back of his lustrous hair.

“I’d love to but I can’t,” he said. “Hollander doesn’t do that. We had a big offer to buy some reds and he nearly took my head off when I asked him, so I don’t think he’d let your boss buy any of our Chard. I can shoot you an email with some people to call, but I’ve got someone in my office right now . . .”

Sadie couldn’t help but overhear. She was sitting right there, and besides, she wanted to know everything about him. Everything he did, everyone he knew, what his days were like.

What his nights were like.

“Hollander doesn’t do what?” she asked when he was done with the call.

“Sell his grapes to other wineries. My buddy needs some whites.” He stood and closed his computer. “It’s time for me to get out there. Want to help?”

Did she.

They took the golf cart out to the farthest field, where the Petit Verdot was planted. She thought about the photography, and the pathos in his voice when he explained it to her. It struck her that she’d never had a serious conversation with Holden. When she tried to talk about art, or the lives of great artists like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf, his eyes glazed over.

“I’m going to do a visual survey of the fruit growth so far. At the end of the summer, Leonard will give me a target date of what he wants for tonnage. I’ll weigh the fruit and count clusters, and if out of two acres he wants six tons, my father and I will go out and determine how much fruit we have out there and figure, for example, okay, we need to leave two clusters per shoot.”

He parked the cart next to the row marker and cut the engine.

“Can you hand me that clipboard near your feet?” he said.

She leaned forward and retrieved it. When she passed it to him, she said, “I’m leaving this weekend.”

“And you’re telling me this because . . . ?”

Oh, so that was how he was going to play it?

“Just FYI,” she said.

“Noted.”

She followed him into the field, where he stopped in front of the vines just a few feet in from the marker. He counted the clusters of buds on one of the plants. “These little guys are late bloomers.”

A cloud passed in front of the sun, granting merciful shade. Sadie’s skin was already a deep tan, and a smattering of faint freckles had appeared on the bridge of her nose. She didn’t have her mother’s olive skin tone, and that seemed to confirm that she was not meant for a life outdoors.

She and Mateo had absolutely nothing in common. This was pointless.

“You didn’t tell me about the other photo in your office,” she said.

He glanced at her. “You didn’t recognize what that was?”

“No. Should I?”

He shrugged. “It’s your winery.”

“It’s not mine. It’s my grandparents’.” And apparently, not even theirs for very much longer.

“It’s a photo from the Harvest Circle ceremony years ago.”

Sadie didn’t want to admit that although she had a vague recollection of her mother mentioning the Harvest Circle to her, she couldn’t remember exactly what it was. The blank look on her face must have given her away, because Mateo said, “Hollander Estates doesn’t use industrial yeast to ferment wine.”

Sadie knew that without yeast, wine was just grape juice. It was the yeast that converted the grape sugars into alcohol.

“My mother suggested to your grandfather that he try using natural flora. He liked the idea, so now on the first day of harvest every year, Leonard has Chardonnay juice pressed and puts it in a big jug. All the employees are invited to drop something in: a flower from their backyard, a shell from the beach—whatever.”

“That works?”

“Yeasts are everywhere. In the air, in plants, fruit, flowers, leaves, and rocks. So it works, but the process is very risky—we have to monitor it closely. The upside is more interesting biodiversity and no additives. Plus, the wine is, in a sense, produced from a piece of us all.”

Why did everything about the vineyard sound noble and romantic when Mateo explained it to her? It was him. He was noble and romantic.

And gorgeous. With her sunglasses covering her eyes, she could stare at him all she wanted and he wouldn’t know what she was looking at. Like the fact that she could stare endlessly at the fullness of his lower lip. Or the dimple in his right cheek when he gave her a hard-won smile.

She couldn’t take it another minute. She leaned forward and kissed him. After a split second of hesitation, he cupped her face with his hands, kissing her back hard. She tasted the salt from his sweat and, pressing herself against him, felt his heart beating against hers. But then he broke away.

“Sadie.”

“What?” she said, breathless.

He smiled and shook his head. She stared at his mouth, those lips, incredulous that she had just tasted them. Her wanting was obscene.

“That was very forward.”

She felt a flash of irritation. She thought of the part in Lace where Maxine calls out the sexual double standard: a guy could get carried away by his passion, but a woman was always supposed to control herself.

“What does that mean? Why do I need permission to express my wants? Men never do!”

He took her hand and tugged her down gently to sit on the ground. The grass tickled the backs of her thighs. The sun beat down stronger again, but she felt impervious.

“My mother took the photo of the flowers and wine in the jar. She’s the one who taught my father how to do it. She has a feminist heart, too.” With that, he gave her hand just the smallest squeeze.

Well, that was her answer: No, she didn’t need permission to express her wants. Or maybe he was saying that he wanted her, too.

They locked eyes, and Sadie knew there was no way she was leaving with her parents this weekend.