Fifty-one
There might have been no setting on earth more perfect for social media than a vineyard: In the twilight of summer, the jewel-toned fruit heavy on the vine. In the peak of harvest, giant bins full of grapes popping with color, conveyer belts carrying mounds of fruit past workers checking for quality, the bright red juice coming off the pressing machine. Even the winter was starkly beautiful, with its acres of plants lying still, in wait, with the promise of new life. It was a marketing gold mine—one Leah intended to take full advantage of. With Bridget’s help.
“Do you think Sadie will come up again to visit?” Bridget said. “Then I can get all three of you.”
“I’d settle for finding my mother at this point.” Vivian had disappeared.
“Angle yourself a little lower so I get the grapes in this shot with you.”
They had mapped out a social media calendar starting with harvest and going through next spring. The one idea Leah didn’t share with Bridget was her thought about highlighting the rosé—if there was a rosé. She wanted to chronicle the creation of their first vintage from the minute the grapes were fermenting to the cork in the first bottle; people would feel an emotional investment in the journey from field to table.
In the winter, they would photograph the bare vines. The pruning process. Spring would bring the task of tying shoots to the trellis wire, taking new growth off the bottom of the existing vine. By the time the rosé was on the shelves, they would be posting about bud break, and then, bloom.
“Let’s walk up to the veranda and do some photos with bottles of wine. We can come back to the grapes later when we find Vivian,” Bridget said.
As flighty as Bridget might seem most of the time, the act of taking photos and videos gave her an intense focus. She was a woman with a vision; she kept talking about what would attract “engagement” and had clear opinions about staging the shots. Leah let herself relax, happy to have someone else making decisions for the moment. Speaking of engagement . . .
“So how’s the wedding planning going?” Leah said.
“Um, let’s just focus on the photos,” Bridget said, clearly unhappy. “So this is the plan: we’ll bank some video for later so we don’t have to do this every day.” She began arranging a dozen bottles of Sauvignon Blanc on a table.
“Every day?”
“Oh, there’s your mother,” Bridget said.
Leah turned around. Yes, there was her mother. And walking right alongside her, Steven.
The dozen or so friends crammed into Sadie’s dorm room, waiting for her to tell them what this was all about.
Sadie didn’t know exactly what it was all about, except she was searching for something. A feeling of incompleteness, of something left undone, nagged at Sadie day and night. This time, it wasn’t her stalled thesis that kept her staring in the dark of her dorm room. If anything, that was the one thing in her life that had some momentum.
No, it was Mateo. Their time together played out in her mind like a romantic montage from a movie, a constant loop of sense memory and longing.
She should be happy that there was no one to pull her away from her writing, no pesky relationship demanding time and attention. Last semester with Holden, all she’d wanted was space. She’d thought the problem was that she wasn’t cut out for intimacy, but now she knew differently. The strangest thing was that she had a six-month relationship with Holden, and when it ended she was able to move on, and she’d had only the tiniest fraction of that time with Mateo and she couldn’t shake it. She kept telling herself that she was grown up, and she had to deal with the fact that it had been a fling and move on. But when someone comes into your life and changes your understanding of yourself, that person becomes a part of you.
She needed to keep her mind off him. And so, as she had always done in times of stress, she turned to books.
The book club with her mother and grandmother reminded her of what it was like to read just for pleasure. Most of her friends had grown up just picking popular books off the shelves for fun, while she’d always been too goal-oriented, focused on literary canons. Like the time she visited the Strand bookstore with her mother, refusing to read the YA novels.
Now that she was back to reading just for fun, she wanted company. She thought her friends in the Jane Austen Film Society would be a good place to start. After all, wasn’t Austen the trashy novelist of her time?
The truth was, she didn’t think of them as trashy novels anymore. At least, not in a bad way. “Trash” suggested something that no longer had value, while, as Dr. Moore pointed out, the books she’d been reading had found an audience for decades. Judith Krantz’s and Jackie Collins’s words were a part of her now, as surely as Susan Sontag’s were.
If only, now that she was back on campus, she was able to get lost in them again.
“As promised, free wine,” Sadie said, opening the bottles she’d brought back from the vineyard and pouring into Solo cups. She sat cross-legged on her bed, while the others took spots on the floor or leaned against her desk or stood by the door.
“I want to hear about the books you read for fun,” Sadie said. “Your favorites. Like, you’re reading and just forget about everything.”
“Why?” one of the women said.
“Because I’m stressed out,” said Sadie. The group nodded, a few women murmuring that they were also feeling pressure.
“That’s what this is for,” one of them said, holding up her cup.
“I’d like to get through this semester without a drinking problem,” Sadie replied.
“Have you tried knitting?” someone suggested.
Exasperated, Sadie put down her cup and said, “Okay, let’s do this. We’re going to go around the room and everyone has to name one book. Fiction only.”
At first, the responses were disappointing. Pride and Prejudice, Little Women, blah blah blah. But then, after a bottle or two was empty, the conversation took a turn. Someone mentioned, offhandedly, that she’d reread Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour three times. “And it’s a thousand pages.”
The room erupted into chatter about everyone’s favorite Anne Rice novel, interrupted only by someone bringing up Outlander. Someone declared her passion for J. R. Ward.
“When I was in high school I discovered my mother’s stash of Nora Roberts and read all of them. I ordered her new one just last week.”
Sadie typed the authors and titles into the notes section of her phone. She had a lot of catching up to do. She wondered if maybe it was time for this non-joiner to start a group of her own.
“What do you all think of starting a book club?”
The women looked at one another. “A book club? We don’t have time to read more books on top of our class assignments. Are you crazy? That’s why we just watch Jane Austen movies.”
Sadie suddenly missed her mother and grandmother.