Eight Hundred Grapes: a perfect summer escape to a sun-drenched vineyard. Laura Dave

all the photographs that made up my parents’ life together—beginning when they were young, at this vineyard, and even before that. One of my favorite photographs was of my mother, still a cellist with the New York Philharmonic, smiling at the camera, her cello resting against her long black dress. The woman sitting here now looking remarkably like the photograph of herself then. She had the same long curls, wide cheeks, a nose that didn’t quite fit. She was still not wearing a drop of makeup, still not needing any.

      Next to that photograph of her was one of me playing softball. I’d been a complete tomboy growing up (care of trying to keep up with Bobby and Finn). I’d pretty much lived in a T-shirt and sneakers, my hair perpetually in a ponytail. But there was no denying how similar we used to look: my curls the darker version of her curls, my nose tilted like her nose, my eyes dark green like my father’s but shaped like hers.

      My mother used to say that I was the spitting image of her, cloaked in my father’s coloring. That was until I moved to Los Angeles and transformed in the way Los Angeles seems to transform people: a little bit at a time until you don’t recognize yourself anymore. With all the gorgeous women strolling through yoga class and into parties, I found myself paying attention to all sorts of things that I hadn’t historically.

      Maybe it would have been the same thing if I’d left Sebastopol for New York or Chicago, but for me, at eighteen, it was Los Angeles that I left for, so it was Los Angeles where I learned some fundamental lessons that growing up in a house full of men and farmers had forgotten to teach me about how to look and feel sexy.

      You could see the transformation on the wall. My mother joked that I’d morphed from the darker version of her into the glam, movie star version—which, I assured her, a walk down Abbot Kinney among the real movie stars would prove untrue. Though, in truth, I did look different and I took a certain amount of pride in that.

      The Southern California sun had lightened my hair, I’d slipped off ten pounds, and I’d started to dress as though I had some idea of how to. Under my friend Suzannah’s supervision (and insistence), I’d spent more money on a pair of shoes than on a month’s rent. I tried to return them the next day—in guilt and nausea—but the store had a strict no-return policy. So I’d kept them. And loved them. In fairness to myself, these had been magic shoes: slinky stiletto heels that made your legs look endless. In further fairness, the shoes had outlasted that apartment and all the ones that had come since.

      Whenever I’d come home for a visit, my mother would always say how stylish I looked. But I knew she judged my evolution from ponytails to pencil skirts. My mother thought style should be effortless and easy. She took to touching my straightened hair, saying, “Shiny.” She commented on new items of clothing with a whistle and a shifty grin: “Look at that Los Angeles armor.”

      And it was always first thing in the morning—when I was freshly awake and racing downstairs for her walnut and cherry waffles, the same way I’d done as a child—that she would touch my skin and say, “Gorgeous.”

      The disjunct left me feeling somewhat alone in navigating my two homes. Sonoma County was blue jeans and fleece pullovers and practical field boots. Los Angeles was slingbacks and blue jeans distressed to the tune of $275. I wavered between the two worlds, neither feeling like it fit exactly right. I was self-conscious about my lifestyle in Los Angeles—a lifestyle on which I felt I had a tenuous hold at best. And when I came home, the put-together version of me who seemed to have it all together felt myself judging, in a way I never used to, how unrefined and rural local life was. I didn’t like being judgmental in that way, but I was having trouble stopping myself. I was still trying to find the balance.

      I lowered my gaze from the photographs, looked down. My mother caught my eyes, held them. Then she crossed her arms over her chest. “Don’t stand there in judgment of me,” she said.

      It didn’t seem wise to tell her I was sitting in judgment.

      “There was a naked man coming out of your bedroom, Mom,” I said. “Who wasn’t Dad.”

      “Well, who shows up at midnight unannounced?” She shook her head. “It’s our fault for not redecorating your room. You think nothing here is supposed to change.”

      “I think you’re not supposed to be shtupping someone who isn’t Dad.”

      “Well, I’m not shtupping him.”

      I looked at her, confused. “What?”

      She shrugged. “Henry is impotent, if you must know.”

      I covered my ears. “I must not know. I must go back in time and know anything but that.”

      “I’m sorry,” she said, holding up her hands in surrender. “I’m just saying … I’m just trying to explain to you that things are more complicated than they seem.”

      Complicated. That was Ben’s word too. The problem was that they were both using it passively. When the truth was that they had made things complicated. Actively. That was the important part they each were leaving out.

      “Where’s Dad?”

      “Dad and I are taking a little time apart,” she said. “He’s been staying in the winemaker’s cottage for the last couple of weeks. Not that he doesn’t do that every year during the harvest.”

      There was an edge to how she said that, which I chose to ignore.

      “Because of Henry?” I asked.

      “Because we’re taking time apart,” she said.

      I looked through the bay windows to the lantern-lit vineyard, the lantern-lit path that led to the winemaker’s cottage. My father was asleep in one of the two bedrooms inside. When I was a little girl, I’d beg to sleep in the other room and go out with him first thing in the morning to help pick the first grapes before school. I told him that when I was older my brothers and I were going to take over the land for him—to keep his legacy running. I meant it. Running the vineyard was what I had wanted more than anything when I was a little girl. Now I had left him there alone. Each in our own way, we all had.

      “How could you not have told me what was going on?” I asked.

      My mother reached for her coffee. “We were waiting until after your wedding. We didn’t want to ruin it for you.”

      I met her eyes. Apparently Ben and I had done that all ourselves.

      “I’ve tried not to burden Finn and Bobby with this either. They both have their hands full with other things.”

      I thought back to the bar—Finn acting weird when Bobby came up. Bobby nowhere to be seen. “With what things?” I said.

      She shook her head. “I can’t get into all of that right now. They should be allowed to be here to offer their side.”

      How had we gotten to the place where everyone in the family was on different sides? I had been home for the last harvest, I had been home another time since—everyone had seemed fine. Now though? I felt like I was going to cry. And Ben—usually my first call when I felt this way, the one person who could help me find perspective on this—was the reason I had none.

      My mother cleared her throat, seeing an opportunity to change the subject. “Are you going to tell me what happened?” she said.

      I shook my head.

      “Did he do something unforgivable?”

      “What kind of question is that?”

      She leaned in. “A bad one, probably. What’s a good one? Tell me and I’ll ask.”

      Ever since I’d left the bridal shop, I’d envisioned sitting at this table with my mother and my father, talking it out. The way we had when I’d needed to figure out what college to go to, how to pay for law school, how to get over a thousand broken hearts. Now my concern was that the three of us were never going to be sitting here again.

      “Georgia …”

      I looked up.

      “Did