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

the city. Afterward, we walked the streets downtown, past the Ferry Building and the pier, up into the ritzy hills of Pacific Heights. We passed a small jazz club, a ninety-year-old woman singing Gershwin. If that sounds ridiculously romantic, it was. And I was completely hooked. I loved the noises of the city, people fighting and laughing in the streets. The old woman singing Gershwin. It’d be easy to say that it was the energy of the city that pulled me in, but it wasn’t. It was the noises. Suddenly, it felt like everything I had known before then had been too quiet. My parents’ sadness, the vineyard, Sonoma County itself.

      I spent the next summer staying with my cousin who ran a law office downtown. She was beautiful and elegant and she took me under her wing, introducing me to city living: coffee shops and skyscrapers, streets and bookstores, fancy shoes and cigarettes at parties. She even gave me an internship at her law firm.

      She warned me that it would be boring, but it was a relief. Law was specific. It was concrete. The soil and fruit and wind and sun and sky didn’t have to cooperate for work to go well. After years of watching my father struggle at the mercy of the weather patterns, that type of control felt empowering.

      When the vineyard worked, it was beautiful. But two years of fallow crops were decimating. And they were especially decimating when I realized they weren’t the first. After I left for college, I learned that my parents had narrowly escaped previous disasters, previous moments when it had seemed the only option was throwing in the towel.

      My chosen path was far less unpredictable, which felt like a good thing, a different thing.

      Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.

      When I arrived at the winemaker’s cottage, the front door was open, but no one was inside.

      “Dad?” I said.

      There was no answer.

      I nudged the door open and walked in, taking a seat in the small living room. I knew my father was probably somewhere in the vineyard, but I’d be better off waiting for him to take his normal morning break after they finished picking. That was how it worked. They’d pick grapes from 2 A.M. until 10 A.M.—when the land was cooler, night lamps guiding their way. Most winemakers left this to the vineyard manager to oversee, but my father liked to be involved in the picking himself.

      I didn’t want to try to find him out in the vineyard, or by the receiving table, watching the grapes come in off the vines, sorting through them, picking which ones would last. I didn’t want to interrupt. Maybe I wasn’t anxious for a confrontation.

      The point is that I didn’t plan on snooping. I planned on sitting, all the windows open, the late morning sun streaming in, an entire banana muffin and cooling coffee waiting to be enjoyed.

      But I put everything down on the coffee table too quickly—and I spilled the coffee. All over the table. All over a heavy pile of files.

      Files labeled: MURRAY GRANT WINES SALES FOLIO.

      There were no napkins, so I picked up the wet files, wiping them against my T-shirt. I was trying to dry them off, though I doubted it mattered. My father hated Murray Grant Wines. He wasn’t alone. Most of the small winemakers in Sonoma County did. They hated them not only because of the quality of their mediocre production, but because they treated winemaking like a business. It was a business, of course. It was just also supposed to be something else.

      So I assumed the papers were a dumb mailer, my father keeping up on what Murray Grant Wines was doing. He had to keep up with them. They were one of the biggest wine producers in Napa Valley, shipping five million cases of wine annually.

      Direct competition, of course, to my father’s five thousand.

      But then, as I rubbed the second file clean, I came across a series of contracts. They were lengthy and specific contracts that couldn’t say what they seemed to say. Except that I was a real estate lawyer and worked on far more complicated deals. And I knew they were saying exactly what they seemed to say.

      The Last Straw Vineyard. Ownership Transfer. To Murray Grant Wines.

      My pulse started to throb in my ears, drowning out my ability to slow down, figure out what I was reading.

      “No way!”

      I looked up to see my brother Bobby in the doorway. He was standing there, wearing a dark blue suit, his tie slung back over his shoulder. The smile on his face, which on another day I would describe as charming, was more like a smirk.

      I wondered if this was one of the reasons we had trouble getting along. Bobby had a penchant for showing up at the exact time that there was no one there to blame but him.

      “What are you doing home? Aren’t you getting married in, like, ten minutes?” he said. “I have two incredibly excited and very cute ring bearers who can’t wait for the wedding.”

      I still hadn’t said hello, the files in my hands. I held them up higher. “Did you know about this?”

      His smile disappeared. “About what, exactly?” Bobby said.

      He ran his hands through his blond curls, which matched our mother’s—and which Bobby thought made him look angelic. What did make him look angelic were his ragged fingernails—Bobby biting them to stubs since we were little kids. It was my favorite part of him.

      “Mom and Dad are selling the vineyard,” he said, trying to sound casual, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. As if we were talking about a car.

      I sat back down and opened the files up, trying to ascertain where they were in the process. I was unhappy to see my father’s signature already on the final page, notarized.

      Along with the signature of someone named Jacob McCarthy.

      Jacob McCarthy. CEO of Murray Grant Wines.

      Bobby shrugged. “I guess Dad didn’t want to bother you until after the wedding.”

      Then he leaned down over me, a little too close for comfort. I thought about swatting him with something. My muffin came into view.

      “What happened to the contracts?” he said, biting his nails nervously.

      I moved away from him.

      “And why are you freaking out?” he said. “This is a good thing. Dad won’t have to work again. Murray Grant made them the kind of offer that comes around once in a lifetime.”

      “Do you even hear yourself?”

      “Do you even hear yourself?”

      If looks could kill, I might have killed him. Right then. That was the thing about Bobby. He had always been logical and robotic about everything. His feelings were like something he practiced—he should be emotional about a wedding, shedding one calculated tear—but never embraced. It was why he was so good at business. It was why he was so bad at showing that he cared about anything else.

      “Since when is that what they want, Bobby?”

      “That’s what everyone wants!”

      Bobby drilled me with a look.

      “You’re yelling at the wrong person,” he said.

      “I’m not yelling.”

      “You are YELLING,” he yelled.

      “You are both yelling.”

      We turned toward the doorway to see my father. He stood there in jeans and a T-shirt, looking younger than he was, with a thick mound of hair, skin brown from the sun. He was holding a thermos and a glass jar of grapes, his hair sweaty against his face.

      He looked toward me as I dropped the files on the table, back in their pile of wet coffee.

      He