Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,20

she still failed to locate him, she went to her last resort: calling Bridget.

“Oh, hi, Vivian. He’s here with me—at the pool!” Bridget said.

Vivian somehow refrained from correcting her with “Mrs. Hollander.” It drove her crazy that the woman had never hesitated in being familiar with her. Now that there was an engagement, it was too late to course-correct.

How, oh how, had everything fallen so far out of control?

She opened the gate to let herself onto the pool deck. Sure enough, Asher was lounging on a chair, his hair and swim trunks wet, headphones over his ears. As if there was no work to be done. As if they weren’t fighting for Hollander Estates’ survival.

Bridget sat beside him in an obscene white bikini, displaying her various tattoos.

“Taking the day off?” Vivian said, walking toward them, suddenly very hot in her white blouse and skirt.

Asher pulled the headphones from his ears.

“Hey, Mom. Just an early break. What’s up?”

“A very early break, I’d say. I can see how an hour of work might be exhausting.” Sarcasm was never ideal, but neither was expressing her frustration through shouting. “I was just in the bottling room and got some surprising news about new labels. Do you know anything about that?”

Bridget, perhaps sensing the tension, jumped up and pulled on a pair of turquoise terry-cloth shorts so tiny Vivian failed to see the point. “I’m going to get iced coffee,” she announced. “Anyone else want anything?”

“No, thanks, babe,” Asher said, reaching out to squeeze her hand before they parted. He watched her walk into the house with his tongue practically hanging out of his mouth.

Vivian crossed her arms. “Asher. The labels?”

“Oh, yeah. John asked for the switch.”

“John?”

Asher nodded. “I ran it by Dad, and he okayed it.”

John Beaman was their head of wholesale. It was one of the company’s most important positions, and a very demanding one at that. They had a high turnover rate, but John had been with them for over a decade.

Leonard had recognized from the beginning that the job of their wholesale reps would be different than those in other places because of their proximity to Manhattan, the restaurant capital of the world. “We are the only wine region in the world that can send people to sell who work on the farm, too. That’s an advantage. People like to have contact with the farmer or person who helped make it,” he’d told her on more than one occasion. At the same time, no one in Manhattan had any interest in New York State wines. Their sales reps had their work cut out for them.

John and his team of reps—all men—walked into restaurants and liquor stores with bags full of samples and asked the person in charge of buying to give Hollander Estates a try. She remembered from her own days of knocking on doors that it was a job that never ended. You might get on the wine list of the best restaurant in the country and they’d be pouring your wine by the glass for a month, only to suddenly replace it with a wine from France. It was rare to have a wine stay on a list for even one full year. So when John got feedback from the field, Leonard listened. It was one of the few instances where he did.

“Last week your father told me that changing the labels was your idea.”

Asher squinted against the sun. “Yeah. But it was John who said something about needing them to be modernized.”

“We never had a problem before now.”

“I guess it’s time to try anything we can to, I don’t know, maximize revenue.”

Vivian sat on the chair Bridget had vacated. She instantly realized her mistake when water seeped into the back of her skirt. She jumped up, but she wasn’t ready to leave. She had one more question for him, one that had been burning her up since Leonard told her about the sale.

“How long have you known about the decision to sell the company?” she said. The tension in her gut told her she’d avoided asking him thus far because she didn’t want to know the answer.

Asher sighed. “A few weeks?”

The answer stung. Leonard liked autonomy when it came to the business, but she had helped build the winery. She was his wife. There was no justification for Asher knowing about this before she did.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Mom, come on. It’s not my place. Dad was still working things out—he told me he’d tell you as soon