Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,24
neatly next to her in a pile. Her hands perspired as she pressed the pencil point into the lock. It took a few seconds to give, and she had a moment of panic that it had been a fluke that it had worked last time. Only then did she realize how badly she wanted to continue reading her grandmother’s words.
* * *
December 12, 1984
It was Delphine’s idea to start the book club. She is the only one who understands how frustrated I feel sometimes . . . so underutilized here in the vineyard I helped build. She said when women gather, there is power.
We’re meeting once a month—there’s eight of us, including Bess Winnel, even though she says she barely has time to think, let alone breathe, now that her twins are toddling around. I, on the other hand, have more time than I care to think about.
Friends have told me to try keeping a journal, but I always give up after a few weeks. Maybe writing about the book club will give me something to focus on, so I’ll stick with it.
Delphine chose the first book—Lace by Shirley Conran. She said it was an amazing miniseries earlier in the year, but I missed it. The book kept me turning the pages, but parts were shocking and I’m afraid I’ll blush talking about them tonight. At the same time, all of the mistakes and bad behavior of these characters make me feel better about my own.
What mistakes and bad behavior? Sadie flipped through the pages. It seemed the book club had lasted just half a year—ending in May of 1985. Out of just six books read, two were written by the same author, Judith Krantz. Sadie had never heard of her. She hadn’t heard of any of the writers except for Jackie Collins, although she might have been confusing her with an actress. All she knew was that the page of notes about the first book, Lace, included mention of a porn star, a secret adoption, and . . . sex with a goldfish.
Did her grandmother still have a copy of the book stashed away in the library? She must have saved it. Putting the journal aside, Sadie made her way back to the contemporary fiction section of the shelves.
“Conran . . . Conran,” she said, passing by the “B” last names and brushing her fingertips over the mid-alphabet “C” names.
Her phone buzzed with a text from her mother.
Mateo is going to give us a tour of the grapes planted for this season. Meet me on the veranda.
Mateo Argueta was a few years older. He’d grown up at the winery and started working with his father when he was a teenager. Sadie barely knew him; he always seemed quiet. Not just quiet, but like he was thinking something important and didn’t want to be disturbed.
She’d go on the tour. Better to risk being bored in the present than entertained by snooping around in the past.
Twelve
Vivian stood at the edge of the veranda, framing her eyes against the sun. In the distance, Leah and Sadie walked the fields with Mateo Argueta.
If not for the current crisis, the sight of her daughter and granddaughter enjoying the literal fruit of their family’s decades of labor would have been gratifying. She still couldn’t believe they might lose it all.
When she and Leonard made the giant leap to start their own vineyard, neither set of their parents had faith in them. The Hollanders wanted him to continue working at Gelleh Estates in Napa. Her family wanted their new son-in-law to have a proper career, and that meant joining the Freudenberg department store empire. Leonard had his own ideas.
“We’ll make our own dynasty,” Leonard said to her at the time. “It’s you and me against the world.” Madly in love, she made the leap, and they set out for the North Fork. Her parents, appalled, cut her off financially.
What she hadn’t known at the time was that conventional wisdom said that wine grapes would not grow on the North Fork. Yes, Long Island was full of grape trees—native American grape trees, vitis riparia. They had too little sugar and too much acidity to produce good wine. In order for Leonard to produce wine to match the success of his father’s West Coast vineyard, he needed to cultivate vitis vinifera. The vitis vinifera had first been planted in Persia. The Greeks brought vinifera vines from the Middle East back home, and then the imperial Romans took the