Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,124
impulsive. Realistically, they could manage without her. Leah had just wanted her there for emotional reasons, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to pull her away from school.
“I’m sorry—you really don’t have to come,” she’d said in another phone call, this one directly after the dinner when her father okayed the plan. But it was too late: Sadie was all in.
Now she was busy helping Steven sort out the Hollander Estates mailing list and the reservation log from the past few months.
“Any luck with that book club from Virginia?”
“I left a voicemail,” Sadie said.
“So we have our book groups here.” Leah made a circle on the whiteboard. “Our cheese class list, our email list from the guestbook they keep in the tasting room, and the emails from the newsletter list. When is the e-vite going to be ready to go out?”
“I’m almost finished with it,” Bridget said from her corner. She was hunched over a laptop working in a graphic design application.
Leah still didn’t have the full story of the reconciliation between her brother and Bridget, but she could see that Asher finally believed what Bridget had told Leah the day she was crying in the oak room: She didn’t care about Asher’s money. She didn’t care about leaving the winery. She only cared about him.
“We’re still missing a bunch of emails,” Sadie said. “I’m working on the customers that only gave us phone numbers.”
Hollander’s weakness in maintaining a reliable mailing list was showing. Leah needed to act quickly; with just a few weeks to go before harvest, they had to give people enough time to plan if they wanted to attend the event. She and Steven had talked about how it was all very much a numbers game: realistically, only a fraction of the women they invited would actually show up, and only a fraction of them would preorder the rosé. So the more they started out with, the greater the odds of that final fraction generating enough sales to make an impact.
A flash of green entered Leah’s field of vision.
“What’s going on here?” Vivian strode into the stable, dressed in head-to-toe emerald: green blouse, green skirt, and a green straw hat.
“Gran, what’s going on with you?” Sadie said. “That’s a serious monochrome color commitment.”
“This is camouflage,” Vivian said. “I had to follow Steven here, slinking around the grounds like a criminal on my own property, since I’ve been excluded from . . . well, from whatever this is.”
Leah sighed. “Mom, I was going to loop you in. But we wanted to get things started.”
“Get what started?” She lifted her sunglasses and squinted at the whiteboard.
“We’re getting our invitation list together for the Harvest Circle.”
“I thought you were just inviting a few friends.”
“It’s a little . . . broader than that.”
“What do you mean?” Vivian said.
Leah and Steven exchanged a look. “Do you really want to know? Because when Dad gave me a hard time over dinner the other night, you backed him up.”
“I didn’t back him up, Leah. I’m just trying to keep the peace. We’ve all been through enough.”
Leah nodded. “Fair enough. But I don’t want him involved. So if you feel caught in the middle you should probably leave.”
“Well, I certainly can’t leave now. Not without knowing what you’re up to.”
“Fine,” Leah said. “If you really want to know, we’re holding a ‘preferred customer’ Harvest Circle. Anyone who comes will get an exclusive chance to preorder our first vintage of Hollander rosé.”
“How can they buy wine we don’t have?”
“That’s why I said preorder.”
“Why would they do that?” Vivian crossed her arms.
“That’s the second part of the idea: we’re telling everyone to bring something from their home garden or other place that’s meaningful to them. And we’re going to hold a giant Harvest Circle, and everyone will get to contribute to our starter yeast. I’m hoping they’ll find this unique and inspiring, and that they all want to make sure they get a bottle when it’s available.”
“Leah! It’s a good thing your father hasn’t caught wind of this. What happens when we aren’t able to make the rosé that these customers paid for?”
“We can always refund money. But if we don’t at least try something different, we’ll definitely never get to next spring. This at least gives us a fighting chance.”
Vivian turned to Steven. “And you support this idea?”
“I do,” he said.
“I do, too,” Bridget said from the corner.
Vivian removed her hat and began fanning herself. “Everyone’s lost their senses.”
Steven shook his head—her mother, dramatic as