Alex
Fourteen
The coffee maker finishes its slow hiss and I pour a mug, leaning one hip against the counter. By some miracle, the house stays quiet around me.
Saturday.
Ballet at ten. After that, the day is open.
My phone sits on the counter beside the coffeepot. I pick it up almost without thinking, the memory of last night rising to the surface as the screen lights.
The alert. The temperature was dropping fast enough that Josie had gone still beside me in the car. After that she was glued to her phone, watching the numbers change until we reached her driveway.
I offered to stay and help, but she smiled and assured me she had everything under control.
As soon as we arrived, she stepped out in her dress and heels and slipped effortlessly into organizer mode, pointing people in different directions before heading inside to change.
Watching her juggle it all, I felt a little in awe of her.
She did clearly have it under control, but I still wonder if I should have stayed, just as a show of support.
I look down at our message thread, remembering the tension in her voice as she explained the frost and young vines and the narrow window between a cold night and the kind of damage that follows a vineyard for the rest of the season. I’m almost afraid to ask, but I have to know.
Me: How did it go last night?
I take a sip of coffee and reach for the pan I left on the stove yesterday, setting it over the burner while I wait for the screen to light again.
It doesn’t take long. Her reply comes through while I’m cracking eggs into a bowl.
Josie: We think we saved them. Hard fight though.
No details. No explanation about heaters or irrigation or wind machines. Just the tired edge that shows up even in a short message.
I picture her in the vineyard before sunrise, walking rows of vines while the temperature crawls upward again. I dry my hands on the dish towel and pick up the phone again.
Me: Will you be around the vineyard later?
I pause before finishing the message, my thumb hovering over the screen. Then I add the part that changes the question.
Me: Eloise and I might stop by.
The words sit there for a moment before I send them. It isn’t a casual decision, confirmed by the feeling I have as soon as the message leaves my phone. Introducing someone to my daughter isn’t something I do lightly. In truth, it’s something I almost never do at all.
The phone vibrates again.
Josie: I should be. I’m going to sleep for a few hours first.
I know she must be exhausted. I imagine the vineyard finally stabilized sometime near dawn.
Me: Makes sense. You’ve earned the nap.
A second later three dots appear, disappear, and then a short answer arrives.
Josie: See you later.
Footsteps sound down the hall just as I finish, and Eloise appears in the kitchen doorway a second later, hair still tangled from sleep, one sock on and the other clutched in her hand. “Are you making eggs?”
Her voice carries a hopeful tone. She’s trying to confirm the breakfast situation before committing to being awake.
“I am,” I say, setting the phone face down on the counter. “Ballet requires proper fuel.”
She considers this seriously while hopping on one foot to pull the second sock into place. “I think ballet requires pancakes.”
“That sounds like a theory someone invented to get out of eating eggs.”
“It’s a very good theory.”
I slide the pan on the burner as she climbs onto the stool at the counter, already launching into a story about something that happened in class yesterday that involves a glitter pen, a drawing of a dragon, and a disagreement about whose turn it was to sharpen the pencils.
I listen with half an ear, answering where appropriate while I move through the familiar rhythm of breakfast.
The phone stays where I left it on the counter.
But the decision behind that last message has already been made.
Later today, Eloise and I are going to the vineyard.
As expected, Dot’s is busy on a Saturday afternoon.
The lunch crowd hasn’t fully cleared out yet, and Eloise sits across from me in the booth with a basket of fried chicken strips and French fries, completely focused on the business of dipping each piece into a rotation of sauces she has lined up along the edge of her plate. Ketchup. Sweet and sour. Honey mustard.
My burger arrives a moment later, the plate sliding across the table with the familiar scrape of ceramic on laminate. I thank the server and reach for a fry while Eloise launches into a story about something that happened in ballet this morning that apparently requires full discussion.
“…and then Mia said it wasn’t a real dance because we don’t have a unicorn,” she says, leaning forward across the table. “But I told her that’s only in books. In real life it doesn’t matter.”
“That seems like a reasonable scientific position,” I say.
She nods, seeming pleased with the support, and dips another fry in ketchup.
The conversation drifts the way it always does when she’s driving the train.
Ballet stories turn into a complaint about a boy in her class who talks too much during reading time, which somehow becomes a long explanation about a new library book she checked out yesterday that involves a horse, a storm, and a mysterious island.
By the time we finish eating, the lunch crowd has thinned and the afternoon light has shifted toward that early-spring brightness that makes everything outside the windows look sharper than it did an hour earlier.
I pay the check while Eloise swings her legs under the table, and then we step back out into the parking lot.
Eloise climbs into the backseat and buckles herself into her booster while I slide behind the wheel. The engine starts with a low hum and the music picks up halfway through whatever song had been playing when I turned it off earlier.
We pull out of the lot and head over the bridge toward Black Bear.
For the first few minutes the conversation continues the same way it has all day. Eloise is explaining the exact difference between two ballet positions that look identical to me but apparently are not, using her hands to demonstrate while I nod in the rearview mirror.
I take the turn that normally leads us toward home, and then a block later, I signal and turn again toward the road that runs along the edge of the valley. I see the moment Eloise notices in the mirror.
“Where are we going?” Her voice isn’t suspicious yet. Just curious.
“We’re making a quick stop first,” I say, easing the car onto the narrower road that leads out of town.
“Where?”
“We’re going to visit someone.”
She waits, eyes full of the question she hasn’t asked yet.
“Her name’s Josie,” I add, keeping my eyes on the road as if this is no different from any other small detour on an afternoon drive. “She works at one of the vineyards out here.”
“Black Bear?”
The question catches me slightly off guard. “You know it?”
“We drove past it when we went to the lake last summer,” she says. “Gran pointed it out.”
I nod. “That’s the one.”
As we leave the edge of town behind us, orchards stretch out along both sides of the road, their rows still bare enough that you can see the lines of the land beneath them.
Eloise doesn’t say anything for a moment. When she does, her voice is quieter. “Is she your friend?”
I glance at the mirror. She’s watching me. “Yes, she is.”
Eloise leans back against the seat and looks out the window.
The road curves gently along the base of the hills before the first rows of vines come into view, stretching across the slope in long, careful lines that follow the shape of the land.
The gravel entrance appears a minute later. I slow the car and turn in. The tires crunch over stones as we move down the lane toward the winery buildings. Beyond them the vineyard spreads across the hillside.
Eloise leans forward, watching the landscape unfold outside the window. It’s a new place and a new person, and she doesn’t say anything about either. The quiet in the car feels different now.
The gravel lane curves past the winery buildings and opens onto the lower blocks of vines. I ease the car into a space beside a pickup truck coated in the fine dust that seems to live permanently on vehicles out here.
When we step out, I can hear water running somewhere beyond the slope. A diesel motor hums near one of the equipment sheds, and voices carry across the rows in short bursts as people move through the vineyard.
Eloise unbuckles and climbs out beside me, her eyes moving over the landscape.
The place looks different than it does from the road.
Closer now, we can see the wires strung between the vine posts and the irrigation hoses running along the ground. A few workers move slowly down one of the rows with clipboards and small instruments in their hands, stopping every few plants to check something before continuing.
I spot Josie a moment later.
She’s halfway up the block, talking with a man who is kneeling beside one of the vines with a probe pushed into the soil.
A notebook rests open against his thigh while he writes something down.
When he turns to speak to her, Josie listens and then crouches beside him to look more closely at the plant.
Even from here I can see fatigue in the way she moves. Not slow exactly, but deliberate in a way that suggests she’s conserving what energy she has.
I close the car door and Eloise steps up beside me, her hand sliding into mine as we start up the slope.
The ground is uneven underfoot, loose gravel giving way to packed dirt between the rows.
Water runs along the irrigation line at the edge of the block, catching the light in thin flashes as it moves.
Josie notices us before we reach her.
She straightens from where she’s been crouching and brushes her hands against the thighs of her jeans, saying something to the man beside her before walking down the row toward us.