18. Garrett
18
Garrett
You wine some, you lose some: Thursday, 2 p.m. - 8 p.m. @ Winery
“ A ren’t we going to a wine tasting?” Evelyn asks as her head swivels to read the various welcome signs to the farm, each declaring Barlowe Berry Farm. Up ahead little blurs of children running through the bushes that extend for acres. A tractor winds through the neat rows pulling a wagon full of guests.
“Blueberry wine,” I say.
“Aren’t strawberries the fruit of romance? I mean, I can’t dip one in chocolate without thinking about Valentine's day. Whoever is doing strawberry PR is killing it.”
I heave a sigh as I maneuver into the parking lot. I choose a spot as far out of ear shot from any of the other guests or workers as possible. “There are a few reasons that no one likes the wine tasting gig for the festival. I told you I’d explain, so I need you to listen because how today goes determines how much wine and beer is donated to the festival and if they have to pay for any of it out of their budget when that should be going to other things.
"The main thing is that all of us have had so much of this stuff that it’s just not that great anymore. The second is that the Barlowes are the ones who run the tasting which is really an interview. If they don’t like us they’ll give us the worst options in the least possible quantities. A few years ago they sent Fletcher and Emily and they made a strawberry joke.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t end well,” she says.
“Let’s just say that it was the most sober the residents have been at a festival in a few decades.”
“Shit. So we’re responsible for everyone’s sanity and you’re just now telling me?” she asks, her voice rising with genuine concern.
“Glad you’re caught up.”
Evelyn looks down at her shirt which just says, I make boys cry . They’ve grown on me a bit. There’s also the fact she’s wearing them for my benefit, which I can’t complain about.
“I wish you told me sooner,” she says. “I could turn my shirt inside out. Or would that be too obvious and look even worse.” Evelyn plucks at the fabric. “I could turn it around and you’ll just have to walk behind me so no one can see it.”
“I brought something just in case.” I reach toward the back seat where I have a bag of options for her. I didn’t suggest something sooner because I didn’t want to risk her going inside and changing into something more potentially offensive. Then there’s the part that this way she gets to wear my clothes. They’re old ones from when I stayed with Alina over high school winter breaks and kept a closet of stuff stashed there.
Evelyn takes a moment to riffle through the bag before grabbing a faded red quarter zip sweater and pulling it over her head.
“Better?” she asks.
“Here, let me.” I reach over and pull her hair out from where it’s tucked under the neckline. “There.”
My hand draws a lingering line on her skin as I pull away, causing her to shiver. Her eyes capture mine and I think for a moment something shifts. The world narrows until it’s just us in the car. Nothing else exists. I almost fool myself into thinking that there wouldn’t be any consequences if I leaned in further, tangled my fingers in her hair and pulled her into my lap.
I’ve never been fond of physical touch; it was something that came so late in my life that it was foreign. But she makes it feel like the opposite. Something so easy that I feel the urge to fall into.
“Eve—” I start, but she shifts away leaving my hand hovering in open air.
“We don’t want to be late,” she says, then reaches for the door.
The front desk greeter directs us into a side room that’s cozy and reminiscent of the ski lodges around the area. The building itself is cabin style with pale exposed wood and vaulted ceilings. Although it’s still reaching the eighties mid-day, there’s a fire cracking in the stone fireplace. A landscape painting of the farm takes up almost an entire wall.
The door behind us opens and Evelyn reaches for my arm. It’s something so small and unconscious. Hell, her grabbing for me makes me feel needed, feeding my bottomless craving to be necessary.
“Sorry for the wait. There was this kid. Cutest little guy, blueberry coma. His mouth was stained and so were his hands,” Millie Barlowe says as she walks arm in arm with her husband Porter.
The husband and wife are the second generation of owners, both somewhere in their sixties. They’re wearing matching blue barn jackets and jeans dusted with dried greenery. Porter is a tall man with skin tanned from working outdoors his entire life and iron hard look in his blue eyes. It’s easy to tell Millie is the more welcoming of the two with her open features and smile lines framing her eyes are the only signs of age marking her ebony skin.
“Oh, is he okay?” Evelyn asks with genuine concern.
“Happens at least once a week, but always worth checking in on. You let the kids run around and pick their berries and it’s just a natural consequence of things,” Porter explains. “I’m Porter and this is the love of my life, Millie. You must be the newest pair sent up from Hartsfall.”
“Evelyn, and this is Garrett. I’ve been dying to visit.” Evelyn takes the lead on introductions.
“I just love it when a couple comes up. It just embraces the spirit of things, really shows that you’re taking the festival seriously,” Millie says and she gives us an adoring look that makes Evelyn flush.
“We—” I start to correct her, but Evelyn cuts me off.
“She’s right, baby. It’s so special to be the ones who get to do this. It’s my first time here, and I couldn’t have come at a better time.” The hand gripping my arm slides up to my chest. It’s like she’s mapped a trail of fire with how my skin heats.
It takes me a minute to register her playing along. She’s the type to. She knows this tasting matters to the town, that’s probably all there is to it.
“Great. We’re going to go check on the first flight of drinks. We’re going to start with a few ales if that’s all right. Feel free to get comfortable.” Porter gestures toward the two love seats around the live edge wooden table.
The Barlowes shuffle out of the room, allowing us a moment to regain our bearings.
“What are you doing?” I keep my voice low in case anyone can hear.
“Playing along,” she whispers back, leaning closer. “They want a couple. Let’s give them a couple. It’s just a few hours.”
“This isn’t going to work.”
“Why wouldn’t it? It’s not like you don’t know how to put on a good performance. Didn’t you guest star on that limited series, you know, the one with the mom who killed all her son’s girlfriends’?” she asks, referring to one of the acting gigs I was sent on to help promote Fool’s Gambit over a decade ago.
“Evelyn, if you have a script you’ve been keeping somewhere that will help me out in this situation, I’d be more than happy to memorize it in the three or so minutes we have until they come back,” I say.
“It’s improv, baby. ” She draws out the term of endearment. The word unlocking something I never knew I wanted to hear her say. “Just act like you can’t get me out of your head and we’ll be fine. There’s no reason we can’t have some fun with this. A little role-play never hurt anyone.” She pats my chest then rises on her toes to press her lips to my jaw. It’s fleeting but launches my heart into my throat.
This is a bad idea. There’s no logic to why I don’t run away and buy the wine for the festival myself. There’s just her and she’s enough for me to turn into a fool.
“Anything for the festival,” I rasp.
After Millie and Porter return, we make it through the ale samples without a hitch, mostly because of Evelyn. She asks all the right questions about the farm and them about their relationship.
“We have a mead, a true blueberry wine, and a Moscato that’s a little lighter,” Millie explains.
Through Evelyn’s questioning we’ve learned that Porter takes charge of the activities, parties, and other general non-alcoholic endeavors while Millie is the mastermind behind expanding the beverage options. It makes sense because we also learned that she was an intern here studying fermentation science when she met Porter. They found that they perfectly fit into each other’s lives and couldn’t let go.
Following the way the tasting glasses have been arranged as a guide, we start sipping the mead. The honey that sweetens the drink is cut with lemon which prevents the liquid from becoming too syrupy.
Evelyn gives that quick smile that lets me know it’s not her favorite, but will lie about it anyway if she has to. “How do you two do it? Forty years of marriage and working together?”
“You know that saying that relationships are all about compromise?” Porter asks.
Evelyn nods. “Sure.”
“It’s bullshit. Collaboration. They’re all about collaboration. We’re partners. We don’t always get along but we work through it because this place isn’t the dream. We’re the dream, our kids and our grandkids too. Never lose focus on that,” Porter says in clipped precise sentences, that make him sound annoyed, but appear to be his natural speech pattern. “There were these chickens—”
Millie cuts him off and preemptively waves away the story. “No, we're not talking about the chickens. Enough about us, we talk about us all day. If you read the label on the wine, you can learn half our story right there. What about you two? No, wait, let me guess how long you’ve been together. I’m good at this.” Millie pauses. She adopts the assessing gaze of a psychic trying to collect clues from her customers. Her hazel eyes drift between the two of us. “Under a year, but just barely. But you were friends before that.”
“Close. He knows my brother. We’ve been in each other’s lives practically forever,” Evelyn skirts around the truth.
Millie offers another one of her adoring looks. “That’s nice, isn’t it? I bet it gets all the basic questions out of the way." She waggles her brows, suggestively. "You get to skip a few steps and get to the good parts.”
I swallow at the implication and try not to think about it too hard so my blood doesn’t inconveniently try to relocate south while we finish our trip.
“What flipped the switch? There’s always a breaking point with these things. Just snap and it all falls apart and then into place. It was like that with us. You know, there was a strict no fraternization rule when I worked here, and I knew I was the one who was going to get the bad end of it if we got caught. But there was this bonfire at the end of the summer term and everyone came to celebrate before we all went back to our normal lives. One kiss with Porter in the blueberry fields and I had no choice but to come back the moment I graduated.” There’s a dreamy look in her eyes as she relives the past.
A reflection of the look seeps into Evelyn’s eyes as I can only assume she’s picturing the future. I can’t help the pinch of jealousy that comes when I know I can’t ask who’s in that image with her.
“There was a party about a year and a half ago,” I start before I realize what’s happening. I guess the past has a hold on me too. I reach out and the edge of my pinkie whispers against Evelyn’s. A small touch to tell her it’s my turn in the dance of this minor deception. “A mutual friend was throwing it.” Though, I’ve never been sure if Avery has actually ever considered me as such. “And Evelyn was dancing. She’s the type of person who makes everyone want to get up and join her. I didn’t, but I watched. She was in this pink dress that kind of floated as it moved, but someone bumped into her and spilled their drink everywhere. Next thing I know, this beautiful woman is standing in front of me demanding I give her my suit jacket.”
“I didn’t demand,” Evelyn interjects, and I wonder if she remembers what I’m talking about. Not that she was drunk that night, but that it might not have been significant to her.
“Fine. You didn’t demand, but you asked and I handed it right over. She disappears, and you know what I see a few minutes later? She comes back wearing it as a dress. You know I never got it back.” And however good she looked in the dress, she was incomparable in my suit jacket.
“I can fix that, sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. My clothes have a tendency to look better on you even if I get them custom made.”
There’s one thing I leave out about my recollection of the night, the real reason Evelyn started to really drag me under. It was the first time I noticed that tell of hers. That stupid forced smile. For a moment, when she dashed away from the crowd and she looked at me, it was gone. It was like I was a solution, not just my jacket, but me. That’s all it took. I don’t know what she was pretending to not care about that night, but I’m happy I was there all the same.
After a dinner on the porch of their farm to table restaurant, the Barlowes take us out to the fields just as dusk paints the sky. Strategically placed string lights give the transition into night, a gauzy, fantastical feeling as we meander through the bushes. Millie and Evelyn wander up ahead picking berries. This is likely the last weekend tourists and locals alike will be able to before fall rushes in and the fields are closed to the public.
“You two were quite the treat. Come back next year and you might actually be together with all that’s going on between the two of you,” Porter says, and I nearly stumble over my own feet.
“Excuse me?” I choke out.
“We got a little ask from the folks in town to give you two a push,” he says plainly. “Hold your apologies. I don’t give half a damn if you two are a couple or not. It was a good afternoon and you can’t buy one of those.”
“Any chance there was money involved in other ways?” I hedge my guess about the situation we’ve gotten ourselves into.
“I might have been promised a bit of a matchmaker’s fee. But I don’t think I’ll take it. This place is a little bit magic; I can’t take credit for it or maybe it will slip away.” The older man looks toward his wife.
It’s not that I want their life, exactly. I don’t think I could ever have that. I wasn’t raised in a way that I can ever see myself having a family without living in a constant state of fear that I would repeat the mistakes that made me feel the weight of resentment so much of my life. I’ve made plenty of choices to prevent that. But I want that, to belong with someone so unquestionably you can see it in a passing glance.
“Garrett! We still need a picture. Come here!” Evelyn calls out, her hand waving overhead.
What we have is mutual exchange, even if some roots have grown deeper than intended. But maybe for this next week I can let myself enjoy it. It’s fleeting. The moment that holds the last few seconds of your favorite song that has to end, no matter how much you wish it wouldn’t.
I stride over and claim the spot next to her, a spot that I force myself to remember shouldn't feel like mine. My arm loops around her waist and I pull her to me so her side is flush against mine. She nestles closer to me, the heat from her body is welcome against the chill whisper of fall. Her soft curves look so good wrapped in my old sweater with my hands pressed into the time softened cotton.
Her face tilts up to look at me. “What are you doing?”
“Let’s take one together this time. Today was worth remembering, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” she says. “I think it was.”
Before she lifts her phone to take a picture, I already know this one will never make it to Holt.
This is just for us.