Chapter 13 Jeweled Boots and Bedwetters #4
Row by row he went. It felt like having each nail plucked from his fingers, ripping up as many vines as the front loader would carry and then driving them to the far end of the property, where his vineyard guys had cleared an area ready to burn.
It would take two years to get any fruit from newly planted vines, which meant he’d lost at least two years of income from his estate plantings.
It would take another seven to ten to grow fruit worth talking about.
In two days, he had wrung from the earth a lifetime of dreams. He slept on a stack of hay bales that abutted the outside wall of the tractor shed, desperate to avoid Bec. Shame caked his insides. Had he let her win, none of this would have happened.
The second morning she came out with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and begged him to eat.
“It took so many years to get here, Bec.”
“We did it once, we can do it again.” She was always optimistic, but he could hear the note of doubt in her voice.
He ran a hand through his hair, looking out over the empty rows, knowing that he had to treat the soil and get to planting if he wanted the roots to take before winter.
“We won’t have anything to sell for two years, Bec.
Even then, it’ll be too young to offer any complexity.
People will say that what we do have in barrel is tainted.
We’re already the laughingstock of California. ”
“People will stand behind you, Otis. Lloyd will be here tomorrow, and we’ll work it all out.”
“Lloyd? How can he help? I don’t want more of his money. I don’t need his advice. I want him out of my life. Out of yours.”
Later that morning, with his men standing beside him, Otis struck a match and lit a section that he’d doused with gasoline. His assistant vineyard manager, Scooter, a calloused-handed man from Santa Fe who’d been with Otis three years now, stood by with a hose for safety.
The flames rose as high as the trees and kicked off a heat that burned Otis’s skin. Sweat dripped down his face and neck. He turned back and saw his boys watching through the window.
A sharp pain took him by surprise and caused him to reach for his chest. His legs gave way, and then all went black.
Otis woke in a hospital bed. Monitors chirped. An IV drained into his arm. He felt a warm, familiar hand slip into his.
“What happened, Bec?”
“You had a mini heart attack.”
“A heart attack?”
In her eyes he saw so much loss and pain. He’d done this to himself, and the reality of it came at him like a train. He’d been pushing for so damn long and hard, and this was what he got.
“Where are the boys?”
“With my parents.”
Bec slid onto the bed and cuddled up with him and began to weep. He squeezed her. “No, don’t do that. I’m fine.”
“It’s gotta stop, Otis. You’re not fine. You’re thirty and had a heart attack. You won’t make it to forty unless you stop.”
“I’m going to slow down.”
“How? We have to start all over. Do you know how many acres of vines we need to get into the ground?”
Reality gut punched him. She was right. He hadn’t earned anything, certainly not tenure with his farm. The following years would be the toughest of his life.
He didn’t know where to go from here. “I’m going to change, Bec. You’ve been right all along. I can’t keep going this hard. We’ll have to get more help. I’ll settle down. If you want to sell the farm, we’ll sell the farm. Maybe it’s time I go back to sch—”
“Oh, right, so you can be miserable about it the rest of your life. We have to replant, Otis. We’re not stopping now, but you have to change.
Your behavior on the road has to change.
How many times do I have to tell you that what you put in your bottles doesn’t define who you are? You take it too seriously.”
Otis stared up to the white ceiling. “I don’t know how else to say it, but that farm and those wines, Lost Souls, it’s my oxygen.”
Bec petted his face, there for him even when he didn’t deserve it.
“We’re your oxygen, Otis. Me and Cam and Michael.
You’re missing out. You’re missing the boys grow up.
All Cam wants to do is go fishing with you, and you haven’t taken him once.
They just watched you collapse and be carried unconscious into an ambulance. ”
She climbed off the bed and stood over him. “I didn’t marry your wines, Otis. You’re a great man, even without them. The problem is that you’re the only one who doesn’t see it, the only one who doesn’t realize that you let the quality of each vintage determine your greatness. That’s not healthy.”
“But it’s true. What’s wrong with that? The quality of Rembrandt’s work had to do with his paintings, not how he brushed his teeth.
Keith Richards isn’t known for the way he dresses.
It’s his guitar playing. I’m an artist, and I am absolutely defined by my output.
I only get so many vintages in a lifetime, and it already feels like I’m running out. ”
She slapped the air. “You don’t get it. You will make better wine when you stop trying so hard.
You’ll make better wine when you can find balance in your life.
What does any of it matter if you have another heart attack and don’t wake up?
You talk like you’re in your eighties. You’re thirty.
Doctors are getting out of their residencies in their thirties.
Most people at our age still have no idea what they want to do.
You know exactly. You’re way ahead, but you have to sit back and smell the riesling—”
“It’s not that easy, Bec.”
“It is. Yes, you only have a finite number of vintages, but what about the finite amount of time you have with your boys? With me? I could be gone tomorrow.”
Otis saw a flash of a life without her, and it caved in on him. “I hear you, Bec.”
Bec didn’t leave the changing up to him. Having read it in one of her cuckoo books that she kept on her cuckoo bookshelf, she decided the first order of business was to institute daily recess for Otis.
Recess.
She laid out the whole plan with a straight face too.
He was back home from the hospital and feeling okay. Along with the doctor’s instructions to eat healthier, start jogging, and stop drinking so much, he had a long list from Bec, including her instructions to “take an hour every day to play.”
“Play?”
“Yes, play.”
“For God’s sake, who has time to play?”
She didn’t respond, didn’t have to. He’d already promised. He could hear himself back in the hospital. I’ll change, Bec. I swear to God.
Worst promise he’d ever made.
“Guess what,” Bec said, determined to fix him, “you have two expert boys outside who can teach you how to play. When will the replanting happen? you might ask. On either side of recess.”
“Do you hear what you’re telling me to do? I’m not seven years old.”
“You’re going to start acting like it.”