33. Alessia
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Alessia
Now - Tuscany, The Vendemmia
Six weeks after Anthony knelt in the mud, I still haven’t given him a date, and the entire valley has decided to have opinions about it.
The grapes don’t care. That’s the thing I’ve loved about them since I was a child.
The vendemmia starts at five in the morning while the fruit is still cold, and by seven there’s a full crew in my mother’s rows with shears in their hands, and by ten it is hot enough that Matteo starts threatening to send everyone home and nobody goes.
My hands have been purple to the wrist for three days.
I haven’t thought about my father once since Tuesday.
The argument happens at six in the morning at the top of the oldest block, and it’s the first real one we’ve had since he put a ring in my hand.
“There’s weather coming Thursday,” Anthony says.
“There’s weather coming every Thursday.”
“Matteo says three days of it.”
“Matteo says three days of it every year and it rains for one.” I pull a berry off and split it with my thumbnail and taste it, and it’s nearly there and it isn’t there.
Four more days and it would be exactly what my grandmother put in a bottle.
“These are my mother’s vines. They’re the only block on this hill that goes in under her name. I’m not picking them green to be safe.”
“And if it rains for three?”
“Then I lose the block.”
“Alessia.” He isn’t arguing. That’s the strange part.
He’s standing at the end of the row in somebody’s borrowed boots with his hands in his pockets, and he’s genuinely only asking.
“I think you’re wrong. I want to say that out loud once, properly, so you’ve heard it said.
I think you should pick Wednesday, and I think you’re about to gamble your mother’s name on four days of weather. ”
“Noted.”
“Right.” He nods once. “Where do you want me?”
I stand there with the split berry in my hand and something goes through me that I don’t have a word for.
Because the man I married would have found a way.
He’d have agreed with me warmly, out here, where I could see his face.
And then he’d have taken Matteo aside at the bottom of the hill and said something quiet and reasonable, and the crew would have started Wednesday, and I’d have been told it was the weather.
He’d have handled it. I’d have gotten my way and it would not have been my way at all.
“Bottom of the block,” I tell him. “With Matteo’s crew.”
“Bottom of the block.” And he goes.
He doesn’t come back up all morning and he doesn’t raise it again, and at eleven I hear him down the hill telling one of the pickers in terrible Italian that the signora says Sunday, and it’s the signora’s hill.
Simon has been here since Monday.
Nobody asked him. He got off a plane in Florence, hired a car, drove up the hill in a white shirt and good shoes, and by the second morning he was out in the rows at five with everyone else, with his hands wrecked and the back of his neck going the color of a brick.
He hasn’t once tried to talk to me. He says good morning and he works and he goes to bed in the room over the old stable, and I’ve spent three days feeling him not ask me for anything.
This morning Matteo puts him on the sorting table. Across from me.
The old fox does it on purpose. I watch him do it. He points Simon to the empty place with two fingers and doesn’t look at me once, which is how I know.
So now there’s a long table between us with a river of fruit coming down it, and neither of us can walk away without making it a thing the whole crew watches.
“You’re doing it wrong,” I tell him.
“I’m doing it slowly.”
“That’s a different problem.”
He holds up a bunch with gray bloom across one shoulder of it. “This?”
“Out.”
“And this?”
“That one’s fine. You’re looking for soft, split, gray, or anything that smells like vinegar.” I take it out of his hand and put it back on the belt. “It isn’t complicated, Simon. You’re just frightened of getting it wrong in front of me.”
“Yes,” he says. “I am.”
We work. The belt rattles. Somebody down at the crush pad is playing the radio too loud and arguing about it with somebody else.
I get about four minutes before it comes out of me.
“I need to ask you something, and I need you not to be careful with me.”
“Okay.”
“At my wedding.” My hands keep moving. That is the only reason I can say it at all. “The toast.”
Simon goes still with a bunch of grapes in each hand.
“You stood up with a whiskey and you said, Anthony has never been able to keep a secret from the people he loves for very long. So, Alessia, if he ever tries, you come find me.” My voice comes out flatter than I want it. “The whole tent laughed. I laughed.”
“I know.”
“Say it plainly.”
He puts the fruit down. He looks at the table, not at me.
“I was telling you,” he says.
There it is. I’ve known it since the car, since Anthony said Simon knew everything, since I lay awake in Euridice’s spare room going back through three years of dinners looking for the moment somebody tried to hand me a rope.
I found it in the middle of my own wedding reception, in a joke, in front of my father.
“You were telling me.”
“It’s the most cowardly thing I’ve ever done and I’ve carried it every day since.
” His hands have started shaking, so he puts them flat on the table.
“I stood up in front of your whole family and I handed you the key in a voice that turned it into a joke. So that if you ever used it I could tell myself I tried. And if you never did, I could tell myself it wasn’t mine to say.
I got to feel like a decent man for about eleven seconds, Alessia, and it cost me nothing, and then everybody laughed and I sat down and ate my veal. ”
The belt keeps running. I’ve stopped seeing the fruit.
“Do you know what I did with that toast?” I ask him.
“No.”
“I told it at parties.” My throat is closing and I keep going anyway.
“For three years. I’d say, you should have heard Anthony’s best friend, he brought the house down.
I told it to my aunt at Christmas. I told it to a woman at a charity lunch six weeks before the arrest.” I finally look up.
“You gave me the answer in a voice that made it entertainment, and then I went out and I did the entertaining for you.”
Simon is crying. Not making any noise about it, just standing at a sorting table in the sun with his ruined hands flat on the wood and his face wet, and thirty feet away Matteo is shouting at somebody about crate weights and the world is carrying on exactly as normal.
“I’m not going to tell you I’m sorry,” he says. “You’ve had enough sorry.”
“That’s the first useful thing you’ve said.”
“Then tell me what you want instead.”
I think about it. I make myself take the time, because I’ve spent five months letting other people decide what I get, and I’m not doing it again, not even with something as small as this.
“You’re going to finish the harvest,” I say.
“Alessia-”
“I’m talking.” I wait. He waits. “You’re going to finish the harvest. You’re going to stay until the last row is in, and then you’re going to come to the wedding when there is one, and you’re going to sit where I put you, and you are not going to be comfortable around me for a long time.”
“That’s fair.”
“I haven’t finished.” I put both hands on the table so we’re level.
“And you are never going to do that to me again. Not in a toast. Not in a joke. Not sideways, not at the end of a sentence, not in a voice you can take back if it goes badly. If you have something, you say it out loud in a way that costs you. That’s the price of sitting at my table. ”
He nods. His jaw is working.
“Say it back to me.”
“If I have something,” Simon says, “I say it out loud.”
“Good.”
I push a crate across the table at him hard enough that he has to catch it against his chest.
“Now do it properly. You’re letting rot through and Matteo is going to blame me.”
And he laughs, this cracked wet laugh, and wipes his face on his shoulder, and gets back to work.
We sort about two hundred kilos of fruit between us without saying anything else, and it’s the closest thing to peace I’ve felt with anybody who isn’t my husband since the day my father walked out of his dining room in handcuffs.
Around ten, I catch Simon and Anthony with their heads together at the end of the crush pad, and they stop talking the second they see me looking.
“What was that?” I ask Euridice, who has appeared at my elbow with a crate she doesn’t need to be carrying.
“What was what?”
“That. Simon and my husband, whispering like schoolboys.”
“No idea.” She says it too fast, and she won’t look at me, and she’s suddenly very interested in a bunch of grapes that doesn’t need her interest.
“Euri.”
“I genuinely don’t know anything.” She does know something. I’ve known this woman since we were six years old, and she has exactly one tell, and it’s that her ears go pink.
Her ears are pink.
I corner Simon at lunch, on an overturned crate with a plate balanced on his knee, and I sit down across from him before he can find somewhere else to be.
“What’s my husband up to?”
He chokes on an olive.
“Nothing.” He recovers too slowly, coughing into his fist, his eyes watering. “Why would he be up to anything?”
“You’ve been jumpy for three days. You keep disappearing with him after lunch. Yesterday you drove into the village and came back with nothing in the car and wouldn’t say where you’d been.”
“I like the village.”
“Simon.”
“I really can’t.” He says it fast and low, glancing over his shoulder like Anthony might materialize behind him. “I promised him. If I tell you, he’ll know it was me, and he’ll never trust me with anything again, and I’ve only just gotten him back.”
Which is how I know it’s real, whatever it is, and that I’m not getting it out of anyone on this hill before he’s ready to hand it to me himself.
I let it go. For now.
Then Matteo whistles from the top of the row.
Not the whistle he uses for the tractor. The other one. Short and flat, two notes, the one that means look.
There’s a car coming up the drive. It’s moving very slowly over the ruts the way a car does when whoever’s inside it is protecting the paint, and it’s black, and it’s shining, and it’s completely wrong among the flatbeds and the mud.
Two rows over, Euridice straightens up with a crate against her hip.
I watch every bit of color go out of her face.
“That’s my mother,” she says.