Authors: Barbara Ellen Brink
“You don’t have anything to say
that I want to hear,” she said, her voice tight with anger. How dare he call
after all he put them through? Last time he showed up she begged Handel to give
him a chance, and she’d lived with regret ever since.
“Maggie. You don’t mean that.”
She tensed at the childhood name.
Her mother had called her, Maggie. When she died, no one was allowed to use
that name again. Especially not the man who made her mother’s life miserable to
the end. “I do mean that. Don’t call here again,” she said and slammed the
phone down.
Tears slid down her cheeks and she
brushed them away with angry movements, unwilling to acknowledge the reason she
cried. Not for herself. Her father had never been a dad. She was used to it.
Seconds later, the phone rang
again. And rang and rang. Then she disconnected it from the wall.
*****
Adam knocked on the door again. Margaret
must be home. Handel said he’d talked to her earlier. He knocked harder and
pressed the doorbell three times for good measure. “Meg!” he called out,
stepping back to look up at the windows, all suspiciously shut against the cool
of the evening. “Meg, are you there? Answer me!”
He heard movement behind the door
and then the deadbolt clicked back and the door was pulled open. “Hey, Adam.
What are you yelling about?” Davy asked, rubbing his eyes. “You woke me up.”
“Sorry, pal. Where’s your mom?” he
asked, more worried now than before. Margaret would never leave Davy alone with
Sean Parker running loose in the neighborhood.
He yawned widely, his eyes watering
with the effort. “Don’t know. Maybe she’s in the cellar.”
“You have a cellar?”
“Sure. I’ll show you.” He stood
back and waited for Adam to enter before carefully closing the door and
flipping the deadbolt. Then he looked up, his expression pensive. “Mom said to
always lock the door. Grandpa Sean got out of jail.”
Adam patted him on the back. “Good
job. Show me where the cellar is and you can get back to bed.”
Davy trudged in bare feet down the
hall, through the kitchen, and out the service door to the garage. He pointed
to the far corner. A slanting wooden door was propped open over a descending
flight of stone steps. Yellow tinged light gleamed from the opening. “She’s
down there,” he said. He yawned again. “Can I go back to bed now?”
Adam ruffled the boy’s hair. “Yeah,
sure. Sorry for waking you up.”
Davy shuffled sleepily off to his
room and Adam moved toward the cellar door. He heard music floating up the
stairs, faint and crackily from a radio station with bad reception. An oldies
station was playing
Please Mr. Postman
—Karen
Carpenter’s voice smooth and creamy as new butter. Then Meg sang along, so far
off key it was practically a different song. He covered his laugh with a fake
coughing fit and she jerked around with an empty bottle raised over her head.
He dodged to the right. “Hey! It’s
me. Careful with that thing. I have a soft skull.”
She blew out a relieved breath and
set the bottle down on a low table. “Do you have to keep sneaking up on me all
the time? I’m too young for a heart attack.”
“Sorry.” He grinned at the picture
she made. With a white lab coat buttoned up over her clothes, and her blonde
hair pulled into two ponytails high on the sides of her head, she looked like
Chrissy on Three’s Company doing a parody of The Nutty Professor.
“How’d you get in anyway?” she
asked, moving toward the stairs.
“Don’t worry. The front door is
locked. Davy let me in and went back to bed.”
She was obviously relieved. “Good.
Not that you woke him up, but that he went back to bed. I was worried he
wouldn’t sleep after this afternoon.” She moved to the table where she had
bunches of grapes and some testing equipment spread out. Behind her, a press
and another machine he didn’t recognize, filled half the room. Four small oak
barrels, two on each side of a narrow doorway, were most likely last year’s
wine still going through fermentation.
“What are you up to?” he asked,
stepping closer to watch.
“I’m testing the level of acidity.
Ripe grapes should be between 0.58 and 0.64. These are showing 0.59,” she said
looking up with a pleased expression. “This is going to be one busy week.
Thankfully, I’ve talked Billie into a joint venture, now that I’m her chief
winemaker. I’d never have time to harvest my own vineyard, otherwise. We’re
going to add a new wine to Fredrickson’s list. A field blend. I found a very
old wineblending recipe that belonged to my grandfather. The Parker vineyard
was planted with half a dozen different kinds of grapes back in the forty’s. It
was once actually part of Fredrickson’s. I think with a couple added varietals
from Fredrickson’s newer vines, we will have something uniquely special.” She
moved away from the table and disappeared through the narrow stone doorway, but
soon returned with a bottle of wine in hand, and continued. “Field blending is
an art form that’s nearly disappeared around here. Most wine made in Napa is
from single grape dedicated, homogenous vineyards. But we are going retro!”
“Cool.” He reached out, plucked a
grape, and popped it in his mouth. “Do you get top billing too?” he asked.
“She did say I could name it. But I
suppose I’ll have to come up with something new.” She set the dusty bottle
down, and wiped it off with a nearby towel. The label said,
Margaret’s Wine
.
He took it from her hand to get a
better look. “Hmm. I would have called it, Meg’s Brew.”
“Wine isn’t brewed—beer is,”
she said, unbuttoning her lab coat. “With your lack of knowledge for this
business, you may not even last as the accountant.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Let’s get out of here.” She
clicked off the radio.
He carried the wine, and she closed
and locked the wine cellar door behind them. The house was quiet when they
slipped in. “I just want to check on Davy,” she said, leaving him in the
kitchen while she climbed the stairs to her son’s room.
He rummaged around for a corkscrew
and glasses. Managed to find both before she returned. “Is he sleeping?” he
asked, smoothly pulling the cork from the bottle.
“Yeah. He’s fine. I’m the one who
seems to have a problem sleeping nights. First, Agosto comes back and rips a
hole in my little world with his demand for joint custody of Davy, and now my
father returns. I may never sleep again.” She took the glass of wine he held
out, her hand shaking slightly.
“You want to sit outside?” he
asked. “It’s a beautiful night.”
The patio was awash with the glow
of the full moon. He pulled another chair close to hers and set the bottle on
the table within reach. Crickets chirped somewhere behind the grill and a light
breeze ruffled leaves on nearby oaks. The whine of a small bi-plane sounded
overhead, tiny lights twinkling against the black velvet expanse.
He was quiet, letting her unwind
while they sipped wine and listened to the sounds of the night. Slowly he
reached out and laced her fingers with his and let them rest on the arm of her
chair. She turned her face toward him and smiled.
“I’m sorry about giving you a hard
time about being too young,” she said. “It’s just that sometimes I feel like
someone borrowed years of my life and never returned them. I don’t want that to
happen to you.”
“Are you talking about Davy?”
“Don’t get me wrong. I regret my
affair with Agosto ten years ago. I don’t regret having Davy. Well,” she
shrugged, “sometimes when he’s driving me crazy, but all Mother’s feel
that—don’t they?”
“You’re a great mom and Davy’s a
great kid. Things will work out. I have total confidence in my sister’s
attorney skills. When it comes to fighting for the underdog, she is in there
tooth and nail.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she said,
but there was a lack of confidence in her voice.
“By the way, I heard through the
grapevine that your old flame actually suggested he was willing to start over.
I’m glad you didn’t jump at the chance.”
She breathed out a faint laugh and
shook her head. “Yeah, like that’s gonna happen. He was only trying to
manipulate me. I find it very hard to believe he could ever learn to love
anyone but himself.”
“The first time I saw him I
thought—Hollywood.”
“What?”
“You know—the perfect leading
man in a chick flick. Handsome, well-groomed, knows how to speak Italian.”
She took a sip of wine, her eyes
sparkling with laughter.
“You two would never work out. You
need someone down to earth, with an ego that doesn’t overpower the
relationship. Someone like me. An average, hard-working guy with open arms and
a heart as big as Yankee Stadium. I’m your Joe Demaggio.”
She burst out laughing. “Right. And
we know how well that turned out.”
He shrugged. “Well, I’m not exactly
like Joe Demaggio. I’m better looking. More like Joe Mauer.”
“And how is
your
ego going to stay under control?” she teased, holding her
glass out for a refill.
He took the bottle from the table
and leaned toward her to fill her glass. “I’m sure you’ll think of a way,” he
said. “My ego’s already been knocked down a few pegs since I met you. What
about that first day I knocked on your door?”
She groaned and covered her face
with one hand. “Don’t remind me. Sometimes I can be a real…”
“Hey!” he interrupted, “Don’t be so
hard on yourself. I deserved it. I was insensitive, immature, and probably
smelled like a gymnasium after walking for an hour in the sun. I don’t blame
you for not seeing the real me under all that raw masculinity.”
She made a sound of disbelief.
“That’s amazing. You managed to turn an apology of sorts into a bragathon.”
He gulped the rest of the wine in
his glass and set it on the table. “Believe me, it’s a special skill I don’t
take lightly.” He took her glass and set it beside him, then pulled her to her
feet. “My other skills could use practice though,” he said and bent his head to
kiss her.
“Get away from my daughter!” a
smoke-filled voice crackled like sparks from a bonfire as a tall, dark figure
separated from the shadow of the trees and advanced toward them. “You’re
another damn Fredrickson, come to take what don’t belong to you,” he accused.
Ten paces away, he stopped and took a drag on the cigarette he held. Smoke
exited his nose and wreathed his head momentarily, appearing like an unstable
halo in the glow of the moon. He dropped the nub and crushed it with the heel
of his boot, never taking his eyes from Adam.
Adam stepped between Margaret and
her father, his hands clenched at his sides. Just the thought of what this man
did to his sister was enough to churn his gut with blind rage. “I think you
better leave before I finish what those cigarettes only started.”
Sean Parker laughed, a harsh sound
of lung damage and age. “Believe me, boy, many have tried before you, but none
have succeeded. Why don’t you run on home now so I can talk to my baby girl.”
Margaret pressed her hand against
Adam’s back and slowly moved past him. “It’s all right,” she whispered close to
his ear. She took two steps toward her father and stopped. “What do you want?”
Her voice was brittle as toffee at shattering stage. “Haven’t you done enough
damage to our family?”
Sean Parker coughed and spat on the
ground. He casually pushed his hands in the front pockets of his jeans and
looked at her like a wayward child. “Maggie, you know I’d never hurt you or
Davy. I’ve done my time and I’m going straight. I just need a helping hand. We
are family.”
Adam could see her tense, her back
straightening like a soldier with orders. “We are not family. And for the
record, the rest of your life wouldn’t have been enough time to pay back what
you took from those children, from my mother and from Handel.” With each word
her voice strengthened. She stepped forward and pointed her finger in her
father’s face. “As far as this family is concerned, you died a long time ago.
Now get off my property or I will file charges against you myself!”
His eyes narrowed and his lips
hardened into the angry man he’d become. “Handel’s turned you against me. He’s
always been soft. If he were the Parker I raised him to be he would have found
a way by now to use that fancy law degree to take back what’s ours.”
“Thank God he isn’t like you. You
are a hateful, destructive man,” her words were but a breath on the wind.
Adam could tell she was about ready
to have an emotional meltdown. He stepped up and drew her into his arms,
turning her face away from Sean Parker. “Go inside and call the police. I’ll
stay and make sure he leaves.”
She hesitated, then pulled away and
without looking back made her way across the patio.
Sean laughed. The dry cackle
reminded Adam of a crow’s harsh cry in a Minnesota winter. “Maggie, I know what
you and Handel are trying to do, sleeping with the opposition, but marrying the
bastards is a tough way to get your inheritance back,” he called after her.
She paused with her hand on the
sliding door.
“I’m not asking for my
share—just a few thousand to tide me over till I find a good job. Handel
owes me that much after testifying against his own father.”
Margaret turned back, her features
etched like marble. “Go to hell,” she said in a voice with enough heat to send
him on his way. She slid the door open and disappeared inside.
Sean Parker turned his eyes on Adam
and spit on the ground. “You tell her I’ll be back. This isn’t over,” he said.
“You come back and I’ll end it
myself.” Adam promised.
The old man smirked and walked off
around the house toward the road.
Adam followed, keeping his
distance. A sickening anger built stone upon stone inside of him until it
became an altar of fury. If Sean Parker had made one wrong move or said one
more thing, he would have been on him like a rabid animal, beating, kicking,
clawing him to pieces in retribution for all he’d done. Thankfully, he didn’t
get his chance. The man climbed into an old pickup hiding in the trees at the
end of the road and drove off. Adam watched the taillights disappear into the
curve of the dark highway before running back up the drive and into the house.