Authors: Barbara Delinsky
The Vineyard (16 page)
“Preread?” the child asked in dismay. “Like, read now and then again in the fall? I don't think that'll help. I'm a terrible reader.”
“You won't be once you learn how to do it the right way.”
“But it takes me forever to read books
one
time,” Tess tried.
“It won't, once you get the knack of doing it in a way that works for you.”
“But how do I know what books I'll be reading in the fall, if I don't know where I'm going to school?”
Olivia explained the situation.
Sandy had answers here, too. “We'll get reading lists from the public school she's been at, plus Cambridge Heath and several other private schools. There will be overlap. We'll work with that book. Most of the ones assigned at this level are good for teaching visualization skills. We'll do vocabulary work from whatever book we pick.”
Tess moaned. “I'm terrible at vocabulary. I can never spell things right.”
“Really?” Sandy asked. She opened her bag and pulled out a book. “We use this one in the fifth grade at our school.”
“I
can't do fifth-grade work. I'm not
there
yet.”
Sandy opened to a random page, put the book in front of Tess, and pointed. “Do you know what this word is?”
“ âKnee,'” Tess said.
“Ah. You saw the beginning of itâthe
k-n
âand guessed. This word does begin with
k-n
but it isn't âknee.'”
“See? I'm not good at this.”
Sandy put a calming hand on Tess's arm. Opening her bag again, she pulled out a notebook. She opened to a clean page, took a pencil, and neatly printed “knight” for Tess to see. “This is the word in the book. Look at both. Are they the same?”
Tess compared the two. She nodded.
“Knight.” Sandy said the word and printed it again. “This isn't the kind of night that's the time of day when we sleep. It's a different kind of knight.”
“A soldier,” Tess said.
“Correct.” She pointed with the tip of her pencil. “Look at it with these letters sticking up at the beginning and the end, like swords or lances. Now, I'm going to draw a line around these letters.” She did it as she spoke. “I'll go up over the top of the
k
and down over the
n
and the
i
and the
g
. I'm going high again with the stem of the
h,
and a little lower with the
t
. We go down the side of the
t
with a little jag where the letter is crossed. We go down to the bottom now and start back underneath. I'm under the
h
. I'm going down deeper under the
g,
then back up and across on an even line under the
i
and the
n
and the
k,
then back up to where I started. There. It's boxed in. Look at that shape.”
Tess leaned forward and looked.
“Run your finger over it,” Sandy said.
Tess traced the outline with her finger.
“Can you feel its shape?” Sandy asked. “Feel those lances on either end, like the queen's guard?”
Tess nodded.
Sandy tore off the page. “One of the tutors said in his report that you can draw. Yes?”
Tess sat a little taller. She gave another nod.
Sandy put the old page next to a clean one. She handed Tess the pencil. “Draw me a knight.”
“A knight? Any knight?”
“Any knight you'd like, as long as it's a soldier, like you said.”
While Tess drew, Sandy sat back. She looked around the patio and out over the vineyard. She took a deep breath. She was clearly enjoying herself.
Olivia was thinking that in optimism alone she had it over past tutors, when Tess put down the pencil.
Sandy's eyes held instant appreciation. “Wow. You
can
draw. This is going to be fun. Now write the word under the picture.”
Tess picked up the pencil and copied the word from the first sheet.
“Now draw a box around it, just like I did,” Sandy said. “Take your time.”
Tess drew the box. It had her own little flair at the cornersâOlivia hadn't expected total conformityâbut it followed the general line of the letters.
Setting the pencil aside, Sandy took that paper and the first one she had used, and turned both over so that Tess had nothing to copy. “Now write the word,” she said.
Tess looked like she was about to argue. Then she picked up the pencil and correctly wrote the word.
“Well, there you are,” Sandy crowed. “For that, you get to have tomorrow's hour with me under that big old fat tree over there on the other side of the vineyard.”
“A
whole
hour?” Tess asked. “I only had half an hour at school.”
“What I'd really like,” Sandy said, “is
two
hours a day.”
“Two.”
Beseechful, Tess looked up over her glasses at Olivia. “This is my
summer.”
“An hour, then,” Sandy said with a conciliatory sigh. “That won't be too bad.”
Tess breathed a sigh of relief.
S
ITTING IN HER WINDOW SEAT
the next morning, Olivia smiled as she remembered the tutorial. Tess had been had. Sandy not only knew about learning disabilities, she knew about kids. If ever Olivia had been optimistic that they were in the right hands, it was now. Dealing with Tess's dyslexia was no longer adversarial. Sandy was on their side. Olivia felt less alone.
She put her chin on her knees. Asquonset was a charm in that
sense. She didn't care if Natalie's book did take longer to do. It would get done.
There was a movement below her, a figure approaching the end of the patio to survey the vineyard at dawn. It was Simon, right on time. As he did each morning, he held that mug of steaming coffee, though Olivia imagined it there more than actually saw it. The dawn light didn't illuminate much more than his overall shape.
Leisurely, she studied his legs, then those lean hips and the rising wedge of his torso. He had several layers of shirts on in the early morning chill, and they made his shoulders look particularly large. But she knew what those shoulders looked like with the sleeves of his T-shirt cut off. She knew how solid the muscle there was.
She sat still as she watched him. After that first morning, she hadn't gone outside. It was obvious she rubbed him the wrong way. Bumping into him seemed pointless. Besides, from here she didn't have to be coy. She could look at him all she wanted.
She would have five minutes to do it. That's how long he would stand there drinking his coffee, looking out over his realm. Then he would leave the patio, mingle with the vines on his way to the shed, and be gone from her view. He was definitely a creature of habit.
Sure enough, at the five-minute mark he shifted his stance in preparation for setting off. This day, though, he didn't leave. He turned his head slightly, as though he had heard something, and stood listening. In profile, she saw the tumble of hair on his brow, the line of his nose and his chin. Then he turned back all the way and looked straight at her.
He can't possibly see me,
she thought. But she wasn't taking any chances. She held her breath, kept her arms around her legs and her chin on her knees, and sat perfectly still. At least, everything voluntary was still. Her heart, though, was beating faster, and there was a thrumming deep inside.
Caught with my hand in the cookie jar,
she mused, squelching a nervous laugh.
He can't possibly see me,
she thought again, but it certainly felt like he had. She was trying to figure that one out when he faced forward again and set off to continue his daily ritual.
Â
R
AIN BEAT ON THE ROOF
of the loft, where Natalie had spread out her photographs. Olivia recognized them as belonging to the very first batch Otis had received, now several months back. She didn't see her mystery woman. These pictures were from an even earlier time. They were primitive black-and-white shots, most of empty fields and dark buildings. Looking at one of the buildings, Olivia recognized the beginnings of the Great House.
“You have a good eye,” Natalie remarked when she commented on it, but rather than elaborating as Olivia hoped she would, she simply stood studying the group.
Olivia followed her lead and stood beside her, doing the same. The pictures were earthy and bleak, drawing her back to the time of the Great Depression. Within minutes, she was newly arrived at Asquonset, there with Natalie's family on that cold and rainy day in 1930.
Turning away briefly, Natalie took a snapshot from the credenza. It was the picture of Carl, the springboard to that first distinct memory.
He was dressed much like he is here, only that day in the rain he wore a brown wool cap and a loose wool jacket. He was standing in the field like he was planted in the ground, looking so much taller and older than me that I should have been terrified. He was a strange person in a strange place. To this day, I don't know why I didn't turn and run back to the house. He didn't smile. But there was something about him ⦠something kind. I needed kindness that day.
“Are you lost?” he asked in a voice that didn't sound so old.
I shook my head.
“Scared?”
I shook my head again, then pushed the wet hair off my face.
“Well, you don't look happy.”
I wasn't. I was cold and wet and lonely. “I want to go home,” I said.
Carl glanced at the farmhouse. “No one's stopping you.”
But that farmhouse wasn't home to me. It was just a faraway pile of stones. “Home to New York.”
“I was there once. Don't care to go back. It's better here.”
“Why?”
“There's air here. There's trees and water.”
“All I see's rain and mud,” I declared.
“Know what that mud is?”
“I do,” I cried, thinking he thought I was a baby. “It's wet dirt!”
Carl remained placid. “Only on top. Underneath is what makes things grow. You don't get soil like this in other places.” He squatted down and pushed a hand through the mud. “If this was packed tight, it wouldn't be any good. But see? It's soft. There's good drainage here. That's why we can grow what we do.”
“I don't want to grow anything.”
He stood and held his muddy hand out to be washed by the rain. “That's because you want to be in New York, but you aren't there. You're here.”
“My friends are in New York.”
“You'll make friends here.”
“My school's in New York.”
“The one here's okay.”
“But I'm not staying! I'm going back to New York!”
“Did your parents tell you that?”
No. They hadn't. As the awfulness of that realization sank in, my eyes filled with tears. Struggling to hold them back, I started to shiver. I felt miserable.
“Those clothes are all wrong,” Carl scolded in a way that suggested concern far more than criticism. I understood that only in hindsight, however. At the time, I was too young and upset to make the distinction. All I heard wasâkindness.
“You need better things,” he said. “You need pants and real shoes and a jacket like mine.” Before I knew what he was up to, he had taken his jacket off and wrapped it around me.
I should have been appalled. The contrast between that coarse brown jacket and my soft blue coat was everything I didn't want. The jacket was old, and it was wet. But it smelled clean, cleaner now than I feared my muddy coat did. And it brought instant warmth.
“Come on. I'll take you home.” He set off for the farmhouse, gesturing me along with a hand. It was the same one he had run through the mud. That quickly, the rain had washed it clean.
“Did you get all those things?” Olivia asked Natalie.
“All what things?”
“Pants. Real shoes. A jacket like Carl's.”
Natalie lifted one of the pictures from the desk. It showed a group of young boys pulling potatoes from the ground. At least, Olivia had thought they were young boys when she had repaired a fold in the center of the picture. But there was a smugness now on Natalie's face that made her take a closer look.
“This is
you?”
she asked, pointing to one of the boys, who despite wearing the same jeans, shirt, and shoes as the others, suddenly didn't look like a boy at all.
Natalie confirmed it and identified each of the others. “Here's Carl. This is my brother, Brad. Carl and Brad were the same age. These other two boys were the sons of a neighbor. We gave them potatoes and corn in exchange for milk.”
But Olivia couldn't take her eyes off the girl. She had already learned that Natalie's family had lost everything before moving to Asquonset. Knowing it was one thing, though. Accepting it was another.
She had spent too long painting Natalie into a life of elegance and ease not to be shocked by what she saw here. “How old were you?”