Authors: Barbara Delinsky
“She added cilantro.”
“Cilantro.”
“Crushed into the mayo.”
“Ah.” Olivia self-consciously crossed her arms, then uncrossed them and folded her hands in her lap. Simon was watching her. All sweaty, he was gorgeous. Feeling decidedly ungorgeous herself, just then she would have settled for
collar
-length hair. “How are the kittens?” she asked, anxious to escape the awkward moment.
“Tiny.” He hitched his chin toward the sandwiches. “May I?”
“Be my guest.” Cilantro. She didn't know what cilantro looked like, but that was easily remedied. She could crush cilantro into mayo. Still, with or without, Simon seemed to be enjoying her sandwich.
Desperate to fill the silence lest he think she wanted a compliment, she said, “Natalie loved Buck being a girl.”
“Oh yes. She's told me that three times now. I may never live it down,” he said, but he didn't look terribly upset. He actually seemed amused. And although he wasn't exactly smiling, he looked like he might.
She waited, hoping to see it.
Then his gaze touched her mouth, and she forgot about waiting for a smile.
“Where is Natalie?” she asked, needing a diversion. “Still outside?”
“Yeah.” He took another sandwich half.
Olivia glanced at the clock. “Where's Tess?” It was a rhetorical question, so she was startled when he had the answer.
“At my place. She wanted to see the kittens. I showed her the path in the woods.”
“Uh-oh. That might not have been a wise move. She's apt to be there more than you want. She's intrigued by those kittens. They were all she talked about at breakfast.”
“Why don't you take one when they're ready to go? Better still, take two. Or five.”
“Uh, I don't think we can. It's not like we own our own place. I'm not even sure where we'll be in the fall. Some landlords hate cats.”
“Well,” Simon said, “you have six weeks to decide.” He held up the sandwich half as he made for the door. “This is good. Truth is, I never was a big cilantro fan myself. Thanks for lunch.”
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“I
T WAS AN EPIPHANOUS EXPERIENCE
,” Olivia read aloud to remind Natalie where they had been. Turning away from the computer screen, she settled into one of the wing-back chairs with her paper and pen. She had fed Tess and dropped her off at the club. She had pushed Simon out of her mind. It was time to work. “Did you seriously consider suicide?”
Natalie smoothed her linen shorts at the same time that a crease appeared on her brow. “For a minute. Just a minute. I was feeling horrible pain, and emptiness, and loss. I was tired. I was frightened.”
“Of what?”
“The future. The whole time Alexander had been away, I had built up a picture of what our lives would be like. Maybe it wasn't an overly pretty picture, but it was one of the ways I rationalized losing Carl. What I got would be worth the loss. Suddenly, it wasn't. The whole picture just ⦠just ⦔ She gestured frantically. “Just
broke apart.”
Her hands fell. Her face reflected the memory of that long-ago pain.
Olivia's life hadn't been without pain. She had felt emptiness and loss, tiredness and fear. Natalie must have felt them that much more, if she actually reached the point of having to consider suicide.
The difference, she realized, was in highs and lows. Natalie had felt the extremes. It made sense that someone who had known the kind of happiness she had with Carl would have found the low of total disillusionment unbearable.
“Anyway,” the older woman said now, “it was just for that minute, and then it was done. During the walk home carrying the children that day, I revamped my view of life. Up until then, I had pinned my hopes on other people. I had relied on my father, then on Carl, then on Alexander. I had listened to my mother and made a decision I shouldn't have made. But it was my decision. I want that to be clear in what you write. My mother didn't force me to marry Alexander. It was my decision to do it.” She paused.
“Yes?” Olivia coaxed.
“But the real decision came that day. Sitting up on those rocks, with the wind blowing hard and the waves exploding in the air, I was at a fork in the road. I chose life. But not just any life. I wanted a good life. I vowed to make it so.”
Olivia saw the next part of the story opening up, but she held
off going there. A major question lingered. “Did you consider divorce?”
“No. I had married Alexander of my own free will.”
“But you did it based on false promises that he made.”
“His promises weren't false at the time he made them. He fully intended to build the vineyard with shoe money. He hadn't lied to us.”
“But he let you down,” Olivia said. “Weren't you angry?”
“Angry? Maybe at the situation, but not at Alexander. How can you be angry with someone who acted in good faith? Someone who had suffered a great loss himself? I was disappointed. I had assumed that he was a smart businessman, and he wasn't, but his heart was in the right place.”
“You said that he stayed longer than he should have in Europe.”
“No,” Natalie corrected patiently, “what I said was that things might have been different if he hadn't stayed so long. But he wasn't idle there. What he was doing was important.”
“What about your father? Your mother said that without more money and new vines, your father would die. Didn't you blame Alexander for his death?”
Natalie smiled sadly. “Alexander had nothing to do with the money my father lost when the stock market crashed. That was the start of my father's decline, but it was his own doing. He was the president of the bank. He approved all major decisions. Alexander had nothing to do with my father's mistakes as a farmer, and as for buying rootstock in Europe, he only bought what my father told him to buy. It wasn't his fault that those vines were ill-suited to the microclimate here. He wasn't the one telling my father to pour more and more money into it. Besides”âshe took a gentle breathâ“my father didn't die. He lingered for quite a few more yearsâprobably because of Alexander.”
Olivia was startled. “He lived?”
“He did. And Alexander was good to him. He used to sit with him and talk, and when Alexander talked, you listenedâand smiled and believed. He would say that Asquonset was on the cusp of greatness, and that the newest batch of vines were producing grapes to beat the band. He would point to a bottle of French wine and insist that it was only a matter of time before our wine was as much in demand as that one. I mean, most of it was baloney,” she said with a fond smile, “but my father no longer went to the fields, so he didn't
know the difference. He listened and felt better. Alexander even took him into town, which I could never do because he was so frail, and Carl could never do because he was so busy. But Al had the time and the patience, and he could lift him and move him. He could help him out of the car and ease him into a chair at Pindman's. Granted, there was something in it for Alexander. My father was a guaranteed captive audience. Still, in his own way, Al did give the man a new lease on life.”
“Well, I'm glad about that.”
“But you're still upset that I didn't divorce him to marry Carl.”
“No,” Olivia said quickly, determined not to be judgmental. “You had your reasons. I'm just not sure I would have done the same thing.”
“That's because times have changed. You people take divorce lightly. You see it all the time in the papers and on television, and you read about it in books. It's become commonplace. So, naturally, at the first sign of trouble, one of you moves out. My generation wasn't that way. Granted, it was harder to get divorced back then, but that wasn't why I stayed with Alexander. And it wasn't for the sake of the children, though had it not been for them, Al and I might have drifted apart. No, I stayed with him because he was my husband. Back then, we respected the institution of marriage. Maybe it had to do with the war. Our husbands had fought so that we could be free. They had risked their lives. They had seen horrors we could only imagine. We owed them our loyalty. Divorce was not a consideration.”
“Even if he had been abusive?”
“Well, he wasn't. He didn't drink. He didn't gamble. He was a good man with no business sense.”
“But didn't you even
think
about divorce?”
“Not as a viable option,” Natalie insisted. “I loved Carl. Had I been able to turn back the clock, I would have chosen to be married to him. But I couldn't change things. I was married to Alexander. I had to live with that. I had to make the best of it. Look at you. Haven't you done the same thing?”
Olivia was puzzled by the shift in focus. “Me?”
“You wanted your mother to love you, but she took off for parts unknown. You wanted Tess's father to love you, but he didn't. So, there you were with no family backup, and you suddenly had a child who was totally dependent on you. You couldn't change
things. You couldn't ask your mother to baby-sit when you were climbing the walls. You couldn't just ⦠draft another man to put bread on the table and play father to Tess. So you went to work. You took care of Tess yourself. I respect that.”
“You do?” Olivia asked with a smile.
“I do. That's one of the reasons I hired you. I might not have known the details, but I sensed an independence in you.”
Olivia's smile faded. “It isn't always fun being independent. It seems that I've spent my life looking for someone to lean on.”
“But you haven't fallen down without.”
“No. I couldn't. I had Tess. She needed me.”
“Just as I had Asquonset. It needed me, too.”
I think that was what kept me going more than anything else. I loved my children, but I knew that they would grow up in spite of me. Children do that. Regardless of what their parents want, they become adults with minds of their own. Asquonset was something else. It didn't have a brain. It couldn't function on its own. If we did nothing, it would fall fallow. If it was going to grow, someone had to take charge
.
Who could do that? My father was frail and sick. Jeremiah was taking care of Brida. Alexander was paralyzed when it came to money, and Carl refused to upstage him
.
That left me. I had worked the farm during the war and knew every aspect of the operation. So I had knowledge, and I had purposeâand the purpose had little to do with growing potatoes and corn. I wanted to grow grapes. Grapes were the underlying reason for my marrying Alexander. What better way to justify that marriage than to make a success of growing them?
Ah. But we couldn't buy vinifera vines. We had no money
.
Well, we didn't have the kind of money we had expected, but we did have something. The Seebring factories were silent and dark, but they were solid structures sitting on solid land in the midst of a plentiful workforce. Someone had to want to take them off our hands
.
Alexander was a hard sell. Those plants had the Seebring name on them. To this day, I believe that a part of him dreamed that somehow they would one day reopen and thrive. Don't ask
me how he thought that would happen, but then, Alexander was never one for solutions. But he did dream. And he did have pride. As long as he owned those plants, he owned something
.
I convinced him that owning Asquonset was something. I painted grand pictures of what the place might be if we put all our energy into it. I told him that he would be traveling to Europe to buy vines, just as he had for my father, only this time we would be more careful with our choices. I showed him a diagram of the farm with the fields that I thought could support grapes, and I told him why
.
How did I know all this? My father had books. He had letters. He had handwritten treatises
.
Unfortunately, he was a banker. He was a mathematician and was good with numbers, but he couldn't read that material and interpret it with regard to our land. Carl could, and he did. He passed the material on to me, and I saw it, too. It made sense that a grape that would thrive in Napa Valley would not do well here. Nor would a grape that would thrive in the warmer regions of France or Italy. Those are Mediterranean climates. They are more stable, with long, hot, dry summers and cool, rainy winters. Ours isn't like that. Ours is a Continental climate, like that of the European growing regions in Burgundy, Champagne, and the Rhine, where the air is cooler and the growing season shorter. We needed to plant vines that had thrived in these regions, because their weather was comparable to ours
.
I explained all this to Alexander, and he understood. He saw the potential for successfully growing grapes here. More important, he liked the picture I painted of his role in it
.
So he gave in. We met with the local bankers, and he made my arguments about the buildings, the land, and the workforce. He convinced them that those two factories would be worth a pretty penny to an entrepreneur wanting to cash in on the prosperity that had come with peace. He was passionate and persuasive. But then, that was his forte. He was also a poker player and knew how to bluff
.
We made fifty percent more on the sales of those buildings than we had thought we would getâwhich wasn't saying much, but it was a start. We borrowed the rest of what we needed from the bank
.
We? No. Alexander handled that part on his own. He was a man. I was a woman. When it came to bank loans, that made a difference
.
Did it bother me? No. The important thing was that we got the money. I wasn't doing this for the sake of pride. I was doing it for Asquonset
.
Besides, I was lucky. Many women I knew were out of work. They had jumped into the workforce during the war, when men were few and jobs were plentiful. Suddenly the men were home, and the women were out of work. That was an injustice. What I experienced was merely an annoyance. There's a big difference
.
Besides, Alexander needed to feel important. He put behind him the factory closings and latched on to the vineyard as though the first had been a deliberate move to facilitate the last. Yes, there was pride involved for him. He had a sizable ego
.
Please, Olivia. Take care when you write that. It can sound critical, which is not how I feel. Susanne and Greg had the highest regard for their father, and he did deserve it. What he did, he did well. He was a powerful public relations instrument for Asquonset. I could never have been on the road the way he was. It didn't interest me. I was happiest when I was at home
.
Why? Because of Carl? you ask
.
No. Because of the vineyards. As my own children grew, the grapes took their place
.
But back to Alexander. His ego wasn't unique. Many men need adulation. The trick is for us women to understand this and use it to our own benefit
.
You look dismayed. Why? Ahhh, you think that sounds manipulative?
It isn't manipulative, Olivia. It is pure common sense. Alexander was good at certain things. He wanted to think he was good at others. If I let him think that, he felt better about himself. When he felt better about himself, not only did he do better at what he already did well, but he was easier to live with
.
That made my life easier. It's as simple as that. Once his ego needs were met, he was comfortable letting me do what I wanted. When I did what I wanted, I felt in control. We supported each other
.