A Wedding on Ladybug Farm (14 page)

He shrugged and took a sip of his wine.  “Anyway, like I said, it was stupid.  Of course
, first thing Monday morning I cashed in some stocks and replaced the money in the client’s account. I went to my boss and told him what I’d done.”

She looked horrified.  “You
told
him?”

“I had to.  This is serious business.  Besides
…” He shrugged.  “It would have been picked up on the next internal audit anyway.”

Lori shook her head.  “You make a terrible criminal.”  And she thought about that for a minute. “But I guess if you have to be bad at only one thing in your whole life, that would be the one to pick.  So the client was mad?”

“Don’t know.  I was escorted out by security within the hour.”

“They fired you?”

“And disbarred me.”

“What?”  Her eyes went wide.  “
Disbarred
?  But—but that means you’re not even a lawyer anymore!  How can they do that?”

“They had no choice. What I did was criminal, and that’s frowned upon in the law profession.” The faint imitation of a smile that touched his lips did not reach his eyes.  “Kevin the Wonder Boy, huh?”

“But …”  Lori cast around for the words, her eyes filled with disbelief.  “But you put the money back!”

“Which is why I’m not in jail.”

“And then you confessed, and your client, the little old lady—you saved her!  Doesn’t that count for anything?  Most people would say you’re a hero!”

This time his smile seemed a bit more genuine.  “I am also unemployable. It turns out ‘embezzlement’ is one of those red flags they look for on a resume.”

Lori sagged back against her chair, staring at him, her hand resting on her chest.  “Kevin,” she said.  “I am so sorry.”

The genuine distress in her eyes touched him, embarrassed him, and pulled at him in some indefinable way.  He couldn’t face it for very long, and he dropped his gaze, lifting his wine glass again.  “Anyway, that was nine months ago.  Since then I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, so I thought
…”  He forced a brief light note into his tone.  “Why not go see what Lori is up to?”

Her tone was quiet, still filled with shock and disbelief.  “What are you going to do?”

“I’ve been living on savings,” he said.  “Cashed in my investments, rented out the condo, sold all the furniture … turned in the car before I left.  I’m going to have to leave DC anyway; too expensive.  And I don’t have as many friends there as I thought I did.”

“Wow,” she said softly.  “Wow.”

He leaned across the table and refilled her wine glass.  “My mom doesn’t know.  I’ll have to tell her eventually, but I was hoping to frame it in a happy ending before I did.  You know, one of those ‘but it all worked out for the best’ things.  So far, happy endings have been a little hard to come by.  Like jobs.”

Lori regarded him solemnly for a long moment.  “We are a couple of hot messes, aren’t we?”

He lifted his glass to her.  “Here’s looking at you, babe.”

She raised her glass back.  “And you.”

They drank.

The waiter left the check and Kevin reached for his wallet.

“Kevin …”  Lori looked worried.  “Can you afford this?  Not just dinner, but this trip, the hotel … Do you need a place to stay?”

Her concern was so genuine, and he was so touched, that for a moment he didn’t know what to say.  And then he took out a credit card and held it up between his thumb and forefinger before placing it on the table.  “I may not have much left,” he assured her, “but my credit is excellent.”

“Well, in that case …” She pursed her lips thoughtfully, then raised her glass again.  “Let’s order dessert.”

He gave her a single small, incredulous shake of his head, then turned and signaled for the waiter.

~*~
 

Kevin and Lori joined the crush of people on the street for the traditional after-dinner passeggiata, when the locals left their homes for the relatively cool outdoors to stroll and be seen, to catch up on gossip, perhaps to go for gelato or to window shop.  It was a time of gaiety and easy social discourse, friendly, noisy, busy.  The two Americans blended in easily, taking their time, smiling at the locals, peering into shop windows.  They walked with their fingers linked unself
-consciously, absorbed in the sights and sounds of a culture that was not their own.

“What would you be doing if you were home right now?” Lori asked.

Kevin glanced at his watch.  “Let’s see.  It’s four in the afternoon there …probably sitting in my underwear with a bottle of beer watching
Ellen
.”  

She punched him playfully.  “You would not.”   

“Woman, you know nothing about me.  What about you?”

Lori’s expression softened, her eyes focusing on a place he could not see.  “I don’t know.  Getting all sweaty cleaning the chicken co
op, maybe, or walking the vines.  Only a few weeks before harvest so you want to be really careful about bugs and disease.  Or maybe working down in the winery with Dominic, or …” A smile lit the corners of her lips.  “I’ll tell you what I’d really like to be doing—taking orders in the office!  And sometimes, if Ida Mae and Aunt Bridget are starting supper and the windows are open, you can smell bread baking and maybe pork chops with that spicy applesauce …”

He groaned out loud.  “Seriously?  You’re talking about food after the meal we just had?” And then he looked at her curiously.  “So that’s home for you?  Ladybug Farm?”

She seemed surprised at the question, and even more surprised by the answer.  “You know something?  I think it is.”

The thoughtful frown on her brow evaporated as she was distracted by something in the distance.  “Look,” she said, pointing.  “The chocolate shop is open.  Can you smell it?  They make the most incredible dark chocolate cherry nougat thing, you’ve got to try it.”  She tugged at his hand.  “Come on!”

They bought a bag of chocolate and shared it as they strolled around the city.  She told him about the time she had decided that Ladybug Farm should go into the wool-production business, but had sheered the sheep a month too early and ended up having to buy sweaters and coats for the whole flock when a late freeze came. He told her about the time he had defended a sheep for trespassing in a mock trial in law school, and they both laughed until they staggered and the locals thought they were drunk.  They reminisced about growing up together on Huntington Lane. They talked about their parents, and their school friends, and about the dreams that hadn’t come true and the few that had.  They eventually left the crowds behind, lost in their own conversation as they took a winding cobbled path that climbed above the city. They sat on the remnants of a stone wall that dated back to the Romans, and speculated about how it must have been here then while they watched the lights of the city below.  They talked about art and architecture, and when Kevin discovered Lori had not yet been to Florence, he decided they should take the train the very next day and see it all.  Kevin noted with some surprise that midnight had come and gone hours ago, and they started back down the path.

The little street was lined with houses that were decorated with painted doors and bright shutters, and pots of fragrant herbs and flowers climbed the stone steps that led to them.  There was darkness behind most of those windows as families slept the peaceful sleep of those who worked and played hard.  Streetlights were few and far between,
but the sky still held the remnants of a Tuscan day that was so saturated with light darkness never really fell, and the air smelled like lavender. Kevin kept his hand on her waist, because it was late and the street was uneven and it seemed like a gentlemanly thing to do, but also because he liked the way it felt.  And Lori leaned close to him, simply because it was good to be close to him.  It almost seemed, in fact, as though there had never been a time when she was not close to him, and there never would be.

Her voice was drowsy and comfortable as she said, “Thanks for coming all this way to rescue me, Kevin, even if I didn’t need rescuing.  You always were a perfect big brother.”

One of her curls tickled the back of his hand, and he caught it with his forefinger, twirling it absently.  It felt like silk.  “I never thought of myself as your big brother.”

“Well
…” She glanced up at him coyly, a flash of starlight in a midnight sky.  “To tell the truth, neither did I.  But you would have made a great one.”

Kevin smiled at her.  Her skin was like porcelain in the shadowy purple light.  “Now can I tell you something?”

“Sure.” 

He said, “I used to have a crush on you, too.”

She stopped and turned to face him, her face alight with astonished delight.  “You did not!”

“The summer I came home from my junior year in college,” he admitted, “and you had just turned sixteen, you about drove me wild.”

She laughed out loud, her eyes bubbling with pleasure.  “What do you know about that?”

“Yeah,” he agreed.  “What do you know?”

She looped her arm through his and started walking again. After a moment she said thoughtfully, “Why do you suppose we never got together, Kev?”

“Aside from the fact that you were a brat?”

“And you were a prick.”

“And for most of my life you were jailbait
…”

“Well,” she admitted, “there’s that.”

“Not to mention the fact that every time I saw you, you were dating some football player twice my size.”

She said in a voice that was oddly soft, almost shy, “I would have dropped them all in a heartbeat for you.”

He stopped walking.  She turned to him, placing her hands lightly on his chest, looking up at him.  “I’m not jailbait any more, Kevin,” she said.

“No,” he replied huskily.  He was surprised to note that he could hardly hear his own voice over the thunder of his heart.  He put his hands on her waist; he drew her close.  “You’re not.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck.  He bent his head to hers.  They sank into the kiss like sea creatures too long out of the water, like birds first discovering the joy of flight, like wandering orbs suddenly and gratefully pulled into each other’s gravitational path.  And afterward neither would be able to explain why they had waited so long.

~*~

Chapter Six

Folly

L
ong before there had been a Ladybug Farm Winery, Blackwell Farms had been shipping its award-winning wine all over the country.  And long before that, at least according to Ida Mae, whose degree of reliability about such things varied widely, the cellar beneath the barn had been a speakeasy and a moonshine distillery.  Even now, on particularly damp days, an imaginative person might catch a whiff of corn whiskey seeping up through the stone floor, its faintly pungent aroma wafting like a ghost beneath the rich fruity smell of fermenting grapes.

None of the farm’s current owners had even known there was a cellar beneath the barn until the original building burned down.  There, beneath an almost-buried trapdoor, they had discovered the old Blackwell Farms winery, all of its equipment from the sixties still intact and, for the most part, still functioning.  Even though it had taken over a year to crystallize, the dream of Ladybug Farm Winery had been born that day when the three of them descended that narrow set of stairs and explored the dusty old winery by flashlight.

That cellar was now a brightly lit, clean and sanitized space whose walls were lined with casks of wine, stainless steel sinks, cupboards, and bottling equipment.  There was a raised oak table in the center and a rack of glasses overhead, although the only tasting that went on in this room was done by the owners.  The public tasting room, when it opened next spring, would be in The Tasting Table restaurant a few dozen steps away.  Twin steel doors opened at the far end of the room directly onto the vineyard, so that wagons filled with grapes—and trucks filled with crush—could back up to the doors and empty their cargo directly into the winery.  The big room was alive with the breath of fluorescent lights and the heartbeat of pumps.  

The barn had been rebuilt over the winery and sectioned off, with part of it for domestic use and another part for the winery office.  Although they could no longer keep animals there—except for Rebel, who could always find a way to be wherever he was not wanted, and the kitten, who seemed convinced there were mice to be found and who was no doubt right—they still used the big space for storage and workshop projects.  They had wanted to move the winery office to the restaurant, which was much nicer, but Dominic insisted on staying close to the wine.  So they built walls, added electrical outlets, a telephone
, and Internet connections, and turned one corner of the barn into the operations office for Ladybug Farm Winery.

Lindsay could not, of course, be satisfied with a utilitarian space filled with file cabinets and steel shelves, so she had given it her own decorative flare by whitewashing the plank walls and hanging an oversized painting of a cluster of grapes over the desk, adding framed photos of Dominic’s father and Judge Blackwell during the days of the original winery to the shelves, and bringing down a patterned carpet from the
house for the floor.  There was a sturdy oak table in the center of the room, just big enough to accommodate five or six chairs, and it was here that the partners in the winery gathered to have their meetings.

When the ladies had established the Ladybug Farm Winery a mere nine months earlier and taken on Dominic as a partner and operations manager, he had insisted that the company be run like an actual company.  Board meetings were scheduled once a month, reports were given, proposals approved, and votes were taken on matters small, like wh
ere to order bottles, and large, like how to price those bottles.  While Lori had been a part of the operation during the summer, those meetings had been filled with lively debate and a multitude of questions.  These days three of the four board members were more than a little distracted by deadlines that were much more pressing than the spring launch of their first vintage.

“There’s a definite advantage to a ten
-dollar bottle of wine,” Dominic explained to them at the October meeting—the last one before the wedding. “But there’s a real downside too. If we decide further down the line to ship out of state, the taxes and licensing fees will eat us alive …”  He cast a puzzled glance around the table, but no one would quite meet his eyes.  “Ladies, do I have your attention?  Is everything all right?”

“Oh, yes,” Bridget said
with a quick smile, but her foot was tapping impatiently under the table.

“Fine,” Lindsay assured him.  “Green bottles.”

“Ten dollars,” added Cici, checking her watch.  “Perfect.”

Dominic hesitated, then said, “I propose a retail price of $12.95 per
750 milliliter bottle.”

Cici
looked at her watch again. Bridget drummed her pen absently against her steno pad.  Lindsay maintained an absent smile and a gaze that seemed focused somewhere on outer space until the silence became palpable and she abruptly came back to earth.  “Second,” she said, a little too loudly.

Dominic swept the others with a studious look.  “In favor?”

“Aye,” the three of them chorused on cue.

Dominic lifted an eyebrow toward Bridget.  “Madame Secretary?”

“Right.”  She scribbled a note on her pad. 

He fixed his gaze on her.  “Further business?”

“Oh,” she said, looking confused.  Then, “Oh!  Yes, burning of the vines party.  The website has presold fifty tickets already!  At five dollars apiece, I know it wasn’t designed to make money, but I think we can offset costs.  And that’s not even counting the people from town who will pay at the door.  I’m thinking we might have as many as a hundred fifty people!  And I was remembering last year when Lori found those monogrammed wine glasses at a dollar twenty-five each …” She looked cautiously hopeful.  “I know it’s last minute and we might not be able to pull it off, but if I could find her source and we could get the glasses monogrammed with the name of the winery and the date, people could take them home as souvenirs and, while it wouldn’t exactly be like having ‘Dominic and Lindsay’ engraved in a heart, it
would
be an advertising expense and we wouldn’t have to wash the glasses.”

Dominic grinned.  “I vote aye.  Ladies?”

Everyone murmured an enthusiastic agreement, and even Lindsay seemed to relax. “That’s a great idea, Bridge,” she said.  “Thanks.”

When Ladybug Farm Winery was first established
, their board meetings had been held at the kitchen table around a pot of coffee and a plate of cinnamon rolls.  Even though prosperity, in the form of a semi-anonymous investor, had enabled them to move out of the kitchen, morning meetings still included coffee and a plate of Ida Mae’s homemade cinnamon rolls.  Dominic reached for one now, endeavoring with the gesture to take the meeting to a less formal level.

“Ladies,” he said, “I know your heads are filled with orange blossoms and lace, and don’t think I don’t appreciate that.  After all, I’m getting married too.”  A glance around the table elicited smiles that were slightly less
distracted than they had been before.  “But …”  There was only a slight sobering of his tone.  “We’re still running a business here and, for better or worse—to coin a phrase—the wedding date also happens to be our busy time.  We’ll start bottling the crush next week and let it lie until spring—well, except for the bottles we’ll be sampling at the wedding party.  I’m holding half in reserve to blend with the new crush that should be ready by early summer.  Now, as we discussed before, we’re leaving the grapes on the vines longer than normal to concentrate the flavor, but that’s risky.  Bad weather—drought, an early frost, even a bad rainstorm—could put us out of business for this harvest.  We might have to put some money into hiring extra workers, and if we do that we’ll have to cut back somewhere else.  If you’ll all take a look at your budget sheets, you’ll see that we’re going to be running slightly in the red for the winter as it is, so …”

A glance around assured him that no one was looking at her budget sheets.  Bridget scribbled on her pad, Lindsay leaned over and whispered something in her ear, and Cici, stretching to read what Bridget was writing, pointed at one of her notes.  Dominic said, “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that those are minutes of this meeting.”

Bridget looked up guiltily and the other two sat back.  “Oh, Dominic, I’m sorry,” she said.  “I have been taking minutes, they’re right here …”  She flipped a couple of pages on the pad, looked a little flustered, and said, “Well, they’re mostly in my head.  It’s just that there’s an awful lot to do before the wedding, and I have to write things down as I think of them.”

Cici said quickly, “I did look at the budget, but we all knew we’d be running negative revenue longer than we expected when we decided to wait until spring to ship, right?  And we all agreed not to sell an unfinished wine, right?”  She looked to the other women for support, then back to Dominic.  “Is that the right term?  Unfinished?”

Dominic looked grave.  “Cici,” he said, “I don’t mean to push into family matters, and I know I was the one who encouraged Lori to stick with this apprenticeship in Italy, but you need to know we can only go so far as a one-man operation.  If there’s any way you can convince Lori to come back here and work—even for a stipend—you need to do it.  I know she’ll probably be getting offers from all over the country once she finishes her year in Italy, but you’ve got pull, right? After all, this is her wine.  And it’s really very, very important that someone other than myself understands the business if we’re going to survive.  So would you ask her?”

Reading the temperature of the room, he found it a bit less warm than he would have liked, so he added, “Once the wedding is over, of course.”

Cici seemed relieved that his request was no more complicated than that, and she smiled. “Sure.  I’ll ask her.”

There was a beat of awkward silence, and then Bridget said cheerfully, “I got a cute e-mail from Kevin. He had dinner with Lori.  I’ll send you the picture.”

Dominic said, “Thanks.” 

Lindsay said abruptly, “Okay, that’s it, then.  I move we adjourn.”

Before Dominic could reply, Cici said, “Second,” and pushed back her chair.

“Aye,” said Bridget, and quickly gathered her pen and notebook.

Dominic said, “Ladies, I know you’ve got a lot on your plates, but before you go we really need to talk about—”

“Whatever you decide, Dominic,” Cici said, moving toward the door.  “We trust your judgment.”

“After all, you’re the manager,” Bridget added brightly, following Cici.  “Great meeting, though.  Thanks.”

The door opened on a bright square of morning light and closed again quickly, leaving only
Lindsay behind.  “Honey, I don’t mean to complain,” Dominic said with a small frown, “especially when I know the reason everyone is so distracted is because you’re all working so hard on the wedding.  But this first year is crucial for the winery, and I need you all to know what’s going on.  Someone has to be able to take over for me when I’m not here, and if I’m traveling around the country selling the wine I’m not going to be able to be here every day running the winery, now am I?” 

“I know, I know, I really do,” Lindsay said, placing her hands on his chest in a quick, reassuring gesture.  “You probably think you’ve gone into business with a bunch of pinheads, but we’re really not.  Not usually, I mean.  It’s just that—well of course, we all want the winery to succeed, but you’re the expert and, well, if we’re not giving you the kind of support you need it’s all my fault, so don’t blame Bridget and Cici. I just …”  She cast her gaze around the small room helplessly, as though looking for words.  “This is such a big step for us, Dominic.  For all of us.  I just want this wedding to be magical.  And maybe … I don’t know.  Maybe I’m trying too hard.  I know I’m driving the girls crazy, and you too, and I’m really nothing but a walking disaster area, but it’s all because I want this so much. I want us all to be a family.  I want your family to be happy.  I want you to be happy with us, with living here.  I want it all to be perfect.   I want…”  Her eyes were suddenly hot and wet as she looked up at him, and she could feel her nose go red.  “
Everything
for you.”

The shadow of frustration that had been building in Dominic’s eyes slowly faded into a gentle, thoughtful regard, and
then he extended his hand.  “Walk with me, cherie.”

Lindsay dashed a hand across her eyes impatiently and sniffed.
“Oh, Dominic I know you’re busy and so am I.  Just ignore me.  I cry about everything these days.  Really, you don’t have to…”

“Walk,” he repeated sternly, and wrapped his fingers firmly around hers as he pushed open the door and stepped into the sunlight.

The morning sun had crested the mountains, and the dew evaporating off the vines gave off a fine golden mist. The goat bleated a greeting from behind its sturdy wire fence a few dozen yards away and Rodrigo the rooster flapped his colorful wings atop the hen house and crowed importantly as they passed. 

A well mulched path led around the cultivated vines and behind the barn, wandering into the woods.  A hundred years ago those woods had been formal gardens lined with hedges and accented by topiaries, complete with reflecting pools and statues and artificial waterfalls that tumbled into artificial meandering streams, all of it fashioned after the overdesigned gardens of European aristocrats.  It hadn’t been called The Gilded Age for nothing, and no excess was too grand for those with the means to afford it.  And no European garden—or imitation of one—would have been complete without a folly in the center of it.