“There you are!” Celine said in a mockingly disgruntled voice. “I was going to give you this in the dining room when you came in with the coffee, but I can give it to you in here just as well. Happy birthday, Rosie.”
She extended the box of chocolates.
“These are my absolute favorite confection in the world,” Celine went on. “You can only get these from a certain chocolatier in San Francisco. I made a special trip!”
I looked down at the pretty box and its pink satin ribbon. Ineeded to thank Celine, but the kind gesture only made me miss my family even more, and the words stuck in my throat.
“Don’t tell me you don’t like chocolate.” Celine was smiling but with her eyebrows pinched.
“No, I do, very much,” I finally replied. “I’m... I’m surprised you remembered. Thank you, Mrs. Calvert.”
“Of course I remembered, and you’re very welcome. You’ll have to hide them from me, though, because they really are quite wonderful.”
“I’m sure they are, thank you.”
“I was thinking you might want the afternoon off for your birthday,” Celine went on. “Maybe you’d like to ride your bike into town and see a motion picture with a friend or something?”
It was on the tip of my tongue to respond with,When have I ever wanted to do something like that, Mrs. Calvert?but I did not say this. It would have been rude. Celine surely meant well. The box of chocolates was well intended, too, but even as I thought this, I realized that what I wanted more than anything was out of this house. Not just for an afternoon but for good. I did not want to spend another birthday like this one, even though in all likelihood I probably would have to, maybe a couple more, actually. A person wasn’t considered an actual adult until twenty-one.
Celine had already decided that I was destined to be a maid, would always be a maid, but I wondered now, as Celine waited for me to answer, what I might be able to do with my life if I decided for myself. What if I took professional cooking classes and then got a job at a fancy restaurant in San Francisco, or even Seattle? I might like that very much. And I was already a good cook. But I would need money to make that happen, probably more than I was already making and saving as a maid. I would need cash for a room to rent, and for classes and supplies and busfare and food until I found a job. At this same moment, I remembered Celine and Truman recently discussing the need to hire someone to help on weekends and selected evenings in the tasting room. I wasn’t sure what I was truly capable of, but I knew this. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days cleaning toilets, washing someone else’s dirty dishes, and hanging up their laundry.
“Actually, Mrs. Calvert,” I finally said, “what I’d really like to do is ask you about that position assisting in the tasting room. I couldn’t help overhearing you and Mr. Calvert talking about it at breakfast yesterday. I could help with that. I don’t work evenings or Sundays, and that’s when you said you needed someone.”
Celine’s eyes widened in surprise. “Why on earth would you want to work every minute of every day, Rosie? You’d be giving up all your time off.”
“I know, but I don’t have much to do on my hours off. I get bored.” That was true enough. “I’d like to work.”
“Well,” Celine replied, thinking aloud. “You do have a professional-looking uniform. And you already know the wines, and you’re polite to people. You already know what I expect in an employee. And we really only need someone when there are multiple clients at once. Hmm. All right, then. I’ll talk to Mr. Calvert about it.”
And then Celine went off to announce her decision to Truman as if she’d thought of the idea herself.
•••
The next few weeks passed with new purpose for me. It was Truman whom I worked for during tastings, not Celine, and this was a refreshing change. Truman treated me more like an equal than a servant, and he’d ask about my well-being from time to time, mindful that my sorrow lingered. He didn’t specifically ask about the colors, either, which I appreciated, but I would see him glance my way when a sound reverberated in the cavernous space.
The tasting room was a part of the much larger barrel room—a two-story building that abutted a steep ridge—where the Rosseau vintages aged in large oak casks, turned on their sides, in three caves that had been hewn out of a rocky hillside of the Mayacamas mountain range. My father had told me long ago that fifty Chinese laborers had dug those caves when Celine was just a baby, and that those men lived for several years at the vineyard in makeshift dormitories that Bernard Rosseau dismantled as soon as they were finished.
The barrel and tasting room was built of honey-colored stone on the outside and timbered on the inside with a cross work of redwood rafters that made its interior look like a church. The tasting room, set off by itself near one of the caves, was the one place Truman Calvert seemed content, almost happy. I supposed it was because the tasting room was the one and only aspect of the family business that Celine let him manage with few intrusions from her.
He showed me how to care for the bottles, uncork and pour, swish and sniff, and even how to describe the vintages with clever words that never failed to bring exotic colors to my mind, and which he would occasionally ask me to describe. Working alongside Truman in the tasting room was almost like working in an expensive restaurant kitchen. It was good experience. Not only that, but I was meeting chefs and sommeliers from San Francisco whose names I was filing away for a future day.
October also meant the harvest was underway. It was a time of year that I had always loved because everyone took part. Even Celine and Truman donned work clothes and grabbed shears to cut the clusters from their vines. It was always a race against time to get the fruit picked at its peak of readiness, before a sudden rainstorm ruined the grapes or high winds damaged them or a wildfire—all too typical in early fall—scorched them. The harvesting would begin at daybreak each morning of the season and last until the sun set.
Working alongside the hired hands that autumn reminded me of all the harvests in my past, when my father had chosen the picking teams and my mother and I made the harvesting crews lunch every day. I’d loved how we all gathered for a celebration at the end of the season and there would be a grape stomp and a whole roasted pig on an outdoor spit and a piñata for the migrant workers’ children. Someone always had a guitar, so there’d be singing and a bonfire and hot cocoa when the evening chill fell across the vineyard.
Nearly nine months had passed since the accident, nine months since my life had entirely changed. But I had kept busy and had saved a nice bit of money. I was finally starting to feel hopeful that the future might yet hold some happiness for me.
In the first weekend of November, even though the harvest wasn’t finished and Wilson was expected home for a couple of days, Celine accepted an overnight invitation to visit an old high school friend who now lived in Berkeley and whose daughter was getting married. She left for her overnight trip on a Saturday morning after giving me instructions on all the details that needed to be handled in the house while she was away.
Enough time had passed that I was again looking forward to seeing Wilson. I was hopeful that, now that we’d put that old memory behind us, he might see that the child I’d been when I said those strange things was no more. I was seventeen, a young woman who his own mother had said was quite pretty. He hadn’t meant to make me feel uncomfortable before, I told myself. He just hadn’t known my mother had sworn me to secrecy. And it wasn’t as if he’d ridiculed me about the colors or even the false notion that I could see ghosts. He’d been curious. Interested. Interest was almost like attraction, wasn’t it?
As soon as Celine was gone and all the sandwiches for the harvest workers were made, I changed into field clothes to spendthe day alongside a crew of pickers from Los Angeles, all while watching the gravel drive for Wilson’s car. It felt good to do the arduous work of bending and clipping and to listen and watch for the colors that were always so stunning at harvest.
In the late afternoon, I finally saw the silver Ford De Luxe that Truman and Celine had bought for Wilson the previous year. I watched as it took the slope up to the big house in a cloud of dust. The row I was working obscured the rest of my view as the car parked up near the front of the house. Wilson honked a cheery hello and I saw ribbons of happy orange. I heard Truman calling out from another part of the vineyard that he’d be right up.
It was too early for me to return to the house, so I kept at it until a few minutes before four o’clock, so that I could clean up before beginning on the supper that Alphonse had half prepared the evening before.
I returned to the big house through the kitchen’s back door so that Wilson would not by chance see me in field clothes and with my hair dusty and plastered to my neck and forehead. My muscles were tired from the day’s work, and the warm bath would be comforting. I took my time in the tub, making sure to wash every inch of my body with scented soap. After I dried off, I reached for my maid’s uniform, but then I turned from it and put on a cotton dress of pale pink instead. It was Saturday night, my evening off, I reasoned. I had told Celine I would make sure Wilson and Truman had a hot meal, but I hadn’t told her I’d be in uniform when I did it. As I checked my reflection in the mirror, I heard voices in the kitchen. Truman’s, Wilson’s, and that of a third person.
