Page 52 of Wild Abandon

“How come she doesn’t come around?”

“She’s…” He pauses. “She lives down in San Francisco,” he grumbles. “Ah, I don’t like to talk about it. After I lost my Rosemary, I didn’t think I’d be able to carry on. But I did. For her.” He leans on his cane, and his face pulls in. “It’s not a good story for a young girl like you to hear.”

I place a hand on Ed’s shoulder and tilt my head to him. “Ed, I want to hear your stories. They’re the highlights of my day.”

I smile at him, and he just stares back at me. Why, I am not entirely sure.

I suddenly feel self-conscious. He must sense my unease because he stops looking at me and then looks around the room. The ranch looks the same as far as decor, but it is clean and orderly.

He pouts his lips, and his eyes squint. “I was gonna teach you about the various wines, but you’re too dehydrated. You’ll be drunk as a skunk.” He hobbles out the front door. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Despite the intense heat, I step out and join him.

We walk down a long row of grapes. He tells me about how Russet Ranch once yielded small quantities of high-end wine. Some of the vines are a hundred ten years old, inherited from Old Man Russet’s grandfather. Another crop is something special. Ed spent years crossbreeding vines and experimenting to create the perfect blend.

“Why do you let someone else harvest the grapes you worked so hard to create?” I’m holding on to him as we walk, more for his balance than for my comfort.

He pats my hand. “Your wine is only as good as the love you put into it.”

I nod and listen as we walk and talk.

Ed tells me how every drop of Russet Ranch Wine was grown, harvested, fermented, bottled, and sold here. There were no mass deliveries. You couldn’t find it in a store.

He tells me stories of harvest season and the smashing of grapes. I am surprised to learn people really do stomp grapes with their bare feet. Rosemary and Ellie would take their shoes off and dance and stomp until their soles were stained purple. Ed’s face lights up as he recalls the memory of his girls and their toes remaining discolored for days after a crush.

His face isn’t as elated as he tells me how, when Ellie reached high school, her girlfriends would come over for a crush, wearing teeny-tiny bikinis—Ellie included. I can picture Ed rushing them all back inside to cover up before the workers could see them.

Ed was a husband and a father. This crotchety old man was a humble, hard-working family man. He lost his mentor and his wife. His daughter is in San Francisco. Without them, he lost passion.

We get to an intersection of sorts. The vines in front of us are growing diagonal in another direction. Ed looks up at the sun and starts to smile.

“What are you so jolly about?” I tease. Jolly isn’t exactly the word you’d use to describe most people in his state, but for Ed, this is as jolly as he gets.

“I haven’t walked out here in ages.” He looks back at me. His smile lessens but is still there nonetheless. “Haven’t had anyone around worth walking with.”

“Ed, why did you close yourself off?”

He lets go of my arm and walks over to the vines closest to us. He leans forward and holds out one of the grapes. “These are cabernet sauvignon grapes.” He places his hand around one of the leaves, cradling it. “See how the leaf has five lobes and an open petiloar sinus? The teeth are also rounded.” He looks at my confused face and continues, pointing to various areas of the leaf. “The lobes are these areas that jut out on the leaf. Almost like fingers. The sinus is the empty space surrounding the stem of the leaf, and the teeth are the serrated edges. See? They’re jagged and sharp.”

To me, the leaf almost looks like a face. The way the holes—excuse me, lobes of the leaf are positioned, it looks like it has two eyes and a mouth.

“This particular grape has a nice thick skin. It needs sunlight to shine through the leaf to get to it.”

Ed walks over to the next set of vines, the ones growing in the opposite direction. These grapes are white. He takes a leaf in hand and explains, “Now, this is the cabernet sauvignon blanc. The grape is soft and can’t stand too much sunlight. What does this leaf remind you of?”

I look at the greenery. It doesn’t have holes, as the red cabernet did. “It looks like a shield.”

Ed nods and puts the leaf down. “The white grapes need more protection from the sun. They are fragile and easy to break through. But the red, even though it’s thick-skinned, still needs to be covered up. The trick is allowing just enough sunlight in to grow.”

I stare down at the grapes, “I wonder if I am a red grape or a white grape. I act like I have thick skin but I tend to shut the light out.”

Ed smiles, not disagreeing. “You and me—we’re white grapes. Protecting ourselves from the outside world. But you, Crystal, when you’re done growing, you will thrive and make a spectacular wine so rare that you’ll break a collector’s heart one day.”

chapter ELEVEN

“What about these with the Napa landscapes on it?” Naomi asks from the throw pillow section of the home decorator store she’s brought me to.

Today, Naomi and I are shopping in St. Helena for my Russet Ranch renovation.