Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (32 page)

Rosa bent to pick him up and hugged him to her heart. Her eyes met Lars’s, and even if she were blind she would have sensed the love and compassion and regret in his gaze.

In all their hushed debates about whether to tell the children and how to tell them, they had never imagined them coming to the truth in such a clumsy, careless manner.

But now, at last, they knew, and even as Rosa ached for them in their pain and confusion, even as she dreaded the tearful questions that were sure to follow in the days to come, it was an immeasurable relief that the lie no longer divided them.

At first the girls pretended that the revelation had never happened. Marta and Ana were respectfully distant to Lars, while Lupita fiercely ignored him, and he wisely gave her a wide berth. Miguel, too young to understand, was happy, believing the conflict had been resolved because no one was shouting anymore. Rosa knew that she would need to unsnarl the tangled threads of their family for him again when he was older. Marta seemed relieved to have the truth out at last, perhaps because she was the eldest and most mature, perhaps because she had figured out the truth on her own instead of having it hurled at her in a moment of anger, perhaps because she had feared and despised John for years and was fiercely satisfied to learn that he could claim no part of her. Ana, solemn and quiet, lost herself in her books. All six of them were frustrated and hurt and angry and lost to some degree, and they cared about one another. Their pain would not be so great, Rosa realized, except that along the way, they had somehow become a family.

Ana was the first to approach Rosa with difficult questions. “Did you ever love Papa?” she asked, not meeting her mother’s
eyes. Rosa knew that what she meant was, “Do you love me and Miguel as much as you love Marta and Lupita?” The answer to both questions, spoken and unspoken, was a heartfelt, sincere yes, and Ana seemed content with that.

Marta was the first to grasp that Rosa had given birth to Lupita—Lars’s child—while still married to John. The knowledge mortified her, and for a time she looked askance at Rosa and was too embarrassed to talk to Lars, but eventually she resolved her conflicted feelings, or perhaps she decided to set them aside until she could better understand them.

Eventually the household settled back into something resembling their former comfortable familiarity. Lupita still refused to address Lars as Pa or Papa or even Mr. Jorgensen, but referred to him, when she had to, with the appropriate pronoun. Lars took it in stride, careful to treat the children as he always had and to require nothing more from them than the respect Rosa had taught them to offer every other adult they knew. As the days passed, the girls seemed to remember how much they had liked him when he was simply Mr. Jorgensen, their mother’s friend and the generous neighbor who once brought them dried apricots that were even better than candy. Now they knew he meant much more to them than that—and that they meant much more to him than they had ever suspected.

A break in the weather at last allowed impatient grape growers throughout Sonoma County to properly tend their vines. January was the time for pruning and cleaning up, a daunting amount of work that required everyone, young and old, to contribute. Lars followed Dante, Dominic, and Vince closely to learn how to cut back the previous year’s growth, leaving the structural vines intact and trimming away the dead wood and weak branches. When Rosa remarked that it seemed
they were cutting back the vines to barely a fraction of their former abundance, Dante explained that fewer, well-spaced buds would mature into fewer, but much higher-quality grapes. “The secret to an excellent wine isn’t the richness of the soil or even the skill of the winemaker but the quality of the grape,” he emphasized, cutting a twisted, dead twig from the structural vine with proud satisfaction.

While the men pruned the vines, the women weeded the soil so that no predatory growth could siphon away nutrients from the grapes. Darting in and out among the rows, the children gathered up the uprooted weeds and pruned vines and tossed them onto a pile in a clearing on the edge of the vineyard. At suppertime they gathered around the long table in the Cacchiones’ kitchen and devoured a hearty supper of beef stew, pasta, and polenta, which Rosa and Francesca had helped Giuditta prepare.

At dusk Dante set the enormous pile of clippings ablaze. Thrilled, the younger children watched the flames lick the wood, squealing and jumping when a sudden pop and shower of sparks startled them. As the fatigued adults found places to sit and discuss the work accomplished that day and the unfinished tasks they would need to complete in the days to come, the children ran around searching out dead twigs and dried leaves to throw upon the bonfire. Smoke rose into the evening sky and drifted over the still, shadowed trellises, wafted aloft by gentle breezes from the south. Giuditta reminisced aloud about a time in the not too distant past when a multitude of bonfires at vineyards throughout Sonoma County would fill the air with white smoke and the scent of burning. She had learned to associate the smell of burning grape wood with anticipation for spring on the vineyard. The old, dead vines had been cut away
to make room for new growth and new vintages, and throughout wine country, grape growers and vintners prepared for a new season, fresh and full of hope. But now only a scattering of bonfires sent plumes of smoke rising into the skies above Santa Rosa, and only the most optimistic and determined among them believed that their spring toil would guarantee a bountiful harvest come autumn.

But even those with lowered expectations and diminished hopes labored vigorously in their fields and vineyards throughout the waning days of winter, holding on until better days could come.

Spring brought unbroken sunshine and tranquil breezes to Cacchione Vineyards. The return of temperate weather lifted Rosa’s spirits despite the strain and worry that lingered in the aftermath of the secrets discovered and revealed over the winter.

Fair weather also heralded the return of tourists to Sonoma County. Several times a day, the sight of a roadster churning up a cloud of dust as it turned off the main road toward the winery summoned Giuditta from her chores to fetch the visitors walnuts, prunes, fresh eggs, lunch, a tour of the vineyard—whatever they wanted. After Mabel gave birth to a daughter in mid-April, Giuditta was often too preoccupied caring for her grandchild and daughter-in-law to greet visitors, so Rosa and Francesca would see to them instead. Unlike Giuditta, however, they were too nervous to offer guests glasses of wine with their lunch or after a tour. Rosa had been startled the first time she witnessed Giuditta produce a jug of wine and distribute glasses to three couples enjoying eggplant caponata, bread, cheese, and olives on an old, soft quilt spread on the grass in the shade of a stand of oaks. “Did you know,” Giuditta had inquired conversationally
as she filled the glasses, which the picnickers held up eagerly, “that despite Prohibition, it’s perfectly legal for families to make up to two hundred gallons of wine each year for their own use?” She never claimed that the Cacchiones produced no more than that amount, nor did she explain how serving wine to paying guests fit within the definition of a family’s own use. The tourists were either too busy enjoying their wine to parse her logic, or they understood and were more than willing to play along.

Once a wealthy San Francisco couple traveling to their summer home on the Russian River cajoled Giuditta into selling them an entire cask of the vintage they had sampled. “Dante would get in a lather if he knew I’d done that,” she confessed to Rosa as the couple drove away. Rosa had spotted her selling casks a few other times too, but only when Dante was away from the vineyard, and Dominic and Vince, who would have told him, were nowhere in sight. When it fell to Rosa and Francesca to entertain tourists, they offered nothing stronger than iced tea, lemonade, and ice water. Word must have spread about the differences in hospitality, because over time, tourists and summer residents began asking specifically for Giuditta, and they often drove away without a bite of lunch or basket of prunes when they were informed that she was not available.

In the last week of April, Giuditta, Francesca, and Rosa were out among the trellises training new vines when they heard the sound of car wheels churning on gravel. Giuditta, intent on the task at hand, sent her daughter to see what the visitors wanted. Francesca hurried off and returned about twenty minutes later to report that two gentlemen had only wanted directions to Highway 101, but she had persuaded them to buy a dozen prunes before they left.

“That’s my girl,” Giuditta praised her. “They wandered a bit out of their way, didn’t they?”

Francesca nodded. “They said they came in from San Francisco this morning, but one of them mentioned something about Los Angeles, as if he’d lived there until recently.” She nudged Rosa and grinned. “He looked so much like your husband that when I first saw him from a distance, I thought that’s who he was.”

Rosa felt her stomach turn over. “My husband?”

“Yes, although the resemblance isn’t that striking up close. He and Nils could be brothers, but not twins. They both have the same blond hair, though this fellow had more of it. He was a bit younger than Nils too, but shorter and heavier. Not chubby, I don’t mean that. Just as if he’s eating well at home.”

“I imagine Nils eats well at home too,” replied Giuditta, a gentle reproach in the sidelong look she gave her daughter. “I know he eats well when the Ottesens join us for dinner.”

“He certainly does. We all do,” said Rosa, managing a shaky laugh although her heart thudded in her chest. Her husband—of course Francesca had meant Lars. Francesca’s description did not resemble dark-haired, muscular John in the least—but suddenly Rosa realized that it described Oscar Jorgensen all too well. Could the visitor have been him? Could Lars’s younger brother have traced him so far? No, it couldn’t be. They had left no trail to follow when they had fled Oxnard, except for the false leads pointing pursuers south to Mexico, and like John, Oscar would have had no idea where to begin searching.

Francesca got back to work and Rosa quickly did too, her momentary terror fragmenting under the weight of cool reason. If the visitor had indeed been Oscar, he certainly wasn’t looking
for his brother particularly well, since he hadn’t mentioned him or shown Francesca his photograph. Nor was it likely, Rosa realized with some amusement, that the diligent, responsible Oscar would have left the Jorgensen ranch to his hired hands in the middle of such an important season, not unless he knew exactly where to find Lars and believed him to be in mortal peril. A search unlikely to bear fruit was a task for the doldrums of winter, if ever.

Seven months had passed since Dr. Reynolds had first examined Ana and Miguel at the Stanford Hospital, and in all that time, Rosa had scrupulously kept them on Dr. Haas’s diet, contriving variations on bananas and polenta so that they would not grow bored with a monotonous menu and be tempted to stray. Although Rosa sometimes feared her eyes deceived her and that such simple changes to their diet could not possibly have brought about the miracle she had prayed for, Ana and Miguel seemed perfectly healthy, lively and vigorous, with no sign of the symptoms that had once tormented them. Even so, when Dr. Reynolds pronounced them fully recovered from the symptoms of their illness, Rosa was stunned. She had borne the certainty of her children’s inevitable early deaths for so many years that she had long forgotten what it felt like to look forward to watching them grow up. Rosa stammered her thanks, wishing she could express to the generous, attentive physician the depths of her gratitude. A handshake and prompt payment of their bills seemed a perfunctory and indifferent response to the man who had saved her children’s lives.

She promised the doctor she would keep Ana and Miguel on the diet so they wouldn’t suffer a relapse. She promised herself she would never take a single day with them for granted.

Before catching the train home, she and the children paid one last call on Mrs. Phillips. Rosa had brought her a basket full of asparagus, rhubarb, and spinach from the garden she had planted in a sunny spot near the cabin. Mrs. Phillips accepted the gift with delight and lamented that all she had to offer Rosa in return was tea and cookies and a newspaper clipping. Torn, both wanting and dreading news of John and Henry with equal measure, Rosa forced herself to wait until she and the children were on the train bound for home to read the article. After Miguel fell asleep with his head resting on her lap and Ana became engrossed in a library book, she took the clipping from her purse, smoothed out the creases with shaking hands, and read that John had been found guilty of racketeering and had been sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Rosa folded the paper, tucked it back into her purse, and took a deep, shuddering breath. Five years seemed an alarmingly brief span of time. And if John chose to become a model prisoner, he could be released even sooner than that on good behavior.

That night after the children fell asleep, she told Lars the news and was not surprised when it left him unperturbed. He was not afraid of John, not the way she was, and he found it highly unlikely that anything John might report to his old mobster friends upon his release, whether five years hence or half that, would help them hunt him down. “He doesn’t know where we are,” Lars told her as he had so many times before. This time he took her hands and pulled her close to him. She rested her head on his chest and listened to the reassuring sound of his steady heartbeat until her own heart stopped racing from fear. Then she pulled away from his embrace, unwilling to meet his gaze although she kept her hands in his. It was dangerous to let
him hold her too long, for it made her yearn for their old intimacy. She could never divorce John now, and after what Lars had said to her the day Lupita was conceived and as they danced at the harvest celebration, she was ashamed to suggest that she would be willing to take him as a lover while she was married to someone else. She didn’t feel married to John anymore—her marriage vows had been damaged when John beat her and when she had betrayed him, and they had been shattered beyond repair when he murdered her mother—but Lars still saw her as married. And so, she was forced to admit, she
was
still married, whether she felt that way or wanted to be or not.