Too Close to the Sun (43 page)

A touch of sarcasm there, she noted. "Isn't
this an odd time for you to be on the telephone?" She frowned. Was
that a horn she heard in the background? Could he be driving at
this hour?

"Well, actually, I'm in Los Angeles. So it is
not so very late."

"Ah." How odd that he had come to California
and not bothered to alert her. Ava, who had delivered her share of
slights over the years, recognized a definite snub. "Is this trip
business or pleasure?" she asked, rhetorically, because she knew it
had to be the latter. Jean-Luc knew no one in L.A.

"Business," he said. Her brows flew up. "I
have come to finalize my movie deal. In fact, we inked the
contracts today. The script is revised, and I have found producers
with ready cash all set to go forward. So you see, the film will be
made. I believe that you will read about it in the trades."

Ava could not have been more stunned if
Jean-Luc had declared that he had been elected president of France.
"Well! Congratulations." She couldn't think what to say next, for
she had a strong inkling that her role in this resuscitated
endeavor had evaporated like the bubbles in uncorked champagne.
"I'm so happy for you, Jean-Luc. And I am not in the least
surprised that you have succeeded in this endeavor."

He chuckled as if he didn't quite believe
that last sentiment. "Well, Ava, perhaps if you were not so busy
with other projects, we might have worked together again. But alas.
Ah, please excuse me for a moment." Then he broke away from the
call to speak to someone. He was giving directions to a driver, she
realized. The likelihood that Jean-Luc was being ferried about
Hollywood in a limousine only added to her sense of insult.

He came back on the line. "Ava, I'm sorry,
but I must go.
Au revoir
," and before she could utter a
word, he had hung up, leaving her fit to be tied holding a dead
receiver in her hand.

Ava replaced it without a slam, never one to
let anger or any other emotion carry her—unless the role demanded
it. With an effort, she calmed down, refusing to think how
humiliating it was that she would be performing a small role in a
soap opera while Jean-Luc was directing his cinematic
chef
d'oeuvre
. But by the time she returned to her wicker chair and
her wineglass, she was once again sanguine.

No matter, she told herself.
If that is
the sort of friend Jean-Luc is, it is better that I find out now,
rather than waste another fifteen years of friendship on him
.
She sniffed, and set all thought of the Frenchman aside. She hadn't
intended to include him in her new life, anyway.

*

In the dim light of a nighttime ward, Gabby
lingered at her father's bedside, the rest of the family gone home
for the night. He dozed while she held his hand and halfheartedly
watched the television mounted to the wall across from his bed. The
11 o'clock news was on, the usual recitation of tragedies followed
by sports and weather. Even with the volume so low she could barely
hear it, she had a pretty good idea what was going on. Nothing
earth-shattering in the great wide world, though the headlines in
her own personal universe were four inches tall. FATHER SURVIVES.
LOVER BEGS FORGIVENESS. WOMAN GETS NEW LEASE ON LIFE.

Her father stirred, emitted a little snort,
settled back into slumber. Gabby smiled to herself, squeezed his
hand. He was attached by various tubes to equipment that beeped and
gurgled and read out an astonishing digital array of numbers and
charts, but apart from that he looked very close to normal. His
color was good; his breathing regular. Even more amazing, his
heart—the very heart that had stopped beating—once again pounded a
steady rhythm.

Sudden cardiac arrest
, they called it,
or more frighteningly,
sudden death
. Not a heart attack, but
the most feared complication of the one he had suffered three
months before. If she hadn't performed CPR, if the paramedics
hadn't been so fast . . . She hated even to think about it. But
thank heavens she didn't need to.

The next day the doctors would give him a
defibrillator, in what they described as minor surgery. Most likely
he could go home the day after. Simple as that. She was sure he'd
have a list of shoulds and should nots, but there was every reason
to believe the long-term effects from this harrowing event would be
minimal.

She punched the power button on the remote
control, and the room slipped deeper into shadow. Two nurses in
soft shoes and pink uniforms padded down the corridor past the
half-open door, giggling to each other and weaving around a wizened
old woman in a frayed robe laboriously pushing a walker. Somewhere
a call button buzzed; a male patient hollered for a nurse.

The hospital was as Will had described it
months before: a world unto itself that you didn't think about
until it was your world, and then it was all-encompassing. It held
your dreams and your hopes; you could barely function outside until
the life-and-death questions it held within its institutional walls
were answered.

Had she gotten a different answer from Will
that day?
I had to come
, he told her.
I am so sorry
.
She believed him. She'd seen the genuineness of the apology in his
eyes; she'd felt it in the way he held her. Was that enough? She
knew she loved him—that had never stopped. She also knew she had
betrayed him when she went to Vittorio. She had faulted him not for
being angry with her, not even for not understanding, but for not
trying to. Was he trying now? And would that be enough to bridge
the differences between them?

That question, too, would be answered soon.
She had put off their own moment of truth-telling, but like any
hour of reckoning, it was approaching.

Her father fidgeted, drew her back into the
present. "Daddy?" She rose from her seat, bent over him. "Are you
awake?"

His eyes fluttered open, focused on her face.
"Gabby." His voice was hoarse.

"Are you thirsty?" She was already handing
him a little cup of water. He sipped, fell back against the
pillows. "How are you feeling?"

He seemed to think about that. "Groggy. Not
too bad." He frowned. "Shouldn't you be at home in bed? What time
is it?"

"Almost midnight. I just wanted to make sure
… " Her voice left her at the same moment that he found his.

He took her hand and squeezed it. "I'll be
fine, Gabby. I'm in good hands here. You should get some sleep.
Your mornings start early."

At dawn, but so did his. That was the
winemaker's life. "I'll go home soon. Let me just sit for a
while."

She returned to her plastic bedside chair.
The big round white-faced clock on the wall, the kind found in high
school gyms and community centers, ticked away the seconds of the
night. Around their private cocoon of father and daughter, other
people slept, and still others held vigil.

After a time he spoke. "I can't remember what
happened today."

She remembered all too well. "Let's talk
about that another time."

"Did something bad happen at work?" He gave a
weak laugh. "Something else bad?" When she said nothing, he spoke
again. "Gabby, I think I might want to leave Suncrest."

She turned to look at his face. It was funny
how often truths came out at night. Maybe weariness and shadows
made some realities easier to face. "Really?"

"Would that upset you? What with Will there …
" His voice trailed off. "I don't want to leave you, or him, in a
lurch."

"Oh, Daddy." What a fine heart her father
had, despite all its troubles. "You wouldn't be doing that. And
besides, you need to do what would be best for you."

He nodded. "I hate to say it, but I think
leaving would be best for me."

She watched him, heard the regret in his
voice, saw the sadness in his eyes. All those years he'd spent at
Suncrest, and now it had come to this. But maybe sometimes it was
wise to walk away. Maybe it wasn't always surrender.

"I've been thinking about it, even before
today." He grimaced as he resettled himself on the thin hospital
mattress. Her heart ached to imagine how much pain he must be in,
despite his "not too bad" demurral. "Part of what's been keeping me
there is Porter. Of course, the rest is you and Felix and Cam and
everybody else. But Porter . . ." He shook his head. "I hate to see
what's happening to what he built. He loved that winery,
Gabby."

"I know, Daddy. But there's nothing we can do
about it anymore." In fact, she hadn't been able to do much even
when she'd tried.

"Porter Winsted was about my age when he
founded Suncrest," he said. "Maybe a few years younger. I always
envied him that."

Gabby was surprised. "I never knew you wanted
to start your own label."

"It was always a pipe dream of mine." His
eyes moved to hers. "A label for the DeLucas. A fantasy, you'd have
to call it."

What a fantasy. To craft a wine just as you
wanted it, to make your own decisions about the grapes with no
interference from anyone else, the almost unimaginable pride of
seeing your own name on the label. Yet it was an extremely
expensive fantasy, which is why Gabby had never allowed herself to
nurture it. "How do you feel about going to work for somebody
else?"

He shrugged, then smiled. "I don't have much
choice, Gabby. I can't retire yet. It won't be easy, though, to
convince a winery to take on an old man with a heart problem."

"That is not true." She said that louder than
she'd intended, maybe to convince herself as well as him. She
lowered her voice back to a half-whisper. "People in the valley
know you're a terrific winemaker. And you have lots of friends. And
despite all this"—she waved her arm to take in the expanse of the
bed and high-tech cardiac equipment—"you're still okay."

He arched his brows as if to remark that even
that analysis was an overstatement. Then his eyes fluttered partway
shut, and Gabby realized she should take her leave, let him
sleep.

"Good night, Daddy." She bent forward, kissed
his brow, tears rushing anew to her eyes, though now it was joy she
cried for. How lucky she was, how very lucky. She would always love
the valley, she would always have a place in her heart for
Suncrest, but it wasn't flesh and blood and bone, in the end it
wasn't what really mattered.

She exited the hospital into the cool,
cloudless Napa Valley night, where love and home were, and always
would be.

Will hadn't slept well. Now, on a Saturday
morning before dawn, he stood in the kitchen of his Pacific Heights
Victorian spooning ground coffee into a drip coffeemaker and
mentally replaying the scene from the night before.

As if they were frames in a reel of film,
images rose in his mind. Beth, standing in his living room after a
hell-bent flight from Denver. Trying not to cry, not always
succeeding. Her words the last ones Will wanted to hear.
Bob's
taken a job in Philadelphia. He's already there. He wants us to
join him as soon as we can
.

Will had hated himself for what he'd wished
for. How selfish could a brother be? Did he ever put anybody but
himself front and center?
What are you going to do?
he'd
asked her, knowing the answer he wanted to hear even as he despised
himself for it.

We're going
, she'd said.
Bzzz!
the wrong-answer buzzer sounded in Will's brain.
You mean
you're
not
going
, he wanted to say.
You can't go
because you have to stay in Denver to run Henley Sand and
Gravel.

And why? Because big important Harvard
Business School graduate and GPG partner Will Henley didn't want to
take on the task. And he was the only other heir. He'd had some
nerve criticizing Max Winsted for not appreciating the incredible
legacy he'd been handed. Because for years Will had been doing the
exact same thing.

He paced the hardwood floor between the
center island and the counter. Lights switching on in the Victorian
next door caught his attention, prompted him to look out his window
into his neighbor's kitchen, one floor down and perhaps fifteen
yards away across their shared alley. He could eye the goings-on
through both sets of rectangular glass, an easy-to-see tableau in
the blackness of this predawn hour. A man was making coffee, like
Will was, a man a few years older and equally bedraggled. A boy,
maybe ten, the man's son no doubt, spun into the kitchen fully
outfitted in a Little League baseball uniform, the cap on, the
shoes laced. He was tossing the hardball repeatedly into his mitt
as if to warm up.

Will smiled. The boy looked excited, fully
awake, ready to go—
Come on, Dad! We're gonna be late!
Probably he had an out-of-town game several hours' drive away and
was counting on Dad to get him there. The boy's father nodded,
produced a sleepy smile, concentrated on making the coffee Will
knew he hoped would wake him up.

As clearly as if there were a cartoon bubble
over the man's head spelling out his thoughts, Will could guess
what he was thinking.
Christ, I wish I could sleep in. I killed
myself at work this week. Now I've got to do three hours out and
three hours back and five hours of kiddie baseball in
between
.

But it was equally clear that the father
would make the trip. He'd slap water on his face and pull on his
jeans and grab some to-go coffee and get in the SUV and drive. And
why? Because it was his son, and families did things for each
other, whether they always wanted to or not. That was how it
worked. That was the trade. Sometimes one person made the sacrifice
and sometimes the other did, and it pretty much evened out in the
end. Or it evened out close enough, because Will had learned lately
it was a bad idea to try to keep a balance sheet.