Page 29 of Grape Juice
I’ve known this. But still, the cold reality of it kicks me in the gut when Antoine makes an announcement at dinner about the annual harvest party—a big soiree to celebrate all of our hard work—that will take place the following evening. Though we still have a few more days’ worth of work to do both in the vines and in the cellar, we are ahead of schedule. “And there’s no night like a Friday night for a party,” he says, beaming.
Suddenly, the conclusion isn’t an amorphous thing offin the distance; it has a shape, a structure, a date on the calendar. The largeness of the impending event expands in my skull and dulls the hum of the conversation around me. I only pick up patches of Bea’s explanation of what our preparations will entail: We’ll pull cases of wine up from the cellar and fill grape bins with ice. Someone will need to haul the foosball table out of Antoine’s office and stick it right on the lawn. Oh, and throughout the evening, we’ll all be on duty makingtarte flambéeto feed the masses.
“You might think Antoine seems like a pretty tame and together guy,” Julian leans over to whisper to me. “But he’s absolutely mad when it comes to throwing a party. This place will be like French Coachella if the median age was forty-five.”
“Way less crochet tops, though.” Ruby giggles to herself while I stare down at my plate.
Later that evening, lying in bed, I listen for Henri’s footsteps, but they never arrive. This is new—unfamiliar territory. It underscores a fear I didn’t know I possessed. As I toss and turn restlessly, the silence seems to grow louder at steady increments. Is there anything so humiliating aswaiting?
Sometime after midnight, my agitation has replicated to every cell in my body, and I creep outside. Slinking my way through darkness, I walk the road to Henri’s truck. There it sits, undisturbed—but Henri is nowhere to befound. Leaving my bed, I knew well enough that I wouldn’t discover him here, but the tug of his absence still does something to my stomach. Nothing had changed between us today—there’d been no shift in our obsessively tender rapport. Which makes this jarring breach in our routine feel like a larger betrayal. Am I really so wed to this juvenile routine we’ve cobbled together that I can’t pass a night without it?It means nothing, his absence, I reason with myself.Why would it mean something?
Embarrassed at the sour taste of my own dismay, I tiptoe reluctantly back into bed. Alone, I feel out of place on my mattress, as if the very fixtures of this room have shrunk in the wash.
When I wake, I have an email from Alec glowing in my inbox. Since dinner, I’ve been avoiding the prospect, even knowing its absolute inevitability. I skim the message, not yet ready to ingest the full heft of each individual word: Antoine had mentioned that harvest was wrapping up, it says. Alec had booked my travel home, couldn’t wait to hear everything, looked forward to learning how, exactly, I would put this particular charade into words. Antoine had said wonderful things, and my ticket—for departing two days from now—was attached.
It isn’t a surprise. Well, it is and it isn’t. In the furthest recesses of my psyche, I’ve known this missive would arrive any day—any moment—now.
I click out of the message almost instantly. Alec’s note is my first dalliance with the bluntness of our end date. The hard-and-fast fact of a forty-eight-hour balance remaining—a death sentence spelled out on my phone screen in the form of a seat assignment.
My alarm sings its second snooze warning, and I hold the button on the side of my phone to shut it down completely, rendering it a mere brick of hardware. I tuck it beneath my pillow as if that might make the information it contains any less capable of touching me.
When I hurry downstairs on what will likely be our last day working in the vines, Bea tells us all that Antoine and Henri are staying behind in the cellar, pressing yesterday’s fruit and distributing tables onto the lawn for the party. For the entirety of our drive in the van, my mouth is a straight line. I turn over the prospect of waiting another however-many hours before Henri and I can speak, before he can offer me some assurance or alibi for his disappearance, before I can address my own countdown clock. The hours ahead feel nearly debilitating, racked with a salad of anxiety, melancholy, and dread—all of it laced with guilt that I’m squandering my final moments here.
“Bella, you look so sad on the day of the party.” Pietro and I inch along together, and he watches me as pinot gris mounts in the buckets below us. “This is the day we go wild. Frowning is simply no good.” He throws a grape in the air and catches it in his mouth, chewing with a slow-burn delight before shooting the seeds through his teeth and onto the ground in a tidy arc.
“I just slept weird, don’t you worry. I’ll be in a better mood later.” It’s a suitable excuse, but my tone is flat.
“We’ll amend your spirits while we’re getting dressed—fear not,” Ruby adds, giving me a solemnwe’ll talk laterlook. She tosses a grape at Pietro, who stands with his mouth hanging open, waiting. Naturally, she misses.
“What about me? Room for Pietro at your getting-ready fiesta?”
“If you let Ruby give you a braid crown, you’re certainly invited,” I offer.
“In that case,si, of course. We fix Alice, we braid hair, we do some techno!” He raises a fist in the air, pumping it to his own a cappella beat.
After lunchtime—bread and pâté as a breezy prologue to the evening’s festivities—we are dismissed to begin our primping process. The promise of novelty hangs in the air, given that the lot of us have yet to bear witness to one another in any state not defined by athletic wear, ruddy knees, and grape-varnished fingertips.
In the shower—where my requisite six minutes have come to feel plentiful—I shave my legs, a ritual I’ve nearly forgotten about. I watch while my razor skims my calves, unveiling this pristine, untouched layer underneath. I scrub at my cheeks with a French exfoliant left behind in the shower, and I feel somehow baptized by the shedding of layers.
Back in our room, I massage lotion across my shoulders, my collarbone, and Ruby plays French pop music out of a tinny set of speakers. With a pang of pride, I realize I canhear how the phrases in the lyrics separate themselves, each word distinct in a way I’d been unable to parse when I’d arrived—back when French sounded more like lovely rambling than a decipherable thing. Ruby sings along, wielding her hairbrush like a microphone, her coarse towel wrapped around her chest.
“Seems so strange that we’re about to see each other looking like we do in the real world. Makeup, proper street clothes.” I rifle through my things for a pair of underwear as I speak. “I feel like we’re breaking this bizarre contract with one another.”
“It’s like we’re shattering the fourth wall—all of us, at once.”
“Right, right—and being here at all feels like suspending disbelief.”
She turns to look at me. “Speaking of suspending: I can’t believe you’re gonna leave soon. I’ll be around until the end of the month, and it’s gonna be so quiet in our littlechambrewith you gone.”
“Well, yeah. Actually... about that...” I’ve been avoiding the disclosure all day, as if speaking it aloud confirms its reality. Or as if delivering the news to anyonebeforeHenri is an act of disloyalty. “Alec emailed me. I’ve only got about two days left.” Two days. I can’t believe the reality of such a finite block of time.
“No! I won’t have it!” she cries over the music and flings her arms around my neck. “No, no, no.”
I nod into her shoulder. “I’m not ready either.”
“And what about Henri?”
“I don’t know...” Merely hearing his name brings the simmering apprehension in my gut to a boil. “I haven’t told him yet. Haven’t seen him all day. Since dinner last night. I... I, yeah... I don’t know.”
