The Vineyard Read online

  Tess’s chin quivered. “Mrs. Wright sent a note.”

  “Oh, dear.” Ted was quickly forgotten. Olivia took a deep breath. She could only hope that the note had been in a sealed envelope.

  “I tore it up.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Tore it up and threw it away.”

  “Oh, Tess. I need to see it.”

  “You don’t. She’s just one teacher. She doesn’t know everything.”

  So. Sealed envelope or not, her daughter knew something of what the teacher had written. “Where is the note?”

  Tess looked away, defiant.

  Olivia caught Tess’s chin and gently turned her back. “Where is the note?”

  She looked at the ceiling. Her jaw remained set.

  Sighing, Olivia released her daughter’s chin and stood back. That was when she saw the torn corner of something protruding from the front pocket of Tess’s jeans. She pulled out one portion of the note, then a second and third. On the small square of counter beside the stove, she put the pieces together.

  “Dear Ms. Jones,” the note read. “We truly do need to talk about what to do about Tess for next year. I know that the thought of having her repeat the year is unpleasant, but ignoring my notes doesn’t help the situation.”

  Ignoring what notes? Olivia thought with a sense of dread.

  “You and I need to meet. The final decision on next year’s class assignments is being made on Monday. If I don’t hear from you before then, I’ll go ahead with my recommendation that Tess stay in fourth grade a second year. Yours truly, Nancy Wright.”

  Olivia’s mind was spinning. Tess had been tested and diagnosed. She had tutoring at school three times a week. As of Olivia’s last meeting with both teacher and tutor, the child was showing a slight improvement in spelling. But she continued to fail tests either because she misread the directions or because she miswrote her answers. She couldn’t read. It was a terrifying problem. She couldn’t read.

  The tutor claimed it would get better in time. Olivia wanted to know how much time. Tess seemed to be falling further and further behind the others in her class. She liked learning and retained what she learned. When Olivia read to her, she was responsive and smart. One on one, she was capable of understanding complex concepts. On her own, though, she lacked the tools to access those concepts.

  Three half-hour sessions a week with a tutor wasn’t enough; Tess easily could use twice that number. What she really needed was a whole special school, but that was a pipe dream. So Olivia did what she could, helping with homework. She also tried to get the teacher to be more kind, although Tess wasn’t aiding her own cause when she failed to deliver letters that the woman sent home.

  “Don’t yell at me,” Tess begged. “I didn’t bring the other notes home because I know what she wants to do. I can see it in her face whenever she looks at my papers. I was thinking that if I tried harder it’d get better and she wouldn’t look at me that way, only she still does.”

  Olivia pulled Tess close and held her with a sudden fierceness. She understood. In fact, she agreed. She hadn’t wanted Tess in Nancy Wright’s class in the first place. The woman was a stickler about directions, and following directions was one of the hardest things for Tess to do. She panicked. She rushed. She lost her place. She guessed. The other fourth-grade teacher was far better with learning-disabled children, but as the principal had dryly informed Olivia, she couldn’t take all of them in her class.

  For the life of her, Olivia didn’t understand why Nancy Wright hadn’t called when her notes weren’t answered. A phone call would have been far more appropriate in the first place. Putting a child’s failings on paper and then sending that paper home with the child seemed cruel.

  Olivia couldn’t begin to estimate the damage that had been done to her daughter’s self-esteem in the last year. Granted, it might have happened with any teacher. Tess was at that age. Much more of the same, though, and she wouldn’t only need a tutor—she would also need a therapist.

  What to do? Olivia had the name of a tutor who would work with Tess through the summer, but tutors cost money, and the electronic transfer of funds that had continued for several months after Jared’s death had ceased abruptly with his parents’ verdict that Tess wasn’t Jared’s child.

  That Tess wasn’t Jared’s. The charge still stung.

  “But she is,” Olivia told the lawyer who had sent the letter informing her of the family decision.

  “Can you prove it?”

  Of course, she could. Tess was there in the flesh!

  But Olivia had watched The Practice. She knew how lawyers thought. Lawyers wanted DNA tests.

  “My client was cremated,” this one said. “His ashes were scattered over the Great Smokies. Unless DNA tests were done before, you’ll have a hard time proving it. His family won’t hand anything over for testing. You’ll have to take them to court.”

  Olivia vowed to do just that—for all of two minutes. Then she came to her senses. She couldn’t put Tess through a paternity battle. Besides, it took money to win money.

  So the Stark connection was severed. It was another sad twist to an already sad saga, because it wasn’t about money at all. It was about love. Olivia had loved Jared. He was a brilliant man, a scientist who was forever writing up treatises on seemingly obscure things, like the correlation between eating carrot greens and the ability to identify birdcalls at night. He claimed that what he did was crucial to mankind, and Olivia remained a believer even when he lost interest in her. She hadn’t planned on getting pregnant. When it happened, she saw it as God’s way of telling Jared to stay put. He didn’t. The man was long gone by the time Tess was born, but paying child support for nine-plus years had been his own free choice. He had taken it on without complaint.

  Olivia had hoped that his family would give that fact some weight. She had hoped that they would want even some small part of the son they had lost. Apparently they did not.

  So here was Tess, badly in need of help. Olivia would take out a loan to pay for more tutoring if she felt the child would go for it, but that wasn’t what Tess wanted. She wanted tennis camp, had her heart set on tennis camp, had to go to tennis camp because two of the popular girls in her class were going, and she saw it as her one chance to excel. She had never played tennis before, but she was a good little athlete, and if she really tried, then anything was possible.

  Not that Olivia had the money for tennis camp. Not that she would have the money for food, if she didn’t find another job. She had sent résumés to dozens of museums in the hope that one would want an in-house restorer. To date, she had received six rejections. She supposed she could always go back to selling cameras, but she had hated doing that. She loved taking pictures and did it almost on instinct. Teaching others how to do it was something else. Olivia had neither the patience nor the vision. Her mind worked differently from most people’s. Tess hadn’t come upon dyslexia by chance.

  What to do?

  She had an idea. Tipping up her daughter’s head, looking into that beautiful little freckled face framed by long brown curls—a legacy of the father who hadn’t wanted to know her—Olivia fell in love for the gazillionth time. “Want Chinese for dinner?”

  Tess’s eyes lit up. “General Gao’s?”

  Olivia nodded. “But only after homework.”

  “I’m starving now.”

  Olivia opened the refrigerator and poured a big glass of milk. “This’ll tide you over. The sooner you start on your homework, the sooner we can go.”

  Tess took the glass. “I have to read twenty pages.”

  “Twenty?” Twenty pages was daunting for a ten-year-old dyslexic. “Of what book?”

  Tess held it up—a geography text.

  “O-kay,” Olivia said, trying not to sound discouraged. “Why don’t you start while I change? We’ll do what’s left together.” She picked up the mail and sifted idly through it on her way to the closet. Halfway there, she turned and sank into the
sofa. In her hand she held a letter that had no return address, only a Chicago postmark. It was enough.

  Her heart started to pound. Okay. The handwriting looked different. But it had been four years since her mother had written. All sorts of things might have happened to explain the change. The woman might have broken her wrist and be wearing a cast. She might have lost one arm in an accident. She might have had a stroke. She might … just might be so nervous about writing to Olivia that her hand was shaky.

  Olivia ripped up the flap and immediately swallowed down a sharp disappointment. Her last letter was inside the envelope, unopened. She unfolded the note with it and read, “To whoever’s writing these letters—you keep sending them to this house, but there’s no Carol Jones here. Don’t write again. She isn’t here.”

  Olivia bent forward and hugged her knees. This address was the most recent she had, so either her mother had moved right after mailing the last letter or had mistakenly put down the wrong return address—“mistakenly” being the important word. Olivia refused to believe it was deliberate. She refused to believe that her mother didn’t want any contact at all. Granted, her last letter had been short and noncommittal, but she hadn’t told Olivia to get lost. She had never done that. She simply had gone off on her own a week after Olivia’s high school graduation. As she saw it, at that point her obligation was fulfilled. Other mothers felt that way. It wasn’t so bad.

  The bottom line, though, was that if Carol hadn’t received her recent letters, then she didn’t know where to reach Olivia now, either. So maybe she was trying. Maybe she, too, was mailing letters and getting them back. Olivia had had the post office forward mail from her old apartment to this one longer than they usually allowed, but that time had long expired. What to do now?

  The phone rang. Tess started to rise, quick to do something other than read, but Olivia snapped upright, pointed her back to the chair, and went for the phone herself.

  “Hello?”

  “Just me again—I’m getting ready to leave here and head for the gym—I probably won’t be home until eight, and then there’s the news on CNN, and by the time I’ve had something to eat it’ll be late—but I need to know if tomorrow night’s a go.”

  Olivia pushed a hand into her short hair and held on. “Tomorrow night?”

  “The North End Bistro.” It was a new Italian restaurant, open barely a month. He had heard good things about it and was rushing to get there, as if it would close if he didn’t go soon.

  Olivia figured that if the restaurant closed so soon, it wasn’t worth eating at. “I can’t, Ted. Weeknights are hard. I’ve told you that.” Tess needed homework supervision. Besides, Olivia came home from dates with Ted feeling competitive and tense. Nothing about him was laid-back. Nothing.

  “They don’t have a reservation open on a Saturday night for three weeks—that’s how popular this place is—I’m telling you, Olivia, now’s the time to go.”

  Suddenly irritated, Olivia said, “If it’s that popular, it’ll be here in a month. Make reservations then, Ted. Tomorrow night’s bad.”

  “Okay—okay—I’ll hold the reservation just in case you change your mind—so call me later, will you?”

  “Let’s talk in a day or two.”

  “But what about the North End Bistro?”

  She fought for patience. “I said no.”

  “You said you might change your mind.”

  “You said that. I said I couldn’t make it.”

  “Sounds like you’re in a lousy mood—Otis must’ve been in a snit again—what an ornery son-of-a-B he is—good thing he’s retiring—a few more years with him and you’d be a basket case—so listen, I’ll call you later.”

  She took a breath. “No, Ted. Good Lord, give me a break!”

  “Hey—don’t get upset—jeez, look at the time—I have to go—much later and the meatheads will have taken over the gym—they spend their evenings there—lifting is their idea of culture—I’ll call you tomorrow.” He hung up before she could argue.

  Olivia stood for a moment wondering how she could get through to the man, when Tess said, “Maybe he’s dyslexic. He doesn’t hear, either.”

  “You hear,” she scolded. Heading off to change clothes, she was struck with a sudden attack of self-pity. Between a school crisis, a maternal rejection, and Ted it had been one hell of an hour. She deserved a prize for valor.

  Doing an about-face, she returned to the front door and brought her briefcase back to the sofa. The minute she opened it, a hint of freesia escaped. She took out Natalie Seebring’s envelope and held it for a minute.

  Don’t let me down, Natalie Seebring, she thought and, for the second time, opened the clasp. Leaving the cover letter and the yellow envelope addressed to Otis inside, she drew out the pictures and laid them on her lap. Slowly, savoring each, she studied one after the other.

  She knew the cast of characters by now. There were pictures of Natalie and her husband, and of Natalie, her husband, and the children. Some of the pictures included a new baby. A new baby! There was no sign of the older son in those. Sifting through, she saw no picture of the three children together at all. That was odd.

  Then again, not so, she realized. This new baby was a late-in-life child, a little surprise born to two people still in love. The older son was probably away at boarding school, even college. Olivia imagined him at Harvard. She half expected to see a picture of him wearing football gear with the college letter on his shirt.

  She didn’t find one like that, but she did find a picture of the daughter at her wedding. There were pictures of Natalie’s husband in the vineyard, with and without vineyard workers. Judging from the long sideburns worn by the men, this batch was from the sixties and seventies. There were also construction photos. It looked as though a new building was going up at the vineyard—an on-site winery, said the construction sign. She couldn’t wait to see the building when it was done.

  Olivia was relaxing already. She had never visited a vineyard, but everything she had seen in the photographs of this one spoke of prosperity, easy living, lots of sunshine, sweet grapes, and goodwill. She couldn’t wait to see photos from the eighties and nineties, imagined scads of grandchildren hanging over the porch of the Great House, stacked in rows with their parents on the wide stone steps, lined up around picnic tables for the vineyard harvest.

  These latest photos wouldn’t need much repair. There were a few stains, a few spots where the emulsion had bubbled. There were several corner folds that had caused cracks, and some prints that were curled or bent. The largest problem—always the case in her work—was fading, but it was easily solved by copying the photo onto high contrast paper and enhancing the image with filters. Only in rare instances, such as the Dorothea Lange print, was handwork involved. Natalie’s pictures wouldn’t need that. By and large they entailed more preservation than restoration. Olivia would be treating the set archivally. Natalie had been firm about that. She wanted her pictures to last forever.

  Wondering what she planned to do with them, Olivia fished out the cover letter. It was on Asquonset letterhead, a full sheet of ivory paper with the burgundy logo in the upper left corner. Like the address on the mailing label, this letter was done by hand, written in letters that flowed as Olivia imagined Natalie’s voice would do.

  “Dear Otis,” she wrote,

  Enclosed please find the next installment of photographs. I continue to be amazed at the miracles you have worked on the older prints. These ones are newer. I’m afraid that’s a wine stain in the corner of the one of my daughter’s wedding. I wish I could say that the wine was from the wedding. If that were the case, we might have left it there for sentimental reasons. But, no. It’s a recent stain—my fault, I’m afraid. We were about to launch our new Estate Cabernet when I was sorting through these prints. My hand isn’t as steady as it once was. Better wine than scotch, I suppose, given what we do for a living.

  Olivia smiled. Natalie had a sweet sense of humor.

  W
e’re nearing the end of my collection of photographs. There will be a final package, which I hope to put in the mail next week. As I stated at the start of this project, my goal is to have all photographs returned to me by the first of August. That will give me a month to put them together in the fashion I want.

  With regard to that fashion, I have a request. It occurs to me, with the time at hand now, that I’m going to need help with this next part of my project. Summers are busy at a vineyard, and there’s so much else going on in my life that I fear I won’t do justice on my end to the fine job you’ve done with my prints.

  There is text to accompany the photographs. I’ve been writing it in bits and snatches, and it’s been therapeutic. But six months isn’t very long to put together a life story. My bits and snatches need organization and editing, and there are whole other parts that I haven’t touched on yet. So I’m looking to hire a summer assistant. I need someone who is computer literate but who has an eye for art.

  Olivia sat up. I have an eye for art, she thought.

  I want someone who is organized and neat and pleasant to be with. I need a curious person, someone who will ask questions and dig around and get me to say things I might otherwise keep to myself.

  I’m organized and neat, Olivia mused. I’m pleasant to be with. And curious? I have a gazillion questions about the pictures I’ve restored.

  I was thinking of hiring a college student, perhaps an English major, though I fear most have already flown wherever it is they fly for the summer. I’m placing an ad in Sunday’s paper, but I would far rather work from a personal recommendation. You’ve done such a wonderful job with my photographs, Otis. You’ve been prompt and professional. I’m hoping that you may have Cambridge friends of like mind, certainly ones with an artistic bent, no doubt a few who are also good with words.

  Ooops. A tiny glitch there. It wasn’t that Olivia was bad with words. Not exactly. She just had to work harder than some people to get them up and running. Was she truly dyslexic? She had no idea. She had gone through school prior to the days of testing and labeling. According to those involved, she was simply a slow learner. But she did learn. She did get things done. It might take her awhile, but the finished product was just fine.