Heard It Through The Grapevine

Chapter Two

Rocco was a stocky man, the beginning of a paunch swelling beneath his T-shirt. His quick introductions made Josh’s head spin: Gathered around the bocce court was a Tom, a Tim and at least two guys named Tony, all even bigger than Rocco. They eyed him with what seemed like suspicion as he removed his blazer, assessing his muscles. Rocco showed him where to hang his coat over a low-hanging branch and proceeded to explain bocce.

“My grandfather and uncles brought the game over from Italy with them, and we grew up with it,” Rocco told him.

Josh opened his mouth to say that he’d never seen a bocce ball, nor had he ever observed any games, but Rocco didn’t give him a chance to speak. The game, Rocco said, was played on a long sand court that appeared to be about ten feet wide by sixty feet long. The brightly colored bocce balls seemed slightly larger than those in the old croquet set that Josh had shared with his sister at their summer house in Maine, but no mallets were involved, so Josh assumed that bocce balls were thrown or tossed.

“Now, Josh,” Rocco told him. “You don’t have to be Italian to learn this game. Right, Collin?”

The other man, standing with a bunch of mostly male onlookers, just grinned. This, Josh decided, was not encouraging.

“Collin married into the family, but that doesn’t make him any less an Angelini,” Rocco confided. “Even though his last name is Beauchamp.”

“Of the Virginia Beauchamps,” Collin said. “Spelled the French way, pronounced Beecham.”

Josh had known some Beauchamps at his posh northeastern prep school, but mentioning that exclusive institution didn’t seem like a good idea, considering the good-natured guffaws that greeted Collin’s statement.

“The game can be played indoors or outdoors, and there can be two to four players on a team. Four balls are assigned to each team. You’ll play on my team,” Rocco said.

Tim and Tom were also on Rocco’s team. The other team consisted of the two men named Tony, someone called Angelo and an older white-haired guy named Fredo, who was treated deferentially by everyone involved.

“First, the pallino,” Fredo said, holding up a ball that was smaller than the others. There was a coin toss, and Fredo’s team won the right to throw the pallino. Fredo rolled it onto the court, where it inched to a stop a little more than halfway to the end. At that point, Josh craned his head to search for Gina and discovered that she was surrounded by a bevy of women close to her age, all of them talking and laughing. Gina was holding a baby, patting it on the back and crooning to it, and paying no attention to what was going on over here.

While Josh was looking elsewhere, Fredo rolled one of his team’s balls, to the accompaniment of shouts of encouragement from his own team and groans from Josh’s team when the second ball rolled close to the pallino.

“Kiss it, kiss it!” cried one of the Tonys, which Josh figured meant that he wanted the two balls to touch. He shot another surreptitious glance toward Gina, remembering with a pang of regret the sweet softness of her lips. He must have been crazy to turn his back on her in Scotland.

“All right,” Rocco said, interrupting his reverie by slapping a ball in Josh’s hand. “Now you.”

Josh, whose mind for the past few moments had been engaged in wistful remembrances of a heather-strewn moor, stared at him blankly.

“Go ahead. We have to bowl until one of our balls is closer to the pallino than the ball that Fredo rolled.”

Josh hefted the ball in his hand and summoned enough bravado to convince himself that this game was a piece of cake. Unfortunately, he slipped as he rolled the ball, and it landed about as far away from the others as it could without jumping the sides of the court.

“You’ll do better next time,” Rocco said before rolling another ball, which edged somewhat closer to the pallino than Josh’s.

Rocco’s team bowled until all balls had been thrown, but not without a lot of good-natured jesting. After that, it was Fredo’s turn again.

“When both sides have bowled all their balls, the side with the ball closest to the pallino gets a point. A point is also awarded for any other ball from that side that is closer to the pallino than any ball rolled by the opponents. Thus, only one team can score in a frame, and that side can get up to four points. The first team to score sixteen points wins,” Rocco told him.

Josh didn’t need long to figure out that bocce was a game of strategy. The pallino could be moved by a shot, so a player often scored by knocking the pallino closer to balls previously rolled by his team. On the other hand, a player whose team already had balls in scoring position sometimes chose to place a ball in front of the pallino to keep it from being moved.

Whenever it was Josh’s turn, he managed to goof up. If he tried to land his ball close to the pallino, it inevitably pushed the pallino the wrong way. If he wanted to keep it from hitting the pallino, it always did. He found that he couldn’t estimate how much a ball would roll from where he stood to throw it, and he tended to throw short. If he didn’t throw short, he overcorrected.

Rocco, on the other hand, was a virtuoso. “Bocce is as simple or complicated as you want to make it,” he told Josh, and then he’d proceed to blow everyone away with a cunning move.

When the game was finally over, Josh realized that he was the one who had virtually lost for Rocco’s team. Even though the others tried to gloss over his many errors, he felt bad about letting the team down.

“Don’t worry, we’re playing two out of three to win,” Rocco said by way of reassurance, which was not at all reassuring to Josh. He looked around, wishing an excuse to bail out would come to mind. But Gina had disappeared, and Mia was hanging over a bench, waiting to cheer him on.

Well, maybe this time he’d give Mia something to cheer about. He forced a halfhearted grin and girded himself for the second game.

Unfortunately, he didn’t play any better in the second game than he had in the first. The only good thing was that now he knew the rules. The third game was a disaster, though his teammates were generous in not blaming their loss on him. Still, by the time everyone dispersed, Josh felt extremely apologetic, not to mention dejected for letting the team down.

“That’s okay,” Rocco told him. “A lot of guys wouldn’t have even tried to play.”

Josh resisted the temptation to invite Rocco and company to play lacrosse. Or hockey. Or water polo, in which he excelled.

Mia jumped down from the bench and ran over. “Don’t worry, Josh,” Mia consoled him. “You’ll get better at bocce.”

“I’m not so sure,” he said, wiping the perspiration from his face with a handkerchief. He was still bummed out from his disappointing performance. He kept scanning the crowd for Gina, but he didn’t see her near the barbecue, the big doors that led to the wine cave or near the group of women she’d been standing with before.

Fredo stumped over, his white hair an aureole standing out around his head. “Come along, my boy,” he said to Josh. “I’ll show you where to clean up.” Josh followed him on a circuitous route along a well-worn grass path past the barbecue, the picnic tables and three or four kids playing with skateboards in front of the winery office.

“You know,” Fredo said as they washed up in the men’s room inside the small tasting facility, which held a bar and a few tiny tables, “it’s not the game that’s important, Joshua. It is the family, and that we play together as well as work together.”

Josh splashed water on his face. “That’s, um, good,” he said. He was surprised that Fredo was treating him as an equal, considering how everyone else deferred to him.

“My father, the first Gino Angelini, always held family to be more important than anything. This is the philosophy that we have let govern our family winery since we started it.”

“When we were in Scotland, Gina talked about her family a lot,” Josh told him. “The other women playing the game never mentioned their parents, brothers, sisters.” He hadn’t, either.

“Yes, that’s our Gina. She is named after my father and her father, too. Gino Junior was my elder brother. He died when Gina was twenty-two.” Fredo dried his hands on a paper towel and then handed one to Josh before clapping him on the shoulder. “Come, Josh. We must join the others. It is almost time for the stomping of the grapes.”

As they were making their way past the winery office, Fredo was distracted by questions from some of the children playing nearby, and Josh stepped to one side to wait for him. After a few moments, someone walked up behind him and gently put a hand on his arm. “Josh Corbett? I’m Maren, Gina’s mother.”

When he turned and looked into Maren’s face, he saw Gina’s delicate features, the same straight nose and high cheekbones. But where Gina’s eyes were dark, almost black, Maren’s were sapphire-blue, and her skin was ivory, not golden like Gina’s.

“I’m happy to meet you,” Josh said.

“And I’m glad to meet you,” Maren said, studying his face for a long moment.

“Aunt Maren, they’re pouring the grapes in the barrels,” Frankie announced as he bounded past.

“Is this the first time you’ve been to a crush?” Maren asked.

“Yes,” Josh said, scanning the group for Gina but trying not to be obvious about it. He spotted her setting food out on one of the tables, her breasts shifting gently against the gathered fabric of her blouse as she leaned over. She looked serenely at home in these surroundings, not at odds and edgy as she had in Scotland. Suddenly, she glanced his way and their eyes locked, stilling her laughter. A breeze stirred the leaves overhead, sending a romantic ripple of sunlight across Gina’s lovely face. In that moment his reason for wanting to come to the Napa Valley became perfectly clear: this trip, he admitted to himself for the first time, had little to do with writing an article about the Napa Valley and less to do with Starling Industries’ search for a winery; it had everything to do with Gina.

“Come, we should go watch the grape-stomping,” Maren said, appropriating his arm and leading him away. Reluctantly, he followed.

On a platform on the far side of the barn, men were dumping grapes into a row of twelve oaken half barrels. Fredo broke away from the children and mounted the stairs, first saying a few words to the group about being glad that everyone could be at crush, and then joining Josh and Maren as an accordion band began to play boisterous music. Josh noticed Frankie standing on the sidelines, tapping his foot in time to the beat and looking for all the world as though he wished he were playing with them.

Josh’s attention was distracted when he saw Gina walking toward him, her long hair swinging around her shoulders. “Hello, Uncle Fredo,” she said.

Fredo gave Gina an affectionate hug, his weathered face crinkling into a smile. “Not only do we Angelinis know how to grow grapes, Josh, we also understand how to grow beautiful young women, each as individual as a vintage of wine.”

“Uncle Fredo,” Gina protested with a light laugh, but whatever she might have said was cut off when Mia ran up, dragging Frankie along behind her.

“They’re going to start the contest! Whose team are you on, Aunt Gina?” Mia tugged excitedly at her arm.

“I—”

“Hey,” said Fredo expansively. “Why don’t you show Josh the ropes, Gina? Be a team?”

“But—”

“Oh, I think that’s a good idea,” Frankie said seriously. “You have very big feet, Josh. That’s important because the team that squashes the most juice out of the grapes in two minutes wins.”

“Frankie!” Gina protested. “Talking about the size of someone’s feet isn’t good manners.”

“That’s okay,” Josh said quickly because of the way Frankie’s face fell as a result of this rebuke. “I know my feet are big.”

“This grape-stomping is a tiring thing,” Mia grumbled. “You have to stomp and stomp and stomp.”

“It’s time for me to be out of here,” Maren declared with a half laugh. “I have to help in the kitchen.” She hurried off toward the entrance to the wine cave, where people were bringing out food.

Gina was trying to melt into the crowd, but some of her family members pushed her forward. “Go ahead, Gina. Go on,” they said.

Rocco dragged Josh along with him to the platform. “You can’t fully experience crush unless you stomp the grapes,” Rocco insisted, and next thing Josh knew, he was rolling up his pantlegs and his shoes were being collected by one of the Tonys, to put in a secure place where they would not be spattered with grape juice.

“I didn’t ask for this,” Gina said helplessly as they faced each other in one of the grape-filled barrels, which was barely large enough for two people to stand in. “I tried to get out of it.” She was so close that he could smell the heady fragrance of her cologne over the scent of the grapes.

“I’m glad you weren’t successful,” he murmured so that no one else could hear, and she glared at him.

“Okay, wait for the sound of the bell, and then you have two minutes to demonstrate your stomping skills,” instructed the person in charge, who Josh recalled was Gina’s brother-in-law and Mia’s father, Nick. “The idea is to crush as much juice from the grapes as you can. When I ring the bell at the close of your round, we measure the juice. The team that provides the most juice wins.”

“Wins what?” Josh asked Gina in a low tone.

“A bottle of wine, what else?” she said. She had hitched her short skirt even higher so that an expanse of creamy thigh showed.

“I’d like something more than that,” Josh muttered, and Gina’s eyebrows flew sky high.

Nick, who did not hear Josh’s remark, cleared his throat. “All right, contestants. On your mark, get set, go!”

The accordions struck up a frenzied melody. Gina said through gritted teeth, “Okay, Corbett. Move.” She’d done this before; he hadn’t. But he did his best, hating the way the grapes felt as they oozed up between his toes but liking the way Gina couldn’t avoid touching him as they jumped and squished and stomped and in general threw all decorum to the wind. Mia was right; this wasn’t easy. He grew tired long before the bell rang to signal the contest’s close, and when it did, he tried a sagging maneuver in Gina’s direction in the hope of bodily contact, but she was already stepping over the side of the barrel.

A hurried consultation ensued while the grape juice from each of the twelve barrels was measured, and then Nick declared, “The winners—Rocco and Jaimie!” Jaimie, who wore a silver tongue stud and had been pointed out earlier by Rocco as one of his cousins, accepted the bottle of wine and acknowledged the applause of her relatives with an exaggerated bow.

“You came in second,” Nick said to Josh as Frankie ran up and slapped him an exuberant high-five. “Where’s Gina?”

Josh gestured toward the crowd. “She’s wandered off, I guess,” he said.

“You did okay for your first time,” Nick said. “Here are a couple of T-shirts. See that Gina gets hers, will you?”

As a new group of contestants climbed into the barrels, Josh looked down at his feet. They were purple. So were all the other previous contestants’, but they didn’t seem to care, so why should he? He scrambled down from the platform and took off in pursuit of Gina, whose ash-blond hair was highly visible near the food-laden tables. He caught up with her as she was piling barbecued ribs onto a plate.

“Here,” she said, unceremoniously shoving the plate in his direction.

“Nick said to give you this,” he said, handing her the T-shirt.

She afforded him a grudging smile as she tossed it over her arm. “Thanks, Josh. Second place isn’t bad, you know, for your first grape-stomping experience.” Her gesture encompassed the abundance of dishes on the tabletop. “Please help yourself to the food. There’s Aunt Dede’s special penne-and-artichoke salad. She’s a caterer here in the valley and my mother works for her. Also, Claire—she’s Uncle Fredo’s daughter—made her prize carrot cake, and you might want to try that.”

Josh set the plate of ribs aside momentarily so that he could roll his pantlegs down. Gina caught sight of the purple stains on the fabric.

“Uh-oh,” she said with a grimace. “I’m sorry about your pants.”

“Don’t be. It’s nothing a good dry cleaner can’t fix.” He picked up the plate and helped himself to Aunt Dede’s salad.

“Try the bruschetta,” Gina said as they moved past the layered salad, the marinated mushrooms, the artichoke pie.

“Hey, Gina, did you make your special mussels-and-tomato fettucine?” Rocco called from a table at the outskirts of the group.

“Not this time. Too busy,” she called back.

“Aw, that’s too bad. I’ll let you sit with us, but only if you promise to invite me over for it soon.”

Gina glanced up at Josh. “Do you mind hanging out with Rocco? Or have you had enough?”

Which was how Josh found himself part of another amiable family group. He met Gina’s vivacious cousin Bobbi, who said she’d served in the Peace Corps, and her husband, Stan, who owned a chain of fresh markets. He met Albert Aurelio, a salt-of-the-earth type who had married into the Angelini family and was now chief financial officer at Vineyard Oaks. When Josh’s plate was empty, he returned to the buffet table for more food and found Maren putting out bread and rolls that she’d baked herself, and later he listened with rapt attention as Gina’s cousin Carla, who was unmarried, talked animatedly about her career in public relations with the local winegrowers’ association.

“Are you the one who made the carrot cake?” he asked her. “It’s the best I’ve ever tasted.”

“No, that was Claire. She’s over there—the tall one with the long earrings. Don’t worry,” Carla said with a laugh. “No one could get all the Angelinis straight right away. A lot of people have the same name—for instance, Big Tony and Little Tony.”

“I met them playing bocce,” Josh said, digging into the artichoke pie.

“They’re not to be confused with Anthony Ceravolo, Rocco’s dad, who married Aunt Gianna and is sometimes called Tony. And of course Aunt Gianna is not to be confused with my cousin Gina, who brought you here, and neither of them should be mistaken for Jennifer Saltieri Thompson, who for some unimaginable reason is sometimes referred to as Jeni, with a long e. Oh, and Marcy, who is Little Tony’s wife, is expecting a baby girl in a few months, and she and Little Tony say that they intend to name their new daughter, guess what? Toni.