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“Oh, girl, I do feel for you,” said Frannie. “But, now, lend me your ear because I actually have a problem that I could use your help with.”
“Fire away.”
“Melissa is hinting around about setting me up with her father. The poor kid wants a mother so badly, she’s considering me for the job!”
A pickup truck that they recognized as belonging to Joe Rizzo, a local olive grower, slowed down next to them. “You ladies in those jogging shorts does an old man’s heart good!” Joe yelled.
“Get on to work, you pervert!” Frannie yelled back at him, grinning. Joe meant no harm. He often bought her a beer at the tavern on a Saturday night. Fifty-nine, and a widower the past five years, he was so busy fending off most of the single women of a certain age that he didn’t have the energy for serious flirting. At least that’s what he’d told Frannie.
Joe laughed heartily. “Enjoy your day, ladies.”
“You too!” Sara called.
“Anyway,” Frannie said, continuing the conversation Joe had interrupted. “Yesterday when she dropped by the store after school she asked me if I’d come to her sixteenth birthday party tomorrow night. Fool that I am, I immediately accepted. I like her, and I was flattered that she’d asked me. Then, I remembered that her father is the same creep who used to make your life miserable when you were her age and now I regret that I accepted so fast.”
“I’m all for sisterly solidarity,” Sara told her. “But you don’t have to feel offended by him on my behalf. Jason told me that Erik said he regretted being an ass back then. If you want to go to Melissa’s party, then go. But what makes you think she’s going to try to fix you up with him?”
“She told me to wear something sexy, as if she would know anything about sexy. She wears clothes so big they’re practically falling off her body.”
“That’s the style these days. Plus, since she’s a little heavy she thinks it camouflages her body.”
“I’d love to give her a makeover,” Frannie said. “Do you think she’d be offended if I took her shopping for her birthday?”
“Make it a girls’ day out and I don’t see why. Invite me and Elizabeth along and she won’t feel as if you’re targeting her.”
“Good idea. We can hop over to Santa Rosa before the mall closes tonight. Are you sure you’re free tonight? I’m pretty sure Melissa is. But I wonder if her dad would object?”
“Yeah, I don’t have a love life anymore, remember?” Sara said with a laugh. “And why should Erik object?”
“His daughter going shopping with three black women?”
“I wish he would object,” Sara said. “I have a few choice words for him that have had nearly twenty years to simmer at the back of my mind!”
Frannie laughed. “Now, watch yourself. You may be talking about my future boyfriend if his daughter has anything to do with it.”
“I’ll pray for you, girl.”
“Don’t pray too hard. I’ve seen him around. He’s got a nice tush. You know I go for big guys.”
“He’s six-four, Frannie, more than a foot taller than you. Isn’t that too big?”
“Oh, please, I once dated a guy who was six-seven. He could almost put me in his pocket. But it was nice while it lasted.”
“What was nice about it?”
“Do I have to tell you about the main advantage of dating a tall guy?”
Sara actually blushed. “No, don’t say it.”
Of course, Frannie had to say it now. “It sort of leaned to the left and, girl, I had to go around the corner to get on it.”
“You ought to quit!” Sara cried, laughing. Knowing Frannie’s history with men she was happy that Frannie could still joke about sex.
“Well, lately, all I’ve got is a few good memories,” Frannie said wistfully.
Later, back at the house, the three housemates, Sara, Frannie and Elizabeth, had breakfast together. Elizabeth had slept in while Sara and Frannie had their morning jog. When they returned, they heard her in her bedroom’s shower. Sara and Frannie went to their rooms and showered and dressed, too. By the time Elizabeth came downstairs Sara had prepared their breakfast of scrambled eggs, ham and toast.
Frannie was pouring coffee in mugs at their place settings when Elizabeth came into the kitchen and gave them a timid, “Good morning.”
Elizabeth was twenty-two, had light brown skin and dark brown eyes. She wore her natural black hair in a short afro. Although Elizabeth was a genuinely shy and modest young lady, she was under the organization’s protection because she had led a walkout of nearly five hundred gold miners in Johannesburg. Since apartheid had been abolished working conditions had improved for blacks; however, there were still some throwbacks to a colonial system that in many aspects resembled slavery.
The government passed laws to protect workers, but the gold-mining companies failed to comply. A group of miners, led by Elizabeth’s father, Edward, wrote down and presented to their bosses their grievances which included the need for better pay, health insurance, an on-site infirmary and more frequent water breaks.
Two days later, Edward Mbeki was gunned down while walking home from work.
The police never found his killer. A week after that, Elizabeth, who was in medical school in Johannesburg at the time, led a march through the city in protest of her father’s death and called for an investigation of the company that he had worked for.
She and several others were arrested.
A group of American human rights lawyers got her released the next day. A few days later, Elizabeth convinced the gold miners at her father’s company to walk out of work and stay away for twenty-four hours. The company owners went ballistic and hired toughs to beat up several of the workers.
An enterprising reporter for a Soweto newspaper actually caught one of the company’s thugs beating up a worker on video. It was shown on every television station in South Africa. Shortly after that, the company came under investigation, and was forced to comply with everything that Edward Mbeki had asked for before his assassination.
However, it wasn’t over for Elizabeth. Her family’s house mysteriously caught fire and her mother and younger sister perished in the flames. She began receiving death threats. Her college friends tried to help by concealing her in their homes. They tried to raise her spirits, but she became despondent, and contemplated suicide. That was when a black woman with a tattoo of crossed spears on her upper arm came to her and told her she was taking her to America where she would be among friends and she could continue her education.
Elizabeth told the woman she wanted to die. She had no family anymore, only distant relatives whom she didn’t know well. “I promise you,” said the woman. “Where you’re going you will form a new family, and when you continue your work, you will find a new purpose. Your family will not have died in vain. You will live on and grow strong, Elizabeth. The name Mbeki will live on because of you.”
She had been living in Sara’s home now, for four weeks. She was still kind of shy around Sara and Frannie, but she had come to trust them.
Sara gauged her success by the number of smiles on Elizabeth’s face each day. She knew that from personal experience, the only thing that could vanquish suicidal thoughts was a reason to live, a purpose. That’s why she’d recently written Eunice and told her that the organization needed to find Elizabeth a job at a local hospital, preferably a job in which she would be working with children. Elizabeth was going to become a pediatrician before her life had been turned upside down.
That morning, when Sara checked her mail on the organization’s site, she had found a message from Eunice saying that everything had been arranged: Elizabeth’s new identity papers were ready, and she would begin work as a nurse’s aide the following Monday. Eunice also added that it was taking longer than she had anticipated, but she had it on good authority that in a couple of months, Elizabeth would be admitted to the University of California College of Medicine on full scholarship.
Sara had the pleasure of relating all of that to Elizabeth over breakfast this morning. The expression of pure joy on Elizabeth’s face made Sara tear up. Elizabeth immediately leaned forward and grasped Sara’s hands in her small ones. “Don’t cry, Miss Sara, you and Frannie have brought me back to life these past few weeks. Last night, I didn’t dream about the fire. It was the first time I didn’t dream about it. Instead, I dreamed my family and I were having dinner together on a Sunday, and we were all happy to be together like it was when I would return home from being at school for a long period of time. We all held hands and Father said the prayer. Then Mother served us all, herself last, as she always used to. Finally, Father looked us all in our faces and said, ‘This is heaven to me.’ Then, I woke up with such a warm feeling inside. I know, now, that they want me to go on. They want me to live well so that one day, hopefully when I’m old and worn out, I’ll join them in Heaven.”
Frannie got up to get paper towels for herself and Sara. Handing Sara hers, then sitting back down, she said, “How would you like to go shopping with us after work? Melissa Sutherland’s turning sixteen, and we’re going to help her celebrate.”
“I would love it,” said Elizabeth, her eyes shining with pleasure.
Jason got a rude awakening that day. He and Claude were in the southern vineyard pruning the vines when Claude, working several feet ahead of him due to the slowness with which Jason worked, uttered an expletive.
Jason looked in Claude’s direction. He didn’t think in all the years he’d known Claude Ledoux, that he’d ever heard him swear. Squinting against the bright sunshine, in spite of wearing shades, Jason said, “What’s the matter?”
Sweat rolled down the sides of his face. It was seventy degrees today. Nice for October, but he was sweating like a horse ridden hard and put up wet.
Claude was speaking rapid French now, and holding out his hand with withered grapes in his palm. Jason didn’t know what he wanted him to do with a handful of dried-up grapes, but he walked over to his foreman and took the grapes from him.
Claude began walking around the vines in the area where he had been working pointing out the raisining of several other grapes on the vine. After a while, Jason started seeing what Claude was seeing: the vines in this area were characterized by stunted shoots, dwarfed leaves, wilting and shriveled grapes hanging listlessly from them. They were sick.
Jason’s heart skipped a beat.
Root rot. He’d heard of it, but as far as he could remember, his parents had never had a major case of it. Dead or severely damaged grapevines would have to be dug up and replanted after the soil had been completely cleared of the infected roots.
The problem was, it was extremely hard to get all of the root, and if any survived at all it could thrive and reinfect the healthy vines.
He was trying not to panic here, but all he could think about was the fact that his parents had run the winery without losing it for many, many years and he’d been in control for under two years and could possibly lose everything.
He looked at Claude, who was still muttering in French. “What do we have to do?” he asked plaintively.
“Root collar excavation,” Claude said with a dire expression on his dark brown face.
“Do I need to rent equipment for that?”
“No, you’ve got a mini backhoe in the storage shed.”
Jason had done an inventory when he’d taken over, but he didn’t know what half of the equipment was called that he’d encountered in his look around the place. “Then, let’s get started.”
Claude shook his head in the negative. “No, first we need to dig up a test root and have a plant pathologist diagnose which kind of root rot we have. Then we’ll know how best to eradicate it.”
“A root pathologist?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of like CSI for plants. They can tell you what killed it.”
“Oh, my God,” said Jason. He had a lot to learn. “You mean I’m going to have to take the infected root up to U.C. Davis?”
“That would be your best bet, yes,” said Claude.
“Okay, I’ll go get a shovel.”
Melissa took a photo of Sara, Frannie and Elizabeth as the three of them were sitting at a tiny round table in the food court. She quickly sent the photo via her phone to her nosy father. He was on the line now. She was standing around the corner near the restrooms where she’d told her friends she was going when she’d gotten up five minutes ago.
“Satisfied?” she asked sarcastically.
“The other two work at Sara’s bookstore?”
“Yes! Now, I’ve got to go.”
“Melissa, don’t you have any white friends?”
“If you must know, no I don’t. And those kids you’ve invited to my party tomorrow night will only come because you’re filthy rich, not because they’re my friends. The only person coming tomorrow night who is my friend will be Frannie.”
“It’s not healthy for you to hang out with black people all the time, Melissa. Do you have something against your own race?”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Melissa asked, exasperated. “Unlike you, I don’t care what color my friends are, just that they’re my friends. I’m ashamed of you.”
Erik sighed on his end. He really stank as a parent. Now his daughter thought he was a bigot. “Melissa, don’t you think you’re going to be ostracized by the white kids in town if you’re always hanging out at that black bookstore?”
“I really don’t care, and Sara sells all kinds of books at Aminatu’s Daughters, not just books written by black authors. Maybe if you’d come in sometime you’d see for yourself, but all you want to do is complain. I’m going now. Bye!”
She hung up quickly and stuck the phone in her jacket pocket.
Rejoining her friends, she asked, “What did I miss?”
Before she had gone to the bathroom, they had been boy-gazing. The mall was packed with teenagers. They were theoretically picking a boyfriend for Melissa.
Two tanned boys who looked like they might be high school seniors were sitting on a bench near the waterfall a few feet to the left of them. “The boy in the blue football jersey is very cute,” Sara said. “Do you know him, Melissa?”
During their selection process, Melissa had known several of the boys by name. They went to her high school. They totally ignored her as a matter of course, but she knew them from class or by reputation.
The boy that Sara had pointed out was in her advanced Algebra class. He sat in front of her, and he’d never once turned around to say hello to her. She could have been a piece of furniture for all he cared.
“The boy in the football jersey is Danny Keener, the other guy is Tyler Gaines.”
“Is Danny smart?” Sara wanted to know. He had the kind of dark good looks that reminded her of the actor who portrayed Clark Kent on Smallville.
“He makes A’s in Advanced Algebra, so he must be,” said Melissa.
“Do you think he’s handsome?” Elizabeth asked. She had never played this game of observing males simply for their beauty. When she thought of dating a fellow student she wanted to know if he was a good student, if he was a good son, and if he was a spendthrift or not. Dating, to her, was a means to an end. The end was marriage.
This notion of dating for fun was intriguing, though.
Melissa’s face turned red when Elizabeth asked her if she liked Danny’s looks. She had secretly been in love with Danny Keener for two years now. She held out absolutely no hope that he would ever notice her. He dated girls like Sherry Newcastle who was beautiful and a cheerleader. Plus, she had thighs that didn’t touch. Thighs that were trim and toned. Melissa knew she’d never have thighs like that. Therefore, she would never be noticed by Danny Keener.
She didn’t lie to her friends, though. “I think he’s adorable,” she said. “But he’s never even looked my way.”
“Well,” said Sara. “He’s looking your way now.”
Tyler Gaines, a tall, gangly boy with too-long blond hair that fell in his eyes and Tarzan’s style of communicating was pointing at Melissa, then back at his chest.
Sara, Frannie, and Elizabeth had no idea how to translate his sign language, but Melissa immediately knew that, “He wants to come over and talk to us.”
“Tell him to come on,” said Frannie. “And to bring the cute one with him.”
Melissa smiled shyly at Tyler and motioned for him to come on over.
Tyler got up and loped over with Danny beside him. “Hey, Melissa.”
“Hey, Tyler.”
“This is Danny Keener.”
“And this is Sara Minton, Frannie Anise, and Mary Makebo,” Melissa said. Like everyone else besides Sara and Frannie, Melissa knew Elizabeth by an alias.
“Ladies,” said Tyler with a respectful nod. His eyes lingered on Elizabeth. Then he looked at Melissa. “I think it’s cool that your dad’s giving you a sweet-sixteen.”
“I nearly gagged when he suggested it, but it’s growing on me,” said Melissa.
“Cool!” said Tyler. That word was apparently his favorite in the English language.
“I was wondering if I could bring Danny. The invitation said I could bring a guest. It doesn’t have to be a person of the opposite sex, does it?”
Melissa was momentarily struck dumb. What could he possibly mean by that? He and Danny weren’t gay, were they? “No, Tyler. You can bring whomever you want to. Danny’s welcome.”
“Cool, ’cuz, see Danny just broke up with his girlfriend and he’s kinda down right now and I figure you’re gonna have lots of ladies coming to your party tomorrow night. Maybe he’ll meet someone.”
Danny looked as if he wished the floor would swallow him whole. But his parents had obviously instilled good manners in him because he smiled at Melissa and said, “Thanks for having me, Melissa. I’m looking forward to it.”
“Sure, anytime,” said Melissa, smiling nervously.
“Well,” Tyler said, yanking on the sleeve of Danny’s football jersey. “See you tomorrow night, Melissa. Ladies, it was nice to meet you.”
Danny smiled at Melissa before turning to leave.
When they’d gone, Melissa heaved a sigh of relief and said, “I almost peed my pants.”
To which her friends burst out laughing.
Chapter 5
On Saturday afternoon at five, the bookstore’s closing time, Sara was ringing up the purchases of a last-minute customer when Rosaura Ledoux came through the door. Sara had met Rosaura a year ago during harvest. Rosaura had patiently shown her how to snip the grapes from the vine without damaging the parent vine. Since then, Rosaura had joined the Wednesday Night Book Club there at the bookstore, and on occasion Sara babysat Rosaura and Claude’s children, Claude, Jr. and Katrina.
Rosaura went to check out the new arrivals on the shelves while Sara finished. But as soon as the customer left she approached Sara. “Claude doesn’t want me to interfere but I think you ought to know that they found root rot in the vines and Mr. Bryant is terribly worried. I wouldn’t mention it but you know I sometimes help with the housework at the Hacienda and I overheard Mr. Bryant talking to his sister and he said he had not said a word to you about it. And he wasn’t planning to.”
Sara was stunned to hear that Jason hadn’t wanted to confide in her.
Rosaura, a petite woman in her late thirties with smooth chocolate skin, gray eyes, and beautiful long jet-black hair, wavy hair that she wore down her back, smiled at Sara encouragingly. “Men can be so stubborn,” she said.
“And bullheaded,” Sara added.
She felt like crying. If Jason didn’t want her to know something as vital as this then maybe he was emotionally distancing himself from her. Formerly, he’d confided in her about things as mundane as choosing a new label for a variety of wine. Now, when the entire vineyard could be in jeopardy, he was leaving her out of the loop!
But she couldn’t rush over there accusing him of wanting to hurt her by keeping her in the dark. That wouldn’t be very mature.
Besides, she had her pride.
“What are they doing about it?” she calmly asked Rosaura.
“He has an appointment to see a plant pathologist at U.C. Davis in two weeks.”
“Two weeks!” Sara cried, disgusted. “The damn rot could spread to the rest of the vines in two weeks’ time.”
“That’s the earliest they can see him.”
Sara knew Jason must be climbing the walls by now. He had reluctantly come back to run the winery and he wasn’t yet confident in his ability to make it work. He was probably riddled with a whole new set of doubts.
She had to see him. But she couldn’t let him know she knew what was going on.
“Rosaura, let’s pretend you didn’t tell me a thing, shall we?”
“That’s fine with me,” said Rosaura, smiling. “Claude would not be happy if he found out I’d done the exact opposite of what he told me to do.”
“He won’t hear it from me,” Sara assured her. “And, thank you!”
“We girls have to stick together,” Rosaura said with a smile before leaving.
The store was empty now except for Sara. She had let Frannie and Elizabeth go home early. Frannie to start fretting over what she could possibly wear to Melissa’s party that could qualify as sexy but would not make Erik Sutherland’s tongue hang out of his mouth. And Elizabeth had plans to go to a movie with one of the other bookstore employees, Linda Ramirez. Sara was both surprised and delighted when Elizabeth had told her she was going out. It was proof that she was coming out of herself more every day and was making a real effort to be happy.
Sara wanted to rush over to the Hacienda and offer comfort to Jason.
However, she made herself go through all of the steps of closing the bookstore for the day in order to give herself time to think about her actions before she did something she would regret.
An hour later, she left the bookstore, locking the door behind her, and hurried to the bank down the street to deposit the day’s receipts. From the bank, she went home, showered, put on her robe, then sat down at the computer on the desk in her bedroom.
She went to the organization’s Web site and went through the profiles of her sisters, looking for a plant pathologist. Whatever that was! One of the advantages of being a member of Aminatu’s Daughters was the rich sources of life experiences the other sisters had to offer. Whenever a sister was in need of help, all she had to do was ask and she received.
This was the first time she’d had to ask any of her sisters for a favor, but if there was indeed a plant pathologist in the sisterhood, she was going to request her help.
It took a few minutes, but she finally came up with a name: Dr. Willow Quigley.
Unfortunately she worked at a university in the Pacific Northwest. She wasn’t right there in California. Sara sent her a message explaining her predicament, anyway.
At that precise moment, at the Hacienda, Jason was standing under the spray in the shower, letting it rain down on his head. In the last twenty-four hours he’d castigated himself over and over for not being more thorough. When his parents had handed him the reins, they had specifically told him he needed to read the winery’s log books. His parents kept a record of every important occurrence on the farm. There was a book for every year the winery had been in operation, dating back to the sixties. Last night, he hadn’t been able to sleep, and he’d found an entry about his parents finding root rot in the southern field. His father had made a note in his careful handwriting: “We believe we got it all, but you can never be sure with root rot. Be sure to keep an eye on the southern vineyard. If it comes back, we’ll have to be more aggressive.”
But his father hadn’t said what kind of root rot they’d discovered in 1978. Maybe there had been no plant pathologists to name the culprit back then.
Jason shampooed, and rinsed. His hair was cut short and close to his head. Black and naturally wavy, he usually just washed it, dried it with a towel, put a little moisturizer on it, and he was set. Tonight, he didn’t even bother with the moisturizer.